I have to say I’ve had an awesome week. I was able to do a rare presentation here in Greenville to the GSATC folks. It really was exciting to see a packed out house to hear about Word of Mouth Marketing. The funny thing is I leave Tuesday the 19th for a speaking engagement in South Africa and I was more nervous about speaking in Greenville, SC!

The other part of my awesome week is why I was up at 4:30 AM this morning. Matt, Amanda and myself leave today for a weekend of training the first Park Angels of Charleston. And I’m excited and nervous. The Park Angels are the movement for the Charleston Parks Conservancy, a wonderful group of folks that we have been working together towards this weekend for almost one year.

The Charleston Parks Conservancy has a big mission “to connect people to people, people to the past, and people to the parks.” And the CPC has the faith that the way to do this is with real people - Charlestonians that love parks.

Several weeks ago we interviewed in Charleston for the lead Park Angels, who are the folks that will lead the Park Angel community online and offline. Mary Neves Richards, one our new lead Park Angels, told us in her interview that as she was thinking about coming in for her interview she reflected on why she loved Charleston’s parks so much. She told us that every major decision she has made in her adult life was made while she was sitting on a park bench.

I still get chills thinking about her words. And those words are still with me as we prepare for the unknown of bringing eight strangers together and starting the journey of building a community of people that love their parks. Mary Neves story is just one of many we have heard over and over and over.

Charleston is a city famous for history, but one thing we’ve come to realize is that even in a historic city like Charleston, history is made every single day.

This brings me to the point of this post: why don’t more brands and organizations empower their messages and messengers with their stories, their mythology? I can think of so many brands that just want to forget about what brought them to where they are today and only focus on the modern part of their story.

Charleston’s Parks have stories that are really only captured in the minds of its residents. Thank goodness the CPC is allowed a group of Park Angels to start the curation of these stories from the beginning to the present.

So I hope you all have a great weekend, I’ll be in one fantastic city listening to stories from it’s Park Angels.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 5:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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