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What is Social Media all About?

By on June 5, 2013 in Social

It’s about connecting, building personal relationships, leaving a lasting impression, educating others, challenging them, and connecting with them.

It’s about being sincere and honest and focused on serving others whom you can best help.

It’s about growing, learning, empowering yourself to be more. It’s about finding what you’re passionate about and going out and grabbing it.

Social media helps my tennis game, my cycling, my faith. It helps me be a better husband and one day a better dad. It helps me connect with my family, friends and those I look up to.

Social media is the world’s knowledge and audience at your fingertips.

(I’m publishing this old draft to test my RSS feed and email. For some reason my MailChimp plugin has not been working so I deleted and rebuilt it. If you subscribe through email or RSS, feel free to give me a shout to let me know it’s working :)

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Social Media Is Insane & Security is Scary

By on April 23, 2013 in Social

When I was a kid I got all my technology knowledge from my dad. I’ll never forget the image of him setting up our first Windows PC wearing a santa hat as I snuck downstairs to spy on Christmas night.

But those times have changed. Now I’m the technology bell-weather of the family.

Except for tonight. I was chatting with my dad earlier and he shared a story I missed today.

Moral of the story: social media is insane & security is scary.

Here’s the story if you missed it:

Earlier today, somebody HACKED the AP News Twitter account. They tweeted that bombs had gone off at the Whitehouse and the president was injured.

twitter-screen-ap

And the Stock Market went Bizzerk

STOCK-CRASH

I couldn’t believe it. Apparently some crazy Syrian hackers are responsible. It just goes to show you how powerful social is.

This little app where people share what they had to eat has massively changed the world.

 

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Social Media is Frickin’ Insane

By on April 18, 2013 in Marketing, Social

We hosted an inside sales meetup today at the ATL Tech Village.

We had a solid speaker who focused on the concepts of social selling. One of the coolest parts of her presentation was a video she showed at the beginning of her talk. It made a major impact on the audience.

I know because I talked to over 10 people after the show that said this video rocked. And it opened their eyes.

I’ve got to say I was impressed as well. Can you believe how BIG social media has gotten? Check it out for yourself:

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What is the Best Startup Resource on the Web?

By on April 10, 2013 in Marketing, Sales, Social, Starting-Up

Want to learn about pricing your product? How about recruiting engineers? Looking for advice on raising money? Where do you go?

The best resource hands down is personal experience. And the runner up is people (mentors & colleagues). But what’s next on the list? Is it books, YouTube, blogs, Twitter? I’m beginning to think it’s Quora. Yeah, the sleepy little Q&A site built by an ex-Facebook developer.

Quora is stuffed with knowledge from experts who are incentivized to provide simple but detailed answers. It’s a fantastic starting point for most topical questions you’ll have.

Here are just a few examples:

Quora as a starting point is better than books, news apps, or social media for getting answers to your startup questions. Would you agree?

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Can Older People Learn Social Media?

By on April 4, 2013 in Social

I sat on the plane today next to a smart, senior, IT Sales Executive. He was well spoken and polished flying back home to Orlando from Atlanta (where he was closing deals with fortune 1000 clients).

I could tell this gentlemen was a sales professional the minute I sat next to him. By the end of the flight, I had shown him 4 social sales applications and left him excited to learn more. To cap off the flight, I sent him an email with an overview of the tools I had shown him

What I’ve learned over the past few years is that most tenured sales executives want to learn social. They realize there is value to social, but they’re less inclined to learn it on their own.

The guy I met today was already a fan of LinkedIn, but just needed a little nudging to jump into some apps to help him along the way.

Here are two tips I’d give for someone to get involved in social:

  1. Pick a single platform and focus on it first (in B2B sales cases, I recommend LinkedIn)
  2. Do one thing on social media every day and add to the routine over time (example: receive and act upon a job change alerts email)

What would you add?

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Author Rank is the Future of Search

By on March 31, 2013 in Marketing, Social

Most tech savvy folks know the core asset behind Google’s success is an algorithm called ‘Page Rank’.

Page rank determines what search results to show.

