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In this article on Forbes, the author provides hard data that show that spending on TV advertising continues to receive a significant investment each year. As I (or anyone that I asked) hasn’t watched live TV in years, I find this very hard to understand. Thanks to the ability to skip commercials, I just cant’ see how TV advertising can deliver the results that it used to.

The fact that marketing executives continue to pour money into traditional advertising like TV, radio, and print is a strong indication that they either don’t know other options are available (doubtful), or they simply aren’t comfortable enough with these other option to “risk” investing in them.

At least not yet.

I wonder why that is? Could it be because they don’t know any colleagues that are having success with these newer options? Or, could it be that the agency they are dealing with won’t recommend these new options over commission-based media buys? Something tells me that it might be a bit of both.

Today, the alternatives to traditional outbound “interruption marketing” are largely relegated to the small business marketplace (I’m referring to companies doing $10M to $100M). The leaders of companies of this size have found that they don’t need to spend heaps of money trying to “rent” peoples attention to generate leads and achieve their growth goals.

The Internet Has Radically Changed How People Shop

These savvy CEOs have turned to inbound marketing out of pure necessity. The reality is that the way people research and buy products has been radically changed by the Internet.

For example, in the “old” days, if you wanted pricing or product specs, you had to call the sales rep. Today, you just visit the company website or do a search on Google. Want to know what customers think? Don’t call the sales rep to ask for testimonials. Instead, just visit CNET or any one of a number of similar “consumer review” websites.

If you still believe that your hold all the power, you are wrong. Today, the buyer has easy access to any information they want, and as a result, if you are still marketing your products and services like you were in the past, chances are the results you are getting are sub-par at best.

The Inbound Marketing Poster Child

Back in 2006, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah co-founded a company called HubSpot. By focusing entirely on inbound marketing, HubSpot grew to $77.6 million in 2013, up 50% from 2012 (which was up 82% from 2011).

Their blog is one of the most popular websites on the Internet and generates over 50,000 leads a month for the company.

How has HubSpot achieved such dramatic growth? Simple…instead of spending a fortune on advertising that was intended to interrupt people from what they are interested in, HubSpot instead focused on becoming what people are interested in.

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them. It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention. – Seth Godin

Will Inbound Marketing Work In Your Industry?

Yes, inbound marketing will work for you. Just check out a few of the many case studies HubSpot has published.

The key to achieving success with inbound marketing is to follow a proven formula for success. Just like buying media, with inbound marketing, there are a lot of details that you need to get right.

It’s a noisy world, your marketing resources and headcount are limited and in some cases, you’re still defining who your customers are.

“What’s on the critical short list and what can we pushback till later?”

Four key marketing strategies are essential in today’s always on world: web site design, jettisoning old school SEO, content strategy and the old marketing favorite that’s been around since the pre $1B valuation days, creating lists.

Sounds mundane, but everything starts with a web site with these hallmarks: loads in under 3 seconds, 30% of your design budget was spent on images, it’s smartphone ready, has functional menus, working Google Analytics and Webmaster tools, has multiple calls to action on all pages.

Don’t think consumers or professionals are buying your product or service by itself – they want a brand experience and a web site is the front end.

What you can expect to pay: $3-5K for a standard twenty page web site, $5-10K for over a hundred pages, anywhere from $35. per hour up to $125. for HTML work.

Yes, you can get custom programming cheaper; but all markets are crowded and your web site look and feel is a key determinant of branding and customer perception.

WordPress is the only platform you ought to consider: it’s free, scales extremely well, has 10K+ plugins that extend it’s functionality, has a huge community of pros dedicated to it, is updated frequently, stable and bulletproof in a design context. It’s the industry standard.

1. For good function web site design, think in iterative processes: 1.0 then 2.0 – don’t get bogged down into feature creep. It’s a time killer and 60 day project can easily turn into 3-4 months, costing you much more in the long run.
2. Give your designers (in house or agency) enough leeway to give them buy in to the project. You have to balance your business objectives with the creative process.
3. Build your site on a test server first and assess all functionality; then, move to your standard server.
4. Hosting is now almost all generic and the biggest “gotcha” we see with hosting is crowded servers. You need FTP (“file transfer protocol” for uploading) and CPanel Access – 95% of most web hosts provide this functionality.
5. Don’t stand up a web site without some kind of sales funnel with at least “crude A/B testing for product or service sales and an integrated newsletter list.
6. Recognize 30-50% of your traffic is coming in via mobile – let this be one of the key determinants of your design (UX/UI): less is more.

Traditional SEO should not even be discussed in any meeting about marketing strategy.

It’s s a myth to think you can and should be manipulating search engines with back links, page keyword stuffing, duplicate content development, etc.

Save your money!

It’s old school and much of these processes are no longer relevant to Google or any other search engine.

Today, SEO rankings are a primarily combination of creating and sharing great content, building a web site that works for your visitor, coupled with basic on page SEO best practices we’ve outlined below.

• Think of Twitter as Google’s new SEO discovery engine – use Twitter to tell Google what new content has been added to your site, with hyperlinks embedded in your Tweets to the blog post or page.
• The Yoast plugin (free or paid) replaces a lot of old school heavy lifting and SEO agency fees.
• Make sure your page construction HTML “score” is correct – use the W3C Validator to check your code by pasting in a URL and checking.
• Write shareable smart copy: well written copy, educates and informs your audience.
• Don’t have a slow web site! Google penalizes sites with poor load times: checkout Pingdom’s site to understand your critical load times for a page. You want to be less than 2.5 to 3 seconds of load time per page.

Great content builds lasting impressions and pays for itself many times over.

Don’t ever substitute quantity for quality. Your business will need both moving forward. But, don’t confuse the two.

What you need to know to be effective with a content marketing strategy

• Start slow: content marketing is a marathon process that is inherently iterative: you learn as you go.
• Establish benchmark measurements at the outset: social engagement, revenue, email subscription, eBook download. Is your traffic converting?
• Keep moving forward: don’t get bogged down in the proverbial trenches.
• Align content marketing with other strategies.
• Involve your entire organization whether it’s five or fifty people: great content ideas come in all shapes and sizes: sales, customer service and/or exec staff.
• Probably 50% of the content across the social web “newsjacks” (see: any reference to pop culture any writer can dream up). Do it carefully.
• Mix and match snackable short form (images, under 300 word blog post, videos) with long-form “evergreen” high value content.
• “Chunk” and repurpose and syndicate content to leverage costs. An image curated and sourced for your web site should be featured on your pinterest board, shared on Twitter and recycled via multiple blog posts.
• Use an Editorial Calendar (download sample), it will help you organize and leverage downstream content marketing initiatives.

Lists may sound as boring as toast. They are not!

Your readers have an attention span of a gnat. – lists help to pull them into the content.

• Your readers, visitors are preconditioned to engaging with content that uses lists.
• Lists drive immediate engagement and move visitors into a sales funnel.
• People want evidence, perspective and answers in your content and lists help to convey all.
• Lists facilitate updates – there is no shame in cutting and pasting updated content via a list.
• You can brand jack your biz into a list. Is this self-serving. Yes, but done frequently.
• Lists facilitate content re-purposing via other content forms (email, other blog posts, social content) which is a fundamental “tool” in any content marketer’s toolbox.
• Every good blog post starts with a list: those scatter-shot ideas can then be fleshed or “listed” out, no pun intended.
• Brands can be creative with lists: use them as a shorthand way to poll your staff, customers, partners, BOD members and any other stakeholders for company, product, customer wins and content marketing topics.
• See texting as a way of life for many today. These people “live” on lists (stretching the metaphor a bit)- so, map your content accordingly.

Rent vs. Own Digital Strategy Takeaways

Remember your business is renting on social media and presence, content shared and more are all subject to change.

You have “command and control” capabilities with a web site and content.

And, you are investing in digital assets that will appreciate over time.

GUEST POST

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“Big data” and analytics applied to healthcare is a hot area of investment. This year alone, roughly $200 million of venture capital dollars has been allocated to the space (according to Rock Health). I’m here to tell you that these glory days are gone.

New startups are finding it difficult to differentiate from the swath of other companies unless they have something extremely novel.

While I still believe in the transformative power of data in healthcare (I’ve had two successful exits with analytics companies: RxAnte and Humedica), it’s increasingly clear to me that the current space is beginning to commoditize:

• A lot of companies are chasing the same targets. Large providers and insurers are increasingly finding it hard to choose amongst vendors — and as a result, pricing for pure analytics is decreasing.
• Most platforms provide extremely useful clinical insights, but rely on an end user that they don’t control to act. Hence these companies have no accountability for reducing the cost of healthcare and improving outcomes.
• Providers and payers are bombarded by different vendors every day. Some offer very elegant data visualization but not necessarily “new” or “better” data, and the underlying issues of accountability and pricing pressure remain.

That’s the bad news. Here’s the good news: There is still plenty of opportunity for startups in this space!

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To hear more about the opportunities for startups and investors in healthcare, join VentureBeat at HealthBeat 2014, Oct. 27-28 in San Francisco,

where Mo Kaushal will be diving deeper into the topic.

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Evolving policies around payment model reform (in which providers will be paid based on outcomes, not just services rendered) and meaningful use bonus payments for electronic medical record (EMR) adoption demonstrate that the healthcare industry is in the early days of transformation. Ongoing technology innovation, macroeconomics, and policy reactions will continue to accelerate the shift.

This creates a world of opportunity of the healthcare analytics entrepreneur. Despite my concerns over traditional healthcare data analytics companies, there are a few areas I believe we need to accelerate.

Here are some of the criteria I believe will be required in the next generation of healthcare analytics companies:

1. New business models.  For example, companies that are building out a service around a core piece of technology and that can deliver this service much more cost-effectively than any other incumbent competitor.

Navihealth is a great example of this. Navihealth’s core analytics uses patient function to predict the ideal setting upon discharge, coupled with a service model that helps optimize individual care in each post-acute facility. In other words, people in conjunction with the right technology targeting an at-risk business model has helped create a very unique value proposition to end customers.

2. Advanced, proprietary technologies. Beyond data analytics, next-generation artificial intelligence platforms will drive the next wave of innovation. New platforms must be able to ingest multi-source data and reveal novel insights that are actionable and not commoditized. These solutions will displace many current platforms as the data output becomes more valuable.

Vicarious is attacking the market for artificial intelligence by building a unified algorithmic architecture. Along the way, Vicarious has also secured investment from many of the biggest names in tech, including Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Jerry Yang, and Marc Benioff (to name a few). I’m also aware of some interesting examples of companies doing this in healthcare, but to my knowledge none of them has emerged from stealth — so watch this space!

3. High-value data sets that can’t be replicated. Companies that can provide proprietary data sets that can’t otherwise be easily obtained are increasingly setting a high bar for entry for new healthcare analytics startups.

This is one of the key reasons Optum acquired Humedica. Humedica is able to extract, standardize, and analyze millions of fully integrated clinical data versus just claims information.

As an investor, my dollars for healthcare analytics companies have already been invested, and it’s time for the next wave of innovation. For my money, healthcare entrepreneurs must focus on unique niches where little competition exists, and they must address those markets using differentiated technologies, data sets, and business models that target large problems.

Where do you see healthcare investment potential?

Mohit (Mo) Kaushal is a partner at Aberdare Ventures. He’s an MD MBA with extensive experience within clinical medicine, venture capital, and health policy. Prior to Aberdare, he was Chief Strategy Officer and EVP of Business Development at West Health, where he developed the West Health Investment Fund strategy and sourced and led investments. Prior to that he was the Director of Connected Health with the FCC, where he established the agency’s first dedicated health care team. He was also a member of the White House Health IT task force, a cross agency team focusing on implementing the technology aspects of Health Reform.

Anyone who has ever delivered a presentation or even listened to one knows that the key to an effective presentation is telling a story. If you peruse even a few pages of any of the books about how to deliver a solid presentation, you will find references to storytelling and its role in passing along information throughout history. Yes, we must tell stories. But not all stories work.

