UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging

Chapter 33. FreshBooks

"WE WOULDN'T DO it if it didn't make business sense."

That statement defined customer engagement for me. It was spoken by Mike McDerment, CEO of FreshBooks, an online invoicing, time-tracking, and expense service. I was on a marketing panel with him last year and I was spewing my normal sermon about how you need to build relationships, when he interrupted me with that statement. I loved it. Meaning at the end of the day, as a business you have to justify financially your engagement efforts. FreshBooks is not only able to see that it helped their bottom line, the execs are experts at it.

In 2008, company reps famously drove an RV from the Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Florida, all the way to South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. They made this trip, in this way, so that they could meet as many of their users during the trip as possible and spread the word about their company. They stopped along the way and took people out for dinner. They made videos during the entire trip and uploaded them to YouTube.

But it's not the big public things that FreshBooks reps do that makes me want to sing their praises—it's the individual efforts that make them stand out. For example:

• Michelle Wolverton, a Virtual Assistant based out of Boston, tweeted about being stood up on a date. FreshBooks reps responded, "We'd never stand you up." That's already pretty sweet—coming from a brand; kind of unexpected. But, the next day, they sent her flowers—something not terribly common ...