B2B Selling and B2B Marketing using Sales 2.0

00:00]

Cliff: Hello, and welcome. Today is November 19th, 2009, and you are watching Visible Gains live. [applause] My name is Cliff Pollen, I’m—and I’m at “Cliff Pollen” on Twitter. With me today is Kiki Mills, President of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, also known by most of us as “MITX”. Kiki, welcome.

Kiki: Thank you, Cliff.

Cliff: It’s great to have you here. Um, you can talk to us on Twitter, so you can send feedback to the Visible Gains hash tag and we’ll answer your questions here live.

[00:43]

Cliff: Um, Kiki, why don’t you tell us a little bit about MITX, and what it does, and—

Kiki: Sure.

Cliff: --And what you’ve been doing there.

Kiki: Great. So MITX is a non-profit industry association. And, uh, we are an industry association for the internet business and marketing industry. And for some, that’s not necessarily something that might, necessarily understand, because we, we operate at this very interesting intersection of technology, marketing, and media. So the companies that are members of our association are the digital agencies and the marketing services firms that are creating the experiences on the web, um, the media properties and companies through which all of this is unfolding, and then all the technology providers that are powering a lot of the web, and video, mobile, and social media applications. And then also the brands, basically the deployers of all these technologies and strategies. So, it’s, it’s a, it’s a broad mix of, of companies and of people, but a very, very dynamic one.

[01:43]

Cliff: It strikes me, having been involved with MITX, that people don’t have a sense for how big an industry this sort of represents. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Kiki: It’s a great question, and, um, thank you for asking, and one which, um, you know, we struggled with for many years as we tried to put a wrapper around what this industry is and explain it to people. And just two years ago, we started a market sizing study which would actually measure it, and, and, in, now in our second year in doing it, we’ve uncovered a twenty-nine billion dollar industry in New England that employs sixty-nine thousand people in over two thousand companies. That’s nothing to, to sneeze about. It’s a significant industry.

[02:09]

Cliff: It’s, it’s almost mindboggling when you hear those, those numbers.

Kiki: Yeah. It, I mean, I think in our first year, we, we were a little bit spellbound ourself, because we didn’t realize the impact of it. And, uh, so you’re on, you’re even doing that, and we’ve gotten more attention from the state, and the people around economic development that need to understand that this is a pillar of the, the state economy.

[02:28]

Cliff: One of the things that sort of represents it was the big event the other night, was the MITX Awards.

Kiki: Yes.

Cliff: And, tell us a little bit about the event, and what it was like, and what it represents for the New England area.

Kiki: So, uh, the MITX Awards, it’s, it’s uh, our fourteenth annual, so it’s been around for a long time, it’s back in 1996 that we started it. And, um, it’s really a labor of love. It’s really our flagship event, and, and the goal of that is to celebrate the, the great innovations that are happening on the web. Um, I, I talked to many people about it, I said, “Well, think of it as the Academy Awards for web work.” And, in, throughout, throughout the, throughout the years, you know, we, we will honor websites, and new emerging technologies, and the application of those technologies for small businesses up to large-scale brands like Fidelity, Genzyme, um, consumer goods companies like Coca-Cola, so it’s, it’s a really, really broad spectrum. And, and what it means is, it means a lot of things. Number one, it, it shows that Massachusetts is a leader, um, in digital marketing and media. There’s a lot going on here, and we’re doing it for some of the biggest brands in the business. And then number two, it just, it brings together the community in a way that, people need to network and understand, what’s happening, what are the best practices, how are people using the mediums. So, it’s very much a brand-building for the state, uh, but also kind of a, a, a, basically an ohm-building for, for the companies and people there.

[03:47]

Cliff: The other thing I was struck by, not to, not to, um, we were talking about a little bit was also, some of the awards around the non-profit websites, so this doesn’t—

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: --Just per, pertain to business, but, you know—

Kiki: Yep.

Cliff:--Government and other organizations. Yeah.

Kiki: It’s a great point, and every year we take a look at the categories and, and we change them up, because so many things change. For example, um, this was probably mid two thousands, financial services was a huge category, I think a lot of things were exploding at that time, in a good way. And then non-profit became a much larger category over the years. So we see trends based on, kind of, a particular area of an industry where the web is becoming a more widely-adopted vehicle.

[04:22]

Cliff: So talk about a few of the winners that you think stoo, I know they were all great.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: But, talk about some that you think stood out, you know,

Kiki: So…

Cliff: In an exemplary way.

Kiki: Yeah, so I, I, uh, Zipcar, number one.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kiki: Um, was a huge winner. I mean, what a great brand to work with. Um, and, they have so much going for them. And, so, one of their firms, I-site Design, was involved in, um, their web, their website redesign, um, they also won an award for best user experience. Um, so that was, that was really great to see. Um, another one, Sapient, uh, who won Best of Show for the Happiness Factory with Coca-Cola, which is a really cool, unique, immersive 3-D experience, and, and, it’s for people and their, their kind of, fans to come in and just experience the brand. Um, another agency that won a lot, Mullen, um, did, did uh, won several awards with one of their iPhone apps for Stanley. Um, they’re non-profit, actually, category. Um, and, let’s see, and Arnold actually won for their financial services site for Citizens Bank for their Green Sense campaign, which was, um, one judge commented on, this is where the industry’s going. So, when you see things like that it’s just really inspiring, you know, that a lot of that’s happening here.

[05:25]

Cliff: You could feel the excitement, I was there that night…Can, tell us, um, tell us a little bit about, just, the concepts behind the awards.

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: What are people getting recognized for?

Kiki: So, so, a, a few different things. I mean, number one, this is a great, um, way for a company to show their prospects and their current clients, you know, we are creating award-winning work, and we’re being judged by our peers, which, are frankly, probably a lot more, harsher, than maybe other groups of independent bodies would be. Number two, it’s great for internal team-building. I mean, these people are slaving and creating these projects, they’re not necessarily client-facing, and they’re behind, they’re behind the boxes doing the work, and so, when it comes time for some recognition, you know, it’s just a great way to really, you know, mobilize the, the team, and show them how great, you know, what’s happening. So…and I think the third is, you know, just seeing and learning what’s, what’s happening, and, and understanding how certain agencies and companies are, are really pushing the media.

[06:22]

Cliff: Yeah, it seemed, it, one of the things I was struck by having been there was just the excitement of people using, and also was a very, a big networking event.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: So, yeah, talk a little bit about that. Yeah.

Kiki: It’s, um, it’s a, it’s a grand-daddy, that’s for sure. You know, over eleven hundred people, and, and you know, frankly, I went into this year, 2009, thinking, well, you know, this, this is going to be a struggling year, can we really pull off a big event? And, I was blown away, because we had a bigger crowd this year than last year, and, and that, honestly, all that speaks to is just the incredible power of the community and the vibrancy of the community here in Massachusetts. And, you know, this has been a, this has been a, a troubling year for everyone. And the power of networking, and, and being together, as, as kind of, you know, silly as that sounds, or softy-feely sounds, it, it’s the most important thing that people could do right now.

[07:13]

Cliff: Well that’s one of the things I think that MITX does, obviously, is to bring people together. So we have some clips, because we asked a bunch of the winners,

Kiki: Great.

Cliff: You know, what did, what did they think, and how did MITX, you know, help them achieve their goals. So why don’t we take a, take a look at that.

[several interview clips]

Kiki: That’s great.

[08:46]

Cliff: So Kiki, what do you take away from that, what are some of the things you hear?

Kiki: So, I hear, a lot, um, about learning, and education. And, that, um, about, I think, that we bring together the intellectual capital to help people make sense of next generation marketing and media. Um, I hear, um, platform, and an avenue for companies to promote themselves, and for their work to be recognized. Um, and I hear stuff about talent, which is about, how do we cultivate and, you know, retain young talent, how do we foster entrepreneurship, and, and, you know, that’s really kind of the crux of what we do, so, thankfully we validated it.

Cliff: Right.

Kiki: Woo! We’re doing something right! You know? [laughter]

[09:26]

Cliff: Um, talk a little bit about the educational programs,

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: That you do do?

Kiki: So that’s really the crux of what we do, when you think about the product of MITX, it’s actually events. And, um, they’re all, um, professional development events. We have about sixty or seventy a year, and they range on, on topics from mobile, to video, to general marketing technologies, to social media, online advertising and strategy, so, quite a big breadth and depth of content. And, you know, with all those events, you know, we, we’re probably bringing together, I’d say, probably two to three hundred speakers over the course of a year in all different types of competencies, at all different types of levels, because while we like to hear the senior, we also like to hear the person that’s really in the trenches actually implementing the work. So, two-hour sessions, you know, enough where you learn something and you can apply it back, you know, to your, to your company. So…

[10:13]

Cliff: And just so people understand, can, can individuals become members? Corporations? How does it work in terms of joining MITX?

Kiki: So, it’s a member-based organization, um, we do have individual members, we actually have student memberships too. On the individual side, we reserve that for sole proprietors, so essentially, kind of one man/one woman shops, that don’t have employees yet. So once you start to have employees, that’s when you get a corporate membership.

Cliff: Right, right.

Kiki: But we were sensitive to the fact that, you know, a lot of, a lot of our companies are frankly, our history, you know, starting back in ’96, started with, you know, one-person, kind of multimedia designers which evolved, so, that’s really where it came from.

[10:46]

Cliff: How do you help local businesses find employees? Talk a little bit about the connections you’re doing there.

Kiki: So, a couple ways. Um, we’ve always had, which is, which is standard, but in, in the, in the heydays it was the most valuable thing, and we have our job board. So companies can post jobs there, and also, people can, um, um, post their resumes there. And, and, over the years, and I’ve been with the organization for ten years now, so I’ve heard a lot of stories, but over the years, I’ve heard the, “I got my job from you guys” and, and “I found someone from your website”. So, that’s a really powerful thing. And then, I think, just the obvious aspects of networking, um, at our events. You meet a lot of people, and, you know, when times are bad, you need networking, and, when people are out of work, you know, they need organizations to meet people. And the same with students, when they’re starting to learn and look for jobs, you know, they, they need to come to, to events, and, we’ve been working very hard around a special initiative called Recruit-Retain, um, which is about how do we cultivate the young talent here and keep it in Massachusetts. So, uh, we’re doing a lot of effort to work with the schools, and, and put, um, some tools on our site so we’re more student-friendly, so they think about, you know, find, they can find us, and see what type of entry-level jobs there are out there. And this something we’re, actually, haven’t really, out, rolled out yet to our membership.

Cliff: Right.

Kiki: So it’s, it’s coming in the next few weeks.

[11:59]

Cliff: Right. That’s, I think that’s such an exciting thing, because we all want to get, you know, there’s such great talent, you know?

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: And how do we, how do we, you know, har-, you know, get them connected so they know there’s great opportunities for them.

Kiki: Exactly. We’re in our second year, and we’ll have the results next week, of our, um, hiring intentions survey for entry-level talent. So we poll the membership and ask them a series of questions around, are you going to be hiring for entry-level? What types of positions, what majors are you looking for? So, we’re excited to launch that, um, and that will be, um, also rolling out some of our services on the website.

[12:30]

Cliff: That’s great. Let’s hear a little bit, then, about what some people’s, on that point, what were some people’s plans for two thousand and ten?

Kiki: Okay.

Cliff: So we asked a bunch of the award winners that question.

[several interview clips]

[13:59]

Cliff: Great, thank you. So, Kiki, tell us a little bit about what you see in 2010, we’re hearing a little bit about—

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: --What the companies are seeing, what are some of the initiatives for MITX, and what do you see in some of the industry trends?

Kiki: So, a few things, um, and we saw this from the awards, I mean, number one, kind of the whole social application, social influence, social networking, is, is becoming kind of mainstream. So, um, and you saw that in a lot of our, in almost all of our websites, and we’ve been seeing as, sort of, the categories have grown, um, as well in the awards competition. So, um, much, a lot more focus, um, on social media and more about the application and the case study and really trying to get to the, to the root of the ROI, which is what everyone wants to understand, and more importantly just also wants to figure out how to actually use it and ensure that their brand’s voice is resonating the right way. Mobile is still a very important area for us. Um, Massachusetts is rich with a lot of the mobile industry, so we focus a lot on the mobile apps side, on mobile advertising, and more of the application of it. Um, video is still a very important area, we’ve got a lot of great companies here, including the one I’m at, so um, there’s a lot more around that we want to do. Um, user experience is very, is also been an area that we’ve started to explore last year, and it was interesting, one of the, one of the person on the video was talking about user experience, and I think it’s, it’s a growing competency, um, and you’re seeing a lot with just, even like Fuse Labs here at Microsoft, where so much is at around social activity and how to actually combine it into user experience, so it’s a growing area for us. Um, consumer internet, um, you know, there are more and more companies that are here and growing, but you still have the mainstays, like TripAdvisor, e-commerce players like ShoeBuy, and CSN Stores, so, we’re focusing more on that, and, and on e-commerce as well. Um, and then, digital trends and strategy, I mean that type of area never goes away for us. Um, but that’s the content area. From the more, you know, initiative area, um, we’re really going to be ramping up our student effort, um, you know, it’s no small task to try and get into a lot of the universities and talk to them, and just explain to them what this industry is. So, you know, that’s a huge area for us. And then also, how do we foster more entrepreneurship, particularly among the web industry-type startups, that are in, you know within kind of the confines of our, our purview. So, those are some areas, and then , you know, kind of the ongoing awards shows we do, career fair, just to help, you know, promote and help advance.

