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| PBN University: Selling with Social Media | |
Selling is a Social Experience!
If you can’t engage your customers in a sociable conversation, you can’t sell them
anything. Look what’s happening in Social Media today:
Learn How to Use Social Media to Boost Sales:
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Moderated by |
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Wednesday, May 25th 12:00-1:00 pm, includes LIVE Q&A Cost: $25 Registration: www.PacificBusinessNews.com For more info call: 955-8074 |
 
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Technology is like that for me. It’s my ocean. It pulls me closer to new horizons and at the same time eventually delivers me back where I began – kind of like something out of T.S. Elliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.”
The metaphor works for just about anything. For in the end, we realize the only way to truly learn about life (or technology) is through constant exploration.
And so, as we wrap up this calendar year and look towards the next, with bellies full of hope and renewed enthusiasm, we should list our resolutions for self improvement. Here are my suggestions:
Get the next generation iPad. It’s due the first quarter of next year. You don’t have to like the iPad, but as a business person you do have to understand it. Consider the purchase small investment in your education. After you’ve played with the ‘natural interface’ for a while, install an app called Flipboard (flipboard.com) and play with a variety of content sources. The iPad and its competitors herald a new era in hardware and software. Now is the time to thoroughly grasp why the iPad is so popular and to figure out how your business can take advantage it.
Join the South By Southwest (sxsw.com) interactive conference in Austin, March 11-15. This yearly event brings the best and the brightest together for one long weekend of seminars, speeches, panel discussions and schmoozing. Think of it as Spring Break for nerds. Everyone is welcome. I highly recommend it. You will learn a lot about what’s happening in social media, e-commerce, search engine marketing, user experience and how your business can leverage those trends to boost profits. Let me know if you’re interested. We should go as an informal hui and serve as the geeky ambassadors from Hawaii.
Start using Plancast.com. As you might have guessed from the name, Plancast helps you plan what you intend to do. But equally importantly, it helps you meet the right people. Are you trying to break into a new market or industry? Want to deepen your network? Plancast is perfect for business. You can follow thought leaders and see which work-related seminars, conferences and events they are planning to attend and then map your own schedule accordingly. You can also see who else in your field is attending and make arrangements beforehand to meet. Plancast is free.
Ask questions, get answers and learn what you need to know at Quora.com. Social Q&A sites are nothing new. If you haven’t yet had a chance, check out LinkedIn Answers. I like LinkedIn Answers because I can help people and because in the process those people may eventually become my clients. Lately, though, I’ve been playing more with Quora. It’s a bit more social and a lot more fun. Create your Quora account during your lunch break today. It’s free and just takes a minute to get going. Follow topics and people relevant to your industry and start interacting with others. Use Quora to position your company as a leader in your field and start turning those prospects into leads.
Share your presentations using SlideRocket.com and SlideShare.net. The beauty of the internet is you can easily sell your product or service to anyone, anywhere and do it with relatively little start-up capital. Both SlideRocket and SlideShare are excellent tools to pitch clients globally. One solid presentation, coupled with strong distribution, could really boost your company’s sales. Both solutions will let you add analytics so you can you can measure your presentation’s effectiveness. You can even embed lead forms inside the presentation so viewers can easily contact you.
Access your files wherever you are with DropBox.com. It wasn’t that long ago when we stored all our files on our local hard drives or the office server and accessed those files while at work. Now, we find our working environments far more decentralized. We want to get to those files at all hours of the day, regardless of where we may be. DropBox is a terrific tool for making sure you have immediate access to the files you need. DropBox will automatically distribute and update the important stuff across all of your devices. Need the same set of files to be on your iPhone, your home computer, your office computer and your laptop while on the road? No problem. DropBox will do exactly that. And it will make sure its the most recent version of those files.
Use Evernote.com as a business tool. Evernote’s goal is to be your online brain. I use a Moleskin for quick notes, phone numbers, passwords and messages. But I use Evernote for everything else, including shopping lists, reading lists and daily action items. It’s great for capturing content on the fly and then referencing it later. But Evernote is also good for work. For example, you can snap a photo of a printed doc, store it in Evernote, and then review it during the commute home. Using its character recognition capability, you can use your cellphone to take pics of things like of business cards and expense receipts, and then file them accordingly. Evernote works across all your devices, from your cell phone to workstation, and syncs all your data so you get what you want, when you want it.
Curiosity is the key to knowledge and knowledge is the key to success. This is especially true in business, where trends and the changes in trends can bring great opportunity. The tech world is moving at warp speed. What worked 5 years ago for your business may not offer as much value today. To stay competitive, we must be competitive. That means we must maximize our exposure to new things. And given the significant return on investment it offers, harnessing the power of new technology should be one of our top priorities. Just jump into the sea. You can figure out how to swim along the way.
