Category Archives: The Market Conversation

Engaging to Sell: Enterprise Sales People Go Social

Since social networks emerged, sales people have been trying to figure out how to use them to increase their sales and shorten sales cycles. Many of these people have been discouraged because they haven’t found value in using LinkedIn or Facebook for networking that actually aids in their sales processes. Now there’s a new network [...]

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Social Media: A Means to Meet Goals

I was just looking at a blog post by Mirna Bard: 15 Categories of Social Media. It’s an older blog post, but Mirna re-tweeted the link today and I happened to catch it. I’ve been following Mirna on Twitter for some time now. Her post opens with: The most popular social media question is: “Where [...]

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Getting You Noticed

This post was inspired by a recent blog post by my good friend Tara Hunt. Oh wait, I’ve never met Tara Hunt! I tend to forget that I don’t actually know her in real life! I’m a fan of her book, The Whuffie Factor, and I follow her on Twitter and read her blog. Anyway, [...]

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Marketing is Dead, Long Live Conversation

I’m not sure when “marketing” became a 4-letter word for so many people, but in my recent experience more and more people think of “marketing” as sleazy. This sucks if you’re a marketing professional, which I am, but I don’t advocate any marketing practices that people associate with the dirty-word sense of marketing. I had [...]

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Listening, but are They Hearing?

I’m always preaching to businesses to keep in mind the 5 keys of true participation when they are looking at getting into the social media/Web 2.0 options to expand their company reach and product awareness. Listening Speaking Caring Sharing Building relationships Lately, I’ve been talking with a number of engineers from startups who are in [...]

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Making Conversation to Build Relationships and Grow Your Business: 2010 Style!

The definition I like best for the word “conversation” comes from Dictionary.com: “Conversation: the informal interchange of thoughts, information, etc., by spoken words; oral communication between persons; talk; colloquy.” But notice that the dictionary hasn’t caught up with the times. It’s 2010, Dictionary People! This definition specifically says “spoken” and “oral” and leaves out all [...]

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Evolutionary Graph Theory and Social Networks for Marketing

Came across an interesting blog post today: The Evolving Face of Social Networks. A bit more science-ish than I normally would be interested in, but as it pertains to social networking I was intrigued. The blog post raised two interesting thoughts (and I am paraphrasing): 1) If social networks are so popular/widely being adopted, why [...]

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Caring: What It Means to Participate: 4th of 6 Posts

Companies provide products and services to consumers who want or need them, right? So what difference does it make if the companies actually care about the needs and wants of their customers, so long as they keep buying their products? It makes a big difference if you want to keep customers and sell more. To [...]

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Listening, What It Means to Participate: 2nd of 6 Posts

What did you say? I didn’t hear you, I was too busy talking, in fact, you’re lucky I realized you were saying anything at all. All too often, this is how companies have treated their customers, prospects, Influencers and everyone else with a stake/interest in their market space. Sad, isn’t it. So much can be [...]

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