Cliff: That’s, that’s a big agenda.

Kiki: I know, I know.

[16:26]

Cliff: Let’s, um, let’s switch gears for a sec,

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: Because we talked a lot about these awards, but you have the other set of awards which represent sort of a whole nother part of things in the technology awards.

Kiki: Yes.

Cliff: Right? So that was in the spring.

Kiki: Yes, exactly. And interestingly enough, it used to be part of the MITX, uh, the big MITX Awards, but we found that, um, there was just such a difference between kind of the creativity and application and the actual building of the technology. So we split it off several years ago. But the, the um, the, the theme of that show is to honor the, uh, technologies that are developed here in New England. And we focus more specifically around kind of our core competency area, around communication, and mobile, and video, and collaboration technologies, and, you know, all locally-grown, built in New England, and, you know, it goes through a very different process, where we bring in a lot of the VCs, and analysts in media, and CTOs and experts to do, um, to hear pitches from these companies on what their technologies do. So, um, and then we do a, a show as well. So, the MITX Awards, we have the big one, our technology awards, kind of the science and technology of the Academy Awards, but it’s growing in importance.

[17:31]

Cliff: Well I thought it was great, I think, um, you may want, I think we had, the lead speaker there, uh, honorary, was the head of iRobot. Right?

Kiki: Yes, exactly, Helen Greiner.

Cliff: So, you can talk a little bit about, just to give people a feel for that side of it, what that was like.

Kiki: Yeah, um, it’s really interesting, we have always had, um, called our Innovation Hall of Fame, and, um, so where we could bring in one type of, you know, one special person to talk about, kind of, how they got to where they did and their vision, and, and, it’s, we’ve, we’ve had so many speakers, a wide range of years, from Ray Stata, Bob Metcalfe, Nick Negroponte, Tim Berners-Lee, Helen, way back in the day, Patty Mays, and David Weatherall, when he was just launching CMGI, George Colony, Ray Ozzie, so, it’s been a rich mix of speakers, and it just, hearing about what they’re talking about.

Cliff: Yeah.

Kiki: And what they’re doing.

Cliff: Terrific.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: It’s a terrific group.

[18:17]

Cliff: So why do you think this has grown up, when we think, we’re sitting here on 128,

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: And this used to be, you know, sort of, whether you wanted, the, the hardware capital,

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: With that, with Prime, with Apollo, you know, we can, and, and all of a sudden, here this is, and probably, if you surveyed most people, um, they wouldn’t realize how big an industry this is here.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: So, so, how did, how did it come about, and why are we such a leader? What’s, what’s driving that?

Kiki: It’s a great question, I mean, our roots started, um, in, kind of, in the design area, and what we did was, we brought together designers with a lot of the software companies, when the, kind of, user-design interface was a developing competency. And, you know, through that design, and we were, really rich, it just grew into these independent, kind of, multimedia design boutiques, which then expanded into these web development competencies. So, it’s been a very interesting ride to get there. I think that one of the issues in terms of understand it has been because the industry is constantly conver…it’s constantly changing, and it’s converging into all different types of industries. And so, when we talk about how, and, and what’s interesting is, you think about a lot of industries that, innovation happens on an intersection. And, and I’ve heard that and I’ve read that in many books. And that’s where we sit, at that intersection of marketing, media, and technology. And so, I think a lot of times, it’s just hard to understand that and grasp that, because in reality you could, you could talk to a company and you could say “well, I’m a media company.” Well, no, but another person would say “I’m a technology company.” And so everyone has a different filter on it. And that’s the beauty of it, and the strength of it, by just an understanding, the power of it, you have to, kind of, take off that lens to see, kind of the, all different sides of, that play into it.

[19:57]

Cliff: It, it really is amazing that we sit here, and we have Unica behind you.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: Right? And then upstairs, in our building, we’ve got Constant Contact,

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: Which is one of the big, sort of, success stories that plays into this whole environment of, of connection. So I think it’s been interesting to just, um, to see the juxtapose of not the big hardware companies, where scale is the big issue.

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: Um, but Constant Contact, you know, built over eleven years. And, a market leader in what they do at this point.

Kiki: Exactly. I think, you know, there’s so many small, and I know the argument of, there’s not the big companies here anymore, but, you know, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing necessarily, when you think about all the small companies and small business, runs and rules this country, so, there’s so much of that that’s happening here, and you see it in a lot of different events that are happening, whether it’s Web Innovators’ Group, whether you’re Dart Boston, whether, um, you’re Mass Innovation Nights, I mean, there’s so much going on to promote the small companies and businesses and start-ups that are out there.

[20:55]

Cliff: I think another trend we, which maybe you can comment on, is, we have a lot of companies here, it appears to me, that are servicing very small businesses. I’ll go back to Constant Contact.

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: For a second. And so, there seems to be a change also, that what used to be able to be just afforded by the largest companies, is now really being democratized in, you know, and people are creating their own content, and using the tools at a much smaller level. But a very huge market in that context.

Kiki: No it’s, it’s a great point, actually, as I, as I had written on, on our blog about some of the trends we saw with the awards this year, and this is not just this year, it’s been happening over time, but just, with the technology becoming cheaper, with the barriers coming down, there’s, there’s so much more that someone with a, you know, a million, millions-dollar budget to uh, not zero, but, a very limited budget, can do now. So the, the entry fees to do this have completely lowered or gone away. Um, and so you could create the same type of experience because there’s such, quality tools out there that allow you to create that experience. And then you see things like, you know, Brightcove’s announcement the other day, about—

Cliff: Yeah. Right.

Kiki: --the express solution, about they’re offering a low-cost solution, so, you know, you, you see it happening, and it’s been pervasive, and I’m sure you guys are seeing it as well.

Cliff: We are. And then you look at, you know, I was looking at some, just look at the YouTube statistics in terms of online video, you know, the new medium that’s being created there for—

Kiki: Right. Yeah.

Cliff: --for people to communicate with. And that has, just, sort of, become the newest communication vehicle.

Kiki: Exactly.

Cliff: You know, whether it’s the Brightcove announcement, whether it’s watching the views on, on YouTube. Now, I was reading a statistic in a Nielsen report, um, that, uh, that basically video viewing has exceeded, uh, email.

Kiki: Really? I didn’t see that.

Cliff: So there’s more videos being watched than emails being read from a marketing perspective.

Kiki: Wow.

Cliff: So, um…

Kiki: I know. It’s good for us, I think. We have to be, start doing more of that.

[22:48]

Cliff: Um, so talk a little bit about, um, you, you touched on it, I wanted to come just back to, the education, and the colleges, and that can actually, because there’s a big initiative that you really, you know, got going there, to get, to keep the kids here.

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: And talk a little bit about the challenge. I, I’ve been in some of the meetings where we’ve talked about some of the challenges, so…

Kiki: Yeah. So, we’re, we’re, our strategy is kind of to go to, kind, there’s three-pronged strategy. Number one, we want to get to our members, because a lot of our members who are small businesses, they don’t have an HR, they don’t have a person who kind of helps them find an intern or go to the schools, and stuff like, “Oh, who graduated from where” and then you go through that route. So number one is, how do we help our companies get more, um, understand how the schools, and how to get in there. Number two, it’s around the schools, and how do we educate the schools, and a lot of that is going in and talking to a lot of the professors and identifying them. We’ve done a lot of work with Northeastern, we’re starting some with BU, um, we can’t go to all the hundreds of schools here, but we gotta start small and work with a few. Um, but then also, working with the students as well, and, and that’s the area that’s going to be the challenge, just from the fact of, how do we reach them, and how do we engage them. We’re coming, um, we’ve, we’ve, uh, just launched a contest called My First Big Gig.

Cliff: Right.

Kiki: And, what that is about, is to get to the, the pe-, the kids that have, well kids, but you know, their first job, and, and talk about what they’re doing in their first job and how excited they are, and so for us to be able to build a, a roster of videos, and we’re getting some in right now, just so then we could go and, and show the schools and show people that these are the types of jobs that are out there for after you graduate. It’s, because it’s not, it’s not necessarily a, an easy concept to understand, what types of jobs are within this industry, so we’re also doing just some, um, research, and some charts and things, into what types of jobs are out there for entry-level students. So if you’re, if you’re a liberal arts degree, then, you might be interested in more the social media. If you really like numbers a lot, then analytics might be the way for you to go. So, just kind of putting it into common terms and language, so they can understand and see the vibrant companies out there. So, it’s, it’s a large effort, and we will need more people to help us, and more members to step in and do it, but, um, we’re really bullish. I think we have the right, um, vibe and energy, and the right types of companies to help us really market what this industry’s all about.

[25:04]

Cliff: It’s, it’s interesting, and I’ll put in a plug for it, we have a great intern from Tufts that’s been with us,

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: Since the summer, and Avid just does a, a fantastic job. And it brings a whole different perspective to what, to what we do.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: And um, you know, in some sense, and I will say it, they’ve grown up on a lot of this stuff. We’ve adopted some of the, you know,

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: some of these things, but, that’s all they know.

Kiki: Right.

Cliff: You know, so we’re still clouded with some other experiences. So, it’s been a great sort of--

Kiki: Good cloud. [laughter]

Cliff: --education. Yeah, exactly.

Kiki: I don’t mind the cloud sometimes.

Cliff: Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s been, you know, uh, I encourage everybody to sort of, you know, to, to take advantage, if you will,

Kiki: Yeah, that’s great.

Cliff: of the fact that there’s great energy. You know, sort of, out there.

Kiki: Right.

[25:46]

Cliff: I wanted to touch, and we touched on a little bit, one of the things I’m struck by, and I’m bringing us back to what the piece was, um, that, all of this technology can be harnessed not only by small businesses, but, but, it’s interesting, I was watching the other day, we talked a little bit about the computer exchange.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: Um, which is, for those of you who don’t know, is a, is donating computers to, uh, over a hundred countries, to help, sort of, non-profits. And I met the person at the MITX Awards. And, I was watching another non-profit that I know, um, and they were using a phenomenal video-based approach to sort of get their CEO out there.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: So just the use of these tools in that area, feels, you know, like there’s a great new connection that’s come of, out of this, that not only the big businesses, but, all of a sudden non-profits can have a great presence and tell their story.

Kiki: It’s so true. I mean, I, I’ll put ourselves in that same boat, because we’re a different type of non-profit, but we still are one. But the, the, the tools now that we have to market ourselves, it, it goes beyond anything that we had even five years ago. I mean, just the free publicity, and, and the ease of, of so many of these things, that we don’t even have to do the marketing. Um it, it has changed everything that, that we do. And I think anyone would say that whether you’re profit or non-profit, um, particularly when it comes to events and things that you have to do customer acquisition, that it’s completely changed your entire, it’s completely changed your outcome. It’s a game-changer.

[27:14]

Cliff: And, thinking about that in relation to what’s about to happen, which is, um, you know, tremendous cuts coming in the state budget, talk a little bit about all the work you do at the state level, so that people are aware that we actually exist here. Right?

Kiki: So, we got introduced, when we first came out with our market sizing study last year, and, we got introduced to Secretary Gordon Bialecki and his team, who are responsible for business development. Um, it was great, because we started a dialogue with him, to understand that there is this industry here, and they were very interested in it. And so since that time they’ve done, um, several events, um, focusing around innovation, and have been using a lot of our board members as, essentially, kind of poster children of what’s happening here in New England. Um, we also participated in the State Innovation Day, where they had a lot of the lawmakers come in to understand some of the different types of companies that are in gaming, and mobile, and video, which we, um, contributed to. So, you know, I look at our first year, first year and a half, as more of awareness-building, and then really figuring out how we can, how we can work with them more hand-in-hand. And, a lot of that is just having the dialogue and starting the dialogue, and they understand that there’s a lot of vibrant businesses around.

Cliff: That’s, I mean, it’s been a big effort, I’m sure.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: To get that going.

Kiki: No small effort, but, you know, you need to do it.

[28:28]

Cliff: Do you think the state takes advantage of enough of the technologies? That you’re seeing? Or, are there some good examples, maybe, a different way to, you know, put it, you know…

Kiki: I’m, I’m impressed, I mean, I haven’t delved too much into it, but you know, they’re, they’re, they’re adopting some of the social media technologies, and I’ve seen that. So, I think that’s really good. I think, any time, particularly in these budget cuts, they’re going to be forced to look and see how they can consolidate. I mean, sometimes you need those, you need those, kind of, negative, you know, triggers to happen so they can actually become more efficient. So, um, they have to now. So, I think that we’ll probably see an even more efficient government, you know, if they’re applying their technologies right. But, you know, they’re, they’re adopting, how, some of the, now what we might say is mainstream, but, Twitter, and, and YouTube, and following, essentially, kind of President Obama’s lead in, in, incorporating some of those into his campaign. So, I think they’re getting it.

