Social Business Intelligence Advance #3

It is not enough to have a web intelligence solution that shows us where our own internal CRM is connected to important conversations and trends. We must also have a solution that shows us where our competitors’ CRM is connected to these same conversations and trends. In addition, we must have a solution that automatically delivers a set of individuals exactly like our best customers, complete with First Name, Last Name, Current Phone, Current Email, Current Social Links and cited examples of participation in these important conversations and trends. That’s the solution yet to be achieved in the social business intelligence world.

Social Business Intelligence Advance #1 and #2

When social business intelligence solutions provide a “Create Prospects CRM” button, the social analytics industry will have leapt one more notch forward. What it looks like is this: a series of 10,000 individuals have commented on a specific brand/issue over 1 month AND this CRM button collects Name, Current Address, Current Phone, Current Email, Current social links for each individual. Instantly. Downloadable in a CSV format or a colorful PDF “dossier-style” format. The social media monitoring solution that offers this button will become a global leader in prospect generation.

Advance number two is when this service is fully applicable across global borders, delivering such info for residents of all nations.

The Sweet Spot in Social Business Intelligence for Weaving Marcoms and Sales: The Machine & Marketing/Sales Process

CONTEXT:
A fierce debate still rages between marketing and sales in most organizations as the enterprise seeks to understand how to use social data for both silos. With exceptional software and smart cross-silo relations, marketing and sales can collaborate on nurturing and closing ideal prospects. This blog post has outlined the type of software needed to do this AND a sample sales approach for teams to consider.

WHAT THIS POST COVERS
This post covers three specific topics:

1. The exact description of an ideal social business intelligence “machine” that would serve both marcoms and sales.

2. The functionality this social business intelligence machine would possess.

3. A set of potent actions that combine a bit of marketing and bit of sales, thus demonstrating how one can progress from market research (using social data) to a closed sales deal.

THE IDEAL SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MACHINE: The sweet spot for social business software is between the marcoms & sales silos, between pools of potential fans & fresh prospect data. The social business software of tomorrow will bring understanding between marcoms and sales, will create an easy funnel for “smart” fans/followers to become customers. Deriving prospects from social data has never been easier with the combination of solutions now avail to the marcoms & sales silos. Now these solutions need to be “merged” into one single machine. I describe this machine below.

THE EXACT FUNCTIONS OF THE IDEAL SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MACHINE (as desired by Marketing and Sales silos):
In the coming powerful social business intelligence software (the “ideal machine”), we will see the following features:

1. Dials to find the exact people fitting prospect profiles. Imagine being able to pull every profile from every major social network AND THEN have dials to hone results down to exactly the customer profiles your business seeks.

2. Get suggestions from the software (from “the machine”) of other “pools of prospects” and prospect types BASED UPON your initial search.

3. Then, imagine pushing a “button” and getting current phone, email, physical address, add’l social links appended on-the-fly to the social profiles discovered thus far in the process above.

4. Now, mix in Topics of Influence & Volume of activity by each profile relative to the themes in your marketing & sales campaigns.

A SET OF POTENT ACTIONS FOR MARKETING & SALES AFTER EXTRACTING IDEAL PROFILES FROM THE SBI MACHINE:

1. STUDY THE LAST FEW DAYS OF TWEETS/SOCIAL MESSAGING: See what the individual is talking about. What is important to him/her? Jot down one or two specific points about these tweets/social posts/forum comments that you can compliment him/her on.

2. STUDY THE WEBSITE OF THE INDIVIDUAL: See how the individual presents himself/herself to the world. Find one to two items on the website to compliment the person about. This will make the call warmer and open an opportunity to collaborate.

3. SEND AN EMAIL TO THE PROSPECT FIRST: A powerful way to invite the person is to send a personal email wherein you introduce yourself briefly, lace in the compliments you discovered through Twitter, other social properties, blog comments, and his/her website, and then invite the individual into a collaboration.

See below sample of an email to send:

Dear Tom,

I am a Client Partner at BrandX, an FMCG group based in Los Angeles, California. Your materials online and, in particular, your steady stream of tweets chronicling your typical business process have impressed me. Would you have some time during the coming week to discuss what you are up to, what we are doing, and a possible collaboration with us?