So how do you pick a story or a framework for a presentation that will be effective?

Stories vs frameworks

Let me start off by saying that you need both stories and frameworks. When you think about the structure of the points you want to convey, think about frameworks. When you want to make a point real, use a story. When you are delivering a technical presentation especially, you are very unlikely to find a single story that can weave in all the points you want to make. You are, after all, a presenter not a comedian. Don’t try to force all of your points into a long story.

So that leaves you searching for a framework. A framework is simply a way of organizing your points. It is ultimately the framework more than the stories that you need your audience to remember, largely because the stories capture moments in your presentation where your framework captures the overarching theme.

What makes a good framework?

Having crafted many hundreds of presentations, you might think that I can say for certain. But the reality is that every time I have to put together a presentation, I struggle with this. Most of the time my struggles are because I am trying to be way too clever for my own good. I come up with these very elegant frameworks that capture nuance perfectly (in my mind, anyway). I choose words that are very subtle and have specific meaning.

But all of that said, the most effective frameworks are not about you. They are about your audience. When you outthink yourself, you end up with nuance and subtlety and context that is lost on an audience member who, if you’re lucky, will remember 3 things you say in an hour-long presentation.

With that in mind, the most important thing in finding a good framework is making it memorable. Here, there are a few tricks that can help you out. There is a theory in public speaking called the Rule of Three. The premise is that the mind will remember things that are listed in threes more easily than two or four. One psychological premise behind this is the idea of creating a progression (a start, middle, and ending). It’s hard to know if there is real psychology behind this, but the idea is so prominent that a simple Google search for Rule of Three will yield a ton of results.

And if you are picking three things around which your framework will revolve, do yourself a favor and make it somewhat catchy. You don’t need to dive straight into marketing to do this, but you should put a little bit of thought into the words you use to describe your framework. A couple of standbys include using numbers or using a common first letter.

Why make it catchy?

Of course you want people to remember your framework. But knowing that is really only skimming the surface. Though you want your framework to be memorable, the question is why?

The key to selling (a product, a position, an idea) is not in laying out a logical argument that your audience is going to remember. In an hour presentation, the details that you spend all of your time obsessing over get lost. Even an hour after the presentation, the chances are that your audience remembers only a few points (if any) that you made. If you really want to move your audience to a particular position, you need to make it their conclusion not yours.

So what does that mean?

The value in providing a framework is that it allows the audience member to deconstruct the presentation after the fact. Whether that is an hour later, a day later, or a year later, the dynamic you really want is for your audience to remember a few key points and be able to deduce what it is you wanted them to understand. Even if they don’t remember the details, if they can reasonably reconstruct the argument based on the framework, they can arrive at the same conclusion over and over again. More importantly, they can tell their colleagues when you are not there, allowing them to be strong ambassadors for whatever position you were advocating.

Some examples

We can look at a few examples from the networking industry itself to see how powerful a good framework can be. For those of you who have been following a little thing called SDN and overlays for awhile, let me toss out a couple of examples.

Nicira very early on described themselves as the VMWare of networking. This was a brilliant move, though the purists probably still cringe every time you hear this comparison. But by describing themselves (or allowing others to describe them) as the VMWare of networking, the audience was able to draw their own conclusions about what that meant. It almost didn’t matter what details were said after that punch line because an audience member could easily construct whatever reality they wanted from the tag line alone.

A more recent example of a framework paying dividends is Cumulus. Depending on who you listen to, they are described as the Linux of networking (which, to be fair, is literally true) or as the RedHat of networking. Both descriptions allow the audience to remember a single point and then to deduce what that means in their context.

When you have a good framework, don’t ruin it

When you have a good framework, the key is not to pollute it with competing frameworks and thoughts. Every framework you put up after the one that works is just one more distraction. You might think you are laying golden points down, but if you are forcing the audience to remember multiple frameworks, then you are really just diluting your strength. I don’t mean to say that you should be vapid and without substance, but be careful layering on too many points. All too often, a good presentation is ruined not because you don’t make the point you want but rather because you make that point and 200 others that follow it.

The bottom line

The value in a framework is in allowing someone to reach the same conclusions without you standing in front of them. And if you think this is just for marketing and sales people, let me add that everyone is presenting virtually all the time. A meeting to review an architectural design? That’s a presentation, and if you want your architecture to go through, you ought to spend time thinking about how to talk about it. That one-on-one with your boss where you want to talk about your promotion? That’s a presentation, and you should make it easy for your boss to summarize the reasons. Why? Because she has to go and make the case for you when you are not there. Presentations are everywhere, and if you think you can get by without deliberately planning for success, you are following yourself.

The message from the Federal Communications Commission is loud and clear: Do not mess with people’s access to the Internet. That's a lesson it's trying to teach the wireless carriers and, it turns out, hotels too. 

According to the FCC, Marriott's Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center intentionally used Wi-Fi jamming tactics on its own guests. The interference made it impossible for people to use their own personal hotspots, leaving Marriott's costly Wi-Fi as the only other option. In response to the investigation, the hotel agreed Friday to pay a penalty of $600,000 and promised to stop its signal-blocking activities. 

But that's as close as it has come to an apology. 

Despite getting caught in this mafia-worthy shakedown and consenting to pay the fine, the hotel doesn't admit any wrongdoing. Instead, it offers this excuse: We're squashing guests' Wi-Fi because we care about our security and theirs. 

See also: Where In The World Is The Fastest Broadband?

Where You Can Go And Disconnect 

According to the FCC’s filing, the Marriott location's Wi-Fi-blocking activities were discovered last year, when an event attendee noticed the dead zone in the hotel's convention center. 

[A] complainant alleged that the Gaylord Opryland was “jamming mobile hotspots so that you can’t use them in the convention space.” Marriott has admitted that one or more of its employees used containment features of a Wi-Fi monitoring system at the Gaylord Opryland to prevent consumers from connecting to the Internet via their own personal Wi-Fi networks.

CNN reports that Marriott didn't use a typical wireless-signal jammer, which the FCC defines as a radio frequency device that illegally interferes or impedes with "authorized radio communications." The news outlet spoke to a senior FCC official, who said that staffers used the hotel's own Wi-Fi system to interfere and dampen outside signals. 

However, details in the commission's filing clearly shows that some specialized equipment from a third-party vendor was used: 

Marriott operates a Wi-Fi monitoring system manufactured by a third party that was installed at the Gaylord Opryland. Among other features, the system includes a containment capability that, when activated, will cause the sending of de-authentication packets to Wi-Fi Internet access points that are not part of Marriott’s Wi-Fi system or authorized by Marriott and that Marriott has classified as “rogue.

Either way, the result is the same: All Wi-Fi, other than Marriott's own, was blocked. And its fee for access ran up to a hefty sum—as much as a thousand dollars in the conference center. 

"It is unacceptable for any hotel to intentionally disable personal hotspots while also charging customers and small businesses high fees to use the hotel's own Wi-Fi network," FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said in a statement. "This practice puts customers in the untenable position of either paying twice for the same service or forgoing Internet access altogether." 

Marriott Responds

According to Recode, a Marriott rep shrugged off the accusation with this excuse: Jamming external Wi-Fi signals protects the hotel's own “from rogue wireless hotspots that can cause degraded service, insidious cyber-attacks and identity theft." The rep went on to say: 

Like many other institutions and companies in a wide variety of industries, including hospitals and universities, the Gaylord Opryland protected its Wi-Fi network by using FCC-authorized equipment provided by well-known, reputable manufacturers.

That's not exactly a mea culpa. Signal interference amid numerous wireless connections can be an issue, but when it comes to security, piling loads of strangers onto a single network usually poses more risks, not less. As for the "everyone else is doing it" excuse, Marriott may not realize that the FCC doesn't take too kindly to that. (Just ask Verizon Wireless.) 

To cap it off, the rep added that Marriott's activities didn’t break any laws, and that's not quite true. 

The company agreed to pay the $600,000 penalty—a slap on the wrist for a corporation that earns billions—but more importantly, the hotel agreed to cease all jamming activities. It will also submit compliance reports for the next three years, which should put an end to these shenanigans. 

Jammed Up

Taking aim at a hotel's Wi-Fi manipulation is a first for the FCC. But now that the issue is on the feds' radar, this may not be the last time it scrutinizes the industry. 

Hotels in general appear to have a love-hate affair with connected technology. Hilton and Starwood seem to embrace it. Both are reportedly eager to finally let guests skip the check-in desk and unlock doors with their phones. That's a scenario tech companies have been promising for years now. Marriott itself also tries to cater highly connected business guests. And in some of its properties, the chain doesn't even charge for broadband at all. 

See also: The E-Cig Traveler: To Vape Or Not To Vape (And Where)

But the old lodging business has seen newcomers like AirBnB enter the fray and connected gadgets chip away at its profits from ancillary services. Our phones, tablets and laptops can now handle things people used to rely on—and pay—hotels to supply.

For all their cash, the Marriotts of the world might be looking at their vast coffers and wondering how much bigger they could've been, if those devices hadn't stepped in to provide an array of services.

• Phone calls (of course)
• Premium TV: Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and even streaming from your own TiVo recordings easily replace on-demand movies and even some premium sporting events.
• Room service: It used to be a treat, but now it seems like a relic in the post-Seamless and Eat24 world.
• Laundry and dry cleaning pick-up: Washio, Postmates and mobile sites of local cleaners themselves offer pick-up and delivery.
• Honor bar: Apps like Instacart can deliver booze to your door—maybe even for a better value than the overpriced tiny bottles in that compact fridge.
• And, of course, Internet access.

Thanks to 4G technology and the mobile carriers' push to build out their networks, hotspots have become viable alternatives for hotel Wi-Fi in many areas of the country. They might even be better, if you're in a busy hotel overloaded with hundreds of guests. 

That is, assuming the hotel doesn't put a hit out on your hotspot. 

Marriott photos courtesy of Marriott Gaylord Opryland Hotel and Convention Center. Wireless Jammer photo by David Mellis. All others courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Transparent Cloud-computing Consortium (abbreviation: T-Cloud Consortium) will conduct research activities into changes in the computing model as a result of collaboration between "device" and "cloud" and the creation of new value and markets through organic data processing High speed and high quality networks, and dramatic improvements in computer processing capabilities, have greatly changed the nature of applications and made the storing and processing of data on the network commonplace. These technological reforms have not only changed computers and smartphones, but are also changing the data processing model for all information devices. In particular, in the area known as M2M (Machine-To-Machine), there are great expectations that information with a new type of value can be produced using a variety of devices and sensors saving/sharing data via the network and through large-scale cloud-type data processing. This consortium believes that attaching a huge number of devices to the network and storing/processing data transparently on the cloud can lead to the birth of new computing models and businesses. We have defined 3 areas in which to form these new markets as device applications, big data analysis and platforms, and aim to investigate the technical development and business potential in each field and contribute to the creation of next-generation device-centric markets.

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Practice professionals have relationship-based businesses that lend themselves to internal growth strategies.

Internal business development strategies focus on retaining clients and building deeper knowledge and engagement, cultivating referrals, and broadening services. Yet, many practice professionals focus more on sales and marketing to acquire new prospects than they do on developing business opportunities with the clients they already have.

In an article I developed in collaboration with Ticoon Technologies, the following eight strategies were applied to financial advisors. These same strategies can also be used by a wide range of business professionals who want to grow their practice – including advisors, accountants, lawyers, consultants, etc.

1. Really know your client.

The better you know your client and understand their true needs and motivations, the better you can serve them. This is both a challenge to get to know your clients better as human beings, yet also an imperative to pay more attention to organizing and harnessing the massive amount of data that exists within your business about your clients and their habits. Every professional practice needs some kind of customer relationship management strategy including software and processes for managing clients.

2. Understand the lifetime value of your client.

Smart businesses realize that it’s more cost-effective to retain clients than it is to find new ones. The lifetime value of a client is a concept that applies very well to practice professional businesses because of the important role that trust plays at the front end of the relationship. Once the initial trust hurdle is crossed and if that trust is nurtured and maintained over time, then your clients will bring you a continuous stream of new opportunities as their needs grow and evolve.