Cliff: Which was, which was, a lot of that which was, driven out of one of the local companies here.

Kiki: Yeah, exactly, Blue State Digital.

[29:30]

Cliff: So, so as we, as we, um, you know, get ready to wrap up here, I guess the other question that, um, that I was thinking about was, letting people know, how do they get up for these awards? What’s your process for that? Because there may be companies out there who say, wait a second, I didn’t even know about this thing.

Kiki: Yeah, no, that’s great. So, we have a special website for it, it’s MITX, m-i-t-x, awards dot org. And, for the technology awards, we start our call for entries in January-February time frame, it’s about a three to four month process, and so that, um, show is in June. And then we kick off our interactive awards in the summertime, it’s typically July. Um, we have about a two, three month entry time there, and then, the, the judging, and then the awards show is in November. So, June and November are kind of the milestone events, and so, basically, subtract four months off each, and that’s where the entry process starts. So, I mean, we have a lot of great partners that help us market, and we have a lot of great social media tools to help us get out there, but this is a perfect venue for me to raise the flag, so, thanks for asking.

[30:30]

Cliff: And the final piece.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: Some of the key upcoming events that you’ve got. We, we have the big, you had your, you know, uh, the awards obviously.

Kiki: Yeah.

Cliff: But I think there’s a couple events left this month. Right?

Kiki: Yes.

Cliff: Or this month, I say, before the end of the year.

Kiki: We just, we just, I know this is probably, this, Jamie’s gonna laugh, from the team, she’s gonna be like, she’s not going to remember it. [laughter] It’s a bad question to ask. No, I can answer a few. We just had, uh, we just had an event today on, on how HR people can use social networking to hire people, which was a very, very well attended event. Uh, we’ve got an upcoming one on Facebook Connect, and what it is, how to use it. Um, we have a charity gala, um, on December 10th, which will be raising money for the homeless children for Horizons, or, the, Horizons Children for the Homeless. Um, and then we’ve got, um, we do in December, we do kind of a digital trends, digital strategy wrap-up on how the year’s been, and so I believe that date is December 17th. So…but, I’m probably wrong, but check the website.

Cliff: That’s right, check the website.

Kiki: MITX, m-i-t-x, dot org.

Cliff: Kiki, thank you so much.

Kiki: Thank you for having me.

Cliff: It’s been great. Wonderful.

Kiki: This is great.

Cliff: Thank you.

[00:00]

Lee: Good afternoon. I'm Lee Phillips, and this is VisibleGains Live. (applause) Thank you. My guest today is Ken Wax, he's the principal of Ken Wax and Associates, and Ken has something we all want - expertise in shortening sales cycles and building incremental revenue. You know, he's done just that for everyone from tiny entrepreneurial startups to giants like IBM, Monster.com, Progress Software, and Accenture. Ken is a writer with many, well over a hundred magazine articles to his credit. He publishes a blog on selling by Ken Wax at the KenWax.blogspot.com. If you wish, you can follow Ken on Twitter at KenWax or connect with him at LinkedIn. For the rest of you, you can reach him by email at KenWax@gmail.com.

Ken, welcome to VisibleGains Live.

Ken: Thanks very much, a pleasure to be here, Lee.

[01:07]

Lee: It's great to have you. Now, Ken, you spend a lot of time in sales over many years, and sales improvement, sales training with organizations, and you've been witness to the change from personal-focused selling to technology-driven selling. I'm wondering, from your perspective and your vantage point, how those changes appear?

Ken: The biggest change is that, for the first time since the dawn of business, customers no longer need salespeople to learn about things. This is the first change and it's undermined a lot of classic selling techniques in that it used to be, if you had a new product and I want to learn about it, I had to meet with the salesperson. Those meetings will develop a relationship, that relationship would, eventually, perhaps lead to a sale.

Not anymore. Now, I may never get to meet you. If a new product comes out, it's on the website right away, I can get specifics, I can get stats, I don’t need salespeople. So, a salesperson who’s been trying to sell by informing, which is how most people have been selling, is in trouble because I don’t need information from you anymore. I need something more.

[02:18]

Lee: So technology, in this case, has really stepped in to take away part of the selling process.

Ken: It's wiped it out.

[02:26]

Lee: It took it away.

Ken: And it did it quietly, subtlely. It was about, I'm going to say, about five or six years ago, website reached a critical mass. Until then, it was stopped being and all of a sudden, one day, they had it all. They had enough information, they had enough of the specs that customers wanted, they had the frequently asked questions. You could now serve yourself raising the question of, “Well, exactly, what do I need to meet with my salesperson for?”

Then, it got more complex because, at the same time, life got busier, more hectic, there's more things to do. Do I have the time to meet with salespeople? The answer, more and more, was, “Not really. Can't we do this through email?” So the whole construct of relationships, the rug was yanked out from underneath it.

[03:12]

Lee: But now, certainly, there must have been some changes brought about technology that were favorable to selling.

Ken: Absolutely. It made communications faster, cheaper. I can interact with you several times from afar. So, it's brought magic. I mean, email alone. What's the magic of that is being able to connect with someone even if they're tied up in meetings. But then along comes the other side of the coin, which is, I don't just have email, I also have instant messages. I also have my phone beeping, I also have all these distractions. And the biggest problem is that, technology doesn’t care who’s using it. So, if I'm trying to use technology to advance my relationship with you, an existing customer, at the same time, there are other people out there with new companies who are trying to get in to you. And you know what? They have the exact same technology, the exact same almost free cost.

[04:06]

Lee: Now, just as technology has changed the sales side of the equation, I suspect that you would observed that there’d been changes in both B2B and B2C buyers brought about by technology as well. How would you characterize what you've seen developed there?

Ken: Well, it's not just the technology, it's what technology has brought, or taken away. What I mean by that is, when things started getting hectic and fast-paced and everything was working in the late ‘90s, something vanished quietly from business - the whole concept of mentoring. In the past, as people would be within organizations, they would either, directly or indirectly, have people they could pattern after, they had processes they could learn from.

When I used to be a buyer in retail many years ago, I would have a merchandise manager. And as a young buyer, I would say, “I think we're going to replace this line with that.” He would say to me, “Ken, well, slow down. Are you sure?” And he would impress upon me the importance of those ongoing relationships and how it worked. That was good because, otherwise, my enthusiasm would have shaken things up. Mentoring is gone! So, a lot of the people who your B2B salespeople are trying to sell to, are, in a lot of cases, winging it, and they're not exactly sure what to do, and that makes for problems.

[05:27]

Lee: That makes for challenges. That makes for challenges. One of the comments here that people oftentimes make is that technology is something that’s difficult for an organization to swallow. I've heard it said, in a number of organizations, that sometimes, the most difficult place to digest a new technology is in the sales side of the organization as opposed to, say, the marketing or the manufacturing side of things. What's your observation? One of your blogs is on selling technology, what observations do you have about the adoption of technology by people in the sales process?

Ken: Well, technology is tough for the sales organization to adopt even if it's terrific, because the sales organization, unlike just about every other department, is not always in the building, is not working together on things. They tend to be islands. Sometimes they are separated by thousands of miles in many time zones. In a lot of cases, they are just working on their own projects. So, in a different department, if a new technology comes in, I'm having a question on how to handle it, I can call over a friend and they can show me, “No, do it this way, do it that way.” If I'm in my remote office in San Francisco and my headquarters are in Boston or in Atlanta, and I'm not sure what to do, I'm a little bit lost. We now go also to the additional fact that salespeople don’t get paid to learn and master a new technology. Primarily, they get paid if they bring in the sales.

[06:58]

Lee: That’s right. It's quota.

Ken: It's quota, and time taken away to learn about technology, usually, does not reduce your quota. So, I want to go out there making the sales, I've got other departments saying, “You need to learn this.” It's a challenge, and it also is a new way of doing things. Salespeople, including the most terrific ones, are reluctant to change.

[07:22]

Lee: Now, and you work with sales organizations, large and small. I'd imagined that you'd come in to contact with things that begin to feel like a generational difference or a generation gap between young sales people and old salespeople. Young salespeople maybe who have grown up with social media technology, isn’t really comfortable with technology. Then you've got the old dogs, the old salespeople who learned to use the telephone, maybe, as their one and only tip of the hat. Do you see that often or frequently now in organizations, or is that not a problem?

Ken: Well, it's not a problem in that, if you look at someone and you’d guess their age, you'll be able to predict how they're going to act. Where it is a challenge, is what's management focus on the right way to do things? For example, I've been brought into sales organizations where the salespeople, primarily, were sending out emails, and wondering why things weren’t happening. I think it's really easy to understand why things aren’t happening by sending out emails because the person on the other end of the email is getting a lot of emails. OK? Their coming is a distraction, they're parading off the screen, they scroll it away.

Not only that, if I want to do something, I have to look at your email that I wasn’t expecting anyway, push everything else aside, hopefully, I don’t get distracted, and then focus on it. So, selling via email is arguably not a very effective way of selling, and we're really in a flux period. It's a big flux period where we're figuring out the right way to use the right technology and the right combination. A lot of people hide behind the technology. So, they send out emails, and really, they should be on the phone in certain situations. In some cases, an old hard copy letter will accomplish things that a ton of technology couldn’t.

[09:12]

Lee: Right, because they're in your hands, it's not parading by, as you're saying.

Ken: Right, and they don’t get that many of them. When’s the last time you got a regular letter? I mean, they're so easy to do.

[09:21]

Lee: The last time I had a child in college.

Ken: (laughs) There you go. So, is that the right tech? No, that’s not the only way to do things, but there are some ways to reach the right people that require a little bit of creativity, and not just going through the motions. That’s the enemy of selling is salespeople who are going through the motions and not using creativity.

[09:41]

Lee: Now, I've heard you used the expression, “words evaporate.” Certainly, in today’s world, whether it's a Twitter, whether it's a very tight reign on what people can say or email or other technologies that use words, it would strike me that there must be some corollary to the notion that words evaporate. Why don't you pick up on that for a moment?

Ken: The spoken word disappears like smoke in the air the moment it's articulated. So, if you and I were having this conversation without a video camera, and I had said something, as soon as it's said, if you didn’t capture it, remember it, assimilate it, and decide to take action with it, it's gone, it's gone. In a lot of ways, the same thing happens for the onslaught of raw text. Who here doesn’t get enough emails?

You know, I remember, I would ask when I give speeches, “Who here gets more than 10 emails a day?” Joking, and very often, the number would go up to 50, 75, a hundred emails a day, people have to triage. Now, even if I have to spend only 20 seconds going through them, you add the Math, I don’t want it. Not only that, I don’t want emails from my salespeople, from people who are trying to sell to me because that’s not my priorities. So, there's too much of everything, and somehow, we have to find a way to become important to that person. Nothing will happen unless a salesperson and their key message, not 20 messages, but their key message or two becomes important.

[11:15]

Lee: So, they should use things like PowerPoint, presentations.

Ken: Sure, that’s the answer. And not only that, it's only 20 slides long and they only each have seven bullets on them, so what's 140 points? PowerPoint is a marvelous technology, and when it came in, it changed the world, arguably, in unpredictable ways. When word processing first came in, companies said, “Here it is, do your own typing,” network. When PowerPoint, and back then, other technologies came in, companies said, “Well, we no longer need graphic artists. We don’t have to make 35-mm slides anymore.” Make your own slideshow.

[11:57]

Lee: We had the genographics machine, and then that was the beast that you had to feed.

Ken: That’s right. That’s right. Before PowerPoint came in, and it'd be younger to say the early, the mid-‘90s is going to really got locked in. The most powerful person in the entire corporation, the one who could tell the CEO, “No, you can't have that,” was the graphic designer. They could say, “I'm sorry, you can't put more than four bullets on a 35-mm slide even using our marvelous technology.” And guess what? They had to do it. Then, all of a sudden, slides came in. The key about the slide is a slide is not about putting words on to the screen, it's about putting ideas into people’s heads. That is not something that (snaps fingers) comes automatically like that.

[12:43]

Lee: Sure. Sure. It's not a skill that we're trained. We're trained to write and learn English or another language and we know how to put together a sentence, but it's tough to communicate an idea.

Ken: It really is. And, how often our people are taught about how other people perceive? For example, when someone’s giving a presentation, whether it's over the Web or whether it's in person, who has been taught about a good way to start it? I don’t want to go too deeply into presenting, but when a slide comes up and it says, “The name of my company,” and you know, “why we're terrific,” a lot of people just close up. So, for example, the best way to start something like that is with a question. What are companies learning form this or that. So, there's a lot of ways of doing things using technology that are more original. They can use up a lot of time and they can use up a lot of one’s access.

