What we should learn from the Crock Pot Girls

Let me be the first to try and share the success of an Internet Sensation. This time it’s not a kid high on nitrous oxide or an interesting squirrel. This time there’s meat, real honest-to-gosh meat. It’s the Crock Pot Girls. They are three mothers, Allyson, Jenna, and Nicole who, as their Facebook page says, “decided here was a great way us moms can exchange crock pot recipes.” Sounds pretty darn simple, and that should be the main lesson. KISS: Keep It Simple…Silly (Moms loathe the word “stupid.”)

So they go about this straightforward project and in less than ten days score half a million “likes” and so many wall posts they have to beg people to behave and follow the rules. What are the rules? Well, simple: share recipes. Now that’s about as Abigail Adams as you can get. This old-fashioned way of connecting people spun up in an electronic forum. And by golly they have 300,000 more fans since I checked the site last night. Soon they’ll be on Good Morning America, and we’ll be watching from our piles of press releases and flowcharts and wondering, “How?”

Since it has to do with food we at Name.com wanted to be a part of it. As the Community Evangelist I contacted the CPGs to see if we could provide them with a domain and a website that we could monetize and search engine optimize. Our customers really think we’ve got something with our PageZen web builder and SEO Tutor, and we’re very fond of them. But that really should be the litmus test: are you portraying your product even close to something that with a flip of a switch can feed your family for a week?

There’s another lesson: give people something they want. We’ve all been serenaded by the sales gurus hammering their fists and berating us about benefits: “Share the benefits of your product!” But the Crock Pot Girls have one up on that. Their product is a benefit with benefits. People want food. They want lots of it, and they want it to appear magically. The Crock Pot is all that. You put something in it, you turn it on, and then you do something else with yourself. All you need is a recipe. In come the CPGs. Throw in the fact that the economy is weak and I’m surprised our ladies of the ladle haven’t been propelled to Congress.

At Name.com we’d love to hear that we’re the Crock Pot Girls of domains and website building. We want it to be quick, easy and convenient, and as satisfying as a pound of pulled pork. We want to put you in that place where you can be any level of web IQ and still get your ideas and products on a website that ranks big with SEO. Actually, I think there should be some kind of buzzword introduced here. Something about a “Crock Pot” business plan (not to be confused with “Crackpot”) where you sit alone with the slow cooker and brainstorm how close you can get to its paragon of goodness. If you don’t get all the way there, then don’t worry. It’s hard to touch moms with vats of food.