How to digital schmoozing for marketing

Controlled Marketing

Currently our marketing consists of:
- The website
- The almost daily blog post
- The micro blogging on Twitter that mainly consists of a catchy phrase and a link to the blog posts
- The regular press releases (except for summer holiday)
- The comments on blogs: only when we feel we can add something to the conversation.

We could easily spend money on on-line advertising especially in the geographic markets where we score lower.

These are all communications that we can control and master.

Marketing beyond control: schmoozing

What we see as the biggest challenge is to have bloggers start writing about LEADSExplorer as a sales and marketing web service. As we haven’t been schmoozing as Guy Kawasaki, it is likely we will be missing this: You need to establish the relationship before you need it. Therefore schmoozing is it!
Guy even wrote a sequel: The Art of Schmoozing as he has been schmoozing his entire career.

We do get into relation with bloggers and LEADSExplorer regularly gets mentioned in solution lists (TargetInfoLabs, WebMarketCentral, FrenzyBlogging, LeadsLoth ).
We also have sveral clients that blog too, but they don’t seem to be too keen to blog about our service. Maybe they are afraid of the competition reading and knowing their secret of success?

We are aware there is still a lot of room for improvement for increasing our visibility in the bloggers community. Building this visibility will not happen overnight but step by step especially as we aren’t located in Silicon Valley.
We are also a startup: our time is very limited and valuable as there are always a gazillion other things we need to get done like serving our customers.

Schmoozers and schmoozing characteristics

- Some people call it networking, others just call it schmoozing.
- It is not what you know or who you know, it is about who knows you.
- Good schmoozers first give favors, then ask for a return.
- The real great schmoozers give favors without expecting a return:
   you will give a return without them asking for.

Schmoozing digitally

Thus we need to schmooze or loose.
Even in this digital communications era (Blogs and Twitter) the schmoozing seems to be happening in analog (real life), which makes it very expensive. Real life schmoozing doesn’t scale.

The best we can do is to continue to schmooze digitally by:
- Asking questions
- Answering questions
- Mentioning our web service LEADSExplorer – website lead generation and customer retention.
- Having an online presence
- Create online connections
in order to get in contact and create interest with bloggers and influencers.

Will this help us reach our potential customer?
Is our target business customer the blog-reading type?
Can he be influenced by blogs and links?

How good are you at schmoozing?
Did you have any success with schmoozing digitally (over the Internet)?