People sometimes light candles as a sign of hope. That's what every one of these torches represents for me.
I got this audience to switch on their phone torches and wave them in the air. A room full of little lights. I did it for three reasons.
Reason one: how fast we grab our phones
The first reason was to show everybody in the room just how quickly they could all grab their phones.
It takes seconds. When I did something similar at a Propertymark event the following year, it took less than five seconds before I had the picture I wanted.
Love it or hate it, most people are rarely more than a few feet from their mobile. It's the first place we go for content now, whether that's to solve a problem, to learn something, or to be entertained and distracted for a bit.
What that means for your marketing
So here's the business question that comes out of that room full of lights. When your customers are on their phones, are they seeing anything from you?
And if they are, does it work properly on the small screen? I've seen far too many businesses still designing everything on a big desktop monitor and checking it on a big desktop monitor. Almost nobody will ever see it that way.
Have a proper look at your own business from the phone in your pocket. Your website. Your emails. Your forms and booking pages. And the simple stuff, like whether people can message you directly from their mobile, and how quickly they'll hear back.
The phone is where your audience already is. It's the playground you need to be in.
Reason two: a decent selfie
The second reason, I'll be honest, was that I thought it would make an awesome selfie. I wasn't wrong.
Reason three: the light at the end of a tunnel
The third reason is the one that has stayed with me.
Every one of those torches could be the light at the end of somebody's tunnel.
Anyone in that room could have been carrying something nobody else knew about. And every one of them had the ability to be a light for someone else, through a kind word, a phone call, some advice, a story that helps.
You never know whose life you will touch, or how big the difference might be. Sometimes you only find out years later. I wrote about one of those moments in I'd already changed his life and didn't know it.
Six years later this photo came up in my memories, and I shared it again because the message still felt right.
If someone you know might be in a bit of a tunnel right now, send them a message. It doesn't need to be clever or long. Just let them know you're thinking of them.