[13:30]

Lee: Sure. Now, but to its credit, PowerPoint and other technologies, did change things by making it possible for your presentation to travel, for it to move into an organization and have an impact after your departure.

Ken: And it still does, and it can really be very powerful, particularly, if it is combined with some voice over, or whether it's combined with some video clips or whether it's combined with something that brings it something human. Too often though, a salesperson will say, “I'll send you over the slide deck,” and that person will now receive more slides than they ever wanted. Slides that they can't make sense of on their own, and those are not going to travel. If I want to make you a hero on your company, I've got to somehow get something…

[14:20]

Lee: Which is your objective.

Ken: I'm not going to get the sale unless you have something that’s big enough to make your boss and your boss’s boss say, “This is worth the money.” So, if I want to do that, I can just rely on words. I've got to give you something that you can use so you don’t look like a show, you don’t look like you're showing a commercial for me. That’s what's going to have the impact, and it touches every part of selling.

[14:47]

Lee: Sure. You know, it's interesting, it strikes me that with the sacrifice of the personal contact form of selling and the substitution of technology, one of the things that got lost along the way was the opportunity for an organization to communicate its personality - the personality of the salesperson, the personality of the CEO, of the engineers, all of the people who are involved in making and distributing a product. That’s something that’s been lost forever to technology. Are there ways back? Is there a way to bring personality back into the selling process?

Ken: Sure. Again, we're at a point where the pendulum’s swung this way in terms of just give them a row of text, send them to the website. Now, people will think that’s a marginal approach, so…I'm sorry, I lost track of where we're headed though. Yes, if I can get people back to the very human desire to connect with other people, go back a hundred, 200 years. Your grandfather made his living probably the same way his grandfather did, your grandfather’s grandfather did. My kids are doing nothing, pretty much the way I did it when I was their age. But, deep within us is the desire to connect. People buy from other people, people have faith in other people. There's a saying, “I'm not going to purchase something unless I look across the table and I see that person.” So, how can you use the technology to make that come alive? That’s really what we're doing these days.

[16:17]

Lee: So, we’re doing a video, for example.

Ken: We're doing a video. Imagine if a clip of this video could be captured. I bet you have imagined that because you [xx].

[16:24]

Lee: I bet you will probably going to do that for you by the time it's all done, said and done. Exactly.

Ken: This gives me, if I'm inside a company, a real powerful tool. If I've got even a minute and a half, little clip, and I want to get on my boss’s radar screen, I can easily say something along the lines of, “I know that we've been told the mandatory 20% reduction in all purchasing, or 30%. But, boss, this is something that I think we need to actually invest in even more. I've attached a short clip about two minutes will give you an idea of the three reasons why I think this is the case.”

I can send that off with pretty good confidence, and my boss or boss’s boss, only has invested a minute or two, and things can happen. Otherwise, it can die right there. If I can't give you the tool you need to get them involved, I can meet with you all day long. I can talk to you in emails for weeks and months. It's not going to happen.

[17:19]

Lee: Right. Right. So, the whole role of competition has changed with the advent of technology. Now, we've seen the old axiom that everybody looks large on the Internet. Everybody is global, everybody’s got this, that, and the other. Everyone can compete in every marketplace when they're competing on the Internet. How do you see that impacting the world of sales these days?

Ken: It has made it easier in a lot of businesses for new competitors to pop up and to [xx]. It used to be, if I want to be seen big, I had to have all sorts of quite expensive brochures and booklets and materials professionally created and published. Now, it's not that hard to have a good-looking website. So, how does that customer - remember, unmentored - how do they come to conclusions about you? It's a challenge. In fact, I've got a client right now who has competitors coming on saying, “Well, you know, we're global, too.”

But they're not, they're not. But to that customer, what's global? Global is global, isn’t it? It's around the world. Well, no, it's not. So, we have to do what we're doing now is we're helping their salespeople explain, without saying bad things about any competitors, when we say “global,” here's what we mean. We've got people and engineers and analysts on the ground, living, working, and knowing all the players in this region, in that region around the world.

Some people say “global,” when they only have people who fly over or if they have a mailing address. So, as you look at us and our competitors, now they're more knowledgeable. Now, we’d helped that customer become a more discriminating purchaser, which, hopefully, works to the advantage of that particular client.

[19:10]

Lee: So, the challenge here would seem is in probably that, really, find the right way, the right technology or use of technology to differentiate yourself. Because everyone’s going to send their PowerPoint deck, everyone’s going to send their written proposal, everyone’s going to do pretty much everything the same way because technology has level the playing field.

Ken: They all have the same tools, but how you use the tools is what depends on whether or not you're going to make a beautiful work of art or whether it's going to appear quite clunky. In the same way, if you look at the world of direct mail, there's an old business. Someone writes a creative letter and it gets sent out to a lot of people. A lot of money is spent in the actual mailings, but the real key is the creative work. So, everyone had the same tools, the same envelopes and postage and letters, but those who could home in on what matters, what will speak to the customers, what's going to make something rise up to become priority, they win, they’ve won.

The same thing is here. What we do when we work with sales teams, is we encourage them to think like their customer. That's a real challenge because they’ve never been with that customer. In fact, even if they were with their customer, employed there a year or two ago, they're still not that customer anymore. Things have changed. But if I can get in to your head a little bit and go, “All right, busy person, got a lot of priorities, a lot of confusion, a lot of distractions,” and I can then, on you with things that will have you self-motivated to champion this, armed to do it without taking too great a risk, and I can make the steps easy, we're going to win.

[20:42]

Lee: Now, I can be a hero.

Ken: I want you to be a hero.

[20:43]

Lee: In fact, if you're doing your job as a salesperson, you're creating heroes everyday.

Ken: Nothing’s going to get bored, unless someone can justify it. And, an interesting thing, because sometimes we teach salespeople how do you sell to senior managers? Senior executives, see quest, because very often, that’s where sales die. I work with lower level, it moves up, it's good, it's good, it's good. I finally get in to the big meeting with the major decisions we made, and that senior executive has got some concerns, I was ready for it. So, we teach them how do you approach that. The salesperson who understands, and can sometimes even help their contact sell higher, because the contact doesn’t know how to impress [xx].

[21:23]

Lee: Because it's not their job to sell your product.

Ken: That's right, nor they even know how, because they don’t know how senior execs think either. So, if we can help them understand, senior executives, for example, they live slightly in the future. They're looking for competitive in the marketplace advantages, not feature benefits. They're looking for big, not little. That’s going to be an interesting meeting. If a salesperson comes in to a meeting, whether it's over the phone, on the Web, or in person, and they're completely surprised when the senior exec hits them with something, it doesn’t work.

[21:56]

Lee: They're dead. They're dead in the water.

Ken: They, certainly, aren’t having a good day, or it's not as good as they’d thought they’d have.

[22:01]

Lee: One of the more provocatively worded blogs of yours that I saw recently was entitled, “What's the purpose of this sales call?” I was intrigued by that, because you would have thought, or one would have imagined, that the purpose of the sales call is immediately known. Right?

Ken: Make money. They get the sale.

[22:23]

Lee: Sure. Exactly.

Ken: What do I do when I get the sale?

[22:25]

Lee: But that’s not exactly what you said. Why don’t you share that with our audience.

Ken: OK. OK. I'm going to lead into it, because you made such a good build up. Most salespeople know one way of selling, and it's not to their detriment. They learned one way of selling along the way and they’ve been doing that. Unfortunately, it's been by informing, and the Web has taken away that job. So, these days, and to companies who want our people to be more consultative. Well, I will use you as a consultant if I see value in it. What's the job of a sales call? The job is to create desire. That’s it.

Now, a different point in the sales process is a different sort of desire you need. For us meeting with you, I want to create desire for you to learn more, so I want to make sure you grasp some big benefits, and important benefits is not feature benefits. Then, as we rise up, it's different. When we finally get to meet, whether if it's a major purchase, senior executives, I want to be creating desire for the advantages that your folks will have. I want them seeing themselves with it. I want them imagining, “If you had this working for you right now instead of doing it this way, your folks will be doing it that way, you'd be benefiting this way, this way.” If people can envision themselves already owning and benefiting from your product, they're probably going to move ahead because it's in their own best interest.

[23:43]

Lee: You know, that’s an interesting point because it's almost rationale for fly into B to C world conventional advertising, in media, was so powerful, particularly around things like motor vehicles or other large ticket purchases. Because your people will really challenge in the ad to put themselves in that car, to really feel what it was like.

Ken: That’s right. Actually, if you would go into the dealer, they know how to do that, too.

[24:11]

Lee: Sure. Give them to take a test drive.

Ken: They do that, but [xx] they go, “Mr. Phillips, can you imagine how this car would look in your driveway? Can you imagine driving up to a friend’s house in it?” And, what they're doing, because the automotive business, they know what they were doing because they’d done the same thing for so many decades. What they're doing is they were using your imagination against you. They don’t know what your driveway looks like. They don’t know what your friends’ houses look like. But they’ve got you in that car driving up, feeling good, and it worked.

When you're dealing with B2B business, these are professional buyers. Particularly if you get a higher up, but nevertheless, they're all sufferings in ways that they won't usually tell a salesperson because it's confidential. But if you can have them imagining, and particularly, if you can have them appreciating what other companies are doing right now, then, it becomes so easy for them to say, “I, at least, think we should be exploring this.” If I can get them exploring it, then we're on our way to a sale. It's much better to have someone exploring something than to say, “We're going to wait another six months. Times are tough.”

[25:11]

Lee: Sure. You bring up a point when you talked about the person on the buying side of an equation. Another one of your more provocatively worded blogs was entitled, “Can your salespeople deliver a stimulus?” I thought that was a wonderfully, shameless way of borrowing from the controversy in Washington. But you have a point to make in that blog posting, don’t you?

Ken: Yes. It's that a lot of people out there, people with a lot of power to purchase and to guide their companies have never been through this sort of times before.

[25:47]

Lee: Kind of economic uncertainty that we're in.

Ken: Absolutely. They have not been through challenges, setbacks, in some businesses, the whole world has changed. It's very easy to panic. It's very easy, particularly if you've got young kids and a mortgage, to want to do nothing risky, nothing risky at all. If the company says, “Our goal is to not spend,” a lot of people will immediately not do that. Now, they're not saying that. What the companies are really saying is, “We're not going to spend on something unless it's crucial and important into our future.” The company still wants great ideas to come forth if the company doesn’t want to close up shop. So, sometimes, a salesperson has to gently teach their contacts what companies are looking for. The best way to do that is by talking about experiences of other organizations.

[26:34]

Lee: Sure. Sure. I want to wrap us all the way back to the first question in the beginning. It goes back to this notion of technology - the technology that can help and the technology that can hurt or impede.

Ken: Or distract.

[26:51]

Lee: Or distract, which is just as bad. Exactly. That’s a good point. You know, I'm curious. If you were to just use a baseball analogy, the season is over now, unfortunately, for us, I suspect. But, there's a baseball analogy that comes to my mind, and all of a sudden, you're going to be the manager of the All Star Sales Team. What kind of technology bats would you want to have in the hands of your homerun heirs(?).

Ken: OK. I can't just say I want to hand them technology, because technology, for its own sake, can waste a lot of time. I've seen companies where they were sold a bill of goods that the answer to all of your sales problem is to bring in this marvelously complex sales monitoring technology, and your people put information over here. It was all internal, it didn’t touch the customer. So, what's going to work is the technology that can touch the customer and touch the customer in the way that, in a lot of organizations, the CEO, knows how to do.

In almost every company, one of the best salespeople is the CEO. They can explain situations, they can get people excited. That’s what they do, they do that all day long. They do it with analysts when they meet them, they do it at high levels. If we can take the salespeople and give them a little bit of that knowledge, of that comfort telling the stories, and then arm them with the tools to get it across. What's the right tool? It depends.

If I can't get through to you at your company, if you're a company I want to crack into, I can't get to you, I can't just send you emails. I can't send you links, it's going to take me nowhere. I have to get creative. And, there are creative things you can do in almost every business. So, if I can get creative, now I get in to meet you, or I talk to you on the phone, I create a little interest, a little desire, I now feed you a little bit more. Maybe it's a link with a provocative [xx] - which you've been so good with in this discussion - maybe it's a video, maybe it's something that makes it easy. I want to, hopefully, with the sales ladder, the whole concept of holding people up, up.

The real concept, the real secret to the sales ladder is not the notion of moving people up. That’s easy. The problem is that, to the customer, you may not have the rungs they need. So, if I said, “Come over to my house and help me fix my roof.” I bring out my ladder and it's missing some rungs, you'd go, “I'm not going to do that, it's too risky!” So, the customer sees things differently. I want to arm my salespeople with the comfort, the knowledge, the tools, and knowing how to use them, it's going to make that customer go, “Oh! That’s not too risky at all. I'll take the step, I'll take the step.” If I've got the right solution for them, I'm doing it with high integrity, a good percentage of them will arrive at the top of that ladder and it would become a sale.

