This is Google Week on my blog. While content marketing, social and mobile are getting a lot of the attention in digital marketing these days, Google is still the 1,000-pound gorilla of online marketing — in part because it supports in various ways those new initiatives, too. Continue reading
Many, if not most, companies will say that their most valuable asset is their employees — that they value bright, pro-active employees who don’t just check the boxes but bring real additional value to their jobs. And one recruiting consultant recently wrote that companies should treat job candidates as customers, not vendors, “The new big thing for corporate HR is ensuring a great candidate experience.” But many companies fall far short of that. Continue reading
“Sales 2.0”, which is often called “social selling”, is one of the hottest topics these days. For example:
- Jill Rowley, the “Eloqueen” who now heads up social selling enablement at Oracle, says that “ABC” should be redefined from “Always Be Closing” to “Always Be Connecting”, and there’s a downloadable Eloqua Grande Guide to social selling (Eloqua is now owned by Oracle)
- Hootsuite has posted a three-part series on how to implement social selling
- Gerhard Gschwandtner hosts several “Sales 2.0” conferences annually
I recently started a LinkedIn group, Sales and Marketing Technology. I hope that you’ll join us. Here’s why:
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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two months, you knew that a new “Anchorman” movie was coming. Continue reading
Researchers in Boston today announced that a person has had their mind changed by comments that they read online. Researchers have long theorized that this was possible, but this is the first time that they have actually confirmed in the wild that it has happened.
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You know I love you. I spend more time with you than any other Internet content. Continue reading
OK, I feel really stupid about this. It’s not like I don’t know about hashtags, and haven’t used them on Twitter for years. (They’ve more recently been added to Facebook, the MeToo Network, but it’s
ial-media/why-do-we-hate-facebook-hashtags/”>not clear that they’re very popular or effective there.)
In general my feeling was that they were best used for events so the people at the event, and those who couldn’t make it, could see what people felt were the most important comments by speakers. There are also a few top level generic hashtags that might be useful. And then there are the “comment” and humorous hashtags like #fail, #justsayin and #firstworldproblems.
So why haven’t I been using them while tweeting out my new blog posts?
I started regular blogging almost a year ago. But my blog has had low readership – just several people a day. It was a nice thing to point people that I’m talking to for more insight on my thinking, but clearly it wasn’t bringing my thinking to the attention of many new people. (I jokingly thought of it as The Least Read Blog in the World.)
And then last week I started using hashtags such as #sales and #marketing when tweeting about particular posts. And this is what happened:
The number of people reading my blog increased almost 10X.
Now, the numbers are still not huge, but I’ll take that free increase of readership anytime.
The interesting question is whether this is the fallacy of small numbers in two ways: (1) my only sample is my own blog, and (2) if I was already getting, say, 1,000 visitors/day without hashtags, how much would it have increased by adding hashtags to my tweets? At the very least I imagine it would add dozens of incremental visitors a day, which can help build a following.
What’s been your experience? Are you using hashtags to promote your blog and posts? Sometimes execution is more important than originality.
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Very few things in sales are more frustrating than working on a deal for weeks or months and then, before you get a decision, the prospect goes into radio silence. Phone calls aren’t picked up, and voice mails and emails all go unanswered. Continue reading
Zorian Rotenberg is the Vice President of Marketing at InsightSquared, which has developed an easy-to-use marketing and sales analytics SaaS product. Continue reading