You can watch the famous scene here: http://bit.ly/9tx34G
I think social media is like that. We’ve been staring so much at the finger, we’ve forgotten that we’re supposed to be getting stuff done. Well, the party’s over. It’s time to get over the shock and awe of social media and start using it for work. Yes, social media is the greatest thing since sliced bread. My point is let’s stop looking at the bread and start making some sandwiches.
One company here in Hawaii is being very smart about it. They have some pretty interesting plans for social media and have asked us to develop a winning solution.
The challenge? They have 10 locations across the Hawaiian islands and about 100 employees. Like all companies, they need to ensure everyone is plugged in and happy. That means corporate needs an effective way to keep all employees well informed of what’s happening inside the company. Yes, email works. So does texting or even faxing. But all that seems so old school now.
The solution? Social media. Imagine a password-protected space on the internet, where employees could login and get company news. Imagine a place where each employee can create his/her profile, post pictures, a brief description about themselves, and maybe something about their hobbies and interests. Imagine the ability to create groups around organizational functions. Maybe there’s a marketing group, an accounting group, and an IT group. There could even be groups for extracurricular activities, like community service projects and company volleyball after work. Imagine calendars, chats, training videos and blog posts. Imagine frictionless ways to send messages and share content and to push those messages to the desktop and to smart phones. Imagine a living, breathing, media-rich communication platform inside the company, allowing employees to share ideas and mentor each other in real-time, while working both on the business and in the business.
Interested? You can do the same for your business. Here’s what you need to know.
Something like Facebook would be perfect. It has the features you need. The only problem is employees need sufficient distance between work and play. The last thing anyone wants is the boss poking around all those private status updates. So using Facebook is – at least for the time being – not going to work.
Fortunately, there are two off-the-shelf solutions that will do everything need: SocialCast.com and SocialText. I have been playing with both and a like them very much. There are hosted options and solutions for doing everything yourself in-house. Costs range from $1-5 per user per month, depending on how many features you want. Start up costs are nominal.
My biggest concern, though, with SocialCast.com and SocialText.com is on-going cost. They can really add up over time. So if you want to use social media but don’t want to subscribe to a service, take a look at existing blogging solutions and simply customize them for your company’s needs. Most will do exactly what you need them to do, including profiles, groups, video, text/email notifications, etc. You can even password protect your hui. Consider these platforms: Posterous.com, Tumblr.com, LiveJournal.com, WordPress.org and Blogger.com. Each can be easily customized and password protected. You can even put your solution behind your website, where only authorized users can have access.
Now, when choosing a solution, make sure it offers genuine utility for your employees. In other words, if you opt for a sexy solution with all the bells and whistles, it may just be overwhelming for everyone and ultimately lead to poor adoption rates. Engineering is good. But over engineering is bad.
To get everyone on board, it’s best to keep it simple and let the solution grow organically. In the end, the solution must work well for most of the people on your team. And for those employees who are reluctant to do anything new, this may be the perfect opportunity to offer much appreciated staff training and development.
Lastly, be sure to harness the decentralizing aspect of social media. Give your employees the freedom to access the platform and supply updates anytime, anywhere. To get the biggest bang, be willing to cede some control. As I’ve discovered in my business, one idea from the least likely person on your team could be worth a million dollars.
Let me know if I can help with anything.
Traditional yellow page advertising is dead.
So you, as business owner, have a choice. You can do business as you’ve always done, just like your parents did, and ride into the proverbial sunset. Or, you can shake up your assumptions about how thing ought to be done, and get with the times.
Take a moment and think about where we are today. The internet is no longer something that’s out there somewhere. It’s now on our desktops and on our cell phones. Hard drives used to be places where we stored stuff. Now our applications come to us, wherever we are, at the ready.
My point is this: Business is different now. And that means, among other things, we have to change with the times if we hope to find and retain customers. Over the next few months, I will map out the steps your organization needs to take to stay viable.
Step one: Throw out your old marketing manual. It’s no longer relevant.
Step two: Get listed. If data is king, and it is, then you want to add your business to those databases. Marketing 2.0 is all about being in the right database at the right time. Remember when everything was location, location, location? Well, now it’s database, database, database.
The insight I’m about to give you is worth tens of thousands of dollars, but only is you take action. Here’s what you need to do today:
Make the above your priority for the week. It doesn’t take a lot of time and you will learn quite a bit along the way. Most importantly, you will get your organization on the map. And you will get noticed.
Lastly, avoid paying to get listed in a directory. Good information wants to be free. That means good info wants to be discovered easily but also available at no charge. So be careful when anyone starts asking for money. In most cases, it’s not necessary to pay to play.
When in doubt, call me. Or email me. I am delighted to help.
