Do you want to know how blogging can help you sell?
Are you sceptical if it will work in your business niche/sector/industry?
Are you trying to figure out if you should start a blog?
Then read on…..
While on holiday in Thailand I saw this article pop up in my Flipboard.
Do you want to know what social business is?
Do you want to know how it will change business in the future?
I believe there is no such thing as “Social Media”. It is just a phrase to describe the current state of the internet.
I believe social business is the future of business. Social business will be the way business is done in the future and eventually what we know currently as social business will just become “business”.
I have come up with my definition of Social Business.
Restoring the equilibrium of power, to make the values, interests and beliefs of the customer/employee equal to those of the company Continue reading
I have just spent the last two weeks in Thailand and I am currently writing this blog on the 13 hour flight back from Bangkok to London. Thailand is an amazing country. I have experienced it’s two extremes – the busy streets of Khaosan Road in Bangkok and the peace and tranquillity around islands such as Phi Phi, Koh Lanta and Ao Nang. I was fortunate enough to experience things such as:
A Buddhist monk prayer session in full flow. Hearing them recite their ancient chants in the Wat Pho Buddhist temple, home to the worlds largest reclining Buddha. 
Passing my open water PADI Scuba diving course 18 metres under the Andaman sea with green turtles and leopard sharks to keep me company.
Riding an Asian elephant called Nancy bareback into the sea and then swimming with her after she decided it would be funny to throw me and my unsuspecting girlfriend into the sea 
The one thing that struck me above everything is the entrepreneurial spirit of the Thai people. The less the person had, the more they tried. When you are on a remote island where there are no shops for miles, the locals set up stores in their houses to serve the community around them. Locals on the streets were working all hours of the day selling fruit for small amounts of money that the western world would not consider worth picking up off the floor. By western standards the low pay, long hours and shanty town living would deem their quality of life as unlivable. However, on the whole, the people seemed very happy. The holiday made me feel very humble and gave me some time to reflect on how lucky I am and the things that have helped make me happy. I wanted to turn these thoughts into two tips to help you live a happier life.
Have you ever wanted to embed a tweet button into your blog post?
Rather than tweet a link to the whole article, have you ever wanted to tweet just a quote or snippet?
In a previous post I explained how to get people to share your content through social networks. This article will help you to make it easier to get people to share parts of your content rather than just the traditional way and sharing the whole article.
Below is an example of a tweet button that I embedded into a previous post. This tweet button was designed to give readers a chance to tweet the quote that I had listed in the post.
Example of a tweetable quote with tweet button embedded into the post
Do you work in sales?
Are you passionate about how social can help your organisation sell more?
Do you want to know what role content marketing and content creation will play in the future way you will communicate with your potential customers?
This post explains how you can build a business case to help change the way your business sells it products and how your sales process works.
In my previous post on how to sell in a social era I explained some of the differences between a traditional sales person and person selling in the social era. I mentioned that up to two thirds of buying process is done before you speak with a salesperson. With this post I want to go into a bit more depth and help you demonstrate the return on investment to get buy in, so you can focus in this area. This post will give you some ideas how you can demonstrate the concept to the following people:
It will allow you to spend more time in your current role or create a new role so you can help your company do it better.
I define social selling as using the social web to help you sell your products or services
I define content as information which conveys a message, such as a blog, video, podcast, ebook etc
There is a phrase which I learnt from a thesaleslion.com post called assignment selling. The higher the value item you sell – the more relevant this is.
The concept works like this. When a salesperson goes to a sales appointment they spend a great deal of their time trying to inform the prospect what their product does and why they must have it. If the prospect doesn’t know this information before you visit then you risk wasting time your time with a prospect, who is never going to be a customer.
Are you looking to improve or modernise the way you sell?
Do you want to learn how you can use the social web to help you sell more?
In this post I will discuss both the traditional and the new ways salespeople can work.
After reading this post you will have an insight into what the future of selling will look like. Hopefully you will start to see that there are alternative ways of working that will help you to help your customers more, which in turn will help you hit your sales targets.
A salesperson is often one of the highest paid people in the business. I believe unless salespeople change the way they work, they will lose their influence over the sales process, which warrants their high compensation packages.
Wikipedia explains the verb describing what a salesperson does:
Selling is offering to exchange an item of value for a different item. The original item of value being offered may be either tangible or intangible. The second item, usually money, is most often seen by the seller as being of equal or greater value than that being offered for sale
Basically a salesperson attempts to convince a potential customer that there is more value in what his company is trying to sell than what they are charging for it.
Imagine a world without salespeople? The world of business would stop. Right? Continue reading
(Until you read this post)
If my last post on why I wish social was NOT in my job title didn’t stir up enough controversy – then this one might!
In this post I will explain the harsh question you need to ask yourself before you decide to spend a pound, euro or dollar on any social media related software. And while you’re at it, hold the head count for any staff to work on social media as well.
Social is a not about the technology, it is about a cultural shift to create a more honest, open, transparent way of doing business.
To clarify my definition of software in relation to this post I am talking about a company trying to sell you a tool do something with social: monitoring, responses, collaboration tools etc. I am not including free software such as WordPress, Hoot suite etc.
You can achieve so much without spending a penny. If you have a plan which builds a strategy for using free social tools closely aligned to your core business objectives, then you could achieve more than any other “social strategy” which could easily cost hundreds of thousands or more.
So what if you have 100,000 likes on Facebook. Who cares if you’ve got 100,000 followers on Twitter. Neither of these translate into anything your CEO cares about.
When I work from home and take a break to eat lunch I normally get my iPad out, open the TED app and watch a video to see if I can find any additional inspiration for the afternoon.
Yesterday I searched for leadership and came across Margaret Heffernan’s talk called “Dare to disagree.”
The official description is below
Most people instinctively avoid conflict, but as Margaret Heffernan shows us, good disagreement is central to progress. She illustrates (sometimes counter-intuitively) how the best partners aren’t echo chambers — and how great research teams, relationships and businesses allow people to deeply disagree.
Trouble viewing? Click here > > http://www.ted.com/talks/margaret_heffernan_dare_to_disagree.html
She talks about a doctor who was investigating why there was a high death rate from childhood cancer in the 1950′s. Continue reading
I have spent the past week sunning myself around a pool, high in the Italian hills of Giaole in Chainti, Tuscany.
For the last 30 years I have been convinced that I cannot hold my breath under water with out holding my nose. During the first day around the pool I was embarrassingly trying to explain to my friends why I can’t hold my breath. Someone said just give it ago. So I did. After two attempts, surprise surprise, I managed to do it. The best thing was, I didn’t drown! Seeing how happy I was at my new found skill, my friends jokingly said that I should blog about it! So here I am.
Social data is the key to how the businesses of tomorrow will build a more personalised service for their customers.
Social data comes from a variety of different sources and forms part of your digital foot print.
Your digital footprint can includes sources such as:
The key parts of your digital foot print which come under social data are the parts which come from the social networks where you publicly or privately share information about yourself. The different areas of social data are:
The companies who will lead the way in social business will be those who fully embrace the amount of data out there about people and companies. They will be able to give consumers confidence in sharing more and more information with them in return for a better, more personalised service.
I have created a couple of articles which discuss how social data could be used to change the way people do business
How do you think social media data could be better used? Are there any ways you are currently using social data to provide a more personalised service?
