Tag Archives: “social networks”

Better & Worse Ways to Deliver Your Message

10 Aug

Following up on my previous post, “Better & Lighter Ways to Deliver Your Message”, Seth Godin posted recently on a chart he thought up about the delivery mechanism of your message:

  • The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about – Interesting graph from Seth Godin that at first glance made me think of Gartner’s magic quandrant. Except that in his chart the sweet spot for a market isn’t the upper-right quadrant. Then I noticed only 3 of the communcation forms had company names attached to them – Twitter, YouTube and Cisco Telepresence. Cisco? How’d they get to be in the upper-right hand corner? Hardly a ubiqituos communication method. And where’s Skype? Where’s all the social networks? I’d put Skype in the sweet spot but higher than telephone. And I’d put social networks in sweet spot, too, and to the right of blogs. And take off Cisco.

GodinChart

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Study Says Social Media Not Useful to Close Sales. Duh.

10 Apr

Great post by Paul Greenburg in his CRM 2.0 blog entitled, “Study Says Social Media Not Useful to Close Sales. Duh.”

Definitely read the whole article. His conclusion:

“When it comes to social networks and channels re: sales, there is some value, due to reputation and influence garnered when participating in the social networks including those identified above, but not to close deals. Their value is in developing the kinds of relationships that serve you over time, if you’re a sales person, in pursuing opportunities and finding leads and developing the kind of sales intelligence that provides you with the insight in making your job easier and better.”

I could not agree more. Social Media/Networking solutions (and we put Inquisix in this category) are helpful in getting the deal started, not closing it.

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5 Simple Rules to Reach Business Contacts on Social Networks

27 Apr

An Inquisix member recently sent me this link to an interesting blog posting. The author, Noah Elkin, writes about how marketing professionals can reach out to business contacts on social networking sites. While Inquisix is primarily a business networking site for sales and business development professionals to exchange referrals, I felt Noah had some interesting comments to pass along.

I’m cutting and pasting his comments that I find most relevant but you can read the full posting here.

“The principal difficulty lies in the ever-shifting nature of personal and professional boundaries…..some individuals are more judicious than others in accepting “friend” requests.”

“With etiquette and consideration in mind, here are five simple rules to follow when using social networks for business purposes:

1. Ask permission, not forgiveness — even though they may be public, social networks are highly personal
2. Remember to inquire about each person’s preferred mode of communication
3. Treat each contact as an individual
4. Respect the boundaries each contact sets (but adjust as the relationship develops)
5. Don’t bombard anyone with messages, regardless of the delivery method”

These simple rules should work for everyone, not just marketers and sales people.

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