[29:44]

Lee: There's another thread that I picked up at one point in your blog postings, and that was about the importance and the value of creativity. I recall you telling a story about that phenomenal activity in the old days, back when you and I were younger and working together at Lotus. The phenomenal trick that was done when you're at COMDEX, that, literally, I use the shirt on people’s backs to really command attention and to sell.

Ken: It's more of a marvelous marketing story, but it really shows you what some real good thinking can do. There's a lot of bright people in every organization, and it goes like this. One year COMDEX was coming up, and it was Borland that predicted this. Borland was a relatively small, not a startup, but they were not as big as the big players. They wanted to get people to their booth. Well, you can spend a small fortune on the booth or you could do what they did. They printed up, I believe it was 200 t-shirts, 200 or 300 t-shirts, and they then hired very attractive models, because the people going to COMDEX, typically, were male. They went to the airports and they could, at those times, and as people got off flights, and you could tell the profile who’s going to COMDEX, they gave out t-shirts. The t-shirts said the following, “Follow me to Booth – with the number - to see Borland’s…” I forgot the name of the product.

So, the next day, the show starts and what happens is Borland has, walking through the show, hundreds…Also, by the way, if you wear the t-shirt, here's the payoff, if you wear the t-shirt and we spot you, we may give you a hundred dollar bill. There's the incentive, there's the incentive. So, for what, a thousand dollars or so of hundred dollar bills, the t-shirts cost to nothing, they had walking billboards going through at that huge tradeshow bringing business to them. It prompted a new rule, the very next year, no longer would any sort of promotional t-shirts be allowed in anybody trying to enter the place.

[31:43]

Lee: (laughs) It's a great story.

Ken: You can bring creativity like that to a sales call as well. If you're going to a sales call or even on the phone, by starting with a provocative question, that’s creative. By saying, “What are companies like,” and you name some competitors or companies in their genre. What are they benefiting from through this technology? It makes some good, “Gee, I didn’t know that. I don’t know. Let me find out.” So, maybe it become more valuable to my company. At the very least, I won't be vulnerable if a senior exec comes in and says, “They're doing that, why are we doing this?”

[32:18]

Lee: Sure. Ken, before we sign off today, I know one of your favorite phrases is “to sell like a CEO.” I'm sure you use that constantly and thought it might be a good chance for you to share that observation, that meaning with our viewers.

Ken: Most CEOs know how to tell a terrific story. They can, because let's face it, no one’s going to say to them in the company, “You should mention that.” So, when I come in to work with a company, very often, one of the first things we'll do, even in the discussion stages, is I'll get to meet with the very senior executives and I'll listen to what they bring up. I'll say, “What are the challenges you're fighting?” because there's always challenges. And, they usually have great answers. I go, “If we can just take the sort of things that I've heard at this table,” because, typically, it's senior execs in the first meetings, “and we can make it so that your people have this knowledge, access to it, we can shift the bell curve over. So, all of your people,” the whole goal is to get more sales, more effects than this from the same people. If we can make them sell a little bit more like the CEO, the curve shift is over and everything works better. Every sales call is now more valuable. It's more valuable to the customer and, therefore, it becomes more valuable to the company.

[33:37]

Lee: And, brings in revenue, shortened sale cycle, and hopefully, gives opportunity to person like yourself.

Thank you, Ken, for coming in today. It's been a pleasure chatting with you.

Ken: Thank you.|"

[3:35]

Matthew: First question is, how important is it to an organization, a b-to-b organization more specifically, to embrace transparency online these days?

Larry: Huge. Not only should businesses be transparent but they need to be completely open with their customer base because they will not retain the customers and they won't get new customers unless they are honest, direct and build conversations around what they do well. I'm amazed that I still go into companies and we'll go all the way up to the C-level and the CEO or this CMO will say ""you mean somebody can say a bad thing about my product or service?"" and I'll say yeah. And those conversations are happening anyway, why not have them on your site? That way you can answer them, say ""hey, it's already fixed!"" if there's a problem and move on. But transparency's huge in the first three phases of the web there was a lot of aliases, people hiding out, we have all the famous stories of that one PR firm that was faking names to help Wal-Mart to have a better image. Then there's the CEO from Whole Foods who that the alias that was attacking his competitor, and that just can't happen anymore. We've gotta be open, transparent and let the web self-police itself.

[6:38]

Matthew: Talk a little bit more about what you mean by ""trust equity"".

Larry: Trust equity is a concept I've had that actually works in the real world too, the more you are open and honest you almost get points for that in customer's minds so that if something does go wrong you'll probably get the benefit of the doubt, right? Because you've just built up so much equity over time that a customer's going to say ""hey, you know what, everybody makes a mistake"" and you were honest about it and you fixed it and that's terrific. That's what we need. So I think it's about building equity, trust. I also think that it plays into a whole strategy around the web. People can't think of the web as a channel anymore and that's especially business-to-business. It is not brochures/advertising web. You have two strategies, that is your real life strategy and your digital strategy. And you've gotta understand that reputation and brand are all intertwined, and so is influence and trust equity plays into all of that.

[8:00]

Matthew: Talk about, just a little bit, what you're seeing how those three things are coming together or already have come together and what that means for an organization.

Larry: Branding, in the past was always bought in a lot of ways so it was a lot of advertising. It was a lot of one-way broadcast messaging. Brand today is the dialogue you have with your customer or the customer base. The better the dialogue, the better the brand. The weaker the dialogue, the weaker the brand. So that's conversation. Reputation comes out of the conversations that you're having with your customers, potential customers, partners, etcetera. And influence comes out of the brand and the reputation working together to influence opinion. It's my view that the future of marketing especially, no matter who you are is around the influence of opinion through content. That can be funny content, we can have funny stuff on the web, it's ok. Serious stuff. But you're only going to influence and change people's minds and get a sale by, again, leveraging your openness, your trust, your directness and combining the concepts of brand, reputation, and influence. Which again, in the past 50 to 75 years were separated and they were owned by different people in the organization. That brings on a piece I don't cover as much in the book, and I'm probably going to do that in this next book that I'm writing but it's about how we organize. I'm still going to companies that don't have a VP of content or a director of social media or a head of analytics and this kind of stuff. We're still very much organized like we were in 1960, which is sort of silly.

[10:05]

Matthew: In the second major section of the book, called ""Shape Your Reputation"" you advocate for implementing what you call creative approaches to promoting dialogue. What are the steps required to do that? What are some examples that you've seen? Maybe talk a little from the book on effective dialogue.

Larry: First of all, everything's driven by content. People wanna talk about things that are of interest to them. The reason the social web has taken off, and I believe is going to have more impact over time than television has had on our society as it matures, I think the social web will have that kind of impact even more. So is the, especially because of the visual on this and its nature, you have to develop and create great content so that people talk about it. Obama was very good at this when he ran for President, and I talk about that in the book. About wherever you were if you signed up you could get on your mobile device where Obama was, what he was talking about that day. If you wanted to hear the whole speech or just part of his speech you could get that. Then you could talk with other people that had interest in that same part of that speech. So there was a dialogue created by his speaking, his whereabouts, where that goes. There's a great site for Sony called Words Move Me right now. Now Sony wants to not take all the heat from Kindle anymore. They think they have a better device than Kindle for a digital reader and the site Words Move Me is by Sony but it lets people like you and me put quotes of our favorite books on it and it's all categorized by different categories whether that be a romance or business book or whatever. You meet other people, you talk about it, it's passionate and it creates those dialogues that are so important to keeping people there. In the future we're going to be measuring this kind of marketing about an engagement time, around downloads, around how much you participate, etcetera. I think it's really important. I also use the example which I think is important for everybody to know because I think the future of all marketing, especially b-to-b is going to be about creating experiences and environments. And if you've been on Amazon lately, even though it's a consumer experience I think it's very relevant to businesses. You're gonna say ""Larry:, get a life"". I was on Amazon for an hour and a half the other night. While I was there I got a permission-based email that said ""Dear Mr. Weber, as you know a great American author we lost earlier this year, John Updike, we noticed you bought a few of his books and we just want to let you know we're going to post some videos Tuesday at six o'clock. Some rare shots of the author reading from his books."" So I go, ok, that's cool, right? So I go on, I make a drink and sit down at my computer, I watch these videos then I notice there's other videos of other authors, I go watch those. Then what do I do, I go read some reviews of Sticks and Stones, I was mad at a guy from Taipei, who gave me only three stars instead of five stars. Then I wrote a review of Malcolm's new book because I wondered why you can write tipping point three times in a row. And I bought six books. Four for myself and two for friends. So what did I do for an hour and a half? I was absorbed in an environment that produced commerce, that produced sharing, that produced content, everything. So that is what is marketing. That's where we're headed.

[16:30]

Matthew: My next question to you is if the goal is to create content of value, what does that mean, and how do we make it emotive? How do we inspire passion and interest, especially in this b-to-b setting which I'm sure you've heard a million times over that it's just not that sexy, it's just not that interesting. Is that true?

Larry: No. Because people are still people. People have emotive qualities all around them, by emotive I don't mean crying, it's laughing, selling, buying. Something that creates or stirs something in you. There's phases of the web. I'm lucky enough, being as old as I am, I was lucky enough to be around when we did all the PR for HTML when Sir Tim Berners-Lee laid it on the Internet in early 1993. That was phase one of the web. We literally had business-to-business companies come to us with stacks of brochures and said just put this on the web. Second phase was the browser came around, that changed everything. So we were transactional. Third phase, social. 1997 or 1998, Friendster comes out. You start to see social, but social, believe it or not started in software companies. If any of you that are out there work for a software company knows, that usergroups were very important to the starts of most software companies. That was the first physical element of a social network around business-to-business. And what was the content? The content was how good the product was, how bad the product was, what it was good for, what would you change, what would you not change? That to me is emotive because it helps you shape a better product, shape a better customer set, and that's just going to be a win-win situation. The fourth phase of the web which is starting right now is really a highly video-rich media, interactive video kind of world that's going to change every way we present. It doesn't mean text is going to go away completely. But I believe we're going to have increasingly more video, more rich media that will try to sell, communicate, connect with you. It doesn't have to be fancy video, it just has to be understanding, it has to be clear, it has to be content that's relevant to your job. You will win, you will get people to watch that and comment on it and work with you around that content. I see a world where it's going to be highly visualized, especially when you look at 2020 which is just about ten years from now, fifty percent of the workforce is gonna be 30 years old. Now you gotta go, these are going to be people highly video oriented, only know the web, complete digital natives, that is going to be the only way we're going to communicate. You're not going to have any newspapers in four years, you're not going to have any nightly news in five years, and you're not going to have any trade publications in two years. So you better start visualizing everything.

[24:20]

Matthew: The final section of the book is the ""Tools and Tactics"" where you lead off with the chapter on YouTube and this kind of gets back to a little bit where you just talk about, great quote, ""every organization needs a more video-oriented culture in order to thrive in world 2.0"" and that kind of feeds into what you were just saying about using it to talk to your employees, use it to talk to your shareholders. Use it to talk to anyone. Is it a medium that is important?

Larry: YouTube's the most underrated social platform that we have right now. It will continue to blow out, it will get organized, it's not just about funny videos that we watch and viral videos, it's going to have more corporate and business-to-business communications. Even their gadgets are much more controllable now. Companies should be building libraries of visual, the way their products are being used, how they're solving problems, throughout leadership, all these things in a more visual manner. That happens to be my favorite chapter in the book. The ""YouTube Juggernaut"" is what it's called. I couldn't be more higher on that, again, that use of the visualization of the web, and when he says world 2.0, that's my encapsulation of where we're moving in a business world. As we come out of this recession I believe there's going to be a huge business renaissance that I think we all can partake in. Some big brands are going to die, some big brands are going to get bigger, and some new brands are going to come out of nowhere and they will not have done one dime of advertising.

[26:33]

Matthew: We did get one question from Janine Swenson who says, how to manage micro-segmenting without being overwhelmed by too much information?

Larry: You have to really balance and prioritize your micro segments. Java developers and SAP is a pretty defined area. You have to build your content around that. You have to prioritize and make sense of your audience. That's why I say that you have to [coughing] prioritize the micro segments that are going to most effect your business. That's why I say in the book you have to do a constituency map first, before you do any of this, so that you can prioritize the customers or constituencies that you're going to build content around. I would not pick more than four to start with so that you can control it.

[28:00]

Matthew: We've got a couple of minutes left. What would you like to talk about with the final few minutes?

Larry: I think the final few minutes is that business-to-business has a huge opportunity right now to first explore where social media is evolving in their categories and really to start to brand themselves as the solution and the thought leaders in their categories. All you've got to do is understand that you have to organize for that properly, it doesn't have to cost a lot of money, that it's content driven, and that you just gotta get going. You know you're going to make mistakes, but that's okay as long as you're open, transparent, and direct with what you do.

