Is me..or you depending on how you look at it.
There has been a huge amount of innovation and early adoption of social technologies across ages, professions, geographies, and technical aptitudes. All this social sharing is noisy and many, many tools have emerged to make it easier to listen, some to help you engage, but pretty much none to help you actually engage in social selling.
Selling has changed in terms of who has the leverage - it is all about the buyer. Easy access to information about your company, your products, your competitors, and even YOU has changed the way products and services are bought and sold.
I think we are still in the early innings of this transformation where individuals are laying out their unique ground rules about how to sell to them, when to sell to them, and what to sell. This takes tradtional sales pipeline approaches and turns them on their head.
Some companies get this but most are still trying to figure out what to do with all the banter, accolades, and trolls that populate Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many, many other sites and forums (Quora anyone?)
If any of you actually pay attention to my various status updates, you'll know my dissatisfaction with the battery life in my Droid Incredible. At least three separate tweets that included "battery", "Droid", and "Incredible" plus lamenting my switch from my BlackBerry all made me a target rich opportunity for anyone who sells batteries, better devices, etc. I was broadcasting a need and I was ready to buy given the right offer. No one reached out. No one.
I've tried it with Saab service around Seattle, a database application for my Mac, and many other products all resulting in silence. This has nothing to do with how many "followers" you have (my numbers aren't huge) as this is about the reach beyond your social graph to the broader on-line population. Try it and see if anyone picks up on your stated need.
A qualified sales opportunity is a thing of beauty and very hard to find so why isn't anyone picking up on this and taking advantage of it? Maybe traditional approaches to sales pipeline development don't embrace social outreach as a worthwhile endeavor?
Some tools are emerging that help identify the questions being asked and organizing them in a marketing/sales framework. I started using InboxQ last week. It is very much aligned with what I am talking about letting you seek out words/phrases present in questions that you can organize as "campaigns." Add a tracking mechanism for the person asking the question and one more piece of the social selling puzzle is complete.
What do you sell? Do you know if anybody is asking for it? What are you doing to understand more about how people are telling you what they want versus how you track your current sales activities?
When you lack enough resources for a business start-up, social media could be an effective alternative for your advertising needs. Social networking sites are so convenient because you can save more time, effort, and money. Although social media ads need thorough strategic plans, its efficiency can more than make up for it.
Posted by: Raela Drigger | October 28, 2011 at 08:19 AM
you need an extended life battery, there are plenty of sellers that sell 3500mAh extended batteries for the Incredible
http://cgi.ebay.com/3500mAh-EXTENDED-BATTERY-F-HTC-DROID-INCREDIBLE-COVER-/270712367505?pt=PDA_Accessories&hash=item3f07b6e991
Posted by: Clinton | March 26, 2011 at 01:51 PM