3. Pay attention to relevance in communications.

Client communication may be the single most important factor in retaining and growing your business internally. Technology is rapidly changing how and where we communicate and increasing the control clients have over what they receive. Communications are more conversational then ever before and relevance trumps everything in conversations. You need to focus on what your client is interested in and how they want you to communicate it to them. Then you need to deliver on your side of the conversation.

4. Be a quarterback.

Nothing is simple anymore. Clients have multiple advisors, consultants and service providers – more choices that ever before. Yet, simplicity is still a virtue for many people and any way you can manage complexity and/or coordinate among service providers is added value for your clients. Plus, stepping up and playing the quarterback role puts you squarely in a position to influence the plays that are called.

5. Get personal.

You’re in a relationship business. Your clients have chosen to work with you because they know you, they like you and they trust you. So, get to know them, like them and trust them too. And their families. And their friends. Getting to know your clients personally helps you understand them and support them in achieving their goals. And you will be the person they refer when others in their network need your help.

6. Engage your clients online.

The majority of your clients are online and that’s only going to increase over time. They’re getting their news online and being entertained online. If you’re not sharing relevant news or a good laugh or something inspiring with them online, you can be sure of one thing: someone else is. Engage your clients in online social networks and stop pretending you can’t afford the time. You can’t afford not to make the time.

7. Demonstrate value.

Long gone are the days when we worked for one employer for 30 years, let alone stay with one service provider or practice professional. And technology is changing so quickly that with each passing year there are alternative digital ways to get traditional services. So, demonstrate value for your clients, day in and day out. Remind them regularly why they should want to continue to do business with you – with YOU and not with someone or something else. Never, ever take your clients for granted.

8. Provide full service.

You already have a stable of clients whose trust you’ve earned. As your business matures, there are many growth opportunities that can come from broadening the range of services your offer. If you know your clients and are paying close attention both to what they are telling you in conversations and what the data surrounding their habits are telling you, it will be revealed exactly how to expand your service offering and grow your practice.

Content from Linked Media Group

Today’s shiny markets wrapped in social media and buffed with billion dollar valuations are not what they seem.

No business can thrive or grow in today’s tech drenched world without some technical competency and savvy marketing.

Digital has replaced traditional marketing.

To be successful, you must be proficient in creating and growing a digital “footprint correlating with your business objectives.

Brands: It’s Noisy Out There – Your Strategy has to be Spot On

1. Have a customer feedback loop and analysis baked in to your brand strategy from day one for course corrections downstream.
2. Attention is expensive in this market; it’s a fools game to assume high growth across the social web means unlimited opportunity.
3. Ideas are cheap in our world today. Tactical execution trumps everything else.
4. Niche in and find a foxhole to defend and ignore the false promises on the horizon. In most markets you’ll have one or two market leaders (see Google and Yahoo) and over time this is probably going to distill down to one.
5. Every market has competition. End of story. Brands that delude themselves by ignoring and/or not doing competitive review will get their heads handed to them on a platter.
6. Web site design drives your overall strategy: its’ the foundation that all of your tactical marketing and excruciatingly painful to rebuild a web site after it’s been launched and fraught with peril.

A viable digital marketing strategy is today much more than a web site, great graphics and baseline content.

One of your greatest challenges is grappling with “you don’t know what you don’t know” – your facing a bewildering mix of technology and process and with little framework for perspective.

• Data is exploding at an unprecedented rate, projected to be ten times greater in the next six years.
• Content sharing is now platform agnostic: it’s anything (text, comments, images, videos, ebooks, social shares) and anywhere and there is so much more of it.
• Consumer demographics are shifting rapidly from one social platform to another – brand loyalty is hard to come by.
• Bigger brands are leveraging their marketing muscle (social influence) to reach high value customers in multiple ways and outspending smaller brands.
• Native advertising is on the rise and helping to blur the lines of how consumers perceive “real” content vs. ads.
• Every business small or large is by necessity of changes in the digital landscape (more platforms and higher content volumes) being forced to become a publisher.
• The demand for greater levels of technical expertise driven by platform proliferation and inter connectivity of data is overwhelming the ability and resources of small businesses.

Don’t Fear the Cloud: Embrace it to Lower Costs and Get to Market Faster

Most of you don’t really have an idea of what the cloud is and the impact on their business.

Dig in to the technology.

Primal Fears Most Businesses have about the Cloud

• Are worried: ‘is my data safe, secure and readily accessible?”
• Concerned about adding another layer of complexity to their business.
• Uncertain about staffing needs and/or how to outsource getting the technology in place.
• Eyes glaze over when marketing tech geeks start throwing around confusing buzz words.

In most cases you’re just moving digital assets to distant servers with providers who probably have Servers as safe, if not safer than what you are using now.

Yes, you will need someone on staff to assess your digital infrastructure (if any) and then develop a plan to move and manage your assets.

We use this standard two page word doc for assessing a client’s digital infrastructure and it should be helpful

How Not to Get Run Over by Tech

Know apps, services, marketing platforms are not going to work as advertised (ever!).

Iterate Technology Deployment with Clearly Demarcated Digital Touchpoints

1.0 Startup

• Domain Name Server (“DNS”) Provider and Settings
• Server Setup and Provisioning
• Hosting
• Content
• Basic Web Site (Apps, Forms, SEO best practices, Plugins, CRM Integration, Analytics, basic Sales Funnel)

2.0 Migration

• Web Site Redeployment or Redesign
• Standing up a Content Marketing Platform & Syndication
• Deeper Sales Funnel Integration: Realtime Reporting
• Dedicated Server
• Cloud Apps Layer with more robust services

Takeaways for Busy Execs

This is a very basic outline above and by no means should be used more than just a quick reference point for “grease board notes” for a staff meeting.

Critical takeaway for this type of blog post is just to make you as an exec aware of some of these “tech gotchas” – tech is now baked in to every aspect of marketing.

E.F. Schumaker, the distinguished British Economist wrote the best seller, Small is Beautiful in the 70′s – it’s as applicable today as it was then, especially for smaller more nimble businesses.

Your greatest strength is your ability to reinvent your business using technology as a competitive driver.

Jonathon Gatehouse is in Hong Kong on assignment for @MacleansMag. Follow along: @JonGatehouse

— Maclean’s Magazine (@MacleansMag) October 4, 2014

What is immediately striking about the Occupy Central pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong is the level of organization and politeness. If this is a revolution, it’s about the nicest one in history.

With more than 50,000 activists packed into a tiny quadrant of the city’s Admiralty district the potential for chaos is immense. But volunteer marshals keep pedestrian traffic flowing, others help people up and down the makeshift ladders they’ve built over concrete highway dividers, and there are even long, orderly queues for the nearby public restrooms. The signs that decorate the walls of office buildings and the sides of concrete overpasses are almost uniformly pleasant. “Keep Calm and Love Hong Kong,” is a popular one. “People say I’m a Dreamer,” reads a large yellow invocation of John Lennon. “Do U Hear the People Sing?” asks another. They clap pleasantly for speeches, pick-up the trash on the ground, and have organized stations to provide water, raincoats, and the umbrellas that can always be pressed into double-duty against police pepper spray.

The crowd is overwhelmingly young and seemingly unafraid. After Friday night’s organized attacks against Occupy protesters across the harbour in  Mong Kok—attributed to members of organized crime Triads, enjoying at least the implicit support of police and the government—there was a great deal of apprehension in Central Hong Kong. But the protesters came out in force all the same. And stayed late into the night, singing songs about love and peace.

Anthony Tsang and his girlfriend, Irene Tsui, both Communications students and Hong Kong’s Polytechnic University, were sitting cross-legged on the ashphalt, reading a book about Nelson Mandela. Both are committed to non-violent resistance, but have no illusions about what they will do when the police finally do come. “Run away,” says Tsang. Still, the greater cause is worth putting themselves in harm’s way. “It feels like the government is kind of corrupt,” says Tsui. “I feel angry.”

“When I was younger, democracy wasn’t that important to me,” says Tsang, just 20. “But now I see why it’s important. China has forbidden so many people from expressing themselves. But we’re Hong Kongers. We’re different. We don’t want our rights to be taken away.”

Related post:
What you need to know about the protest in Hong Kong

This is the scene right now at #HongKong democracy protests. #macleans pic.twitter.com/pxn6NcVdNu

— Jonathon Gatehouse (@JonGatehouse) October 4, 2014

 

Democracy Wall at #HongKong protests pic.twitter.com/Rn4LDhbt9Y

— Jonathon Gatehouse (@JonGatehouse) October 4, 2014

 

Settling in for a long night at #HongKong protests # macleans pic.twitter.com/1J9VMQ6Nze

— Jonathon Gatehouse (@JonGatehouse) October 4, 2014

 

Post It protest in #HongKong. #macleans pic.twitter.com/odwy5vmnsH

— Jonathon Gatehouse (@JonGatehouse) October 4, 2014

 

Anti-democracy-protest protestor sits atop bridge in Central #HongKong Airbag waits below #macleans pic.twitter.com/HEUtcAXz9J

— Jonathon Gatehouse (@JonGatehouse) October 5, 2014

Protesters sit outside Chief Executive's office in #HongKong Police said to be on way to clear them out #macleans pic.twitter.com/VbSyBlvMym

— Jonathon Gatehouse (@JonGatehouse) October 5, 2014

The post Video: ‘Please’ and ‘thank you’ at the Umbrella Revolution appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Social media is inexorably tied to your inbound marketing efforts, whether locally in Toronto or even in a global scale. It’s virtually inescapable that you harness the potential of leading networking sites Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus for your business. After all, you go where your customers are, and between just those three, they have about 1.6 billion users.

Photo courtesy of seanrnicholson(CC No Derivatives)

Sharing on social media for you inbound marketing efforts, however, shouldn’t be taken lightly. You probably know some of the basic best practices, but if you want to go deeper – as you should – what else should you know?

Beyond Just Sharing

Using images, posting links, even scheduling your updates and tracking your metrics – everyone knows that these are absolutely essential. Behind the scenes, however, the technical mechanics that make social sharing work can be pretty tricky – and if you know what you’re doing, you can make the most out of it.

Let’s run through a few of the advanced sharing tips you can use in your inbound marketing campaigns incorporating social media (using the top three social networks):

Facebook

Facebook Open Graph– Leverage Facebook’s Open graph protocol to control how a link from your website shows up in social networks when shared by users. If you’re using WordPress, you can use Facebook’s recommended plugin or the more general and still highly recommended Yoast SEO.

Tagging fans – Don’t go overboard when tagging fans. What usually happens is one Facebook page admin sees another page tag a bunch of followers and thought it was a good idea. Copying what appeared to be best practice, he went and did the same.

The problem is that tagging fans without giving much thought as to WHY can damage your relationship with your fans. Only tag relevant fans and influencers and only when your status updates are relevant to them, such as when they provided a tip you decided to post or if they’re part of the discussion.

Hashtags – Twitter handles hashtags well because you only have 140 characters to use and spending them all on hashtags is ridiculous. The same doesn’t apply to Facebook; and so many pages are overusing hashtags.

If you need more reasons not to do this aside from the fact that you look ridiculously amateurish, how about this: adding more than relevant hashtags distracts from your posts’ subject matter. Worse, creating your own hashtags hoping they’ll catch on reeks of desperation and an inflated sense of self-importance, which is not good for your brand image.

Twitter

Twitter Cards – In a similar way, Twitter cards allow for more immersive social sharing by including rich media elements and your Twitter handle in the Tweet. WordPress plugins that support this include Jetpack, Yoast SEO, and JM Twitter Cards.

Automation – Be mindful of the automated tools you use: don’t retweet everything you’re mentioned in – if you want to express gratitude, a simple “favorite” would do. Don’t automatically thank everyone who follows you. It’s obvious and instead of showing you value people, it shows you letting bots handle interaction.