Kind regards,

Client Partner
BrandX

4. SCHEDULE A PHONE CALL: When you get a reply to your email, schedule a call with the person. The call will involve listening to the Prospect, letting him/her know what we appreciate about him/her, what we saw in his/her materials and then working on an idea to collaborate on. It is a good plan to come to the call with some options that are personalized.

SUMMARY:
A fierce debate still rages between marketing and sales in most organizations as the enterprise seeks to understand how to use social data for both silos. With exceptional software and smart cross-silo relations, marketing and sales can collaborate on nurturing and closing ideal prospects. This blog post has outlined the type of software needed to do this AND a sample sales approach for teams to consider.

Weaving Humanity Into a Golden Chord For the Seventh Generation

Nowadays, the depth of avail data provides a foundation for putting the “7th-generation” puzzle together accurately. #SeventhGeneration

SEVENTH GENERATION THINKING: Customers can now be matched with products/services that truly serve a need every single second of every single day. The data is that rich now. ALSO, there is enough positive intent nowadays to make this a nurturing process…for the planet, for humanity and for the “seventh generation”. The throw-away culture of two generations ago is being replaced with “seventh-generation” oriented action-takers. AND, the depth of available data actually provides a foundation for putting this “seventh-generation” puzzle together accurately. #SeventhGeneration #ForwardThinking #WiseData

WARP-SPEED MANIFESTATION: Since the Internet is not a hierarchy, all images, text, movies and songs have the opportunity to grow very large and swallow preceding “giants”. As a collective entity, perhaps the Internet is like a serpent swallowing its own tail. Being within this multi-dimensional eco-system is a transformative experience for individuals and the collective. Humanity is undergoing an extremely rapid phase of evolution presently. Extremely rapid and deep. Humans are realizing how malleable time can be…particularly since ideas become flesh at light-speed now. What would have once taken an entire generation to unfold occurs within minutes in today’s world.

Each person has the innate ability to take a dream and make the images in his/her mind into a tangible, concrete physical experience.

WEAVE YOUR REALITY: An innate talent taken from humans long ago is the ability to create tangible physical realities out of intangibles. Slices of humanity do this for a living: artists, writers, inventors, business founders. But each person has the innate ability to take a dream and make the images in his/her mind into a tangible, concrete physical experience. Try this today. Draw something simple on a piece of paper, such as you walking to the fridge and getting a glass of juice. Then stand up and do it. Now add complexity to this and watch the most “impossible” images turn into physical experience. #PracticalMagic #FictionIntoReality #Here2There

Each person has the innate ability to take a dream and make the images in his/her mind into a tangible, concrete physical experience. Each person can quite easily go from “here” to “there” nowadays.

The Relationship between Marketing Communications and Sales

The Ideal:

The key to long term success is to have Imagination, Persistence, Compassion.

Fostering a deep, real and fruitful conversation between marketing communications AND sales is one of the most important tasks for senior managers nowadays. The marketing department is working with product development on a lovely garden. And sales is out there hunting, hunting, hunting to bring “eaters” to the garden. Market researchers see who the potential “eaters” are from a distance and, ideally, marcoms aids sales with extremely accurate messaging to lure the “eaters” into a rich and beautiful experience.

Joan Damico writes, “Marcom (Marketing communications) tends to operate from a longer term visionary / brand perspective. This often leads to a content clash with sales, which must meet monthly and quarterly revenue targets. There’s opportunity for marcom and sales to reach a happy medium between content that is visionary, such as thought leadership, and tactical content that is more immediately useable, such as ROI calculators and product comparisons.” (SOURCE: http://www.business2community.com/content-marketing/will-content-marketing-end-contentious-b2b-marketing-and-sales-relationship-0504728)

Damico’s excellent observation pinpoints the need for accuracy within the marcoms-sales relationship. Ideally, the two silos come to an understanding and are able to work together. The process of market research, content development and “message tweaking” can seem endless to the Sales silo. Salespeople want it “right now”. This is why it is wise of senior managers to start specific marketing programs six-twelve months PRIOR to attached sales initiatives. In fact, a deep market audit can inform a far more accurate sales process and marcoms can provide the sales teams with incredibly accurate and effective messaging due to the research. Likewise, sales can communicate their on-the-ground experience with customers to marcoms. That’s a very rich conversation and planning approach!

