Schmoozing
Schmoozing is to chat in a friendly and persuasive manner to make a social or business connection in order to gain a favor or to obtain an advantage.
Schmoozing takes long before it can effectively be used for getting the favor or the advantage.

Digital schmoozing
Digital schmoozing is similar but using the Internet as medium:
- Commenting on blogs of industry leaders or influencers – praising the writer
- Getting linked on LinkedIn, Xing, Viadeo, … with company leaders or influencers
- Answering questions on business social networks in order to be remarked
- Writing a blog that mainly summarizes and links to blog posts of industry leading bloggers
- Favor and comment published presentations or ebooks of industry leaders or influencers on social publishing sites
- Follow industry leaders and influencers on Twitter and send them direct Tweets

Getting remarked
The first goal is to:
- Build rapport supporting their content with the industry leaders or influencers
- Provide supporting or interesting links to their work
- Propagate their content on the Internet (this is more than just retweeting)
The problem is that all your efforts shouldn’t be to obvious but look natural and not on purpose as these people will spot fraudsters from far.

If you are sure they have noticed you, try to engage into a conversation by making a suited bold or daring statement to open the discussion using:
- The social websites
- A comment on their blog
- A comment on a industry leading blog
- A published presentation or paper that you suggest to them by a comment or tweet
Don’t send them a direct email as they will feel the intrusion.

Engage into a conversation
If they engage into a conversation with you, it signifies they find you important enough to spend time on you. This engagement can be using the social websites, but more likely they will address you directly by email – as your email is easily retrievable.

This is when you build your relation further in order to get to your real goal: get a favor or gain an advantage.
Try to increase your relation through a direct conversation by email, IM (Instant Messaging) or even calling using VOIP like Skype.

Asking the favor or advantage
As you communicate with them directly and you have gained their respect, then it is appropriate to ask for your favor or advantage.
It is a hard and long investment that is not always rewarding as the industry leaders or influencers can forget about you at any time or they can decrease in importance while schmoozing digitally with them.

Digital schmoozing is probably even more time consuming than schmoozing in real life.

Business social networks: LinkedIn, Go BIG Network, BizFriends, Biznik, Ecademy, Xing, Viadeo, Vator.tv, …

Social publishing sites Scribd, SlideShare, Authorstream or Docstoc

Have your ever tried digital schmoozing ?

Business: the complex sale
People in a company or in their business are always hard to persuade to make a purchase as it takes presentation, sales pitches and negotiations.
In B2B the complex sale is a fact and comes with a long sales cycle.
Business buying decisions are rational and based upon evaluating different propositions.

Consumer: consumption
The same people as consumer go shopping in their spare time with the main goal to buy, spend money and feel good. In many cases shopping is their preferred spare-time activity – even during their holidays.
The sales cycle is very short and in many occasions impulsive – even for their expensive cars.

So how come when people are in a business environment it takes time, evaluation and consideration?
While during their spare time as a consumer they just buy for spending the money.

The entrepreneur:
We all know entrepreneurs who are very hard to deal with as they will get into hard negotiations for all their purchases related to their business, whereas when they buy stuff for their living they spend their hard earned money easily.
His buying characteristics change during the same day.

Business purchases: beneficial
The thing is business purchases could improve their business or effectiveness and thus generate more revenue or more income which should be most important. Thus the more improvements, increase in effectiveness and increases in convenience they can achieve by purchasing tools and services the more likely to increase their business activity or more profit.
More income means more to spend during or consumer part of live.

Consumer buying: convenience and ego
Consumer purchases can increase personal convenience or could boost the ego and in very few cases can save money in the long run. But in most cases it is just money spend for the sake of:
- The eagerness of having things to take home
- The good feeling of buying
- The social status obtained with goods
Consumers are not very rational.

Are we schizophrenic buyers?
So why it is there is this huge difference between spending for the business and spending for their personal life?
Are we all schizophrenic ?
Do we all have double lives ?
Do we think differently between business and consumer ?

Are you difficult to deal with during your business and very easy when you are a consumer ?
Or are you just difficult all the time for purchases ?

You would expect salesmen to sell themselves well when the are looking for a new job.
Although they might get a new job fairly quickly, the question is: did they sell at the best price ? The bid price.

There is a huge difference between selling a product frequently and selling a service or product one time only.

Recurrent deals:
If you sell a product frequently you can increase or decrease the price and measure the increase or decrease of the number of deals closed.
That is a good feedback.

Unique deals:
In case you sell a one-off there is only one shot for that particular deal:
- To high will result in having no deal
- To low will make you close the deal but not at the best price
This is selling by making a bid.

Selling, negotiating, poker and bid pricing
So even if the great salesman gets his contract for a new job, did he get:
- The best deal
- Just a good deal
- A lazy deal?