Google Plus

Search results – Updates on Google Plus appear on Google search results, so try to pack as much information as you can in the first 45 characters of your update – that’s the part of your post that is guarantee to show up in results.

GIFs – Google Plus has the visual edge over Facebook and Twitter as it allows GIFs on its status posts. Don’t miss out on the viral potential of these animate images and maybe you can finally use Google Plus like you mean it.

You may know the theories that make social sharing best practices work, but your inbound marketing strategy relies just as much in the technicalities as it does on the principles. Brush up on these advanced social sharing tips and empower your inbound marketing.

GUEST POST

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The past few years have seen an explosion of startups delivering highly focused apps for small businesses — despite the fact that it has historically been very difficult to attract SMB users at scale.

Many of these startups have entered the space believing they can be part of an ecosystem of specialized apps that leverage the data and connections of large incumbent players, namely Intuit and Xero, to pull in large user bases. The great hope is that small businesses will want to cluster a number of these highly specialized apps around their core accounting system to better run their business.

It’s an attractive idea. But I don’t think it’s correct (even though my company is behind one of those specialized apps).

I think the future of the space will be driven by established players trying to own the relationship with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which will lead to increased consolidation of the right products and services.

It’s a story reminiscent of the battle between Microsoft and Apple in the ’90s. Microsoft prevailed at the time, despite the superiority of Apple’s system, by bundling Windows with commodity hardware and Microsoft Office and reaching customers through a ubiquitous partnership distribution model. In doing so, Microsoft quickly became the go-to operating system for mainstream consumers and enterprises. Its ability to aggregate the “good enough” solutions that made it easier for the customer to do their job helped propel Microsoft to the top.

To realize why an established aggregator of products will win in the market, it is important to understand the typical SMB user and the challenges of serving them. The reality is that the vast majority of small businesses in this country aren’t forward-thinking Bay Area startups, eager to adopt the latest technology. The allure of a superior product isn’t enough to drive them to adopt a solution.

The majority of small businesses will only adopt new technology when they are pushed to do so by an individual or organization they have an established, trusting relationship with. For example, my company, BodeTree, benefits from pursuing distribution channels that include financial institutions and trade associations that have strong, deeply developed relationships with their SMB customers. Through trust, these organizations can drive SMBs to take action.

Still, even with these channels there are huge barriers to encouraging SMBs to adopt new technology. Gaining a significant foothold in the SMB market takes time, the determination to overcome generational perceptions, and most importantly a forcing function to drive decisions. Simply put, it takes the power of a major player bundling together a suite of solutions, wrapping it in a familiar package, and feeding it directly to the small business owner that is already accustomed to what the company offers.

This harsh reality poses a major challenge to the idea of a world where small businesses are comfortable seeking out multiple providers to serve their various needs and managing multiple accounts or logins to reach their goals. I think that the big players recognize this, and that’s why I believe we’ll see further consolidation in the industry. You only need to look to Intuit for confirmation of this trend. In the past year alone, Intuit has announced the shutdown of its QuickBooks Desktop app ecosystem and acquired 10 companies including Lettuce, DocStock, and Check. Why? I suspect that their acquisition spree is motivated primarily by their focus on driving adoption of their cloud-based QuickBooks Online (QBO). It’s no secret that QBO doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles that the company’s deeply entrenched desktop user base has grown accustomed to using. Intuit has identified apps that fill these gaps and is snapping them up left and right to present a complete solution set to its users.

Intuit is using its app ecosystem to horse race solutions and then integrate the winners into its corporate family. On a deeper level, this strategy speaks to the incumbents wanting to monetize as much of the ecosystem as possible and control the experience for their customers. By acquiring and integrating promising solutions early on, they can push through additional product to their users and fill in product gaps.

If this theory is accurate, then the future of the SMB tech market may look significantly different than the latest entrants into the market may hope.

Small business owners are becoming more comfortable with the concept of the cloud, but at a glacial pace. Unless we become comfortable with measuring change in geological time, expect Intuit and Xero (as well as potential outsiders such as GoDaddy) to take a more proactive role in the transition and leverage their scale and reach to drive adoption.

It’s highly likely that the ultimate winner in the small business market will be the player that bundles valuable solutions as part of an entire suite of products, using one platform that seamlessly integrates across all aspects of the business. While independent applications will likely have a place at the table, it will become increasingly difficult for them to carve out a sustainable business for themselves.

In order to survive and thrive in this consolidated future, third-party applications like ours are going to have to find a way to deliver unique strategic value to the big players. For us, our focus is on expanding the universe of potential customers that the incumbent players can work with while developing a suite of solutions that put the small business owner at the center of the equation.

Every developer looking at the space should be realistic about the strategies and goals that Intuit, Xero, and other large SMB providers are pursuing and prepare their company to proactively create value in a future where the landscape may be markedly different than what developers may expect.

Chris Myers is Co-founder & CEO of BodeTree.

Marketers and sales enablement professionals and salespeople who curate content to send to their clients should always give it a content header to create value for the receiver.

The following is a true story and a lesson learned.

Earlier this year I sent a link to a whitepaper to a new contact on LinkedIn. My contact (Bill) is an important player in the target account and I felt that the whitepaper had useful insights that Bill would appreciate.

By sending it, he would understand my point of view a little better and after reading the article he would better understand how we could help him achieve his objectives… at least that was my line of thinking at the time.

It is big whitepaper, 170+ pages entitled Tech Trends 2014 and it was produced by Deloitte Australia. Lots of excellent articles and two that I found really aligned with my thinking on couple of disruptive technologies. Buried on P 149 there was an article of particular interest to Bill.

Here is an excerpt of the LinkedIn Inmail I sent to Bill.

But without context, or a reason for reading it and an excerpt of the relevant section, I was doing Bill a disservice. I sent Bill a piece of naked content.

Never Send Naked Content, Use Content Headers

How was Bill to know that buried inside this document there were gold-nuggets of information that he might find interesting and useful for his team in communicating a point of view to their customers?

By sending naked content I shifted the burden of creating context to Bill and asking him do a lot of unnecessary the work to figure out if it was relevant and useful. This is something that I should have done in a minute or two that would have made the article really useful, shareable and more valuable.

Let’s review what Bill (and the person receiving your content) has to do when my Inmail arrives.

1. Scan it and understand what it is,
2. Make a judgment call as to whether the sender has credibility,
3. Make a judgment call as whether to click on the link… it could go anywhere, although in this case the full link describes the source and media,
4. Read the whitepaper introduction and determine if it’s of interest,
5. Find the index and scan it for interest areas,
6. Download it, at 170 pages, it’s a weekend reading project,
7. Find the time to navigate to the sections of interest and read them.
8. Cut and paste excerpts of relevant sections and email to his team, with a content header.

This is a similar problem that salespeople and knowledge workers face when accessing documents in sales portals and Internet file stores. They don’t know what is in the document, or if it’s relevant, until they have downloaded and read it.

Content Headers Create Context and Value

I use the WittyParrot content delivery platform to index and store source content and to curate, share and deliver both structured documents and plain text content.

Here is a screenshot of the article in WittyParrot. I have included links to the landing page, the source document, an excerpt of the content with a content header and have tagged it so that it can be easily found.

This Wit is 1400 words and has multiple pieces of useful content aggregated within it.
I scrolled down the wit and took this screenshot of the relevant piece that I resent to Bill and for which he thanked me. I simply highlighted this section in WittyParrot and dragged it into the email I sent.

Summary

It takes a few minutes of effort to add a content header to a piece of content. Those few minutes will likely increase the value and the ROI of the content and the frequency of usage. By tagging it, it becomes accessible in a search using logical terms and by giving it a header we enable the viewer to quickly determine if the content is relevant.

80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. You’ve heard this before. Not only that, you’re probably pretty confident that you live by this adage every day, down to the letter.

However, your lead generation campaign may not be as on-target as you think when your 80% isn’t actually there.

Ever heard of the Rosetta Stone company? Chances are, you might have if you’ve been using its trademark language education software. But today, the company is now in the same, undesirable market position that it had pushed its previous competition when it was still a young company.

Before its products knew very well where its 80% was coming from but today it’s only realized that this same source has suddenly been consumed by upstarsts. As a result, its frantically trying to change its target market in order to stay relevant.

Like it or not, the 20% percent that’s generating your 80% is neither static nor one-dimensional. Increasing your focus on what you think that is could leave you for a nasty surprise when you realize that it doesn’t actually exist.

It’s like boldly ignoring the feedback of your new customers because you think your older customers are enough to maintain your revenue. You’re not just being overconfident here. You’re underestimating the kind of voice your seemingly ‘newbie’ customers are capable of.

• They could be from a bigger industry – For example, suppose this new customer is actually from a larger industry that you’re just trying to put a foothold in. A similar case is already developing right now with the iWatch. Jonathan Ive believes that the new wearable would put Rolex out of business. However, the fight’s going to be a lot tougher than that. Getting loyal Apple customers to buy it is one thing but seizing a huge chunk of the luxury business could be another. If you were Apple, your 20% may not even put a dent into that target market.

• They could be the ‘real’ 20% – It’s not often advisable to focus on generating new customers over nurturing current B2B relationships. However, it’s not always easy to tell if you’re really abiding by that rule. Your products could be hardwired to please old customers but frustrate newer generations of buyers. Yet after the dust has settled, you realized that your ‘best’ customers can’t keep your business from spiraling after all so you go after new ones! Consider this another reason why you should really pay attention to feedback, regardless of whether it’s from an old or new customer.

• It could be flat even – And lastly, there’s always the possibility of 50/50 and not 80/20. Your total revenue/product is 50% new clients and 50% old clients. This leaves you with a need to have multiple buyer personas on hand and a careful assessment on what niche is really working versus what isn’t.

Think of it as another case of counting your chickens too early or putting all your eggs into one basket. Don’t be too confident about your most valuable customers unless you’ve actually proven them to be. Neither should you think your lead generation campaign can automatically focus on them oh-so-perfectly.

“Content, content everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” Today’s B2B content marketing scene can be summed up by this riff on the old saying.

What I mean is that there’s a surprising gap between B2B marketers and their customers when it comes to content. Modern marketers know that that today’s buyers want to do their homework by doing online research on their problems and possible solutions before contacting a vendor. That’s why 93% of B2B companies are turning to content marketing, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2014 Content Marketing Survey.

Yet according to IDG Research, 82% of IT decision makers find it at least somewhat challenging to locate the information they need to make an informed purchase decision. And nearly four out of ten (39%) find it very or extremely challenging to find the content they need.

Why the disconnect?

The IDG Research found that the most frequently cited complaints were: Too much marketing hype and empty buzzwords (64%) and a lack of truly independent, unbiased information (63%). This means that the problem isn’t the amount of content available. It’s that IT buyers feel they can’t find trusted content.

So how do you ensure that customers perceive your content as being trustworthy?

Solve Customers Problems by Providing Trusted Information

The following are tips based on research from actual customers as to how to make sure your content is perceived as trustworthy.

1. Eliminate Hype. As noted above, the most frequently cited complaint among customers who find it challenging to find the trusted content they need is “too much marketing hype and empty buzzwords.” So create content that’s clear and straightforward.
2. Make it unbiased. Customers perceive a lack of truly independent, unbiased information (63%). Yet marketers are loathe to say anything that could possibly be perceived as at all negative about their product. That’s understandable. They’re afraid that any small negative statement will prevent someone from buying your product. However, it’s also true that most products are best for certain purposes—you can’t be everything to everybody. You’ll earn more trust from the customers for whom your product is a great fit, if you’re honest about who the product is suited to—and who it’s not suited to. Besides, if you say so yourself, you maintain control over the conversation. If you don’t, you’ll have to rely on the charity of third parties.
3. Present alternative perspectives. Leaving out or not addressing different perspectives is another factor that makes consumers skeptical about content from marketers. Think like a journalist and try to present both sides to the story.
4. Include objective research—and cite your sources. Customers are more likely to trust your content when your arguments are backed up by research. Marketers generally know this and do include facts and figures in their content. However, one of my pet peeves about vendor-sponsored content is that marketers often neglect to include the full citation or a link to the actual source. Customers feel the same way. According to research from Kentico Software, 57% of customers say educational information from a company is more credible when it contains verification from named sources.
5. Beware of product pitches. Much of content marketing is meant to be educational and help make people aware of the problem and the unique solution you provide. But it’s very tempting for B2B marketers to want to dive straight into a product pitch after a short bit of education. Bad move. According to the Kentico report, trust is very fragile. Even adding a product pitch to the end of an otherwise objective blog post or newsletter brings down the credibility level significantly. Only 45% of consumers say they trust such content.
6. Proclaim your identity. Another peeve of customers is that erodes trust is when vendors try to hide their identity. 15% of customers surveyed in the Kentico research said that presenting information in a way that hides the face that it comes from a company makes them skeptical.

