{"id":5270,"date":"2009-12-29T09:29:41","date_gmt":"2009-12-29T09:29:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/publicityhound.com\/blog\/?p=5270"},"modified":"2025-06-05T13:32:54","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T13:32:54","slug":"meet-jeanne-hurlbert-my-new-and-unlikely-business-partner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/purelysupp.com\/publicity\/marketing\/social-media\/meet-jeanne-hurlbert-my-new-and-unlikely-business-partner\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet Jeanne Hurlbert, my new (and unlikely) business partner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jeanne<\/a>If you asked me to describe my ideal business partner, never in a million years would I envision\u00a0someone with a PhD in sociology.<\/p>\n

Such degrees, I always believed,\u00a0are expensive pieces of paper\u00a0printed\u00a0by the diploma factories otherwise known as universities.\u00a0They seldom lead to “real world” jobs outside of academia.<\/p>\n

I certainly <\/strong>wouldn’t want a Phi Beta Kappa tagging along with me. Such a highfalutin academic would be\u00a0horrified to hear that I flunked five college courses and almost\u00a0didn’t graduate because I was three credits short of a diploma just six weeks before graduation.<\/p>\n

Meet Jeanne Hurlbert, a PhD sociologist at Louisiana State University, survey expert and\u00a0Phi Beta Kappa, who was studying social networks long before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was born.\u00a0When I heard her on\u00a0a teleseminar in January this year, I was hooked less than 10 minutes into the call. I emailed the teleseminar host immediately and gushed, “This woman is brilliant! Where did you find her?”<\/p>\n

Jeanne (pronounced Jeanie)\u00a0was the\u00a0guest expert, and she was explaining the importance of using customer profile surveys to\u00a0gather scientific data about what our customers want. Don’t make false assumptions about products to create or services to offer, she cautioned, based on discussions you’re having at social media sites.\u00a0 False assumptions can derail your\u00a0business.<\/p>\n

Her message hit home.<\/p>\n

For a few years, I’d been wondering where to take my business ever since\u00a0newspapers started marching\u00a0toward the graveyard.\u00a0Traditional media has far less influence now than it did\u00a020 years ago for any Publicity Hound who’s self-promoting.<\/p>\n

Two days after the teleseminar,\u00a0I hired Jeanne\u00a0as a consultant to help me create a customer profile survey.\u00a0She suggested questions I never would have thought of asking, and she devised a clever way to generate customer testimonials for my website and product pages.<\/p>\n

In March, when I was called to Ohio for a funeral for three days, right in the middle of the survey, she kept all the plates spinning, personally attending to dozens of customer service problems we encountered when the technology “hiccuped” and many of the respondents\u00a0had trouble accessing the survey.<\/p>\n


<\/p>\n

Social media: The bridge to a partnership
\n<\/strong>
\nThe results of Jeanne’s survey were like the footbridge\u00a0to our partnership.<\/p>\n

Many of the respondents admitted that they were completely confused—and sometimes terrified—by social media.\u00a0 Jeanne and I talked about how we were, too, when\u00a0we started creating profiles at the social\u00a0media sites and how it’s still often\u00a0overwhelming<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I confessed to her two of my big social media sins:<\/p>\n