06 Dec 2010
When talking to potential clients about the impact of social media on their sales and marketing efforts, I often find myself addressing the question, “how does social media fit into the sales funnel?” Social media brings transparency to the sales process along each step of the funnel: AWARENESS Your company can join the conversation already happening about your brand or industry online to relate to and educate consumers. You can make recommendations to people looking for more information, thank happy customers, and rectify the situation with unhappy customers all within the public platforms where people already spend time. Your company can also use tools to monitor the conversation and reach out to potential prospects. Through this, you can make prospects aware of the product and/or service your company offers to help them meet their goals. PROSPECTS After the prospect is in your funnel, the company can build trust by providing…
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13 May 2010
Sharing/Oversharing I vividly remember my first Facebook status update; I felt like I was crossing a dangerous threshold. This past January, I had an acquaintance tell me he enjoyed that I was always in his news feed, regardless of time of day. I took that as a bad sign, and had flashbacks to reading Emily Gould’s piece Exposed, which detailed her addiction to sharing online. Her job, and thus her life, was online, and over time her sense of privacy crumbled to a point of no return; every action was chronicled via blog, and every reader comment became part of a life-defining feedback loop. The New York Times did an interesting piece this weekend on the “Tell-All Generation”, chronicling a small shift as early 20-somethings realize their online persona is also their virtual resume. Yet, just as some freshly-minted college grads are realizing the discrepancy between their resume interests (volunteering, photography) and…
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26 Feb 2010
For a long time, Myspace was the go-to social network for musicians looking to connect with fans. Today, Facebook has surpassed Myspace to become the social network of choice for most. As most users leave Myspace to join the ranks of Facebook, the same goes for musicians wishing to promote their music. However, Facebook musician pages leave a lot to be desired for those promoting their music within the world’s largest social network. The Facebook music player is either tucked away in the box tab or it is halfway down the page in the side bar. Even worse, the fans who actually look hard enough to find the music player are unable to share the songs with their own friends. RootMusic is working to make Facebook pages more musician friendly withBandPages. Their simple tool creates a tab for your Facebook page where your fans can hear your music while they…
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14 Jul 2009
Free is the way of the internet. Google, Pandora, Digg, and Facebook to offer their products to hundreds of millions of people without charging anything. The marginal costs of adding your millionth user and your twenty millionth user are roughly zero. That is because bandwidth, storage, and processing power are cheap, and they get cheaper every year. Free is no longer a marketing gimmick, but a necessity for most online businesses. When you get into the mindset of a consumer, cheap and free are completely different from one another. If Google had decided long ago to charge a single dollar for their services, consumers would have found somewhere else to search the web, manage their email, or read the news. Free-conomics: The old way to look at a market was to examine how supply of a product and demand for a product would change as the price shifted. Today, free has become an…
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