It's easy for me to forget that The BeanCast Marketing Podcast is having an impact. Lost in the details of show prep, guest scheduling and surrounding conversation, I rarely get accurate glimpses of what the audience thinks about the show and about me. That's why this post by D.A. Schweiss caught me off guard. 

Yesterday I asked the audience (half jokingly, mind you) to handle my promotion since I would be traveling. Dieter took me up on this challenge, though, and spent the day promoting my links. Then, rounding off the day he wrote the above piece, pulling some quotes from my own past blog posts that make me look pretty darn good. 

Obviously I was humbled by the experience. But I also learned an important lesson about conversational marketing: Everything we say is important. Every interaction, every thought and every details matters. Dieter even specifically called out my video game and family tweets as an important part of the whole that made me interesting to follow. That fact is not inconsequential.

Most of us would negate such idle chatter as video game talk — this "throw-away" conversation — as worthless distraction from our focused efforts online. But Dieter's post shows that it added unquantifiable color to the aggregate whole of my promotional efforts. It may have even been the driving force that inspired his advocacy on my part yesterday. So while on the surface it is disposable chatter, in the end it's what really drove loyalty.

Take this message to heart, you who manage brands online: People don't have relationships with brands, they have relationships with people who work at those brands and with fellow brand loyalists. So how are you coloring these relationships with real and meaningful personality?