Social Media allows slightly interested prospects to gradually become interested enough to contact you.

Compare this to the encyclopedia salesman, who used to go door to door peddling his wares. My father did this for a time, and explained the procedure. I don’t recall what the pitch was, but the salesman generally walked out with a sale and probably a few referrals, all in one visit. Probably he’d never see the family again. Why would he? Neither he nor the family expected to see him again. The sale was done.

These days we have lots of options. Asides from the fact that we’d probably think twice about allowing a stranger in our home, we are probably going to resist buying right away until we have had a chance to “Google” for the real scoop.

By properly engaging in a corporate social media campaign, you can provide the backup data needed for a prospect to verify you are for real, and validate their purchase with you. From the viewpoint of the seller, social media also provides a kind of consumer analysis through the feedback customers tend to leave behind on sites like Facebook and Twitter. By consistently dripping out your latest news, articles and relevant information, clients come to know you and your company. Once they are comfortable you are for real, they may reach out to you, virtually closed on doing business by the time they request an appointment.

Skip the Pine-sol. That’s the power of social media, baby.

While I was wildly deleting spam emails this morning, Chris Abraham’s blog post title caught my eye, just in the nick of time. I found it to be a great article, and wanted to share it with you all. It has to do with the importance of blogging.

For many small business owners, blogging is a little more than scary. If they even had a marketing department to help them, it’d probably take a ransom note and the threat of their website disappearing into the “Internet ether” for them to really get involved. Well, I’m here to deliver that note, because if you’ aren’t blogging, disappearing is probably what a website faces as a result. Well, disappearing of the first few pages of Google searches, anyway.

Chris brings up some great points in his article, titled, “8 Reasons Why Now is the Best Time to Start Blogging,” and anyone interested in blogging (or social media in general) would find it worthwhile. One of the points that really resonated with me is how much dedication and work is involved! Blogging and leveraging corporate social media really takes discipline and hard work. But that’s just part of being in business, and always has been.

The good news Chris brings is that those who take a business-like approach and are disciplined about blogging will probably beat out their competition. There are so many tools available now that make it easier to handle the logistics of blogging and leveraging social media. The Association is using Topic Optimized Marketing, but there’s no lack of tools.

Now’s the time to start blogging! If your company hasn’t started taking advantage of long tail keyword research coupled with today’s’ blogging technology, it might be time to write your own ransom note. I suspect a lot of company websites will be held “hostage” by those companies who start (or have already started to) engaging in blogging. Where will your company show up?

Having a restless spirit has led Snehal all over the world in search for a better way to tell his stories. He grew up in Chicago where he worked in television and film from the age of seventeen. He spent a number of years in Mumbai, India directing commercials and working on features. Snehal now resides in Hollywood, working furiously.

The Association’s resident expert on the Canon DSLR 5D camera, Snehal is a featured instructor at our Canon Boot Camp, providing training and certification on the 5D (and other models) to both still photographers and seasoned cinematographers alike.