[00:00]
Matthew:  Hello and welcome. Today is October 29th and you are watching VisibleGains live. (crowd cheering)

[00:18]
Matthew: Well, thanks everyone for joining. We have a pretty special episode cued up for you today.

[00:24]
Dave: Really?

[00:24]
Matthew: With me today is Dave Kilkenny senior digital producer here at VisibleGains. Nice to have you back on the show.

[00:30]
Dave: Old Reliable

[00:31]
Matthew: Old Reliable. So I mentioned that we have a pretty special show. You can also tweet to us through the VisibleGains…

[00:42]
Dave: VisibleGains live, right.

[00:42]
Matthew: …VisibleGains live hatched egg. And we’ll see your tweets and we’ll answer them here on camera. What we have done today is we’ve cued up some video for you to watch. We’ve gone out on the street and talked to a whole bunch of different local online marketing, B2B marketing, and video marketing experts.

[01:02]
Dave: Familiar faces.

[01:03]
Matthew: Familiar faces. People you should all know and recognize. And we’re going to be offering some commentary on those interviews through some new technology that allows us to play these videos directly into the stream with us in kind of a picture in picture effect. So it’s a new thing that we’ve launched. It’s one of the reasons we’re running just a couple of minutes late today. So if we experience a few technical difficulties throughout the show, you know just bear with us.

[01:27]
Dave: Apologize in advance.

[01:28]
Matthew:  You’ve got two producers over here today helping us out. We’ve got Abba who we have every week, and we’ve got Chris Kyle also. So make sure that we’re doing alright, guys, alright? Alright, thanks. So the first thing that we have cued up is some video that we shot, Dave and I, shot at the Invale Marketing Summit.

[01:47]
Dave: Right, great event.

[01:48]
Matthew: It was a super event put on by the folks over at New Marketing Labs. And this is, I think, the second or third year that they’ve had the event at Gillette Stadium. Great, great venue, and they brought together all the key experts in B2B marketing and social media marketing, and engagement marketing, and it’s…it was two days really fun time. And VisibleGains was actually able to record one of the panels. And the one that we recorded was called “End the Social Media Hype.”

[02:23]
Dave: Right.

[02:24]
Matthew: And there was, I think, 5 or 6 great experts including Chris Brogan, Jason Falls, C. C. Chapman, who was on the show last week.

[02:31]
Dave: Yep.

[02:32]
Matthew: Brian Solice, and Paul Gillan. And it was hosted by Mike Lewis of Awareness, and they talked a lot about how in the year since they had the New Marketing Summit social media has clearly taken off.

[02:45]
Dave: Right. Lot of change.

[02:46]
Matthew: And it’s attracted kind of an undesirable element of people offering or making kind of big promises and not really able to kind of deliver on those promises.

[02:56]
Dave: I have no idea what they’re talking about.

[02:57]
Matthew: There was a bit about how it affects B2B that I thought was interesting. Chris Brogan talks a little bit about social media, and the use of online video. So why don’t we hear what the story is that he had to say.
VIDEO CLIP
[03:10]
Mike: On the B2B side, you’re trying to influence a greater group, and I get the whole [?] you know it’s still a person selling to a person. I get that.

[03:17]
Chris: You’re right, it’s a multi-person sale, it’s a complex sale, but I mean it’s the same sort of thing. Great content sales great stuff. When I was at IBM research, we had this great conversation about there was this guy who made a video about one of these super computers. These  super computers are a three year sales cycle. It’s three years from when you think you might buy one to when you can get one. And this guy took an internal IBM video and recut it and had his friend with a really good baritone voice make a YouTube video. YouTube video got 149,00 views within the first several months, and not through the official channels ‘cause it turns out the guy who made the video was in the call center. So the head of marketing contacts the call center guy and was like, (makes ringing sound with mouth), hello? Yes, there’s a guy there that made a video and it’s really unauthorized and it got 149,000 views on YouTube. And we don’t like that. We need to take it down. And the call center guy’s like, I’m sorry did you start this by saying 149,000 views on YouTube? I’m not talking to you. (Thumps mic on leg.) So I mean I think yes, the tools all still do the same thing. You’re right. You have to influence more people. But people love good content. We don’t stop loving good content because we buy equipment from other people or we buy services from other people. Just maybe that we have to hit different targets, so maybe the strategy  is just, you know, how do you touch as many, kiss as many babies as you can on the way to make the purchase?

[04:34]
Second Man From Left: B2B doesn’t get talked about very much because it’s boring. But I mean, the stuff that works in B2B, it’s blogs, it’s pod casts, they rock, they absolutely are killing in B2B. Look what Microsoft is doing with channel 9 and with it’s blogging and there’s a huge success in B2B channels. But there’s not a lot of sexy stuff. It’s not like YouTube. Not a lot of contests but very mainstream.

[04:58]
Mike: So and there are a lot a great companies here for everyone back home that are doing some great B2B stuff. Help Spot, you know, Radiant 6, doing a lot of stuff on the B2B side. Using social media to get more sales, to get more revenue, the whole nine yards, so definitely, yeah…

END OF VIDEO CLIP

[05:15]
Matthew: So I think Chris brings up a great little anecdote about how, you know, B2B is still selling to people. I think kind of Mike cued that up as part of his introduction. And creating compelling content is still going to when whether you are in  B2B or B2C.


[05:35]
Dave: That’s right.

[05:36]
Matthew: Great story about a B2B hardware company was able to take advantage of online video as well as social media. You know, that’s what YouTube kind of brings together as a social community around video. And use that to talk about their product but also expose a little bit of their personality. And I think that’s ultimately sometimes what B2B marketers are afraid of because there are multiple decision makers.

[06:02]
Dave: Right. I mean, if you think about it, for a B2B video to get 149,000, which is no small feat in and of itself.

[06:09]
Matthew: Right.

[06:10]
Dave: You get the one person…you don’t even get a lawyer involved in this. It’s the guy in marketing who goes, can you take it off? And, you know, it’s a common thing that we talked about for, you know, episodes in the past about outdated ideas what marketing is these days. You know, it’s going to hold your company back. It rings true even on the B2B side that even though it’s YouTube, it’s different market, blah, blah, blah, it still works.  You got to get your content out there.

[06:40]
Matthew: Still got to be, you know, I think it was C. C. Chapman who said last week there are two primary ways that you got to create content. You can do it to educate, or to entertain.

[06:49]
Dave: Right.

[06:50]
Matthew: And especially in the B2B world, that rings true that you can, you can, you can create what’s perceived as compelling content in those two ways.

[06:58]
Dave: Yeah, even  if it’s entertain, it’s still, it’s still getting your brand out there.

[07:01]
Matthew: True.

[07:01]
Dave: It’s still getting the eyeballs.

[07:04]
Matthew: So entertain would probably be best used for the brand awareness piece.

[07:08]
Dave: Right.

[07:08]
Matthew: Although you could probably use some entertainment to get some demand generation, and lead capture.

[07 :14]
Dave: Right.

[07:14]
Matthew: Maybe not so much in the B2B world.  Certainly educational content is gonna, is gonna be the way that you get those inbound links and you get leads coming in.

[07:26]
Dave: Right.

[07:26]
Matthew: So, moving on. Dave, you and I actually went to a MyTechs event a couple of weeks ago. It was a meet up, a tweet up.

[07:37]
Dave: Yeah, for Chris Brogan.

[07:38]
Matthew: It was a book signing for Chris’s book. And we had the opportunity to take a few folks aside and ask them a few questions, and get their reactions on camera. One of them was a local online video marketing superstar.

[07:53]
Dave: Steve Garfield. Yeah. Yep.

[07:53]
Matthew: Steve Garfield, of SteveGarfield.com. We asked him a few questions and had some great insights both in terms of…well, you know what?

[08:04]
Dave: Let‘s just watch it.

[08:05]
 Matthew: Let’s just let Steve do the talking.


VIDEO CLIP

[08:10]
Steve: And I think in Boston, we have an amazing social network of people, that like, actually for this week I’m going out every night of the week for a social media event.  And I get to meet all these different people and some business might develop out of that, so I think the environment for companies to come into Boston, and who are in Boston to participate in this social network of people could be very valuable to them to find employees. For me it’s very valuable, because I find people that I want to work with or that want to work with me, and it’s all this situation where you know them. And there’s really no resumes forwarding around. It’s not show me a resume to get to know you and then they’ll hire you based on having met you and gotten to know you and in a social way. It’s great, really.

BREAK IN VIDEO CLIP

[09:04]
Steve: …event is open and free. And I’m a proponent of free events. And I think that opens it up to more people being able to attend. And there’s a number of events in town that end up being paid events, and I think that keeps people back from attending. When you have a whole week of free events and there’s one that costs some money. So I think that being generous and hosting this one without having like a cover charge, encourages people to attend. So if they want to sponsor events to be able to make more things like this happen, that would be great.

BREAK IN VIDEO CLIP

[09:47]
Steve: Sometimes I’m wondering if the sponsors end up buying a speaking position to sell their product. And that ‘s something, you know, I don’t like to end up sitting in a conference and saying oh, here’s some selling.

[10:00]
Matthew: Right.

[10:01]
Steve: So when I run my events, there’s no sales allowed. So the combination of having it be a paid event with the possibility of the sponsors getting a minute to talk about their product, I mean, I understand that, but I don’t really like it.

BREAK IN VIDEO CLIP

[10:22]
Steve: Online marketers need listen. Right? And they need to go out on the web and listen to what people are talking about and saying. So, now you can use tools that some of the sites have in-built like Twitter Search, which is at search.twitter.com. And you can key in your company name and you can see what people are talking about. But there’s a whole nother level of tools that companies can use to help them find out what people are saying, when they are saying it, how much of an influence certain people have. Like when they say something on Twitter, who re-tweets it, and you know, who are the thought leaders and trust agents out there. So I think that some of these tools that analyze how we’re, people are saying things about you, are something that companies should look at. And then, to take that one step further, look at tools that would help the company join in on the conversation and respond, and you know, share and let other people know what the conversation…

END OF VIDEO CLIP

[11:30]
Matthew: So, a couple of great insights from Steve. The first question that I asked him was what  is it about Boston that technology companies as well as technology workers need to understand in order to kind of see what’s really great about Boston. And I thought he had some great insights in terms of if you work here and if you’ve…you know, for me, I grew up in this area. I went to school in this area. And I live and work here, and I kind of got used to how great it is here. Dave you’re a transplant from a different part of the country…

[12:02]
Dave: Yep. Originally from New York.

[12:03]                                       
Matthew: Originally from New York. Which isn’t really that far away, but…

[12:07]
Dave: Well, I mean, it’s coming from…it‘s a totally different environment. It’s a totally different market. You know, when I came up here I had…didn’t know Waltham. I didn’t know downtown, didn’t know where all the hot spots were.  I learned it through time.

[12:20]
Matthew: And have you found it? I mean have you found that this obviously you’re still here, so…

[12:24]
Dave: Yeah, absolutely.

[12:26]
Matthew: This professional move is probably a good move for you?

[12:27]
Dave: Absolutely. I felt New York, for as great as it is, it’s tough. It’s a tough market. And up here I felt that there is a lot of opportunity for me. My wife and I feel like one of the greatest things we did was come to Boston, so…

[12:41]
Matthew: Cool. And then we talked with Steve a little bit about all of the events that do take place. A sponsored versus non-sponsored, paid versus non-paid.

[12:52]
Dave: Right.

[12:53]
Matthew: Clearly Steve has a pretty clear preference for free. But I’d like to ask the folks that are watching if…You know it’s very difficult to, as an organization, let’s say MyTechs was hosting that particular event, to have free events all the time.

[13:10]
Dave: Right.

[13:11]
Matthew: I mean, MyTechs is the premiere organization that brings together innovative technology and technology companies and you know, they, it takes money to do that.

[13:23]
Dave: Absolutely.

[13:24]
Matthew: Can’t give it away free all the time. I, myself, I do like free events, of course, who doesn’t like free? But I’m not adverse to paying to go to an event if the panel seems worthy of, you know, a few bucks, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on that.

[13:38]
Dave: And I think not just the panel too, but I think just the people who would go to events…take for instance the Inbound Marketing Summit. I mean, I would tend to think that you would get more people…

[13:48]
Matthew: The Inbound Marketing Summit was like 700 bucks a ticket, right, for two days?

[13:52]
Dave: Yeah, I mean, I think the people you would meet there would be more people you’d want to know.

[13:54]
Matthew: Uh-huh.

[13:54]
Dave: …some of them more, better decision makers that if you’re looking for a job or you’re looking to network…

[13:59]
Matthew: Sure.

[14:00]
Dave: …that these are the people you would really want to engage with. Would they go to a free event that often?

[14:03]
Matthew: Keeps out the riff raff. Quite honestly, I mean candidly, that’s what it does, right?


[14:08]
Dave: Right.

