Chris Kenton, CEO of SocialRep kicked off the usual end-of-year predictions with an anti-prediction under the title The One Truth Behind All Social Media, and it was welcome. Rather than cross his fingers and guess about what happens in 2015, Chris:
“focused on trying to distill the significance of social media’s impact on business down to a single point. If you cut through all the hype, if you boil all the trends down to one fact, what is the single, incontrovertible truth that explains social media’s disruptive role in business?”
His post on LinkedIn should be required reading for anyone wearing a marketing cap. It’s not anything shockingly earth-shaking or eyebrow-raising. Indeed, it is so elemental that one could easily say “yeah, of course” and continue on marketing the old-fashioned way that not longer works.
But his insight is clear and his analysis is unusually trenchant, so we recommend it wholeheartedly: Read the full article.
The Scredible Team
Everything
Early on a salesperson learns the ABCs — Always Be Closing. Now it has changed to Always Be Connecting and we credit the insight to Jill Rowley. A couple years have passed since her firestorm post “The ABCs of Social Selling: Always Be Connected.” But it is worth revisiting often:
“The modern sales professional is actually not a seller, but is someone who helps people buy. This is someone who helps the buyer understand his problem, helps the buyer understand there’s a solution to the problem, and helps the buyer understand why her company is uniquely qualified to solve the buyer’s problem. Today’s buyers are better informed by information available via the web and social connections, yet their buying processes are longer because more people sit on the buying committee.
What Is a Modern Sales Professional?
· She’s an “information concierge” — she provides the right information to the right person at the right time in the right channel.
· She’s an “insights professional” — she teaches the buyer something he doesn’t already know.
· She’s a socially connected individual — she’s where her buyers are: on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Facebook, Quora, Slideshare, Pinterest, and more.
· She has a personal brand — she’s a thought leader, not a product pusher.
· She’s a content connoisseur—she reads what her buyers read and shares that content across her social networks.
· She’s a challenger—she makes her clients think differently.
· She’s a mini marketer.
… Always Be Connecting, because your connections lead to your next hire, your next job, your next lead, and your next close.”
Lori at Scredible
To increase sales, of course. And a lot of businesses, especially smaller ones, feel especially stuck with this. They’ve heard a thousand times that they ‘must do social’ but their larger to-do list is full. What’s more, they’re learning that they can’t just show up online, they have to commit. Like in a relationship. So success begins by treating social less like a campaign… and more like a relationship.
The Scredible Team
Things are moving so fast online, keeping up feels like a full-time job. Things keep changing. Seems like only yesterday that these were the ‘hot tips’ for businesses for building-up and benefitting from a great online presence:
· Have a business Facebook page
· Create and post videos
· Have a LinkedIn company page
· Host a business blog
All good stuff. But no longer enough. Today, a competitive business needs to:
· Connect with every customer
· Focus on the power of mobile
· Cultivate long-term relationships
· Position as a thought leader
Tomorrow it gets tougher. And so getting good tools becomes absolutely essential.
Lori at Scredible
Bastiaan Janmaat runs the technology intelligence company, DataFox, and blogs about the tools his company has devised to help investors sort through data for insights to profit. And he recently posed a rather poignant theorem in his company blog:
“With the continuing explosion of information online, there’s speculation that internet-based-research has reached peak efficacy. It’s becoming harder and harder to sift through the noise and consistently pick up the signal you’re looking for. As a result, the knowledge worker’s benefit from online data is beginning to plateau, even decline.”
Here at Scredible we’ve spent a lot of time debating this — pro and con.
We know how knowledge workers can now spend 2-3 hours a day dealing with the “firehose” of information — databases, newsletters, reports, emails, search queries, and social media. It was all too much, until AI:
“Innovative companies are leveraging artificial intelligence (including natural language processing and supervised machine learning) to collect information from disparate sources, organize that information, and disseminate it to the right people at the right time.”
Now AI companies are:
· Scheduling your meetings for you (x.ai)
· Analyzing emails to tell you who you should be following up with (RelateIQ)
· Suggesting new contacts for you based on career changes (LinkedIn)
· Helping you navigate your schedule, location, and surroundings (Google Now)
· Surfacing corporate data to identify and engage with prospects (DataFox)
· Creating a socially credible online footprint for you (Scredible)
And the key thing is — with the help of AI, these services can all be done in a fraction of the time once required. That’s real AI in action. Full story.
