My meeting with the rainmaker: David Bullock

Last year, I met the renowned social media expert and profit engineer, David Bullock. I was sitting at a sushi bar in a hotel in Orlando, Florida where I was attending one of the best internet marketing event EVER, and he showed up looking for food and and drink. He was a keynote speaker at the Rainmaker Event being hosted by Jerry West. I’d never met David before, although I had heard him speak.

David is larger than life – and just by hanging out with him at the sushi bar over a crab bisque, I learned more than I’d hoped to learn. He was talking the language that I wanted – and needed – to hear. David has a background in robotics engineering and moved into sales and sales conversion optimization before then moving into the internet marketing industry. He has developed expertise in the Taguchi method of multivariate testing for sales, advertising and business development.

David is also well-known for his coverage of the Obama Web 2.0 social media campaign.  When Barack Obama was running for president in the United States, David Bullock teamed up with Brent Leary and wrote a book about how the Obama campaign was using social media as a strategy to connect, engage and communicate with millions of people.  Listening to David speak about his experiences with this project got me so fired up about the potential of the internet to connect people together – something I talk about in my presentations.

The main rapport I felt with David was that he has reinvented himself a number of times – and this is the journey that I am on since selling my businesses and letting my employment contracts lapse without renewal.  I related to David as a professional who has made the shift into online media and I wanted to know what he was doing and how he was doing it.  In his presentation the following day, he was again smacking me right between the eyes with good solid advice – advice which has motivated me to stick to my guns and continue even more strongly on my path of reinvention.

I recently wrote a blog post about Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, in which I said we need to focus on creating opportunities – those ‘lucky’ opportunities that can take us in directions we’d never have imagined.  Meeting with David was one of those ‘opportunities’ – if I hadn’t traveled to the US to study, I wouldn’t have had the opporutnity to hear him speak live and ask him questions.  If I hadn’t stayed out late to hang out, I wouldn’t have met him in the sushi bar and had the chance to get to know him a little more personally.

The key lesson here is to get out there where the people are – the kind of people that can help take you to the next level.

David is a fascinating individual and someone I’m keeping close tabs on – check out his site at davidbullock.com

Tagged as: barack 20, david bullock, internet marketing, jerry west, nic lucas, rainmaker event