When it comes to content marketing, the best way to reach customers is to put on your journalist cap—and providing solid, useful, objective information.

When I get the chance to sit down with Andrew Bartels, one of the finest business-technologists I know, we have spirited and in-depth conversations about LinkedIn and Salesforce.com; about the integration between sales and marketing and where most businesses are relative to the available technology (think apps, social platforms, LinkedIn, CRMs etc.).

Andrew spends most of his days contemplating, consulting or integrating Salesforce.com into business process, workflows and cultures. He understands Salesforce.com at a level few do and that’s why I always reach out to him to learn more about how LinkedIn and Salesforce.com can work together.

When asked about how these tools can be utilized in tandem, Andrew had this to say: “The days of using Salesforce.com as no more than a system of record are behind us. Today by integrating the contact data you already have in Salesforce.com with LinkedIn you can transform your instance of Salesforce into a ‘System of Engagement’ which will empower your users to develop forward looking, actionable next steps.” To gain more great insight into Andrew’s thoughts and ideas on Salesforce.com, please visit his blog.

When I launched LinkedIn’s new Sales Navigator and saw the initial set up prompting a Salesforce.com data import, I immediately saw the potential and thought of Andrew. The level of chaos and more importantly, opportunity, just elevated to a whole new level.

This is not a brand new integration but it has been updated and most people are not merging the two together, and that’s a big miss for several reasons.

Why aren’t sales leaders and sales professionals combining LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Salesforce.com; two data powerhouses?

1. They don’t know it’s available.
2. They don’t know how.
3. They haven’t customized Salesforce.com.
4. They are not LinkedIn power-users
5. They don’t want to upgrade and pay for the upgraded membership.
6. They don’t have ongoing training and updates.
7. They don’t know Andrew or me.

Why sales leaders and sales professionals need to combine LinkedIn and Salesforce.com.

Sign up for Sales Navigator and LinkedIn will prompt you to import your Salesforce.com accounts. (We’ve provided some data sheets and an FAQ sheet below). Need a bit more context for LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Read my last post, LinkedIn Sales Navigator — Getting Started.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator takes out all of the clutter from your LinkedIn.com individual profile and will showcase your accounts, suggest new leads, receive all updates from your point of contact and the company. You will, if your company has activated TeamLink, see how you are connected to the potential lead or client (if you are not already connected). Understanding the introduction pathway is critical. Leverage your network. Consider the following:

Your Salesforce.com contacts and accounts will now have a face to them. We are visual creatures and matching a face with a name makes that person real. We work with, collaborate and sell to people. Let’s turn our Salesforce.com records into real people and find out more about them, who we might know in common, what their company is doing on LinkedIn and more. We want to gather key intelligence to separate us from our competitors.

Buyers trust their networks*:

76% prefer to work with vendors recommended by someone they know

73% prefer to work with salespeople recommended by someone they know

65% say their network is critical for checking references

2. When you use Sales Navigator and Salesforce.com in tandem you increase your context, key intelligence and network. Consider the difficulty you experience when you only have one point of contact in an account and they leave, are transferred, promoted etc. Your sales cycle stalls and you begin at square one again. Sales Navigator will provide greater perspective and show other key contacts that may re-ignite the buying cycle.
3. You need to drive revenue and differentiate yourself and your company.

You may not feel ready for all these tools but know the modern buyer is connected, informed and discerning. They expect you to be informed and they expect you know who the other key people in their organization are. LinkedIn and/or Salesforce.com are two of the most important tools you need to use daily. Yes, daily.

Need to know more, let us know.

The Slideshare below is a great overview. The Salesforce.com example begins on slide 20.

2014 has been quite an enlightening year for me so far. I have had the privilege to learn valuable life lessons from the likes of Anthony Robbins and Jay Abraham. Following my curiosity, I have explored Dr. Carol Dweck’s theory of intelligence (Fixed Vs. Growth Mindset). Observing the leadership qualities of high-profile CMOs, I have been able to share with you a few of their success secrets in the CMO Spotlight series.

Most of all, I have learned that the ONLY way to deliver a consistent, positive customer experience is through employee engagement. If you cannot breed and nurture an engaged, motivated, innovative workforce, you run the constant risk of losing business—existing and new. Team building events, employee education opportunities, Think Tank sessions, informal huddles, etc. have become more frequent at ALEA and the results are remarkable. Not only are we finding that there is greater aspiration and ambition to enhance performance, there is also a very strong increase in the sense of camaraderie as each employee strives to help other team mates work faster and better. The entire team is developing a Growth Mindset. This fresh infusion of energy and enthusiasm is also doing a world of good for our customer satisfaction levels. Everybody wins!

Here is Dr. Carol Dweck’s definition of fixed and growth mindsets:

“In a fixed mindset, students believe their basic abilities, their intelligence, their talents, are just fixed traits. They have a certain amount and that’s that, and then their goal becomes to look smart all the time and never look dumb. In a growth mindset students understand that their talents and abilities can be developed through effort, good teaching and persistence. They don’t necessarily think everyone’s the same or anyone can be Einstein, but they believe everyone can get smarter if they work at it.”

When we hire, we know we are looking for smart professionals. From there on begins the journey of growth. The work environment is designed to help these individuals push their limits, explore new areas through experimentation and results monitoring, weigh the pay-offs and go further. We know we didn’t hire an Einstein, but does that mean we won’t ever have one among us? I don’t think so. On the contrary, I am eager to see it happen! It’s what I wrote in my piece last week—I want all our employees to believe that they can and should be born twice.

Customer Experience Management—Top 3 Benefits of An Engaged Workforce

1. Enterprise-Wide Focus on the Outcome. As B2B marketers, we spend too much time and effort (and money) focusing on managing campaigns. The advantage of having a highly motivated and engaged team is the ability to focus instead on the positive outcome of the campaign. Remember what I said in a previous piece, you are not selling a drill, you are selling a hole in the wall because that’s what your customers want.

2. Increased Ownership and Accountability. B2B organizations are making some inroads into breaking down the silos and integrating sales and marketing. One of the toughest challenges in this process is trying to stop the blame game and finger pointing. When a Growth Mindset begins to take shape within your company, not only are roles and responsibilities shared, but so is ownership and accountability. Retaining a client and bringing new ones on board becomes a combined mission that transforms organizational performance.

3. Quality Leads Get Nurtured and Nourished. A current lack of readiness to buy should not be interpreted as an unchanging one. If a lead was once qualified as a good one, it’s worth it to stay on the radar by feeding valuable information and building a relationship of trust. That’s when your brand starts to earn the status of a pre-eminent advisor—see Jay Abraham’s strategy of pre-eminence. Is it typical to drop a once-hot lead because of a lack of readiness to buy? Not when your team is trained and enthusiastic about showing genuine care and interest in resolving buyers’ needs.

Looking for ways to evangelize your customer experience management? Gain the confidence of your team and bring the power of an engaged workforce into play. Watch your B2B lead generation efforts yield greater conversion, customer retention rates go up and customer referrals multiply.

Share your thoughts and leave me a comment. 

Image credit: Shutterstock

We’ve all been there. You come back from your next sales meeting walking on eggshells. Your sales manager looks upset. You’re not sure if it’s because that deal you were working on hasn’t closed yet or because she skipped lunch again. You lay low at your desk and feverishly begin logging your notes from your sales appointments. You check her Facebook page and Twitter for any indication of her mood. A meme, a cryptic quote – anything will work. Wouldn’t you love to know what’s bothering her? Keeping your sales manager happy is a fine balancing act sometimes. You close a deal and it makes them happy, but you don’t hit numbers for the quarter and they’re not so happy. The unknown element is what places a lot of stress on sales reps. When you work mainly for commission, you don’t need that extra stress. In order to eliminate the guessing game and open up some insight into the complicated role of the sales manager, we’ve compiled four reasons why your sales manager is mad at you.

1. He/She has no idea what deals are in the pipeline.
   If there’s one thing sales managers hate, it’s being in the dark on numbers. Managers are held accountable by the executive team to hit certain revenue goals. On months that numbers are less than stellar, the only way that a sales manager can ease an executive’s fear and get them off the team’s back is to show them what the pipeline looks like. In order to speak intelligently about that pipeline – he/she has to know what deals you have that are closing. If you haven’t been communicating about your deals, then your sales manager probably isn’t very happy with you.

2. Your conversion rate sucks.
   Feeling like a lot of your leads are falling through the cracks? Unfortunately your organization pays big bucks to bring those leads in, so if your conversion rate is less than stellar or you don’t know what your conversion rate is, it’s time to make a change. Eliminate the standard follow-up e-mail and get a task management tool or CRM that can help you track every single lead and better understand why they didn’t convert. This will allow you to pass that information on to the sales manager and marketing team and help them hone their efforts so you can close more sales.

3. You have no activity, prospects, or opportunities logged in your CRM.
   If you’ve got a CRM and aren’t using it – your sales manager isn’t just mad at you, he/she’s likely downright pissed. In order to help you refine your sales process and understand what’s working and what isn’t working – you need to document that process. Documentation in CRMs isn’t all about micromanagement, it’s there to help everyone. It helps marketers market better, executives and managers get a better handle on the pipeline, and sales reps (yes, you) close more deals.

4. The huge lead you’ve been working on finally closed – with your competition.
   You know what it feels like to lose a big one because of timing? It’s not the best feeling in the world. And when your sales manager finds out that you lost the deal to your competition, he’s not going to be too excited either. If you lose a lead, make sure you have a very good idea of why you lost that lead to your competition so you can do better next time.

Now, there could be other reasons your sales manager is mad at you – like that time you took the last cup of coffee without making a new pot, but at least these are a few that might help you do better in your sales career. If you’re feeling frustrated in your sales position or your boss won’t get off your back – it might be time to become more accountable by documenting your sales process and collaborating with your sales manager and marketing department to help identify issues. Avoid becoming a pissed off sales organization by working together. A team that works together to identify and solve problems is a happy team.

Sales squirrels ignoring you? Here’s a fun way to get their attention: tell them you’re cancelling all the trade shows next year. Now count backwards from ten after you click send and stand by for the howling, the outrage, the pleading. It will sound something like this:

“How will we ever make quota?”

“The quarter is doomed!”

“How can I meet my clients?

“Where else could we demo the product?

“How am I going to close my deals?”

“Where will the leads come from?”

“I need quality face time.”

“Everybody will be there”

Select all that apply.

Yes, these are the same people who refuse to take a shift at the booth, sit around eating, reading and talking on the phone when they are at the booth and who take a perverse pride in wearing a suit instead of the swell golf shirts you ordered for the show.

Let’s assume you are the number one or two player in your market and you are attending a mid-level event with a good-sized booth, say 20×20. Let’s assume there are 2,500 people at this event and it’s two days long.

Cost of the booth space, shipping, equipment, toys, furniture, internet connection that never quite works, carpet and trinkets: $50,000. So about $20 per person just to be seen. Say you have about 25% share of market in this crowd. You have 1875 people who could be described as opportunities. Now what percentage of those are decision makers? Be honest: for B2B sales, you need at least a director or better to get anywhere close to a deal. Senior people don’t go to tradeshows. They send junior people to go to tradeshows, look at stuff, pick up bits of paper, sit through demos and come back with a report and a new cloth bag.