The Scredible Team
Fun story in a recent Times-Picayune about the other skills gap. Not the STEM gap for the lack of science, technology, engineering and math whizzes. No this is the, er, soft and fluffy social media practitioners skills gap.
One study says that 90% of all job openings next year will require some level of digital knowhow and social media acumen. But 90% of the applicants don’t measure up.
What’s needed is “just in time” training for the social and digital capabilities that today’s businesses are requiring. In the same way that “just in time” manufacturing swept across industries in the 1980s — maximizing physical capital, “just in time” social/digital training is sweeping across today’s industries — maximizing human capital.
And here at Scredible, we are pleased to be playing a role.
For the full story: Is Social Media Causing a Skills Gap?
Lori at Scredible
Photo by: tratong/Shutterstock.com
Which national product kicked up from last place to 3rd in a competitive market – in just three years?
That would be the Portland Timbers soccer team, which Forbes now ranks as 3rd most valuable franchise in MLS. Providence Park is selling every seat; fans are camping out overnight to get in; there’s a big waiting list for season tickets. And they did it all in just three years by “getting social.” Here’s some lessons for any marketer, compliments of Timbers owner Merritt Paulson, COO Mike Golub, and the Studio Jelly agency…
1. Create a 1-to-1 connection with each and every fan – like on opening day instead of bringing in a name talent to sing the national anthem, you have all 18,627 attendees sing it together, off-key and all!
2. Celebrate every success with your fans – when the Timbers score, right there on the spot a lumberjack cuts a slice of tree to pass around the stadium for fans to grab onto and hold high, owning the score.
3. Tap the inherent authenticity of the product – like capturing the countercultural fierceness of the Pacific Northwest by buying lots of billboards with ads that didn’t name the team, didn’t make an offer, didn’t even give a URL. Instead they ran photos of fans with just the Timbers’ logo, communicating that this fan base is the real deal.
4. Put your advocates to work for you – like seating 5,500 members of the Timbers Army in one section with colored placards to hold up forming the Timbers’ green-and-white flag and confirming to everyone in the stadium that they are part of a very special family.
5. Seriously listen to your advocates – Timbers management meets regularly with their ‘army’ and take suggestions on seat-pricing, parking, you name it—because if you aren’t learning from your most passionate supporters, then you’re learning from your least passionate!
6. Sustain the passion in-between purchases via social media – the Timbers stoke the conversations on message boards and social networks, keeping the fever high and genuinely including everyone in the community’s fun.
What do all of these lessons have in common?
They’re all woven into the social storytelling and sharing fabric that unites us as humans, that grows stronger and more powerful as we move from the “closed and controlling” marketing of old to the “open and sharing” marketing of our social future.
We listed only six lessons. What should be added to this list, to complete the storytelling?
The Scredible Team
Forrester has issued their top IT predictions on everything from mobile to security and big data analytics and from the Internet of Things (IoT) to the changing role of the CIO. The biggest takeaway: The gap between digital leaders and laggards will widen… and the need for digital coaching and training will increase as a result.
Other key predictions:
1. Almost half of the world will have a powerful computer in their pocket and vastly different expectations from your business in 2015
2. Apple will rule 2015
3. More money spent on security will lead to… more security breaches-related losses
4. Data is the new product
5. Many established companies will become venture capitalists
6. Some sectors will not see the fruits of digitization for a long time
7. The Cloud is the New Normal
8. In 2015, many organizations will answer the question “Who’s your digital daddy?” with a three- letter acronym……the newly hired Chief Digital Officer (CDO)
For detail on these forecasts: http://clk.ie/4t8XvM
Lee at Scredible
Funny how things turn out. We’ve fallen so in love with our mobile devices and apps that we’d rather work longer hours than give them up. We’re actually so happy, we’re hardly complaining about the extra workload. Just the opposite, in fact.
These findings from Evolve IP tell us that increasingly we’ll turn to smarter apps to increase our productivity on the job.
We see Scredible fitting into that suite of must-have productivity apps. Thoughts?
For the full story: http://clk.ie/cQSj2Q
The Scredible Team
Scredible 