[14:09]
Matthew: And then finally, online marketers need to listen. I think that was a pretty simple, but yet still insightful bit of advice from Steve. There’s a…and we talked about this on the show a lot…there’s a conversation about your brand that’s happening online.

[14:24]
Dave: Right.

[14:25]
Matthew: Whether you partake in that or not, it’s still happening. People are twittering about you. They’re blogging about you. They’re having this discussion online, and if you’re not listening to what’s happening, you’re letting someone else take the initiative on your brand.

[14:41]
Dave: Right.

[14:42]
Matthew: So, good advice from Steve on that.

[14:44]
Dave: Well, actually one other point that Steve wanted to make was regards to social networking and to, you know, the whole thing about linked in, and it’s not just about getting, knowing people on linked in and connecting that way. It’s about getting out there and getting to these events and networking that way as well, getting face time.

[15:02]
Matthew: Right.

[15:03]
Dave: Because you could meet one person and then just grab a whole bunch of linked in links and not actually know any of these people.

[15:10]
Matthew: It’s not a genuine connection.

[15:11]
Dave: Right. It’s not a genuine connection. By going out there and putting a handshake to the username I guess, is I think, the best way to get out there in the market.

[15:21]
Matthew: And some of the folks that we’ve shown today on the video portion of the show are the masters of doing both sides of that.

[15:28]
Dave: Exactly.

[15:29]
Matthew:…both networking online and being relevant and creating that both educational and/or entertaining content as well as getting out there. I mean Steve mentioned he goes out almost every night. Every other night.

[15:41]
Dave: Right. That’s a lot.

[15:43]
Matthew: To meet folks and put faces to names, so that’s important. Love to get your feedback on how this new technology’s going. Anything we can do to improve or just do better in any way. It’s a little, it’s gotten off, it’s gotten me off my mojo, I don’t know about you.

[16:04]
Dave: Well, it’s…

[16:05]
Matthew: To see myself in the camera and to see the picture in picture, so.  What are your thoughts on how we’re doing so far?

[16:11]
Dave: I think great. I think, you know,  obviously it puts a new spin on the show.

[16:13]
Matthew: Yeah. Yeah, another thing to worry about.

[16:16]
Dave: If you’ve watched the show in the past, you’ve noticed we’ve tried to do this in the past.  Put it on video in the back, it’s a little awkward. The transition isn’t as nice.

[16:24]
Matthew: Can’t see it.

[16:25]
Dave: Can’t see it. Can’t hear it, so you know, some of those complaints that you’ve said in the past, we are listening, and I know Matt has worked hard to make this show progressively better.

[16:34]
Matthew: Well, we all have. And you’ve definitely contributed as well, as well as Abba and Chris and the rest of the folks, so…It’s a great technology, certainly allows us to get more people on the show virtually.

[16:49]
Dave: Absolutely.

[16:49]
Matthew: I mean we can go out and  see Steve and ask him to sit down, and ask him 4 or 5  questions. And then put him on the show when he doesn’t truck all the way over here and be here Thursday at 3 o’clock.

[17:01]
Dave: Exactly.

[17:01]
Matthew: So I’m really looking forward to utilizing this going forward. But once again, leave us some feedback on what you thought, if it’s working, if you can hear it, if you can see it, anything you want. So as always, we’re really interested in feedback. We did have the next clip was another industry expert on the subject of viral video, so let’s see what he has to say about getting video online.

VIDEO CLIP

[17:30]
Expert (Dave): Has this ever happened to you?

[17:32]
Man’s Voice: Calsinger, what are we doing about YouTube? We need to be doing this now. All our competitors are already doing YouTube.  Why haven’t we done it? Figure it out.

[17:40]
Expert (Dave): Well, wait no more. Here at IWantMyViralVideo.com, our patent pending algorithm can answer the YouTube question once and for all. You can test drive the iwantmyviralvideo.com system with 30 day test drive before you buy it. You’ll go viral for it.

END OF VIDEO CLIP

[17:59]
Matthew: So that was a clip from a campaign that we launched with Dave, obviously. Geez, I don’t know, 6 months ago or more?

[18:07]
Dave: Yeah. Probably in the winter of this year.

[18:10]
Matthew: It was a little bit of a parody on kind of that hype that’s built up around video. Everyone wants a viral video. How do I make my video go viral? As someone who works in online video company, I must get that question asked of me at least one or two times a week.

[18:28]
Dave: Well, it’s easy. You go to I Want My Viral Video and you just make it.

[18:32]
Matthew: So check out iwantmyviralvideo.com. You can see more of Dave doing his best impersonation of Crazy Eddie.

[18:39]
Dave: Crazy Eddie.

[18:40]
Matthew: And all your viral video needs will be answered on that site. Check it out. So next up, I’d like to play a quick video that we worked on with David Meerman Scott. He went around the world and asked people some questions. And Chris actually put together this video which I think is a pretty cool synopsis of what he found out, so Dave, uh, Chris, why don’t you roll the old 5 questions.

VIDEO CLIP

[19:07]
David: Ok, so I’m here in Istanbul. Riga Latvia. Estonia today. Lithuania. Hi, I’m in Zagreb Croatia. We’re in Boston. We’re in Wellington, New Zealand, today. I’ve done this in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Turkey, all over the United States. Here’s the first question. In the last 1 to 2 months, either privately or professionally, have you answered a direct mail advertisement? Zero. Oh, I’m sorry. We’ve got, let’s call it 5% of this room. 4% of the room. 30% . I got 3, 4 people, 5 people, ok, we’re up to 4% of the room. Looks like I’ve only got 2 hands. Have you gone through the telephone directory? The Yellow Pages? The telephone directory? Has anybody done that in the last several months? I see zero hands. 2 we got 2 people. No hands. That would be zero. In order to research a product or service that you might want to buy, have you gone to mainstream media? That means magazines,  radio, television, or newspapers. That’s 20% of the room. I’d say that’s 10% of this room. Let’s call that 4% of the room. Have you gone to Google or another search engine? Google or another search engine? Look at that. There’s 100% of the room. 100%. 100% of the room and one person in the back playing (?). Do you believe that’s 100% of this room. Have you tapped your online network? That means used email, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, and somebody sent you back an answer to, which was a URL, a website you visited? How many people can answer yes to this question? I’m gonna say that’s 85% of the room. 95% of this room. That’s 80% of this room. 80%. 90%. I’m gonna turn the camera back to myself, and say see I told you. All over the world. We’re here in Istanbul. All over the world, people answer that question exactly the same way.

[21:32]
Matthew: So you can see, that video and others on David’s blog, Web Inc. Now. Highly encourage you to check it out if you haven’t done so. Dave is a great speaker and online video, online marketing, and just an expert. He wrote The New Rules of Marketing and PR.
But, you know, it was pretty cool how Chris was able to put that video together. You can literally see everyone answering the same way, whether it’s in Istanbul, or Boston, or Philippines, or  wherever it is. And it shouldn’t be any surprise if you’re out there marketing to anybody whether it’s B2B or B2C, the traditional media is not where…

[20:15]
Dave: No.

[20:15]
Matthew: …people are going to find the answers to their informational needs. They’re going online. They’re searching. And if you’re not present online whether it’s your online, your website, your main website, your blog, your Twitter account, your Facebook fanpage, your YouTube account. These are all places people are going to find answers about things that will help them solve their problems. And if you are offering a product or service to help people solve problems, which …

[22:45]
Dave: B2B or B2C

[22:46]
Matthew: …everybody’s doing, you are missing out on a tremendous shift in the way people are buying online, so check out Web Inc. Now, and also follow David at @DMScott on Twitter. He’s got a lot of great stuff to say. What did you think about that video?

[23:03]
Dave: Yeah, I mean, to exactly to your point. I mean, it’s the whole shift. It should come to no surprise. You might say ahh well that’s David’s audience they’re probably shifted towards that to begin with. That’s why they’re there. But not really. That’s how people are thinking. That’s how people are buying these days.

[23:18]
Matthew: I mean, I would almost say the opposite. You know, I’ve seen David speak a bunch of times, and, you know, I think I get the gist of it.

[23:27]
Dave: Right.

[23:27]
Matthew: I’m definitely a convert. I’ve read the books, and I would probably not go to see Dave again. I mean, I would if it was convenient to me, but I would probably say I think I get it already.

[23:42]
Dave: Right.

[23:42]
Matthew: Where as the folks that do go probably say…

[23:44]
Dave: I don’t get it?

[23:45]
Matthew: I need to learn something.

[23:46]
Dave: I see. I see.

[23:47]
Matthew: And yet at the same time, they probably understand it more than they know. Does that make any sense?

[23:53]
Dave: Yeah, absolutely.

[23:54]
Matthew: So, yeah, I confused myself on that one. (laughs)

[23:58]
Dave: Nah. You made your point. I understand.

[24:01]
Matthew: Alright, so I think this technology has definitely confused me enough for one day. (both laugh) Once again feel free to send in some tweets, send in some iTunes reviews. You can check us out on iTunes VisibleGains.com/iTunes. And you can also check out our Facebook page and any other way you want to give us feedback on what you saw here today. If it worked, if it didn’t work, anything. What do you got, Dave?

[24:33]
Dave: Yeah, exactly, I mean this is all…

[24:35]
Matthew: Exactly. (laughs)

[24:36]
Dave: This is all brand new and we look for more good things to come in the next few weeks as we introduce more ways for people to interact with the live show.

[24:47]
Matthew: And get better.

[24:47]
Dave: And this whole transition, this awkwardness goes away.

[24:52]
Matthew: So next week, speaking of future weeks, we will be talking Thursday at 3 o’clock with Larry Webber.

[24:49]
Dave: Absolutely.

[25:00]
Matthew: I’m excited about that. Larry was going to be on the show a couple of weeks ago. Had to reschedule due to a prior commitment. But he is the author of the recently released…he’s the author of several books…but recently, Sticks and Stones, which is all about managing your brand online and dealing with the trials and tribulations of negative comments and that sort of thing.

[25:23]
Dave: It’s a great read.

[25:24]
Matthew: So we have a quick sneak peek on what we’ll be talking with Larry about. And that’s how we’ll end the show so ‘til then, we will see you next week. Thursday, 3 o’clock. I’m Matthew Mamet.

[25:37]
Dave: And I’m Dave Kilkenny.

[25:39]
Matthew: Take care everybody.

VIDEO CLIP

[25:41]
Larry: Hi, I’m Larry Webber and I’ve been in marketing for about 30 years now. I’m most known for building the largest technology PR firm in the world that was called the Webber Group. I built the largest PR firm in the world, Webber Shandwick. My last group of companies which is called W2. I also started MyTechs. Why did I decide to write Sticks and Stones? What does it mean to influence people? At any time, somebody can click on a blog to find a negative comment about you. There’s a bigger issue going on here. Brand influence and reputation are all becoming one. I mean, You’re gonna have to create the environments people want to learn, share, meet up, but also, buy things.

BREAK IN VIDEO CLIP

[26:24]
Larry: You know I look forward to being on PTV, you know in a few weeks.

END

[00:00]
Matthew:  Hello and welcome everybody.  Today is October 22nd, 2009 and you're watching Visible Gains Live. [applauds]

[audience applauds and cheers]

[00:10].
Matthew:  Thank you, thank you, thank you.  My name is Matthew Mamet.  I am at 'msmamet' on Twitter and with me today CC Chapman, Creative Director at New York based Campfire, a full service Marketing agency.

[00:22]
CC:  That's us.

[00:23]
Matthew:  Welcome to the show.

[00:24]
CC:  Thanks for having me man.

[00:25]
Matthew: Thanks for being on the show.  Really excited to have you to probe your brain, about marketing, about sales, about engagements, about social media. 

[00:33]
CC:  Cool.

[00:34]
Matthew:  CC has been kind of running ragged lately from Inbound Marketing Summit and beyond.

[00:39]
CC:  It's been crazy.  It's been, uh, it's one of those things. I mean, you know, if you ever speak, summer happens, there's no conferences.  And then all of a sudden it's back to school, they pause, and then all of a sudden everyone rushes to get everything done before the holidays.  So, you know, it's one thing last week.  I'm going to be headed to L.A. next week. You know.

[00:56]
Matthew:  Tell us a little about your itinerary.  Where have you been and where are you going?

[00:59]
CC:  Where have I been?  Last week I was in, so, ok, Inbound Marketing Summit started everything at Gillette Stadium.  That was great, down the street from my house.  Every conference should be held there.  I wish.  Then it was on to Blog World in Las Vegas, which was last week, which was a really good time.  And I’m off this week.  I’m here. No, I’m here.  I’m not off.  I’m here.

[01:16]
Matthew: (laughs)

[01:16]
CC:  And then next week is L.A. for the One Forty Conference.

[01:19]
Matthew:  Ok.

[01:19]
CC:  And then I come back, New York, for the Audience Conference, which is a brand new one.  I’m really excited about the Audience Conference.  It’s a different conference focused on the importance of the audience.  Where it’s going to have art mixed with social media and performances.

