Back in the 70′s

sales reps would have a cigarette allowance. They were expected to provide the “social glue” during meetings and expensed the cost. Later, in the 80′s and 90′s lunch was the big deal. Depending on the account this would be a pint and sandwich in the pub, or even three courses in an exclusive restaurant. Then of course there were the golf trips.

The information passed between the parties, in subtle ways. We didn’t recognise it but that was Infotainment.

Now

We have the same thing going on still. Only now it’s not cigarettes, or lunches, or golf games. It’s social media, networks, blogs, tweets, friends, followers, images, video, games, downloads, podcasts. When people talk about social media marketing they’re describing this paradigm where we get people’s attention with entertainment, and quietly pass on the information.

The big difference

between the old days and now is we no longer go out looking for prospects. They won’t see us, take our calls or read anything we send. We have to attract them to us. Just like store keepers we need to be where the customer is, with our wares displayed out front. And we need to talk about the weather, the sports, the news – entertaining the prospect while s/he quietly decides to do business with us.

Now we have to use a blog to impart the information. It’s our store front. We have to deliver our information in short sound bytes, and we have to entertain, with video and pictures and maybe games. Just having pages with even quality content isn’t enough anymore. We have to make the visit entertaining as well.

It seems to me every business, but especially the smaller kind, needs to offer that type of experience.

The more things change, the more they stay the same!

Google links the Wave account to my Google Profile (not just me obviously). I guess that’s how my address is stevensreeves – not my choice but I’m quite happy with it.

Starting up there’s a wave with introduction stuff and another with an Invites panel and eight invites we can send to friends. That’s exactly the way they rolled out Gmail, a long time ago, so we’ll expect to get more as time goes on.

Diving in I checked out a couple of Public waves – there are thousands already – then started my own – “Is anybody from Scotland out there”. Within a couple of minutes a guy in Israel replied and we were joined a few minutes late by somebody in India.

Global – Social obviously works.

But there’s a lot either missing, or not working. Most disappointingly the drag and drop of files only works with Gears installed in the browser, or with Chrome – neither of which are supported on my Snow Leopard drive Macbook Pro. So that will have to wait.

Later in the day we used Wave in anger. I needed some help with installing new themes in our self hosted WordPress. An IM to Marc got him suggesting we try out Wave, and for the next 30 minutes we did, and it works.

Quite whether it’s better than IM for one to one conversations I’m not sure. But certainly it has huge potential for many to many conversations. And maybe even for replacing Email in lots of circumstances.

The invitations let me set up frontofficebox@googlewave.com so we now can officially we contacted there and will try to make sure we’re on-line most of the time.

Finally (for the moment) I’ve just discovered an extension which adds phone and video conferencing via Ribbit. That’s going to take some working out, but I bet it’ll be exciting – Goodbye Skype?

I got pretty excited about this. All sorts of people who would never think of Twitter or Facebook are joining LinkedIn. It seems to the the professionally acceptable side of social media. Increasingly Searching for somebody throws up their LinkedIn profile. Therefore it makes sense to use autopost services (e.g. Friendfeed) to publish our stuff on Twitter and have it automatically show up on our LinkedIn profile. Just like it does with Facebook.

The excitement palled a little soon after I set up the link. A typically self deprecating “more proof I’m a jerk” type post on Twitter got me a thinly veiled sales pitch, from some type of coach, of course.

The prevalence of blatant selling is LinkedIn’s main weakness, and why most don’t seriously engage with the networks. If posting my Twitter updates there is going to bring more unsolicited sales pitches to my inbox I won’t be doing it for long,

I’ve always been a little dubious – it just seems to be the wrong environment. Great for keeping up with family news, or even distant friends it certainly is. A few minutes everyday is enough for me for that. Otherwise Facebook doesn’t do anything for me that I can’t get done, and better, somewhere else.

Having said that, hedging one’s bets is never a bad strategy so we do have a Page, and we use feeds to autopost our content in profiles. One day Facebook may really challenge Google in the Search business and it makes sense to ensure our articles are indexed over there.

But others are much more positive. In Is Facebook Really a Good Tool for Business? Ann Handley reports on a conversation with Paul Chaney in which he explains the value of Facebook as a means to connecting with customers.

Paul winds up the conversation with;

“I don’t see Facebook as less legitimate for business use than any other social network, LinkedIn and Twitter for example. I realize people don’t go to Facebook to interact with brands. That’s not to suggest they won’t, however.

Fact is people talk about brands and their products and services every day. Doesn’t it make sense to be available to engage them on that turf? I think so.”

Can I steal your ideas, or can you steal mine? While you wouldn’t do that, I know, there are people around who would. How can we protect our work?

Some weeks ago I got wound up when Zemanta offered me a link which sounded familiar. In fact it wasn’t like something I’d written it WAS a headline I’d written. This did not please me.

BTW I have no relationship, of any kind, with Digiprove other than I’m using the plugin and service for all our blogs from now on.

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