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In 2007, I was brand new to the storied advertising agency DDB, having been appointed chief communications officer. One of the first memos that hit my desk was a “heads up” that Doyle Dane Bernbach was going to be featured in a new television series. Creator Matthew Weiner had consulted with the agency prior to production and my arrival, but we did not know how we were to be treated in the storyline for Mad Men.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Sales Blog. To read more content like this, subscribe to Sales.
Salespeople can make or break an organization. Do you have the next big idea? Great. But if you don’t have someone on your team who can sell it, your idea might be dead in the water.
In a world where the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” is a widespread mantra, people of all ages are sharing a wide range of information about themselves on social media.
Of course, social media websites were designed to encourage sharing. Many of us spend a large chunk of our days sharing lots of professional information on social, whether we’re managing our company’s Facebook account or tweeting pictures of the event we’re attending.
“We’re getting to common version, which is a superset of the functionality being built in Rainbow 5, which uses version 2 of the Asian code,” said our new client in a kick off meeting.
Yes, people really speak this way. Especially, when they work in complicated or regulated industries. While it’s one thing to banter about codes and supersets, or BI, ERPs and CRMs, when you’re behind the scenes developing amazing new tools for people to use, the conversation loses its flare when industry jargon becomes part of your customer facing content.
Every day, humans make snap judgments. In one Princeton study, participants made assumptions within 100 milliseconds of being exposed to a portrait. In a similar study on virtual bias, researchers at the University of British Columbia compared respondents’ in-person impressions with those obtained by only viewing Facebook photos — and the results revealed that passive, virtual impressions tended to be more negative.
Have you ever wanted to create a single chart for two different (yet related) pieces of data? Maybe you wanted to see the raw number of leads you’re generating from each channel and what the conversion rate of the channel is. Having those two sets of data on one graph is extremely helpful to picking out patterns and identifying full-funnel trends.
In the last month or so, there’s been a big surge in live video broadcasting. Thanks to smartphone apps like Periscope, users can record live video streams and share them with their network.
For example, a friend of mine recently used Periscope to livestream an iPhone video of her walking her dog. She shared a link to the live stream on Twitter, and a few of her followers clicked through and watched her walk her dog in real time. Kind of weird, but at the same time, kind of cool.
In our fast-paced and tech-driven world, companies are reeling, wondering if brand loyalty exists any more. And to some degree, they’re right to question it. Today’s customers aren’t loyal to a brand for the same reasons that their parents and grandparents were – they have thousands of other options.
“Blog early, blog often.”
In the inbound world, these are words to live by. After all, blogs help businesses attract new website visitors and convert them into leads. Each time you publish an original blog post, you’re creating a new opportunity to get found in search engines, get shared on social media, get linked to by other sites, and get a new person to interact with your company.
The web has inadvertently made authors out of us all as we post on forums, send emails, share information, write white papers, guides and various web content. Most of us, however, are not authors by profession and so consequently the quality of writing on the web varies greatly.