Seth Godin writes, “Valuable marketing campaigns are the result of time and user experience, not media and more media. Social media is a marathon, a gradual process in which you build a reputation. The best time to start was a while ago. The second best time to start is today. But turning it up to 11 isn’t going to get you there faster.” (SOURCE: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/06/the-thermostat-and-the-frying-pan.html)

When a marcoms team has been given a realistic lead time, their contribution to the sales silo will be very valuable. More managers have to realize the differing pace of marcoms and sales. And need to plan accordingly.

Questions for Social Business Intelligence Software Providers

CONTEXT:
Do you own or are you building a social business intelligence platform? If so, I’m interested in your answers. Why? Because I have specific projects I am working on where a satisfactory answer to these questions will result in a sale for you and a win for my clients. Looking forward to your thoughts on these question, all purveyors of social business intelligence solutions.

THE ULTIMATE GOAL:
If you are a social media monitoring solution, have you considered adding a social append function to your offering? Your customers want to see what people are saying about a brand or a market. AND they want to see EVERY bit of contact detail related to each of those commenters. We need blended solutions where the precision of Brandwatch filtering matches with the aspirations of Fliptop social append and is housed in the “nearly there” dashboard at Salesforce/Marketing Cloud.

QUESTIONS FOR SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOFTWARE PROVIDERS:

1. Is your social append to emails automatic and 100% correct?

2. Conversely, is address, phone, and email append to social profiles automatic and 100% correct?

3. When will any social business intelligence solution find the social account associated with an email, append this account, and place the photo of the prospect automatically in the photo slot within the sCRM interface?

4. I want to upload just a single column of emails? Can your social business intelligence solution automatically find and append all other info (social profile, address, phone, social streams).

5. What is the future of Salesforce’s Jigsaw?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jigsaw_(website)

6. What do you think of Jive’s new StreamOnce? If you had the chance to use Gist prior to its sale to RIM, how would you compare StreamOnce to Gist?
http://www.zdnet.com/jive-streamonce-aims-to-connect-microsoft-salesforce-google-apps-7000015367/

7. What is the max upload of emails for append in your social business intelligence solution?

8. Is the upload of contacts confidential? How do I know that?

Replacing email blasts with relationship marketing

No, it was the other guy, the guy who bought what worked, the one in charge of the real budget–he wasn’t easy, but he was worth it… ~Seth Godin

THE CURRENT SITUATION: Ever receive an email with a sales pitch? We all do. And what do you do with 90% of these? You do not have time to read them and you trash them. Many times even when the pitch is about something you really want or need. There just isn’t time to open that email and read the pitch, click on the link and do all the digital “paperwork” to get what you want.

Receiving an email blast from a company is different than receiving a helpful solution in the context of a comment thread in social networks. The former is likely to end up in the junk folder. The latter is “in context” and will be read every time. This is why corporations are ceasing email blast campaigns and building relationship marketing teams. This is why corporations are building customized communities based on customer needs and competitors’ shortcomings.

Eleftherios Hatziiannou writes, “Marketers spent fortunes every year for marketing research and data to understand precisely who their target group is, what they want and where they can reach them. Today people publicly say what they want by using social media. Wouldn`t it make sense to learn how to participate in this new kind of marketplace and thereby turn conversations into commerce?” (SOURCE: http://www.peopleizers.com)

THE DEEPER REALITY WITHIN CORPORATIONS: An organization that moves away from email to internal communications networks, such as Salesforce Chatter, Yammer or Sharepoint is an organization that gets the value of relationship marketing. In addition, such an organization gets the value of knowing the context in which an employee/customer is complaining.

Brian Solis, Principal Analyst at Altimeter Group, writes, “Collaboration takes more than the idea of Facebook behind a firewall. This is about aligning people around a common vision, to encourage engagement beyond the teams you know, to create inside and outside experiences that matter to employees, customers, and partners. Enterprise social networks represent the technology to bring your vision to life as they are merely tools that mimic the way that people connect and communicate in the real world.” (SOURCE: What’s the Future of Business – http://www.wtfbusiness.com)

It’s one thing to have an email, a name and a role in our marketing database. And then to blast a prescribed formula to segmented lists. It’s a far deeper action to have a complaint, a context AND an email, name and role. When an organization has EVERY complaint out there about a competitor/themselves PLUS the current contact info for those who are complaining, they have an opportunity to engage in conversations with those complainers one-to-one. This is called relationship marketing.

