The Salesby5 Blog

Are you placing your least experienced employee in charge of your social media; the face of your company to millions? Too many companies are hiring inexperienced firms or college students to build and execute a social media strategy for their company.  Most of the students have either not been on Twitter, dislike it, or have little experience beyond Facebook and tagging drunken pictures of friends from the party last weekend.  Many of the companies in charge of Twitter strategies have less than 40 followers, just got a Facebook account up, or have no strategy/execution plan. Social media effectiveness is directly proportional to reach and making sure the person on the other end is listening and cares about your offering. Youth trumps age in athletics, but not with business strategy and marketing execution; that’s where experience trumps ignorance!

I challenge you to check the Twitter Grade of your social media expert.  This isn’t the final word on Twitter expertise, but it can help you in making a decision.  Take a look at our CIO, Nan Palmero’s Twitter Grader score.  You’ll usually find his score around 99.9x (it fluctuates a bit), and typically between #1 and #10 ranked person on Twitter in San Antonio.  Now, go back to http://twitter.grader.com and fill in the twitter handle of your company or the company or person you are considering hiring.  Is it below Nan’s dog, @clunkerspalmero? His dog just joined Twitter and has a rating of 94 out of 100. The difference between my present rank, (@erikdarm) at 98.4 and Nan’s at 99.95 is 43,377 people out of about 2,841,887!

Here is a quick understanding of Twitter Grader.  Twitter Grader measures the power, reach and authority of a Twitter account.  In other words, when you tweet, what kind of an impact does it have?  It is based upon the following criteria, although not all are equally weighted:

1. Number of Followers

2. Power of Followers

3. Updates

4. Update Recency

5. Follower/Following Ratio

6. Engagement

Here is my last thought. It’s time for me to visit my Dentist, Dr. Jay Roach.  Lately, though, the guy that cuts my lawn also seems to have experience in brushing and flossing and wants to handle my family’s dental care. I think I’ll let him take over our dental and orthodontic needs. After all, he has done a good job on our lawn.  Your thoughts?

photo by R4vi

With the surge in shortened communications, such as Twitter and text messaging, there seems to be a loss in the nickels and dimes of social interactions.  Those small but valuable tokens are the words “please” and “thank you.”  I know, you only have 140 to 160 characters to get your point across.  I know you’re busy and moving quickly.  Just remember, everytime you choose to have an interaction with a person, be sure to drop them a nickel or a dime.  Just like compound interest at the bank, those nickels and dimes turn into dollars later.

picture by EJP Photo

This weekend I passed the billboard seen above. With a little research, I found out that Your Wife is Hot was the most popular among the respondents to the recent NEWS online survey on the effectiveness of billboard advertising.

I was pleasantly shocked; it made me look three times and I wanted to take a photo. That has only happened once before, when I encountered the worst billboard I had ever seen, and I only wanted to take a picture then so I could show people what not to do. At SalesBy5 we are not usually fans of billboards because most lack a call to action or the ability to track performance. However in this situation, with the South Texas heat already breaking 100 degrees a few days this year, their advertising was spot-on.

A few months ago we wrote about brand promise and brand experience, so I called Jon Wayne Heating & Air Conditioning yesterday to talk to them about writing this blog. After a few rings an automated phone system answered and promptly hung up on me. I called back, which I would not normally do, but I was in search of answers. This time their system worked, so I asked if there was anyone available I could talk to about their billboard. Unfortunately no one was available, and I was told to leave a voice mail. Persistent, I then asked if I could get the cell phone number of someone to talk to, and was once again told to leave a voice mail. Finally, I offered to leave my name and number and have the person call me back as soon as possible, but was once again told to leave a voice mail. Dejected, I ended up doing as I was told.

It is rare that we see good advertising, let alone great. We are exposed to so much clutter that letting something through our subconscious gate keeper is huge! I have mentioned this billboard to about 15 people now and also wrote about it on Twitter. As Seth Godin puts it; if something is remarkable, people will remark about it. I say people are going to talk, so give them something to talk about with your ads, pitches, and brand.

No one from Jon Wayne was heard from as of press time which is now 24 hours later!

Photo courtesy of Derrich.com

Today, many of you may have experienced either a delay in the use of your Google services including Google Reader, GMail and other Google services (Google claims that only 14% of users were affected).  In case you were wondering, Google is updating from an older standard of networking to the shiny, new IPv6 for a better and faster user experience.

