You Can Go Home Again

Read the January 11th WSJ article entitled “The Car That Got Away” and you’ll get a sense of what my wife puts up with fairly regularly. The timing of this article was perfect: after 60 days of online hunting on enthusiast Web sites and associations for one of my favorite cars from my youth (a 1979 Toyota Land Cruiser), I found it, about 2,600 miles away from my garage in Boston. But I found it, and it’s on a truck heading east as we speak.

What was truly interesting about this process were the people I spoke with along the way. No fewer than 45, either on the phone or through email. And every one of them was as excited as I was to talk about their cars. One of them sent a pound of gourmet coffee from Seattle as a thank you for considering his ride. Many poured over our company’s Web site, and asked me very insightful questions about our business. My favorite was a couple who sent voice-over samples of some of their client work, inviting me to learn more about their studio business – and I did. That was completely cool. Others sent videos of their cars in action off road, and made sure to customize them with brief cameos, saying, “Hey Cam, hope you liked the tape – we had fun making it for you.”

Our community was quickly built, private in scope and incorporated the following media channels:
Web sites – enthusiast sites with classified advertising that sold hard

Web-based Original Video – the product in action

Email to send photos and mechanical reviews

Telephone for one-to-one Q&A

Magazines and Newsletters which invigorated the category, and brought all of us together

A customized communication approach to a unique community – at King Fish, we call that creating a Private Media channel – where buyers and sellers create dialogue with one another in trusted environments. It is efficient, it is highly measurable, and it helped me bring home an old family friend.