Friend, col­league, and dude-who-never-comes-to-my-birthday-party-cos-hes-always-doing-something-for-his-own-birthday-on-the-same-day Myles Eftos of Mad­pi­lot Pro­duc­tions is run­ning a lit­tle com­pe­ti­tion with his co-working-office-mate Alex Poo­ley of Brown Bea­gle Soft­ware. Essen­tially Myles is only doing offline mar­ket­ing (word of mouth, print ads, tele­phone, real world net­work­ing etc) while Alex is only doing online mar­ket­ing (social media, web, email etc) for the next month. They’ve each got $250 to spend and the one with the most jobs at the end of the month wins.

It’s inter­est­ing, because while I do both online and offline mar­ket­ing in a kind of pas­sive way, it’s word of mouth that gets us almost all of our work. If I wanted to keep expand­ing Clever Starfish, tak­ing on new jobs and gen­er­ally becom­ing a big wig, I would prob­a­bly spend time and money on mar­ket­ing of both kinds. But world dom­i­na­tion is not in our cur­rent plans, we are turn­ing away jobs at the moment and let’s be hon­est, it all sounds a bit like like hard work, doesn’t it?

The boys have a site to track their progress and I notice that at the moment, Alex is in the lead with two jobs to Myles’ one. The pre­dic­tion on the Port80 forums was that Myles (offline) would win in the short-term but that Alex (online) would do bet­ter long term.

It’s an inter­est­ing idea. Who would you back? Maybe I should set up a bet­ting pool…