Page rank determines the importance and relevancy of web pages by looking at:

  • on-page content
  • meta-data
  • inbound links

Page rank has made Google one of the most powerful companies in the world. But there’s a big problem: Page Rank doesn’t account for the author.

And that matters a lot.

Think about it, all else being equal would you rather see a Spielberg film or one from a no-name director? Could you imagine that a Martin Luther King speech would be good even before you heard it?

The author of content matters. That’s why Google has created Author Rank.

Author rank creates a ‘digital license’ for writers and content marketers. It scores them based on the quality of their contributions. It allows authors to float from site to site, recognizing their work wherever there are.

Measuring content by its quality AND the author’s reputation is bringing a whole new level of relevancy and accuracy to search results.

If you care about SEO and content creation, Author Rank is important and you should learn more. I suggest you start here:

http://www.copyblogger.com/hunter-author-rank/

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Sharing an Achievement

By on March 4, 2013 in Marketing, Social

I try not to do this very often, but I wanted to share something with you all that I’m really proud of.

Today, I had the opportunity to publish a guest post on the salesforce.com blog. Anyone who spends any time with me knows that I’m a huge nerd when it comes to Salesforce (even to the point of getting a picture taken with their mascot) and this to me is like a basketball fan getting to meet Lebron.

Last Wednesday, I got an email from Salesforce exploring the idea. They referenced two of our posts as examples they liked. I went to work immediately putting something together and shared it back with them the next day. I invested some good time getting comfortable with the post and solicited the help of three peers to take a look at it…one of which was my wife :) Their feedback was instrumental. I was anxious until the post went up.

So here it is:

http://blogs.salesforce.com/company/2013/03/7-sales-steps-to-making-your-buyer-decision-simple.html

I’d be super honored if you’d share it or leave a comment. The links below can help. Thanks a ton!!

Share on LinkedIn or Twitter

 

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Top 10 twitter accounts in digital signage

By on September 11, 2011 in Digital Signage, Social

I recently made plans to leave the digital signage industry to start a new business. Through this transition, I am left with a decision on what to do about the 60 or so digital signage accounts that I follow on twitter. This got me thinking about my favorites & the contributors whom I believe add strong value to the Twitter ecosystem.

I decided to build a list. So here goes, in no particular order, the Top 10 11 (I broke the rules a bit), twitter accounts in digital signage:

  1. @davidweinfield – David is a machine. He consistently shares & creates amazing content in the world of interactive & experiential out-of-home media. David was one of the first to adopt twitter as a medium for information share, and one of the reasons I originally got into this business.
  2. @NEOCAST – Ken is a digital signage business owner who has seen a lot of big deals in this industry up close and personal. I look forward to his perspective from an entrepreneurial and industry veteran’s point of view. Ken’s a world class dude who is never too big to help someone out.
  3. @sixteennine – If Dave Haynes is not the best known digital signage pro in North America, then he will be soon. 16:9 is an amazing resource for industry news and commentary. David has personal relationships with virtually every major player in this industry and adds value to so many on a daily basis.
  4. @wamos80 – This is my hometown pick. Will is a long-time colleague and friend and he has a great eye for curating the top relevant stories of the industry. He’s got deep experience in the public display sales world and is a helpful asset to the community.
  5. @stephenrandall – The pioneer of mobile integration to digital signage, Steven’s contributions are thought provoking and revolutionary to DS and in my eyes his tweets reflect the future of DOOH.
  6. @Ardinger – The CMO of Nanonation, Brian shares marketing relevant data to the industry and has a great, unique perspective. Always willing to lend and hand, Brian is a asset on twitter to anyone in this business.
  7. @PaulFlanigan – The most social contributor in the space. Paul was speaking, blogging, tweeting and contributing before pretty much anyone else here was. I’m a big fan and you should be too.
  8. @SignageLive – Jason runs a killer cool product and represents vibrant life in digital signage and OOH industry. His company is rapidly becoming a big-time leader and one of the major factors is how in-tune he in this area.
  9. @11thscreen – Mike creates content, keeping an awesome blog on digital out-of-home media. His tweets are relevant and show his knowledge of the space. He inspects everything with an intelligent eye and is dedicated. It shows in his contributions.
  10. @snarvasa – Sean represents the “cool” side of digital signage. In fact, I think that he is the only one on the list here that lives in the bay area. He works with one of the pioneers in our industry and is always up to date on trends and great concepts for DOOH.
  11. @DailyDOOH – While overly brash & bold at times, there is no denying the fact that the DailyDOOH is the top information and opinion site for digital signage in the world. Adrian and the team seem to always get the scoop. They basically have digital signage running through their veins and no DS list would be complete without them.
So there they are, the big dogs in the industry. I’d love to hear your opinions… who did I forget? Even though I’ve “left” the industry, I’ll still be able to stay informed by following these guys on the web.
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New salesforce additions

