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…