Let’s pretend that some decision makers do come. Say 10% of the non-clients are actual people who buy stuff. That’s 188 people. Uh oh. That’s $266 a piece just to have them walk by. If you were bright enough to hit them with a mailer first, that cost might pop up to $270. And this generously assumes that each of these paper-picker-uppers represents a separate company, which practically never happens.

Oh, and let’s back out the other vendors, students, speakers, organizers and those Shriners who showed up a week early for their own event. They aren’t your customers.

$270 to stand in a loud, crowded hall with a couple of thousand other people trying to move the sale along? That’s a terrible deal, people.

Let’s have a look at the clients, shall we? Squirrels insist trade shows are great places to hang out with clients. Maybe compared to the deck of an aircraft carrier they are, but it’s hardly intimate, quality time.

Clients are there to attend sessions and scoop up trinkets, not meet with you on crowded noisy show floor. If you were organized enough to set up a quiet lunch or dinner, good for you. That is a way tradeshows can be useful.

In our scenario here, we have 625 people who already give you money. They represent some much smaller number of companies; say 1.5 people per company that’s actually only 417 customers. How many of them are going to come to your booth to say hi? About two, and they probably have their resumes in their hands.

How many are going to come by to complain? I’m going with a generous ten percent porcupine factor in your base, so about 42. That’s fun. Forty-two unpleasant conversations in public. Who doesn’t want to pay $50,000 for that? In my experience, when the porcupines show up, the Squirrels have an urgent need to count their nuts someplace else.

Now we’re down to 300 and change actual customers, and at most, about 30 decision makers. While there is always merit in handing out a keychain and showing off a new product, you can’t really justify 50 big ones for that, can you?

So trade shows are not the best ways to move prospects through the Funnel of Love. But they are great for filling up the top of the funnel with fresh leads, right? Wrong. That fishbowl full of business cards you’re going make Skippy type into your CRM system might as well be full of Lego guy heads for all the good it’s going to do you.

The Squirrels long since picked out the very small number of those cards that held any promise, leaving you and Skippy with a bunch of sales-rejectable leads. If you collect 500 cards, you will have paid $100 for each of them.

But you know that business card.

There are a lot of laptops out there. A lot. Too many to navigate easily. But this chart thrown together by Marek Gibney helps. It's called the Tourist Map of Laptops, and it can help you grok the whole wide range of available computers at least a little bit.

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In an annals of overused corporate clichés, few match the immortal words of Walter Gretzky, as passed on to the world through his son Wayne: “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

The Gretzky puck quote has been used, rehashed and mangled by CEOs, managers, corporate consultants and M.B.A.s for years. It’s launched a hundred million PowerPoint presentations. And it keeps going strong.

In debuting its new Passport phone on Wednesday, BlackBerry took things up a notch by actually having Gretzky there at the launch to recite it (though even he bungled it at first, saying, “As my dad always said, ‘Go to where the puck is,’ ” before correcting himself).

To get a sense of its rising popularity, this trend chart from Infomart, the news database, illustrates the increase in the number of stories in which the phrase “Where the puck” and the word “company” appear:

Here is just a small sample of some of the quote’s more prominent appearances in business:

Steve Jobs: “There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been. And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple.” (You can listen to him say it here, in the first 10 seconds of a tribute video Apple put together upon Jobs’s death, which is no doubt behind the spike in the above chart in 2011.)

Warren Buffett on stock market pessimists in 2008: “In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.’ “

John Roth, former CEO of Nortel in 2001: ”So we’re looking at this and saying, ‘When the customers have money again, when will that be and which products do we have to have?’ making sure we go to where the puck is going to be.”

That last one is a particularly useful reminder of the hollowness of so much corporate speak. Nortel didn’t just miss where the puck was or was going to be, it found itself stuck at home, waiting for someone to give it a lift to the rink.

Business has a long history of sports metaphors, but this one is unique in the sense that it’s Canadian and stems from hockey, not baseball (“Keep your eye on the ball”) or football (“They dropped the ball”).

Its popularity has much to do with the ego of businesspeople who think they’re the Gretzkys of their industry. But, more than that, it appeals, in a way no other sports cliché does, to the current obsession with that other insidious buzzword, innovation. Get ahead of the competition by figuring out what the market will look like five years from now, says the management consultant to the client, while handing him a substantial bill. It’s that simple.

Of course, it’s not. Gretzky’s uncanny ability to read plays has never been matched. The hockey world has yet to produce another player capable of coming close to matching his record. Which makes the adoption of his quote by businesspeople all the more empty and galling. Warren Buffett can get away with it. Maybe Steve Jobs. But that’s it.

The best thing everyone else should do is stick to baseball quotes.

This article originally appeared on Macleans.ca

The post CEOs: Stop debasing Wayne Gretzky’s “I skate to where the puck is going” quote appeared first on Canadian Business.

Science fiction writers have been conjecturing for decades about a future where man and machine become one, spawning essentially a new race of cyborgs. Rarely, however, did they put forth the idea that our clothes would be the catalyst for this evolution. Usually the change came about with cybernetic implants and prosthetics, progressing from the likes of the Six Million Dollar Man (stronger, faster, better) to the complete assimilation of humans into the Borg.

It looks as though we’re pretty close to the first step in combining humanity with technology with the advent of wearable tech. For now, let’s leave the Skynet/Terminator possibilities in the hands of the writers and Hollywood and talk about how the next evolution of social media might look in a year or two. Before we do that, however, let’s have a short discussion about wearable tech in general.

The Dipping of Toes in the Wearable Tech Waters

You have a smartwatch, right? No? Well, surely you’ve acquired a set of Google Glass. No? Really? How is it that you’re not on the wearable tech train yet? Tell me you have a Pebble, or at least a Fitbit. C’mon, man! You’re missing the boat! Before you start to feel any shame over this, let me put your mind at ease. You are still way in the majority, despite what any tech blog might imply.

So why is it that we and all of our friends, who like to think of ourselves as tech-savvy if not bleeding edge tech groupies, aren’t sporting the latest and greatest in technology? There are three reasons, and two of them are excellent alibis. First of all, many if not most of these innovations aren’t available yet to the public at large. You have to be a Robert Scoble type to get first dibs on the stuff. Second, they’re very cost prohibitive to most of us. Even the more accessible category of smartwatches will set you back a couple or three hundred bucks. Why would you pay that much for an accessory for your smartphone? Which brings us to the third reason.

Most people don’t see the point. Why would they pay $200 or more just to keep from having to pull their phones out of their pockets to answer a call or check their incoming messages? This might be the best reason of all to hold back. However, as soon as the price drops to somewhere around affordable, you can bet that the shelves will empty as fast as they are filled.

Truth, Still Stranger than Fiction

Now let’s consider for a moment just how fast this train is picking up steam. Smartwatches and other, similar “accessory” items have been around for 30 years. It’s true, look it up. The idea dates back at least to the Dick Tracy comics that were first published 60 years ago. It’s only in the last year or so that they have gained momentum, however. And just so you understand, this isn’t a trend that’s going away.

For instance – moving away from phones and watches for a second – that super-cool, “futuristic” technology that Iron Man wears as a suit in the comics and movies? Yeah, that’s already been surpassed in some ways. DARPA (or as I call them, our evil overlords of technology) already has a working prototype of a “soft exoskeleton“, material as thin as your clothing that will imbue the wearer with superhuman strength and stamina. Too much? Well, how about the Flame Base Shirt, a fully funded indiegogo project which is a shirt that will keep your body temperature at a toasty and regulated level, even when the weather outside is frightful.

And it’s not all black ops and high-tech organizations either. Ralph Lauren (no big name in technology) just released the Polo Tech shirt on first day of the US Open. The second-skin shirt reads the biometrics of the player and allows them to adjust their form in real time. This follows a wave of high-tech shirts that want to replace wrist-wearable biometric readers like the Fitbit. Under Armour and others have hinted at “smart shirts” that will actually have LED screens built into the sleeves, for things like Facebook of course.

Which brings us back to the topic at hand, of course – how do these advances in wearable tech relate to social media?

Watches and Glasses and Social Media, Oh My!

Google Glass has had more scoffers than supporters, I think it’s fair to say. That doesn’t mean the scoffers are right, however. At least Sony doesn’t think so. They have now demonstrated a prototype of their own version, called SmartEyeGlass, of all things. It’s nothing more than Google Glass from a different developer, of course. How will these glasses fit into social media? The correct answer is, perfectly.

What do we do with Facebook and Twitter? We share quick thoughts, pictures, and videos primarily. When our glasses can snap a pic or record a video and send it to the social site of our choice in a fraction of the time, how cool will that be. What about getting your notifications and messages tight in front of your eyes as you go on doing whatever you’re doing? It might sound obtrusive from the description, but take my word for it – you will be using it before you know it.

Smartwatches are already gaining traction, and there’s hardly a tech company out there that isn’t already producing one or that has one in the works. Once that price drops, watch out. The secret is in apps, of course. Mobile browsing via apps jumped 52% from June 2103 to June 2014, while regular mobile web browsing only increased by 17%. So it’s no surprise that even with limited sales, social apps such as Snapchat have already developed their product for the Samsung Galaxy Gear and others.

What Does it Mean for Business?

If you’re in the technology field, this obviously means that the world will be your customer if you find the right niche. For the rest of us, it means that all of the admonitions about proactively and purposefully integrating social media into our business plans and strategies have been vastly understated. The coming wearable tech revolution will take us from staring at our phones all day to check our social media accounts to having them fed to us without very much, if any, effort on our part.

This will increase the ubiquity of social media in everyday life exponentially. So all of that advice you’ve been ignoring about being online and doing it right just got even more important. The best course you can take as a business is to fully embrace what will inevitably come, and start today. Things like managing your online reputation through social media monitoring become all the more vital in light of what the near future is likely to look like. Looking through your Google Glass, of course.

My son’s high school baseball coach wore the same wind shirt to every game and every practice for three years without washing it once. He had it on the year they won the state championship, and decided it was his “lucky” shirt. It could be 100 degrees on the field, and he still had the long sleeve, wind breaker over his jersey. In the movie Major League we got an inside look at a baseball locker room. Everything from chicken sacrifices (Actually, it was fried chicken) to blessing a bat with a religious symbol. Many sports figures believe in superstitions.

This got me thinking, are sales professionals superstitious too?

              I suppose many are. They believe in their “lucky” tie or suit. But more than a symbol of luck superstitions are an exercise in consistency. Just like an athlete that relies on muscle memory to perform, sales professionals rely on knowledge, discipline, and a deep desire to succeed. Sure it doesn’t hurt to have a lucky token in your corner too. But unlike athletes sales professionals must interact intellectually with their challenger (or prospect). Understanding not only what your value is, but the economic impact your value will have on your prospects overall health is a key success factor. Selling value sometimes isn’t enough, prospects now require you to understand their most pressing issues, and respond quickly to how you can reduce their costs and improve their revenues.

Just like professional athletes, there is no substitution for preparation. Sales professionals must prepare for every prospect encounter. Executive time is at a premium, and value must be added each time you interact with a prospect.

So what should you be superstitious about?

Your lucky socks are black and your suit is brown? Awkward? No you needn’t worry, black goes with everything. What you really need to do is prepare. Do your homework, spend time understanding the issues, pains, and goals of your prospects, and craft a message that delivers a solution, that will drive your value up, and their risk down.

Rick Page wrote a book several years ago called, Hope is Not a Strategy. If you are superstitious during a sales cycle, then hope is your strategy.

 

Michael Nick is the Author of three best selling business books. He is available for a keynote address, workshops, or a breakout. For more information visit www.roi4sales.com or call us at 262.338.1851.

The post Are Sales Professionals Superstitious? appeared first on ROI4Sales.com.

When talking about social media marketing, discussions often focus on decisions about promoted tweets and Facebook ad campaigns.

