“Gentlemen, this is a football.”

In case you haven’t heard, there’s going to be a football game this weekend.

And so I’d like to share an interesting story about the man considered by many to be among the greatest NFL football coaches ever-Vince Lombardi.

Every year, as his players came out on the practice field for the first team practice, coach Lombardi launched into the new season with this simple statement: “Gentlemen, this is a football.”

And so with this, Lombardi set the tone for reviewing the fundamentals of the game. Mind you, this wasn’t a junior high team he was talking to. It was a group of men who had won the SuperBowl.

So what can we take from this?

The fundamentals are so important that even the most knowledgeable people need to review them from time to time. That applies to social media marketing as much as it does to football.

With thousands of social-media centric apps, it’s easy to get caught up in the shiny cool tools. But as we remind you over and over again in The Social Media Road Trip Workshop online video series, the fundamentals, i.e., strategies, come first. Then the tools.

To bring it back to our football analogy, if you don’t know where the goal line is, you’ll just end up running in circles. So to put a twist on coach Lombardi’s quote, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is a RSS feed.”

And now here’s a little coaching session from the man himself…

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