Marketing with a forced smile

This is the last weekend of what will probably be the last of my <a href=”https://www.facebook.com/pages/Kickin-Wiccan/656925304388242″>jewelry giveaways</a>. I’ll go into the marketing and business reasons for that in a subsequent post. There’s another reason why this will be the last giveaway: This kind of marketing requires a certain amount of callousness that I don’t possess. <lj-cut>Perhaps “callousness” is the wrong word. Perhaps a better word would be “differentiation” in the sense that Sabrina taught me: The ability to separate your own feelings from those of others. These past few days have been hard on many of the people I know. There’s been pain, death, and loss. I find it hard to keep on posting faux-cheerful Facebook and Twitter updates with how great my silly contest is. I’m still going to do it. I promised myself, before I heard the bad news from my friends, that I’d end off the giveaway with as much flourish as I could. I’ll keep that promise, though I’m not in the mood for it. I could tell myself that “the show must go on.” Except this isn’t entertainment, this is marketing. On the weekend after September 11, 2001, I worked at the Ren Faire and marched in the merchants’ parade knowing that I was helping people deal with a tragedy in their lives. My boasting about jewelry is not the same thing. In my <a href=”https://argothald.wordpress.com/89070/”>last journal post</a>, I pre-apologized to my friends for my marketing efforts. I’m still pre-apologizing with this one. A couple more posts with amateur pictures of jewelry, and the giveaway will be over. </lj-cut>

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