Contributing to other people’s knowledge/understanding/fun etc. pays huge dividends in today’s Internet enabled communities.

This won’t come as a surprise to anybody hanging around Twitter, but for the non-believers here’s concrete, quantified evidence.

David Petherick @clarocada is enormously generous in sharing what he discovers, so others don’t have to go looking.

Along the way he likes to have a little fun, collecting interesting Tweets and publishing his Top 50 in his blog.

I’m sure he doesn’t make the effort in any attempt at self-promotion, but he certainly gets noticed.

Within 40 minutes of publishing a link to this post traffic to David’s blog was up a staggering 800%.

After which he’ll have had his work cut out for the next couple of days “following” all his new followers.

We’re able to report a similar increase in traffic (from a modestly low level) following a post we made yesterday.

The post was an update on our Social Media Marketing project and summarized stuff that is working for us, and stuff that isn’t, in our Front Office Box business.

We aren’t sharing this stuff to show how clever we are – quite the reverse since we’re hard working amateurs.

We’re sharing it because there’s a shortage of case studies detailing the performance of Social Media Marketing.

In our small way we’re trying to contribute to the conversation with a real world example anybody can refer to.

“What happens when our customer has a brother who’s a vendor, and a sister who works for our regulatory authority? Disappointing the customer with delivery whilst demanding extra discount from the vendor might have an impact on our ability to satisfy the regulator.

Doesn’t seem likely to be a positive influence.”

“It doesn’t matter if we’re insurance agents, plumbers, lawyers or interior designers. There are people who buy what we sell hanging out on social networking sites. If we don’t join in they’ll buy from somebody else, because they don’t know what we do, and how good we are at it.”

At first glance Personal CRM seems an oxymoron, or at least terms put together by somebody who doesn’t really understand their meaning. After all, there’s nothing personal about ways companies implement Customer Relationship Management. The systems are intended to enforce control by accountants over sales and service functions.

But distill the concept of CRM to it’s fundamental elements – Relationships, Plans and Schedules – “Who” we know, “What” we want to do them, “When” we plan to do it – the potential for Personal CRM starts to emerge.

Are we seeing the end of the “expert buyer”?

In the “good” old days sales guys would meet people, understand their interests, offer their expertise, propose solutions. People bought from people they trusted. The relationship between the two became the basis on on-going successful business for both parties.

Then we saw the emergence of the “expert buyer”. Third parties started offering guidance on how to buy the best solution. Incompetent managers started paying consultants to help make decisions, laying off responsibility for getting them right.

Is it one 24 carat diamond, or thousands of tiny pieces?

Is a strategic resource, or a convenient way of storing email addresses?

Is is a single, sharable, business asset, or a collection of semi-complete, partially up to date, collection of old data you don’t use most of?

It’s a fair bet the answers will all be the alternatives. After all if it’s just a way of storing phone numbers or email addresses we don’t need to change out of date records we don’t use, or store last names or companies for close contacts. We don’t need to note contact history, categorize positions or industries, or those extra little items that turn the basic information we can use to relate one contact to others.

Doesn’t sound like much of an asset – more a liability.

Actually the question might more accurately be “Why don’t businesses engage?”. Some of the answer to the first question might be indicated by the second. However:

Let’s look at some numbers:

* Facebook has 120 million members.
* Linked In has 20+ million members
* Estimate 35+ million small businesses in the English speaking world
* Estimate 8+ million new small businesses every year (and growing)

Can we assume there are small business owners on Facebook but as individuals – not businesses. I certainly know a few.

http://www.addsyou.com
username=MjAwOC0xMS0yOSAwNjo1NTo0OQ==

Noted author, and feminist, Robin Morgan is generally attributed with the quotation “Information is Power”.  So true, this has become a “truism” – we know that, right?

So why don’t we do a better job of looking after that information?  Please note the word “information”, we’re not talking about data, but information which is data in context.

Knowing our prospect, John Jones, is a member of Chicago Golf Club is data.  It becomes information when we put it together with more data e.g. Hank Harrison, our reference customer is also a member of Chicago Golf Club.  Now we have power – an indirect influence on John’s decision.

Typically we don’t record these extra details in our databases.  Once the deal is done, we move on and somehow the extra information held in the sales guy’s head is lost to the business, and probably her too.

Is There Anything I Can Do To Help You?

No!  Well maybe explain why this question is so important.

Our world is changing in so many ways.  Most importantly we’re all tired on being “sold to”.

Whenever we meet somebody new a little voice in the back of our heads asks “where’s my risk here?”

Quite naturally.After a decade of bouncing equity markets, soaring property values and ever mounting debt, we don’t feel like spending money to please somebody else. Politicians, bankers, auto industry CEOs etc have all made shed loads while our retirement plans and property values have suddenly disappeared into the black hole.

“NO, I don’t want to buy anything, thank you very much!”

“What I do want is somebody who’ll help me solve my problems, whatever they are.”

Everybody we meet has this sentiment running through their head.  Overt selling turns us off quicker than a switch.