Around noon today, Google sent out a tweet that they were aware of the issue, working on a fix and they would be releasing more information soon.  Then, at 2:15 PM CDT, they released a blog post, explaining the problem with 5th grade simplicity, apologizing for the downtime as well as including the reason for the downtime.  It’s great to see a company as large as Google recognizing that people rely upon them heavily and communicating in simple terms that everyone can understand.  How do you feel they did with their communications?

Last December, seeking to enhance sales, Gary Vaynerchuk offered free shipping and promoted it three ways. As a result, he said, a direct marketing mailing cost $15,000 and brought in 200 new customers; a billboard ad cost $7,500 and won 300 new customers; and tweeting the promotion on Twitter attracted 1,800 new customers.

Are you using social media to get your story out there? You don’t have to pay for attention anymore.

When ABC began broadcasting the NCAA football games in the 60′s, the footage was quite different than it is today. In the early years, ABC would broadcast the field with the plays as they were happening. You might not necessarily think about it, but that type of broadcast makes it difficult for a person, say in New York, to care about the UT vs. Texas A&M game. So, what’s different today? Consider the shots of the bonfire in College Station, Bevo out on the field and the screaming fans with their bodies painted to match the colors of their school. Context for the city and the personalities at the game have helped people become engaged in games that they otherwise wouldn’t have cared about. The 29 year old who came up with this idea of showing context also developed ABC’s Wide World of Sports and numerous other highly successful shows.

Context is also one of the benefits of social networks. We meet people casually at conferences or for a meeting and are able to get a general feeling about them. But then, when we connect on Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter, we are able to find the context in which those people live their lives, and that helps us develop an interest in them. Through these sites, we are able to find more ways to connect with each other, professionally and socially, noticing a love of similar sports, that we read the same books, or maybe that we went to the same school. Providing context is important in the sale of products and services as well. These are the stories that we share to make our offer compelling and meaningful.

Nan and Erik were asked to speak about Twitter to the 210 business owners at Fortune Small Business Sales and Marketing Summit. We helped many of these attendees to get their names and company names taken for Twitter. We quickly realized that most of these companies have marketing firms/departments, ad agencies or PR firms, so why on earth are these vendors/partners failing to get these accounts set up for their clients? Isn’t that the proactive services that they expect? Well, we think that people have low expectations and need to raise them. It should be painful to imagine running your business without your marketing company. What steps can you take today to make yourself invaluable? Are you taking the proper steps to delight your customers by saving them money, thinking two steps ahead or bringing an additional value that they didn’t expect? Drop us a line in the comments about what you do to be indispensable.

Our last 8 blog posts have featured insights from the 8 scheduled speakers/presenters for the Gazelles Sales and Marketing Summit in New Orleans April 21-22. Tomorrow we will begin live tweeting from the conference from @salesby5, so join us if you’d like to hear more from these sales and marketing experts!  We will hear advice from guerilla marketers, recession marketing experts, relationship nurturers, and more!  Tune in and learn the latest best practices for sales and marketing in today’s challenging economy!

The rules of marketing and PR have changed, according to David Meerman Scott, who has made it into the Marketing Sherpa Viral Hall of Fame twice, in 2006 and again in 2007. He shows us that the old ways of marketing and PR are outdated; you don’t obsess about being “on message,” break the bank with expensive advertising nor do you beg mainstream media to write about you. Instead, you tell your story directly to an interested market.

With all the tools we have to connect with one another—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Plaxo, to name a few—it is much easier to reach an interested audience. These money and time saving tips are more relevant than ever. To learn more about David Meerman Scott, join us at the Gazelle’s Sales and Marketing Conference!

Nan here, writing on location from the Press Room at CTIA, an incredible wireless conference, in Las Vegas. I’ve seen some amazing new technology here including some of Garmin’s new phones as well as had the pleasure of seeing Al Gore speak – he’s a great showman! The most interesting part of this show, though, is the gradual death of the business card. It seems that more and more people at these events are refusing to carry them.  Interestingly, people are opening up their social networks to everyone that wants a business card.  Essentially, this lowers the time to be able to connect (it’s a pain to enter the contact information), it let’s people get more details about you and a better look at who you are thanks to the information you populated on your network and it gives us multiple avenues to communicate. Our friend, Alan Weinkrantz, even wrote about the new .tel domains that are standardized for you to create a website with your contact information.

This brings up a few interesting concerns.   First, are you on Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo or the other more popular sites with appropriate information that sells you and your brand?  Next, do you have a smartphone or web enabled device to make these 21st century connections on the go?  Third, do your photos and the things you talk about sell you or unsell you as a brand?  All of these considerations matter.  The future of social networks is now, are you prepared to face it?  Like the internet, it’s not a fad.