This will depend on his selling capabilities for one-off products or services if he obtains the best pricing or not.
How well is he in negotiating and bid pricing ?
Bid pricing a different metier.

Some sales people are great in presenting the best suiting benefits, advantages, features and functions for the customer.

Other salesmen are better skilled in negotiating and playing a poker game and setting the bid pricing.

There is a huge difference in these two types of deal making.
Recurrent deals:
- A standard product
- A standard service
Where the price is more or less fixed and comparable with competitors.

Unique sales deals:
- A house
- A project
- A service
- A vacancy
Where the price is more floating and not exactly comparable with competitors.

Some of the best salesmen will not get the best deal for their job.

What is your metier ?

Why tell less ?
People can only retain two or three messages from one presentation or speech.

When you are explaining your products, business or business models, you have to focus on the main or essential stuff that is significant to your potential customer.

If you tell people about 10 benefits, advantages or features during a presentation or conversation, they only will retain two or three of them.
Then the problem is which three will they remember ?
You don’t know. You don’t know which messages they take back home.
You need to be in control in order by limiting the number of messages.

The company presentation is universal
If you use the standard company presentation you will be presenting too many subjects, benefits and ideas as it has been made for many purposes:
- To please the CEO
- To please the investors
- To please the VP Marketing
- To (maybe) interest the customer

Certainly not to please the Salesman.

The company presentation is intended to be universal.
In sales nothing is universal – all customers are unique (or they think so) and should be treated that way (especially in B2B).

Investigate to clean out the presentation
Any presentation or sales pitch starts with an investigation in the company and the people to meet or talk to. You need to know the purpose for attending, their problem and their interests.

This implies you need to clean out the standard company presentation, even if management imposes you to use it as it is.
In the end it is your sales revenue and your sales bonus that counts, not the pride or ego of your management.

Kill the company presentation for your own benefit !

Do you use the company presentation ?
If so – are you the top notch salesman of the company ?
Ever wondered how to become one ?
Start with the company presentation.

Joint venture culture clash

When the COO of the American company asked for sales estimations to the Direktor Vertrieb (Sales manager) of the German company, he expected a spreadsheet with numbers.
Instead the Direktor Vertrieb gave sales estimations without any calculations.
The COO then asked where he got the numbers, the German replied “Aus dem Bauch” (just his best guess based on his gut feeling).

The problem is both people were working for companies that had joined forces in a Joint Venture.
The American COO almost went nuts. For him it was impossible to run a company based upon gut feeling. This was unheard of in a time of information systems, ERP and spreadsheets.

The rational American COO could demand for forecasts based upon calculations in a spreadsheet, but he had no power over the German Sales manager to oblige him.

The German Sales manager had no intention to go through all the required calculations as he was sure of his best guess. Moreover he had too much pride to succumb to the demands of the American COO.

Driven by his pride and prejudice the COO went out to calculate a myriad of spreadsheets as it was important for him to know and to have numbers based on assumptions, input from analysts and salesmen.
The numbers of the COO were used to plan the production.

About a year later it became clear the “Aus dem Bauch” numbers were near the realized sales, whereas the numbers produced by the COO were far off.

The German Sales manager had a decade experience in selling similar products into the market, whereas the COO not.
Experience counts more than all the number that can be assembled and mixed into the most complex calculations that are based upon certain assumptions.

Joint venture sufferings and oppositions

A joint venture is an organization that is difficult to manage as almost every aspect or habit of both companies can cause a clash that can make the joint venture fail.
Pride and prejudice are one of the main factors of failure.

When two cultures or company cultures meet many problems arise causing oppositions and sufferings at both sides. This is inevitable.
The sufferings and oppositions are the life and operations of any joint venture company.

Did you ever survived a joint venture ?

Is Facebook redefining the way people go about obtaining information and news?

Facebook provides every member with a social stream containing the events and news of their friends. Effortlessly the stream comes to them.

Information is becoming less of a destination that people seek online.
The social stream of information comes to the people instead of them reaching out to a search engine to find news or information.

Social stream versus search engines

For a start people no longer seek. They expect the information or news to come to them in a social stream.
This is probably due to their laziness as:
- a stream is convenient and is automatic,
whereas
- search using search engines require some inspiration for keywords and the effort of narrowing down the result by multiple searches.

The Recommender model of trusted parties

In a social stream all their friends are trusted parties, because they belong to their network.
The friends have evaluated the web page or content and recommend it to their friends.

In search the search engines are certainly not trusted parties as they are sponsored by advertising and can have higher goals (like Google). The top links are not always the better or higher value links. It is not because many people have previously clicked upon certain good looking links that the information or content on those high ranking pages are the best.

The problem with the “Recommender model“, using friends as trusted sources, is the biased and limited information that will be generated.
A lot of information will be missed due to the friends only receiving a small part of the information available on the Internet. The friends will be filtering and gathering only this limited amount information.

