Newly Corporate

Last week I used Google Alerts to introduce myself to the CEO of my company. As a peon, low on the ladder, I had been looking for a way to make contact. I decided to get his attention by offering to help him. You see, I work at a technology company and the CEO is always having to go on stage and act like he knows what’s going on in each of the 20 markets where we compete. If he does a bad job at this, Wall Street analysts think the company is doomed and our stock price goes down (and so does my retirement fund). I surmised that this must be a difficult task for him, how could he possibly keep up on all the different markets? I saw an opening here and decided to highlight my superior domain knowledge by sending him a cheat-sheet. That’s right, I decided to send him an unsolicited email that basically did the job of what five marketing wizards were supposed to be doing. I did all of this with about 15 minutes worth of work? Am I a genius? No. I cheated.

I simply went to google.com/alerts and setup about 30 alerts. I used keywords and phrases from our industry, and I also used our competitors’ names. I set the alerts up to come once a week. Every Friday I get news and blog results for all of my search terms emailed to me. I then take those alerts and copy/paste the good content into an email that I send the CEO. I then take credit for the content by putting it in a report that bears my name. Shameless; I know.

Now, this wasn’t an all-out assault. I sent a very brief email with an introduction that said I had put together the report for something else, but then realized that it might be helpful for his executive presentations. I then gave him three options. He could ask me to stop. He could ask me to keep sending to him. Or he could ask me to send to his admin instead. He said he loved the report and wanted me to keep sending directly to him on a weekly basis.