Potomac Blog was the Washington DC, Metropolitan area's first collective attempt to bring Social Media experts under one roof for an unconference.
Initiator, organizer, champion and MC, Geoff Livingston, proudly announces Blog Potomac a success, as I agree. Largely an audience of marketing professionals with a healthy attendance of PR and communications professionals, the event was an excellent inside look at how the "other" communication disciplines -- PR, Advertising, Marketing, Branding -- use New Media to create dialog with the prospect and customer. As a representative from the Sales camp, I walked away with the question, "aside from having a social networking account, how much does the focused field rep need to understand and use the plethora of Web 2.0 communication and media organizational tools becoming available every day? Here's a small sampling of the techie tools post-lunch keynote, Frank Gruber, professed to love and often uses:
Gmail - AOL Mail - Remember the Milk - AIM Instant Messenger - AwayFind - AwayFind details
Facebook - Twitter
- Flickr - TubeMogul - Viddler - Blip.tv - YouTube - eyespot
- Typepad - WordPress - Tumblr - Evernote - Mixx - Digg -Delicious - StumbleUpon - Shareaholic - SiteMeter - FeedBurner - Google Analytics - myAOL - FeedHub - AideRSS - Summize - Google Alerts - Filtrbox - Lijit - SocialThing - MyBlogLog - FriendFeed - TwitterFeed - Dopplr - Tripit - Basecamp -Quicken Online
If you're a committed Sales Professional, you are accountable for public relations, branding, marketing, advertising and customer service, whether or not they are another's responsibility.
Social media tools are about engaging in the conversation with your public. They're having it with or without you.
Yes, it can be overwhelming. So, to get started, here's a couple of suggestions, opinions and observable options:
- Start reading about Social Media and Social Networking to understand the fundamentals -- if you're lost, use Google Reader and subscribe to Alliance Science
- At least join LinkedIn and use it (Facebook is becoming popular to the selling professional, too)
- You're responsible for your brand and building your credibility as an expert -- consider blogging if you can keep up with the responsibility of research and content creation at least once a week.
- Ask the most successful Sales Professionals you know how they're embracing Web 2.0 (there, I said it). If they're not, find out who is and ask them what they're doing.
If you're not growing as a sales professional, you're dying. The worse part -- you won't know it until you're dust.
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