What will be retained is not necessarily the most important news, but is likely to be the most sensational news.

On the other hand a lot of not relevant or not interesting information will be filtered out by the friends thus saving time for the person using the stream.

An additional benefit is that all the friends get the same information which gives again a basis to be part of the group and to discuss about events and news they are all aware off.

Social stream beating up the search engines

Is Social stream becoming competition or a challenger for search engines?
Probably this has already happened.

Can the conquest of Social stream on the Internet go fast?
Anything can happen fast on the Internet especially as there are already so many people using it: Facebook.
This type of Social stream is not limited to Facebook: LinkedIn and others provide it too.

The search engines have a serious issue with Social stream as:
- It will decrease their advertising revenue significantly over a short period of time.
- They cannot deliver a social stream due to the fact they don’t have members with friends.
Hence the end of the hegemony of the search engines is near.

Of course for searches on specific information or news, search engines are the specialists.

The Social stream becomes a marketing challenge

The repercussions of this “Recommender model” od Social stream on marketing can be important as the commercial messages need to get into the stream of the trusted friends.
How to get advertising into recommendations and messages of friends ?

Thus instead of getting a high SERP (Search Engine Results Page / Position) by SEO, SEM, link building and all the black hat SEO tricks available, the fact of getting included in the Social stream of friends becomes important.

This is whole different game as this model of Social stream nears the Word of Mouth model.
However it is still different as Social stream is emitted by only one person to influence many.
The Word of Mouth repeats itself by communication from one person to another to another.

Should we forget about search engines, links and SERP?
No – as recommenders still need to find the original information, news or event.
Should we find methods to get inserted into social streams ?
Yes – as their importance is rising due to the convenience and the adoption.

The new game and rules of the Social stream are a problem for marketing to be solved.

If you know the answer or solution please let us know.

Today we launched a new web service for dynamic content targeting: popupbooster

Until now having an existing website to display content tailored to specific groups of visitors was a complex and expensive process.
Popupbooster simplifies this process and allows serving of customized content and messages within minutes at an affordable price.

Benefits

The benefits are multiple:
- serving of relevant, visitor tailored content
- without large upfront investments, major modifications to an existing website – low setup and running costs
- easy customizable
- easy to maintain

Challenging Internet

On the Internet a website has only a few seconds or pages to:
- Capture the visitor’s interest
- Make them stay on the website for more page views: sticky website
- Decrease cart abandonment
- Convince them to make a purchase
- Leave their contact details
- Convert them into leads
- Increase online sales: up-selling, cross-selling, transactional selling

Previously this kind of targeting could only be solved by implementing expensive and complex content management systems (CMS) requiring experienced consultants resulting in hard to rollback changes to the website and expensive invoices.

Popupbooster solves this problem by offering easy to manage, easy to design, flexible popups and overlays that appear on conditions related to:
- The visit characteristics
- The search characteristics
- Reference website
The look, design and feel of each popup/overlay can be specified to your needs.

Beyond popups & overlays

While the idea of popups might trigger memories of spam-infested websites, the rise of these techniques is seen on more than 80% of the top 100 sites where they are implemented as popups, top bars, bottom bars and dynamic overlaying techniques which can range from being very subtle (not recognizable as popup) to aggressive attention-catchers..

Additionally the appearance can be triggered only when certain conditions are met and limiting the number of appearances for avoiding annoyance for the regular visitors while still being engaging to new or otherwise bouncing visitors.

Embedding web services and widgets

Most web services (online forms, surveys, email opt-in), media (Youtube, Scribd, …) and widgets can be embedded with relative ease expanding the possibilities beyond text and images.

Analytics

In order to be able to test different versions of popups and overlays adequate analytics, statistics and click-through recordings are provided.
This instant feedback mechanism and the easy to manage interface allows instant iterations to enhance the message displayed with the goal of the visitor’s engagement.

For more information on popupbooster please visit: www.popupbooster.com where you can sign-up for a 30 day free trial or a limited free account.

You can post many blog posts.
You can leave comments on many blogs.
You can reply on forums.
You can submit articles to article websites.
You can in vain submit your website to directories.
You can tease (or spam) bloggers.
All this will make you run out of time anytime soon.

Many (skills & experiences) more (people) is required

Unlike Apple most companies can’t rely upon their advocates or customers (Apple fan boys) to promote their stuff on the Internet.

As the Internet is overwhelmingly big you need many more actions and efforts to score on the Internet.
Something you cannot accomplish on your own due to lack of time, experience and skills.

Hiring a staff for social media marketing isn’t a solution for most companies as you will need many people that have different skills and experiences in different matters.
And after the job has been done, you probably no longer need them or occasionally.