By on September 4, 2011 in Sales, Social

Marc Benioff made some bold statements at DreamForce on how his company is going to create the “Social Enterprise”. Lucky for him, he is backing it up with strong product releases to support his position. I believe that the majority of these will come out in the Winter ’12 release, but here is a preview of them if you’re in to that sort of thing:

  • Database.com- Fully available to the public now alongside a data residency option that allows you to put some data in your own servers while it still can be processed through the salesforce apps.
  • Chatter updates- Chatter is kind of like facebook for your company, but now it’s more. They’ve opened it up and added many improvements like the following:
    • Bringing customers into the chatter experience to socially collaborate with them or conduct meetings with them (think “GoToMeeting killer”) sharing updates, screen view, charts, videos, etc
    • Knowing who is online available, getting approvals from management (like will I be able to expense this dinner?)
    • RESTful services to integrate other social services through the connect API.
  • Social profiles- Contacts will pull photos & profiles data from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn into the salesforce record. This will liven up the data and give you more to work with on your sales campaigns. The update also included the newly named Data.com offering. This is a combination of Jigsaw personal data and Dun & Bradstreet company data to populate new prospect lists. You can pull this contact info out of the cloud and into salesforce with the click of one button.
  • Touch.Salesforce.com – Using salesforce on phones and tablets sucks. With the winter ’12 release, it will become available in a universal web platform across any touch device. It includes all of your customizations and is optimized for touch. It’s all done with the power of HTML5. Check out the video here.
  • Heroku- This is a multi-language cloud application platform that offers instant deployment & scale. The release here is that they’ve expanded Heroku to include Java which provides a social platform for the 6 million Java devs out there.
  • Service Cloud- An entire customer service application within salesforce.
All in all, I was pretty impressed by these updates, I feel sorry for some of the vendors in the ecosystem because some of them may get squashed. What do you think about all this? Are you a salesforce user and if so, do you have any interest in using these new apps & features?
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Rockstar Marketers Need to Make People Smile

By on May 19, 2011 in Ads, Marketing, Social

Click to follow me on Twitter

Last night I fell further in love with a photo booth. Not just any old camera with lighting equipment, but the OMG! Booth.

What many of you already know is that OMG Booth is the next generation of party picture services. But here is the kicker: the engagement experience that they can offer to brands is the real deal. It has taught me a lesson.

Let me explain: everywhere OMG goes, people are lining up to participate in the experience. They are happy, goofy, smiley and excited. Props like below help. These people are having fun:

Do you think they will remember this event?

After the photo is taken, the magic happens. They are immediately uploaded to Facebook where they get seen by hundreds, thousands or even 10,000′s of times. Rapidly. They become new profile images. Friends & brands get tagged and it shoots around the Internet. If the cards are played right, a brand is integrated in the image, and they reap rewards.

When I used to sell digital menu boards to theaters and stadiums I worked closely with Coca-Cola. What we learned fast was that they wanted to be in places where people were having fun. Period. And they would pay to be there. Think big football games, awesome concerts, super theme parks, or that hot new movie release…

Just last week we saw Coca-Cola put up one of the ultimate happiness engagements with their super projection project. It’s just another example of effective advertising through smiles.

I’ve learned the value of integrated ads this year through my own purchases and hearing brand success stories. One good read on the topic is a post here by blogger Mark Suster. My takeaway: Add happiness to integrated advertising and you’ve struck gold.

Its a no brainer.

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