But how much do you consider Google+ to drive marketing ROI?

I’m not talking about crafting an eye-catching author bio, promoting your Google+ page, or increasing your circles – although those matter, too. Rather, I’m talking about an aspect of Google+ that is often overlooked by social media marketers…

Google+ Communities.

Google+ Communities offer a great opportunity for marketers to engage, network and promote businesses. With over 150,000 communities and continuously growing members, it’s about time that you start giving Communities a serious thought.

Types of Communities on Google+

There are two types of Communities you can join/create – Public and Private.

Public Communities: Allow you to post content that can be seen by everyone; the doors can be kept wide open, or you can set the community as ‘ask to join’.

Private Communities: Just like Secret Groups on Facebook, the content in private communities can only be viewed by members. The ‘Search’ function can be used to hide the community.

A community can’t be changed from Private to Public, and vice versa.

Interesting Communities for inspiration

Here are a few Communities making a big difference on Google+ – they’ll make you itch to get involved:

Makers, Hackers, Artists & Engineers

This is the place to be for the web’s coolest creations, such as building your own WiFi network.

The projects posted in this community are links to how-to videos and web articles detailing DIY projects. It’s an inspiring idea for anyone running a DIY business (hint: make-up artists should take notes).

Startup Bootstrappers

Curious about providing bootstrapping advice on the web?

Maybe you should contribute to Startup Bootstrappers, where Saul Fleischman has done a great job. The community is a small group of dedicated Google+ members adding as much as they can to early-stage internet applications. It’s a great place to get your feet wet in the startup world.

Places to See Before You Die

This is one community that is really offbeat and makes you want to come back for more the next day. It’s filled with imagery of the most exotic, wonderful, and strange places that you would want to visit once you see the pictures. In terms of promotion, any photographer or travel enthusiast will find this community inspiring.

Social Media 4 Good

Performing good deeds with social media seems like a lonely crusade, right? It doesn’t have to be when a passionate tribe of like-minded individuals are willing to back up your endeavors… or at least motivate you towards the cause. Inspired by the mind of Gabriel Reynoso, this community talks about the association of social media and cause marketing.

What experts/influencers/industry leaders have to say about Google+ Communities?

Mike Elgan on Computerworld:

Communities solve the stage fright problem with Google+. If I post something in a community, it feels far less consequential. Posting publicly in a stream can be unnerving, like talking about your steak dinner in front of people you suspect might be vegetarians.Posting in Communities, on the other hand, is like talking about a book at a book club, talking about sports in a sports bar, or talking about tech at a tech trade show.

Kristi Hines on KissMetrics:

Participating in Google+ communities can be a terrific way to gain exposure for yourself and your business. The great thing is that unlike Facebook pages or LinkedIn company pages, you can use your Google+ page just like you would your personal profile to create, join, and engage in communities.

Kevin Lee on Buffer Blog:

Like any other area of social media, these communities are hugely important in terms of interaction and relationship-building. There is value in digging into these places daily, posting your most relevant and well-timed information, and being available to comment and give back to the conversation.

Scott Wilder on HootSuite:

By mining your Community’s content, you will gain a better understanding for how people talk about your company and its products. Their phrases and words can be incorporated into your marketing communications, your SEO, etc. I remember when I presented to Scott Cook, the Founder of Intuit. He would always say “don’t tell me the numbers, share the verbatim”. In other words, he wanted to know what were people saying and how they said it.

Getting started with Google+ Communities

Now you have the basics on Communities and the benefits they offer, let’s look at the steps that will help you get started using them, especially in relation to your social media marketing strategy:

Discover your ideal community

There isn’t a directory to discover relevant communities; you need to log in Google+ first and then click on ‘Communities’. This section will include ‘Recommended Communities’ (based on your Google+ circles) and any community invites you’ve received.

The ‘Community Search’ bar is the most useful tool; you can search for communities by the topic/niche you’re interested in and choose ‘Communities’ in the drop-down menu. After you’re discovered your desired community/communities, click the ‘Join Community’ button. The best way to discover communities for your business is to search for topics your target audience is interested in, or search for keywords important to your business. Then you can start contributing useful posts in these communities.

Or create your own Community

If you’re a big corporation or have a big social media marketing department, you can slam dunk Google+ with your own branded community. In the Communities section, click on ‘Create a Community’ button. Then choose whether it would be a private or public community.

Next, add a tagline and a unique profile and cover photo for your community. These needs to be consistent to your brand and should be eye-catching. Community names can be edited and changed later.

Tip – when you select a tagline or community name, choose keywords that people may use when searching for your business.

Now select ‘Edit Community’ and fill in the ‘About’ section with the description of your business. This can include your business address and phone number (if there’s any). Hyperlinks can’t be inserted in the About section, but you can still include your site’s URL. If you’re marketing a local business, you can ‘Add Location’ by choosing the option below the About section.

Moving on, you’ll want to include categories specific to your business. Follow these engaging post categories for the best results:

• Introduce yourself
• Contribute something new
• Help needed
• Discuss/Chat
• Questions
• Tips & Tricks
• What we don’t know
• Industry news

These categories will engage anyone who joins your community.

With any community, you can set up some roles on what you will allow (or not allow) to prevent spam and moderate discussions.

If you need help with moderating discussions and flagging spam, you can ‘assign a moderator’, which can be a random community member or someone on your team using Google+. A rule of thumb is to pick a moderator who is an active participant.

Actionable tips to drive engagement in G+ Communities

1. Post your own and curated content

People will expect your brand’s unique insights and expertise on the topic. So be sure to keep it well-stocked with the best content. Think of approaching is as a targeted email list of your prospects and customers. They expect you to contribute all the time. Neil Patel on QuickSprout advices posting the most popular content at the best times, such as sharing videos related to your business on Fridays. Quotes, images and GIFs are some other popular content types. Hashtags can also complement some of the content.

2. Use the community to offer customer service

Your community can become a forum where not only your team handles customer queries and issues, but other experienced participants and fans can pitch in to help with answers, saving you money and time. In this case, you can get close friends on board with helping to grow and manage the community as a customer service platform.

3. Participate in discussions

Communities are all about discussions; participate in them to drive engagement. Join other communities and get to know other businesses and influencers through participation. You can ‘+mention’ anyone by name in community discussions to let them know you are engaging them in a conversation. Try out different communities, but don’t spread yourself too thin, or you’ll have a hard time identifying people who benefit your business.

4. Add some emphasis to your posts and updates

It’s a great tip from Amy Lynn Andrews: just *follow this’ for follow this. Just_follow this_ for follow this.

Bold, italicize and add strikethrough to add some emphasis to parts of your updates and posts, just as you would do in emails, blog post promotions, and other content marketing campaigns. You can also use the bold command on titles to make them stand out even more.

5. Use Hangouts

Google+ video Hangouts offer a wonderful way to add more intimacy to real-time connecting. There are many creative uses of Hangouts, such as: live product demonstrations, eight-hour concerts, live cooking… the possibilities are endless. With community members, you can have interesting conversions, meetings and discussions; being more visual and having a voice will let you build even stronger relationships. An integration with YouTube makes it possible to have an archived replay ready when the Hangout is over.

Over to you

If you want to start with Google+ communities, the above tips and insights are as good a place as anywhere. The great thing about these communities is that they are flexible enough for users to come with creative ways to use them (that even Google+ founders never dreamed of).

What has been your experience so far with Google+ communities? Have you tried any of the above advice? We’d be real interested to hear what you have to say.

There are so many signs that I’m a content marketer (thanks for the great list of signs Brooke!). I catch myself wishing I could edit my husband’s texts for grammar, sorry sweetie!; I look at every trade show flyer, TV commercial and digital signage ad and wonder, “Could I have done better?”; and I get ridiculously excited when my number of Twitter followers grows.

I even prefer staying in resorts/hotels/getaways that rely on a robust content marketing strategy. In other words, I’m that person.

So when I first met with my travel agent six months ago to start planning my belated honeymoon, it’s probably not all that surprising that I immediately got excited when some of the hotels she suggested featured blogs on their websites. Yup, I am looking at you Hotel Le Littre in Paris!

Content marketer or not, I am still a consumer, meaning I want as much insight into every purchasing decision before I make it. Blogging is a great first step brands can take to reel in customers. Let’s explore this further…

My travel agent did a wonderful job selling Hotel Le Littre all on her own. She eloquently described the hotel’s Parisian charm; the delightful concierge who could plan all our honeymoon delights and the lovely rooms with gorgeous views. But the blog helped her close the deal.

The Le Littre blog is extremely effective. It lets me know the delectable local restaurants to visit (including those that will give me a complimentary welcome drink as a guest of Le Littre!); it informs me of the best things to do in Paris during the fall; and it elucidates on other must-see attractions from museums to retail stores. All in all, it gives me a firsthand look into all I can experience in Paris. In minutes, I was sold on having Le Littre be the one to stroll with me down the streets of the Left Bank.

Blogging works. It shows consumers that your brand is modern, communicative, transparent and, above all else, customer-centric.

So as you take a good hard look at your blog this next month, ask yourself a few questions:

• Does your blog open a door to your industry? For instance, if you are in retail does it scream of imagination, ingenuity and color? If you are in technology, does it have just the right balance of jargon and value-add?
• Are you customer-centric? In other words, are you writing the stories your customers want to read, rather than the stories your band wants to tell. While it would be ideal if those two stories were on in the same, be sure before your start posting.
• Is your blog rich with multimedia? It is near impossible to sell a watch without the use of visuals. It is exceedingly challenging to urge someone to stay at your vacation restore without providing pictures of sun-kissed beaches and palm trees. So take a look at every blog entry and consider how you can enrich it with the use of video, pictures and graphs.

Perhaps you’ve just started your blogging venture—or maybe you are knee-deep in it like Le Littre. But no matter how seasoned you are, your blog can always use a little nip and tuck. So set aside some time this month, do a deep dive into your platform and ask yourself those gut check questions you’ve been pushing to the side. As for me? The content marketer in me can’t wait to spend part of my October with Le Littre. À plus tard!

Docendo discimus. By teaching, we learn.

Penned by the Roman philosopher Seneca the Younger in the early days of the Roman Empire, it holds as true today as it did two thousand years ago. Modern psychology researchers have dubbed it the protégé effect. Yes, according to SCIENCE, you are psychologically wired to learn stuff better when you teach it.

This is why you, as a PR pro or marketer, should jump at every opportunity to teach others within your organization.

Consider what happens when you become the “teacher” in a situation. The need to understand the material well enough to recall and explain it to another person leads you to reinforce your grip on topics you already know and refresh yourself on topics that have become rusty. Your “protégé” will ask you questions that challenge you to re-examine what you know from a different perspective – and help you discover gaps in your own knowledge.

You don’t know your stuff nearly as well as you think you do! This is both humbling to realize and rewarding to overcome. The first time I tried to train an intern on measurement tools like Moz and Sysomos, he asked me all sorts of questions I had difficulty answering. I had to push myself to find different ways to explain things so that they made sense to him, not just me. Flexing my brain sparked thoughts like, “I never thought of measuring it like that before!”

What’s actually happening here? Let’s dive into psychology for a moment. In a 2009 Stanford study, fifth- and eight-grade students were enlisted to instruct a computerized “Teachable Agent” in biology. Students who aware that they were teachers put more time and effort into learning the material, and scored higher on exams than students who thought they were learning for just themselves.

Why teaching causes us to learn better is the subject of part two of the same study. Students responsible for a Teachable Agent expressed a wide spectrum of emotions tied to the success of the agent: dismay at its failures, pride at its progress, and a strong overall sense of responsibility for its success.

In short, the emotional relationship we form with a “protégé” motivates us to learn material more thoroughly so that we can recall and teach it effectively, and not “let down” the student depending on us. You could even say that teaching others is a way to “hack” your professional development by tapping into the power of your psychological drive to teach well.