Still you need presence, links, articles and mentions in as many a possible places on the Internet else the findability of your website is minimal.
You need noise using written content, video content, spoken content and visual content.

Hiring a temporary army

You need an army of workers: temporary workers to do the job of making noise on the social media.

Mechanical Turks
One of the possibilities are the Mechanical Turks of Amazon but they require simple straight forward work tasks which you need to organize and explain.

Freelancers
On other possibility is to look on freelance boards like eLance (or similar web services) to find skilled people. The question is will these freelancers be interested in a short 15 minute job? Probably not.

Fiverr @ $5
The easiest and probably cheapest solution is to browse and select some of the propositions on Fiverr.
These people have a certain skill or have a certain experience and offer these for $5 for a job.
The benefits are:
- their experience
- the well specified job
- the fixed price
This is the place on the Internet where you can afford to hire an army to conquer the Internet.

How are you planning to get a presence on the Internet for social media ?
What services do you use ?

Video

Video as search engine
YouTube has become the #2 search engine: after Google and before Yahoo.
Dailymotion (#112) and Vimeo (#232) have high rankings of popularity too.

Search:
Search means getting found on the Internet.
Highly used search engine means: important enough to have a presence.

Search engines:
Search engines index the video websites fast as these do fall in the social media category and sensational news events get uploaded quickly on YouTube.

Read vs view:
People hardly or even don’t read anymore.
Even clicking though a presentation has become too much effort.
The last resort is video as people prefer to click once and watch the story or information to unfold: effortlessly.

What content?

Many subjects or items you can be presented in a video.
- Not necessarily an interview with your CEO (as he might not be interesting at all or present not well in a video).
- Even a short video blog (vlog) by one of your employees with a challenging subject is sufficient.
- Just a demo of your application or solution using a screen capture like CamStudio is already good enough in order to have a presence with a video on the Internet. if you require more functions and features: look here.
- In case you have no inspiration or guts to make a video, then convert your (Power) presentations into a video clip:

Requirements

Whatever you present in your video make sure:
- The content is interesting
- The duration is short (60 seconds to 180 seconds)
- The message is clear: just one main selling point
- The quality is good enough for YouTube but it hasn’t to be outstanding
- The title needs to be shocking or generate interest
- The title, description, keywords and tags are well chosen
- Keep within your budget as video shoots and editing can become expensive quickly

Entertainment marketing

Video marketing is content marketing that has become entertainment marketing.
If you present a boring video, it is less likely your video will be rated and praised. As people want to be entertained your video needs to entertain them too as there is so much competition competing for interest online.

Quality of video

If the goal is just to be found and create links for SEO purposes, the video don’t need to be of high quality and include sound or music.
However if the video needs to convert potential customers into leads, high quality and sound (music) is a requirement.

Multiple websites

Facebook: upload video too
At the same time you are uploading the video to YouTube, take a Facebook account to create your company page and upload the video there too! getting found and getting exposure are the main goals.

Don’t forget to upload to Dailymotion and Vimeo too.

Embed the video also on your website by using the provided code on YouTube.

A business without a video is a business lagging behind.

Where is the video of your company ?

The Social media chaos rules

PR agencies have always been doing their business in an organized world using press releases, journalists and editors. A world where they could pull certain strings knowing these would generate or deliver a rather predictable effect or event.

On the other hand social media marketing is like chaos: a cluttered media spectrum.
In this chaos many strings can be pulled but nobody has a clue which string will generate a big event or have no effect at all. The predictability is gone.
The uncertainty rules in the chaos of social media marketing.

The old relationships with mass media are diminishing in importance as any lucky bastard can pull the right string (content) at the right moment in social media marketing and get all the attention at almost no cost.
On the other hand we all, including PR agencies, can pull many strings (publish content) and have hardly any result:
- no engagement
- no conversations starting.

PR Service level agreement

PR agencies are losing their market importance, domination and share due to social media marketing.

Why would a company pay a PR agency when they cannot guarantee you any service level due to the unpredictability of social media marketing?
A company pays for a professional service mainly to make use of professional skills and to minimize risks. The PR service level agreement.
Can any PR agency promise a service level agreement to a company?

From one-way to two-way communications

PR agencies are used to one-way conversations: press releases, editorials, influencing journalists and advertising.
Social media marketing is about initiating and managing conversations between people and company on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.

Spamming press releases to journalists on Twitter or sending emails to leading bloggers is not social media marketing.

You or your PR agency can try to initiate a conversation, but if the public doesn’t want to participate due to:
- a lack of interest
- a different conversation gets all the attention
There will be no conversation.
Nobody can force conversations to happen. (Maybe except Apple / Steven Jobs – thanks to their advocates: the Apple fan club)

Social media marketing and PR agency marketing are just different.
PR agencies will need to convert and adapt if they can or just die.

Do you take the social media marketing gamble or stick with your PR agency ?