[01:33]
Matthew:  Cool.

[01:34]
CC:  Kind of, you know, like Mike Arrington and then a hip hop band, and then Jason Calacanis and then a puppet.  You know, who knows what’s going on.  So I can’t wait for that.  Then it’s Web 2.0 in New York.  So, and then I think I’m done.  I think. Something else might come up. So, that’s the current schedule.

[01:47]
Matthew:  Well thank you for taking time out to squeeze in our little half hour appearance.

[01:51]
CC:  It’s awesome to be here. I mean, you know, I have to take care of the other Boston people.  Boston people take care of each other.


[01:58]
Matthew:  I had the opportunity to be down at the Inbound Marketing Summit and I heard some of the panels that you were on.


[02:01]
CC:  One of them you hosted. Yeah. (laughs)



[02:05]
Matthew:  VisibleGains is actually working with awareness and Mike Lewis who was moderating the panel that you were on, which was pretty cool I thought.

[02:13]
CC:  It was fun.  It was different, yeah.  Next time we’ll get a woman on it, right?

[02:17]
Matthew:  That’s right.  Cause Chris Brogan had a kind of unique way of pointing out …

[02:22]
CC:  Yeah, we’ll leave the counting,

[02:24]
Matthew: … the chromosome count.

[02:25]
CC:  We’ll leave the counting to everyone else.

[02:26]
Matthew:  So you can check that out on our blog as well as the Awareness blog as well as probably a million other blogs.

[02:31]
CC:  Yep.

[02:32]
Matthew:  That panel but, I want to talk a little bit today about some similar topics but the first thing I wanted to bring to everyone’s attention is that you, as I mentioned, are Creative Director at Campfire, which is a new role for you because you recently had an agency that was acquired.   Tell us a little bit about that.

[02:50]
CC:  So, yeah, the Advance Guard was an agency that was started in 2007 with me, myself and Steve Colson, my business partner.  And we worked with Campfire from day one.  I mean, we leased office space from them.  We knew these guys.  We worked with them on a variety of projects.  And what was interesting was over the summer we just kind of got together and had this conversation and it came up, you know, well what if we acquire you.  And it was interesting.  It was the first time I’d ever sold a business to somebody and everyone was what happened to Advance Guard, you know, what are you doing now, you’re living on the beach, living large.  I’m like, no.  I’m still working my tail off.  I mean we all came over to Campfire just to, it was a, it was a, it made, it made sense.  It was a nice continuation where we could continue working with the clients we’d already worked with and we’d done stuff on Horizon 5 (?),  HBO, Shark Week, a lot of things, and then now all of a sudden we can do it together.  And so it’s really nice.  It’s exciting where we’ve got a really cool team in New York.  I'm here in Boston. And I'm excited about it.  Campfirenyc.com if you want to find out more about what we do and who we are.  It's been kind of fun, we've been sweeping up awards lately.  I'm not much of an awards show guy but it's kind of cool.

[03:52]
Matthew:   You'll take 'em.


[03:53]
CC:  Oh yeah when you go to awards show and you get, you know, you beat Coca-Cola and some other, you know, small brands, it's kind of cool I have to admit


[04:00]
Matthew:  Yeah.


[04:01]
CC:  So a lot of that's for the work we did, we've been doing on True Blood a year ago.  So it's been a fun couple of months for sure.  I'm looking forward to it.  I'm looking forward to the new clients we've got coming and some of the prospects and stuff that'll,  maybe I can come back in a year and we can talk about them.

[04:13]
Matthew:  Yeah.  I want to talk to a little bit about some of the stuff that you guys are kind of brewing up in the lab, anything you can share with us.

[04:19]
CC:  Ok.

[04:19]
Matthew: Well we'll talk about that a little bit later on.


[04:21]
CC:  All right.


[04:22]
Matthew:  The last thing I  wanted to mention about Advance Guard was kind of a cool story about how you got that name.  I love that story.

[04:28]
CC:  You do!


[04:29]
Matthew:  Yeah.  I think that's kind of cool.  Tell us a little about it.


[04:31]
CC:  Ah so it was kind of funny.  It was actually the Nutley Diner when we said it.  Nutley Diner in New Jersey and me and Steve were trying to figure out what we were going to do for, you know, naming the company and we liked the word vanguard.  So we said let's find out more about this.  So we started Google-ing and Wikipedia.  And we found out the Advance Guard is where vanguard came from.  And, you know, it's been used in books and everything.  And then we went out and all the names were free.  And we went oh, ok we got to do this.  It was one of those things.  The only other reference is, there's a reference in a Harry Potter book to the Advance Guard.  Once.  And so we still have Harry Potter fans coming to our website sometimes.

[05:08]
Matthew:  Cool.

[05:09]
CC:   But it's interesting. But that's what it was.  And there's a great Melville quote that we use a lot.

[05:12]
Matthew:    That's was, that's was what I was

[05:13]
Matthew and CC:  Yeah.

[05:13]
Matthew:  The Melville quote.

[05:13]
CC:  The Melville quote's awesome. 

[05:14]
Matthew: I was in college back before I realized I had to make money to earn a living.  I was.  I was an English major.

CC:  Ok.

Matthew:  And so I had this whole kind of, you know, Hemmingway, Melville kind of thing going, yeah so.

CC:  Oh, all right.  I couldn't read the whole book, White Jacket, I haven't read it.  Is it good?

Matthew:  I haven't read that one.

CC:  Ok. But still the quote is beautiful.

Matthew:  I love the quote.

CC:   The quote's pretty cool.

Matthew:  Check it out on the Advance Guard website.  There's a cool little page that kind of describes the story more.

CC:  Yep.

Matthew:  More in detail.  But let's get back to business.

CC:   All right.

Matthew:  If you're out there watching a flat make sure that you're tweeting your questions to VisibleGains and we'll see them and we'll get the questions answered online.  But the next question I have for you was a subject about engagement versus activation.

CC: Ok.

Matthew:  So I was talking Mike Trejano, the President of Hallmark Digital, and his, he was blogging at the time, a couple weeks ago, about this very same topic, which is there's a lot of buzz around engagement marketing, engaging with people using social media and kind of getting your fan base, and

CC:  Sure.

Matthew:  Get your fans, friends, and followers going.  But the next level or the next step is, ok now that you have all these people how do you activate them to do something?  And it, and I know that this is something that you guys specialize in. So for those that are out there who are probably at that point.  I think, if you think about the grand spectrum of people they

CC:  Right.

Matthew:  Ok I get that social media's important.  I get that I need to be out there.  And they've probably created some compelling concept, gotten people who are interested in what they have.

CC:  Right.  Right.

Matthew:  They're prepared to follow them, now what?

CC:  So, ok, yeah.  So we talk about this all the time where it's funny that so many people are more focused on let's get ten thousand followers, let's get a thousand followers on Twitter or Facebook.  Let's get a hundred thousand Facebook fans.  That's nice and that's cool and it makes you feel good and you want that community. But then what do you do with them?  You know.  And we talk about this a lot and one of things that we always preach is the fact that you've got this audience.  They're passionate about your brand.  They had to have been to some level or they wouldn’t have joined.  You've given them a reason to join, become part of your community, whatever the platform.  You know, where , I think this holds true whether it's Facebook, Ning, Twitter, or whatever it is.  You got to give them something to do.  Now I like to talk about using it to educate or entertain them, it can be one or the other.  Both, if you get both it's great.  But you want to give them something that's going to stimulate them.  That they're actually going to want to share, interact, comment back, share, you know, share on their blog, do a like if it's on Facebook.  You've got to give them something to do.  It could be something as simple as a Facebook application that is right for them.  You know, maybe it's  something that gets them to interact with each other.  Maybe it's  getting them, it's a contest to get them to send photos in or maybe win.  Whatever it is you've got to ask them to do something and give them some benefit for it.  It doesn't have to be a contest necessarily.  Sometimes people will do it just for the pure sake of I like this enough much I'm going to do something. You know, I love, it's good to have brand advocates.  That they're so passionate about your brand they'll pretty much do anything for you.  All you have to do is ask.  And I guess sometimes people will  kind of forget or are they just doing this.  Well it's because you didn't ask them to.  And it could be something as simple as, hey tell us about your experience in our store or share the latest piece of clothing you bought or it could, it could be anything.

Matthew:  So from what I see, kind of, in my experience, which is, is limited.  To say the least.  And it's also a little bit more focused on B to B.

CC:  Yeah.

Matthew:  I think there's kind of two, there's the two ends of that spectrum.  There's the folks that have the ten thousand followers and they're afraid to do anything.  They're afraid to ask.  They're like I don't want to do anything wrong.

CC:  Right.

Matthew:  Because there are so many people out there telling me how to do it and I don't know who's right and I'm kind of nervous and scared.  And then there are the other on the other end of the spectrum is great I got ten thousand people.  I'm going to tell them to buy my stuff immediately.

CC:  Right.

Matthew:  So, what are some examples?  Specific examples that you've seen in that middle ground and I heard what you said just now about you have two main choices, educate or entertain.

CC:  Entertain, yeah.

Matthew:  And I think in B to B kind of, people kind of,

CC:  It's more towards the education

Matthew:  Education.

CC:  Educate, yeah.  But if you could entertain them while you're educating them then that's the coup de gras, if you can get it. It ain't easy and it doesn't always work.

Matthew:  And it, it's takes, it takes a little bit of risk there too.

CC:  Oh yeah.

Matthew:  Educate, you know, you're not entertaining.

CC: (laughs)

Matthew:  You know, well, we'll table that.  So in the education piece I'm thinking about, you know, all these companies out there.  VisibleGains is one of them.

CC:  Yep.

Matthew:  That's creating as much compelling, educational content as we can.

CC:  Right.

Matthew:  To attract the right people.  And then what?  You know, so, how do we kind of convert them into?

CC:  Well let me ask you, because I don't, I don't know this about your econo-, I mean, I've seen the show.  I've seen the content.  But do you ever ask, you know, your viewers, either during or after the fact, do you ever ask them hey what could we do better, what question didn't we ask.  You know, I don't, it's something as simple as that.  I don't know if you're doing it or not.  But it's amazing where, if you've got people who are paying attention, even if it's only ten people or a hundred or a thousand.  If you say, what did you think of this, what could we have, do, done better.  That's a safe question no matter what industry you're in.  I'm not saying that people are not scared to ask it cause brands are petrified of what could we do better.

Matthew:  Right.

CC:  But its such a simple, easy ask and an easy win.  Tell us what you thought is another simple, and I know that's scary too.  I mean, I say, I talk to clients all the time and they're like what if they say something bad.  Yeah some people might say stuff bad.

Matthew:  So I am a, as you can probably tell by the questions I just asked you.

CC:  Yeah.

Matthew:  I am always looking for feedback.  I'm always looking for advice.  And you can leave that on VisibleGains/itunes.  Go in there and give us a rating, whether it's zero stars or five stars and give us your review and give us that feedback. Love to have, um..

CC:  So you ask for it on itunes.

Matthew:  Yeah, that's how I, uh..

CC:  That's very public.

Matthew:  Yes.

CC:  That's, that's cool.  No, no I'm all for it.  I'm just, I was expecting you to say, you know, come to our website and leave it on the show.  That's great you asking for that public of a forum.

Matthew:  You know we also do the Facebook page and all.

CC:  Ok.

Matthew:  But I think we've seen the most success with itunes.

CC:  Well it's a double win for you obviously, because if other people see positive reviews, they subscribe, I mean, it's like, it's a smart strategy.

Matthew:  Cool.  So asking people what they think.

CC:  Ask them what they think.  Give them you know, give them something to play with. I mean, I was talking in, uh, don't be afraid of what they're going to say.  And I understand it's such a hard concept.  I worked with some of the biggest brands in the world and they're nervous too.  But I think you'd be amazed if you gave a little bit of a trust in your community, if you have a passionate community, if you trust them a little, even a little bit, they're not going to revolt against you. You know, it's one of, you know, baby steps.  Give a little bit of trust, give a little bit more.  It won't hurt.  I promise.  Maybe a little bit at first, but...

Matthew:  And you know if you're that transparent and open and honest, they'll help you.  They'll protect you.

CC:  Yeah.

Matthew:  That's one thing that I've learned from personal experience.

CC:  Especially because then they become your advocates.  They will step up and defend you.  Or they will step up, there's nothing better than if someone does say oh I hate this, whatever it is.  Some action you took, it's a product, whatever it is.  If they step in and say I hate this, if you have a passionate enough community, you don't have to say a thing.  Because your advocates are going to step up and say well I had that problem but here's what I did to fix it.  Or, yes, but did you see this.   Or, that's the one time that they will step up and defend you and if you can get that community so passionate that they'll defend you.  That's, that's the goal that you're striving for.  Where you can just kind of sit back and jump in where appropriately, where your community takes care of itself.  When you get to that point it's a beautiful thing.