The value of learning-by-teaching becomes all the more apparent in fast-evolving industries like PR and marketing, in which success often depends on quickly and efficiently mastering new tools (or inventing new uses for old tools). When you discover something new, not only do you learn it better by teaching it, but your colleagues benefit from valuable new knowledge.

Informally teaching colleagues is just one way to spread the value of the protégé effect. A few more ideas:

• Write how-to tutorials for internal use on your team
• Contribute posts to your company blog
• Run an internal training session
• Conduct a webinar

The best part is, teaching begets more teaching. When you teach a colleague something, they now have the power to teach it to others (and learn it better in the process as well), who then teach yet more people within the organization. Everyone wins. Why wouldn’t you want to get in on that?

So many businesses now offer a free eBook download on their website to generate leads. In fact, we offer a free online marketing strategy eBook on our own website. They are a great lead generation tool when done correctly, as they give a prospective client some information prior to committing to a purchase. There are so many different topics that you can create an eBook around, and the focus should always be on the quality and not the length of the eBook.

The goal is to present your prospects with some information that leaves them wanting more at the end. Think of an eBook as a sample offering of what you can deliver to your customers.

It is important to produce an eBook that is useful to your prospects, but at the same time it needs to convert them from a lead to a paying customer. We have put together a list of five components of a successful eBook that will help you generate more leads for your business.

1. Contains Valuable Information

You need to create an eBook that your website visitors are going to want to download, but it is going to need to contain valuable information as well. Many businesses throw something together and assume that as long as people download it they are going to generate leads and the sales will soon follow. This isn’t going to happen unless the reader finds it valuable.

The eBook that we give away is over 80 pages and delivers valuable information that can help any business owner that downloads it. If it were overly promotional and read as one big sales ad do you think it would be effective? It wouldn’t! Don’t be afraid to give away some useful information to prospective customers.

2. Gives a Small Taste

It is important that your eBook stays on topics and provides useful information without completely solving your prospects questions. Remember, the goal of an eBook is to get the readers familiar and confident in your business, which will then increase the odds of them turning into a customer. If you give away too much information or completely solve their problem then what incentive do they have to become a customer?

Think of your eBook as a non-threatening sales tool that works 24/7. When a prospect visits your website and downloads the eBook you have the opportunity to soft sell them on autopilot. When they finish reading your eBook they should be excited to speak to you and ready to make a purchase.

3. Has a Strong Call-to-Action

You could have a very strong eBook, but if it doesn’t feature a strong call-to-action you aren’t going to convert your leads into customers. Simply let the reader of your eBook know what YOU want them to do when they finish reading it. Do you want them to make a purchase? Call your business? Visit your business?

The goal of our eBook is to get the business owner to contact us for a consultation and quote, so at the end of the eBook we present a CTA that tells the reader to contact us. A business owner that downloads our online marketing strategy guide is obviously interested in the services we provide, so if they find that the eBook was valuable don’t you think they will be open to discussing what we can do for their business? Our CTA is very clear and they can take the next step with one mouse click on the last page of the eBook.

4. Has a Professional Design

We have seen a lot of eBooks over the years. Some look great, while some look like they were tossed together in 5 minutes. Your eBook is a direct reflection of your business, so make sure to spend the time to create an eye appealing design. You don’t have to get too crazy with graphics, but make sure it is branded with your company logo and colors. Also, don’t forget to include your contact information on the eBook. Often times your eBook will get passed around, so in the event that someone else reads it and wants to take further action they need to be able to easily get in touch.

If you downloaded an eBook and it was a plain white text document that was poorly formatted what would your impression of that business be? If a business can’t put in some effort to create a nice looking eBook there is a good chance that same effort will apply to all of their business.

5. Well Promoted

Once you have a great eBook created it is time to get it into the hands of your prospects. You will want to feature it in a prominent location on your website, preferably above the fold. Have a strong call-to-action that your website visitors will notice immediately. You can also promote your eBook on social media, encouraging your social audience to visit your website and download the eBook. If you do guest blogging you can also mention your businesses eBook within your bio or within the blog post.

Focus on creating a high quality eBook that provides a real value. When done right it can help your business generate leads around the clock and on autopilot.

We live in the Big Data era. The volume and variety of data available to marketers from internal sales records and public records, sophisticated marketing analytics applications, social media and a multitude of other sources is matched only by the staggering velocity at which this information grows and changes. According to Wired magazine contributing editor Clive Thompson, social media alone accounts for “some 52 trillion words every day….the equivalent of 520 million books.”

It is not only your marketing department that have access to this information, but also your buyers. The result is a major disruption over the past few years in the way that products are sold. Your buyers learn about your products, their market perception and what the competition is offering through social media and many other sources—not your sales reps. While that has forever changed the battlefield, marketers can make a huge impact on sales revenue using two very effective tools: Big Data and Social Selling.

Social Selling: How to Listen to the Data

If you intend to harness the power of Big Data, first you need to observe what the market has to say. With so much data and marketing intelligence available, it can be rather daunting to know where to begin a data listening program. Fortunately, there is no shortage of marketing analytics tools to help.

For structured data, the latest generation of analytics software solutions offers not just statistical data crunching, but also behavioral data analysis that marketing departments can use to discover answers to highly specific questions about individual buyers and businesses who may consider buying from you. It is now possible to query large data sets with behavioral analytics software and extract insights on subjects once considered very philosophical in nature. Now you can trace the exact steps buyers went through before they purchased, how much they spent, when, where and from whom.

Even with highly unstructured data —such as social media commentary and online marketplace reviews—marketers can extract valuable information from large volumes of data to help sales teams build revenue effectively. Tools such as Radian6 from Salesforce.com and HubSpot’s Social Inbox allow marketers to analyze tens of millions of blogs, forums, news publications and feedback reviews for mentions of a brand, industry or specific keyword.

The 5 Big Data Insights For Effective Social Selling

While there is no limit to the breadth and granularity of information that can be gleaned from Big Data marketing analytics, marketers should at a minimum be looking to gain the following insights from data listening:

1. Who is buying: Buyers come in many shapes and sizes but generally can be boiled down to comprehensible “buyer personas” that marketing and sales teams can watch for, understand and serve.
2. Buyer sentiment: Find out what the various buyer personas are saying about your brand and products (and those of your competitors!)
3. What your buyers want: Find out what needs and products are trending and what buyers are asking for and complaining about online.
4. What information sources they use: Analyze data to see which sources of information various buyer personas turn to, and which information is most influential upon their purchase decisions.
5. The ‘Buyer’s Journey’: Perhaps more important than any of the other insights that marketers can deliver to sales is identification of the unique steps a buyer takes from inception to purchase. Knowing how buyers gather information, establish options and make decisions is the critical context that makes social selling programs tick.

Utilizing the five insights gathered from Big Data and Social Listening, marketing departments can now arm sales with the information, attitudes and interests of each buyer persona and provide highly relevant content that is in line with these insights. The CMO should engage the VP of Sales to develop programs by which sales reps learn how, where and when to connect with buyers and prospects on LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media marketing channels.

The ability for sales reps to reach buyers in a personalized way with the right content, in the right context, at the right moment is the secret sauce of sales. By listening to data, analyzing buyer behavior for key insights and arming sales teams with highly relevant information marketers today are in a unique position to reinvigorate the value that sales teams offer in the Big Data era.

I just had an interesting conversation about campaign targeting with a really smart client. We were discussing the best way not only to attract prospects, but also to set up a lead nurturing campaign that will convert the largest number possible into paying clients.

The technical definition of persona is “the way you present yourself to the world.” But in marketing terms, we think of personas as individuals who share common characteristics that represent important segments of your target audience. For example, if you sell accounting software, one persona might be middle-aged males who are controllers at mid-sized retail companies. As in this example, personas can be fairly general, but they can also be much more detailed in terms of the target segment’s demographics, interests, buying motivations, and so forth.

When you are targeting or nurturing a persona, the idea is to focus your messaging as if you were speaking to one individual and not just a bunch of nameless and faceless prospects. In the hands of a talented copywriter, persona marketing can be much more effective than (pardon my French) the “spray and pray” approach.

While persona marketing has its uses, you should also carefully consider marketing to the pain points of your target audience. Basically, products and services exist to answer the needs, challenges and desires of customers. In other words, to overcome their pain points. When you successfully identify the major pain points, you then target your messaging, offers and sales process around the alleviation of your prospects’ pain points. The major point to remember about this type of marketing is that the pain transcends personas. For example, instead of marketing to middle-aged controllers at mid-sized retail firms, you cast your promotional message at anyone who has the pain of attempting to close their monthly books promptly.

As we have shown in multiple client engagements, online media can be extremely effective at both identifying pain points and then creating content, offers and lead nurturing programs to convert prospect pain to awareness, leads and revenues. The more acute the pain, the more important it is to keep focus on the specific pain point, and the alleviation thereof, than to immediately jump to the totality of the solution.

As mentioned earlier, persona marketing can be an effective way to conquer a market, but it does tend to have a lot of moving parts. The small image at the top of the page is an infographic from Tony Zambito titled the Buyer Persona Canvas. As you will see if you download the canvas, there is a lot of research, hypotheses and testing involved in persona marketing, while pain point marketing can be accomplished much faster. I recommend that you don’t make it a Persona vs. Pain argument, but rather figure out how to incorporate both strategies.

Carpe occasio.

I hear a lot in the press about being a “Social Business”, but not many of my customers ever mention this. Strange? Yes, Worrying? Very!

Is it because nobody really knows what a social business is or perhaps how a business becomes a social business? Maybe it’s because they just don’t know the steps needed to get there or even if it’s a journey worth embarking on?

What is a social business?

A social business is one which has broken free from its own social media handles and has seen the bigger picture.

Their customers and prospects are interacting with the organisation via social media… at all levels… before they become a customer, when they are about to make a purchase and of course after they’ve made their minds up and bought the product(s).

Importantly, social businesses have their teams engaged on social media too. Senior Management to educate the market, sales teams to find and close business, marketing to drive awareness, HR to recruit new staff, and Customer Service to serve customers. The list goes on and on.

These social businesses have grasped the crucial fact that social is no longer something which can be done in isolation, in one part of the business or for just one function…it is the business.

For me, what separates a social business from one which is not, is the difference between “Social something” and “Social everything”.

Is becoming a social business important?

I believe very much so. There is no doubt that social media has changed the way we do sales, PR, marketing, HR, and technical support. Critically, with change comes opportunities, and today they are bigger than ever.

Social businesses can do everything faster, better and more effectively. They can react to customer issues quickly, they can adapt to change and move to new markets faster, and they can be more personal, engaging and likable.

Look at how brands like Oreo managed to take advantage of the Super Bowl lights fiasco in 2013.

It’s not just about marketing either; British drink brand innocent leads the way in handling customer feedback and engaging with customers every day, which delights their customers and builds their brand on a one-to-one level.

It’s a tough journey to get there.

Enterprises are going to need to address critical areas of the business in order to become full-blown social businesses. Technology can get you a long way, but it’s not the silver bullet.

Your sales teams are going to have to learn how to effectively sell socially, your customer service teams are going to have to learn how to engage with customers in a timely, sensitive and sometimes confidential manner when the whole world is watching.

It’s not simple. Your enterprise will need to put in place policy changes, controls and training in addition to working out how each component of the social business can be unique enough, but also similar enough to sit within your brand.

How to help your sales and marketing teams?

Once you have made the decision to create a social business, and you’ve thought about how you can “socialise” each area of your business, you need to start thinking about how you’re actually going to do it. This is where technology comes in.

Most of your social business is going to need a technology which allows you to create the vast majority of your content centrally, and to distribute this content to the right people, at the right time in your organisation.

Marketing automation platforms, and in particular, content syndication and amplification platforms will go a long way to helping you become a social business. I’m in the space, and I’ve seen it first-hand how technology is revolutionising businesses, and helping them to socially enable all parts of their business through content distribution and amplification.

If you’re interested in getting more out of your social media marketing efforts, want to help your senior managers and employees amplify your brand messages and become influencers, or even want a healthier and happier partner and retailer network, then becoming a social business is the step you need to take.