The Cheese Maker Who Forgot About Her Neighbours: A Fable About How to Grow on Social Media

Once upon a time in a kingdom not so far away, there lived a woman named Linda who made the most magnificent cheese.

Her cheese was so good that the villagers who lived on her street would weep actual tears when they tasted it. They brought it to dinner parties. They tucked it into their children’s lunches. They whispered about it at the market. One woman, Brenda from two streets over, had been known to hide a wedge of it in her handbag just in case of emergencies.

Linda knew she had something special. So she did what any ambitious cheese maker would do.

She packed up her cart and rode to the kingdom of Faraway Strangers to find new customers.

The Kingdom of Faraway Strangers

She set up her stall in the middle of the busiest square she could find. She studied what the other vendors were doing. She watched a young man juggling wheels of cheese while doing a backflip and thought, I should probably learn to do that. She watched a woman stacking cheese into elaborate sculptures shaped like dragons and thought, maybe I need a dragon.

She went home and practiced the backflip. She pulled a muscle. She built the dragon. It collapsed. She spent three weeks perfecting a new sign with a font she found on the internet that she didn’t entirely understand.

Meanwhile, Back on Her Street

Brenda from two streets over had run out of cheese.

Brenda waited. Then she waited some more. Brenda was 54, perpetually warm (IYKYK), and very serious about her protein intake. She had discovered Linda’s cheese at Margaret’s dinner party in October and had quietly reorganized her entire approach to snacking around it. This was not a casual preference. This was a full on commitment.

By week three of no Linda, Brenda had started showing up on the street at different times of day just in case she’d missed her. She mentioned it to her naturopath wondering if she knew where Linda went. She brought it up at book club. She had been ready to buy four wheels and tell every woman she knew about it, which, for a woman with Brenda’s social calendar, was not a small number of people.

Then she told Margaret, who told Susan, who told Patricia, that Linda had apparently abandoned them for the kingdom of Faraway Strangers and nobody could figure out why, because all three of them had been ready to buy more cheese for weeks. They knew exactly what they wanted. They just couldn’t find her.

There were people lined up who had never even tasted the cheese yet, and Linda had no idea, because she was busy trying to do a backflip in a town full of strangers who didn’t know her name.

Four Wheels of Cheese and a Very Unhappy Hip

Months passed. Linda had sold exactly four wheels of cheese in the kingdom of Faraway Strangers. The backflip was coming along but her hip wasn’t happy about it.

One day, exhausted and smelling strongly of aged cheddar, she rode back through her own village. Brenda was standing at the side of the road with her arms crossed. Along with a line of of hungry cheese lovers.

“We’ve been right here,” Brenda said.

Linda looked at her cart. She looked at her street. She looked at Brenda’s expression, which was the specific expression of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for cheese.

“I was trying to find new customers,” Linda said quietly.

“We were here telling everyone we knew. Margaret has a very large book club,” Brenda replied with a knowing look.

The Part Where Everything Changes

Linda set up her cart right there on the street. Within an hour, Margaret had texted the book club. The book club told their neighbours. By Thursday, three people from the next village over had shown up asking about the cheese they’d heard so much about.

Linda never went back to the kingdom of Faraway Strangers.

She still can’t do a backflip but she doesn’t need to.

The Moral of the Story

Your followers are already there, already trust you, and are ready to tell everyone they know about you. Stop riding to the kingdom of Faraway Strangers and start showing up for the people already interested. It’s really quite simple when you sit down and think about it.

If you’re like most of the women I work with, you might be wondering why ALL of your efforts on social media have rarely (if EVER) turned into a client.