| Marketing, Sales, and the Art of Persuasion |
| More things change, the more people stay the same |
Last week on Thursday April 22, 2010, Erik Deckers participated in the Strategy Session called Mistakes Small Business Makes in their marketing. Erik was responsible to talk about “The 3 Mistakes Companies Make with Their Blogging and Social Media. He will discuss the following:
I think he did a pretty good job.
Check it out:
Hi Everyone,
Yes, this is a shameless promotion of my new business.
My company Indy Associates is winding down its operations to focus on a new business we started several months ago. Some of you may have received an email about “Professional Blog Service.”
In a nutshell, www.ProBlogService.com is a new service that provides ghost writing, promotion, and social networking management for companies that want to blog, but don’t have the time or resources to do it properly or effectively.
Traditional Search Engine Optimization has been going through changes over the past several years. In Internet Marketing, “shoppers use keywords, buyers use phrases.” Corporate blogging helps companies connect with the buyers in their market because GOOGLE wants “FRESH, HOT CONTENT”.
The challenge is, it takes a lot of work to keep up a corporate blog. Most companies don’t have the resources to do it. Nor, do they know how to do it right and make sure the activity is measured properly for an ROI. This is where we help.
Lloyds of Indiana is a local retailer that sells printing equipment, supplies, and binding machines through their webstore. We have been blogging for them and manage their social media profiles. We continue to grow their list of marketable prospects and have even converted sales off their MySpace page.
These guys were a local print shop for years. How many print shops have you seen go under in your local market? They changed their business to sell the supplies people need in their office, including high-end printers and corporate displays.
Blogging is helping them do this.
The cost is simple:
$135.00 per post – written, promoted, and managed through social network
$75.00 per post – written only.
So, if you have any friends or family that are complaining about their traditional marketing being expensive and unmeasurable, send them my way.
My office number is: 317-644-3034
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(I am Paul Lorinczi and I approve this message)
Everything that even smells of something new gets a buzzword. I have visions of smartly dressed people with stylish glasses and fancy haircuts going, “let’s give a name.” Then we come up with a sample like this:
3-6-3 Rule
A Ton Of Money
Accounting Noise
Acquisition Indigestion
Across The Board
Active Box
Activity Based Budgeting – ABB
Affluenza
After The Bell
Agency Cross
Agflation
Air Pocket Stock
Alligator Property
Alligator Spread
Alternative Energy ETF
Alternative Investment
And Interest
Angel Bond
Angelina Jolie Stock Index
Ankle Biter
Anonymous Trading
Antitrust
Arbitrageur
Aspirin Count Theory
Sourced from www.investopedia.com/categories/buzzwords.asp
What usually happens is a small segment of the population actually understands what it means. People in the know sound really smart because they can repeat the buzzword and sound really intelligent. The Internet has spawned all kinds of them. Example: “It is important that your GUI design captures the eyeballs. Make sure that you employ search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click (PPC), and Web Analytics. ” The genius ones use a lot of them in many sentences. (Wow, he’s smart, he is buzzword compliant). And people buy it all the time. (I guess that why they work).
I will be the first to admit that I loved buzzwords too. I used to sit around with my collegues who dressed nicely and play the buzzword game too. I was a buzzword expert too. I would do it in front of clients and feel really good about myself.
There is one constant in human evolution. Human interactions have not really changed. Despite all this technology introduced into our lives, we as a species still function pretty much the same way. While we may not feed each other to lions, we find new ways to be cruel just the same. And our fears and desires are pretty simple too. We can still be made to fear and sex will always sell.
So, what is all this social media hype about anyways? What’s all this Internet stuff with My Space, Facebook, Linkedin, and Plaxo about? Well, the reality is human evolution in buying has gone from the bazaar to the store, to the electronic store. Buying and selling is still done on emotions. Doing it on the Internet is no different. Now we have to either visually or through words impact people’s emotional reaction to buying from us. Just like we did when people stood in front of our table at the bazaar. There is no buzzword to describe this. Businesses just need to learn how to sell in this new market. It is old fashion buying and selling that is going on today.
Cold calling is dead. People no longer pick up the phone and talk because caller ID says I don’t have time for people I do not know. So, they are changing from having the world come to them to opting into the world of their choosing. People are quorom sensing beings. They will naturally gravitate towards those people that have similar interest and become part of a community. Instead of going down to the Church Hall, they may now choose to join the forum on under water basket weaving because there are not many people at church who are into under water basket weaving.
Business professionals globally are also trying to connect with potential colleagues with like interests. They no longer pick up the phone and listen to sales people. Instead they pick and choose what information interests them or could help them. The challenge today is learning how to generate the information they would be interested in reading. Or, creating an environments that gives them the option to participate. Again, it is old fashion buying and selling.
In the end, humans have not changed. We are still creatures of habit. We still gravitate towards shared interest. The only difference is that we do it in a different environment today. So, if you peal off all the buzzwords and narrow down the basic human behavior we see today, success is simply watching how humans behave in their new environments. If you observe the Internet from this perspective, you will see that nothing has really changed, only the location where people congregate has.