“We created a contextual social space where people interested by a topic (in this case the World Economic Forum – http://weflive.com/kpmg) could follow what what said about it and the brand was opening a discussion channel in this precise context,” writes Nicolas Dengler of Shore.li, http://www.shore.li

The question is whether they will use such information in a way that the customer truly gets and wants to respond to. Will they mobilize their marketing team to offer solutions one-to-one in social comment threads? Or will they simply do another email blast?

Ted Rubin, a world expert in relationship marketing, writes, “Creating the opportunity for customers to share via a social platform allows people to give feedback/suggestions real-time and therefore increases the brand benefit exponentially.” (SOURCE: http://www.tedrubin.com/blog/)

When asked about the difference between corporations running email blasts and those running Relationship Marketing campaigns, Giles Palmer, CEO of Brandwatch, the world’s premier social media monitoring service, said, “The answer’s obvious, isn’t it? The difference between email marketing and relationship marketing reminds me of a guy driving a car around a town centre with a big microphone screaming their message out versus someone walking through the crowd shaking people’s hands and talking WITH them. If the broadcast message is funny or informative, ok, it’s a way to get to a large number of people quickly. But if it’s not, it’s just noise. And who wants to be remembered as the noisy guy in the room.” (SOURCE: Personal call with Giles Palmer of Brandwatch, April 2013)

This transition from email blasts to relationship marketing IS the future of marketing and sales. And it is the next step in moving from a culture that looks at people as digits TO a culture that sees people as people.

SOLUTIONS:
Solutions for corporations to build relationship include (in order):

a) an audit of all complaints/feedback about a product/service (using listening tech, such as Social Media Monitoring tools),
b) a creation of responses internally and/or with the help of a content-marketing agency,
c) the assignment of an individual/team to respond within 24 hours to complaints/feedback in ALL social streams and comment feeds,
d) the creation of a “living” database where these responses and the resulting sales are documented.

PURPOSE OF SOLUTIONS:

1) To identify who is complaining about our competitor.
2) To offer solutions to these people directly.
3) To improve our products/services through knowing their complaints.
4) To increase awareness of our comprehensive understanding of this market niche AND of what our customer needs.
5) To increase sales.

IN BRIEF: Social prospects are developed THROUGH providing solutions in social comment feeds. Conversion occurs when a prospect finds the solution satisfactory AND better than a competitor’s solution. The process involves: identification of needs through listening, providing better solutions to these needs than competitors, follow up with people who want to use the better solution.

RESOURCES FOR FURTHER STUDY:

1. THE ULTIMATE EMAIL STATS LIST VIA HUBSSPOT:
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33901/The-Ultimate-List-of-2012-Email-Marketing-Stats.aspx

2. THE GRAND GUIDE TO SOCIAL SELLING VIA ELOQUA:
http://www.slideshare.net/Eloqua/the-grande-guide-to-social-selling

3: HOW TO DO RESEARCH IN SOCIAL NETWORKS VIA BRANDWATCH:
http://www.brandwatch.com/knowledge-base/ebooks/

Growth Hacking Lessons: A list of links related to measuring viral loops, customer retention, engagement, and lifetime value

“Growth hacking is acquiring, retaining, and monetizing users more effectively. A growth hacker is an individual who can, from end-to-end, collect data, ideate, plan, execute, and deploy the necessary tactics and strategies to hit goals.” ~Matt Humphrey

On Growth Hacking:
http://www.quora.com/Growth-Hacking

http://www.aginnt.com/growth-hacker

http://www.slideshare.net/mattangriffel/growth-hacking

How to Measure Viral Loops (and, more interestingly, predict how people will travel through time to outcomes):
https://speakerdeck.com/sicross/viral-loops-lessons-from-the-front-line

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causality_loop

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination_paradoxes_in_fiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-factor_(marketing)

http://www.slideshare.net/anuragmjain/viral-loops

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law

http://andrewchen.co/2007/07/11/whats-your-viral-loop-understanding-the-engine-of-adoption/

http://www.amazon.com/Viral-Loop-Facebook-Businesses-Themselves/dp/B0040RMF7U

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_marketing

How to Measure Customer Retention (and, more interestingly, grow your seduction abilities):
http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/11051-21-ways-online-retailers-can-improve-customer-retention-rates

http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexlawrence/2012/11/01/five-customer-retention-tips-for-entrepreneurs/

http://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/customer-retention-keep-good-customers-from-leaving.html

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/engaging-customers-after-purchase-what-is-the-value-of-an-existing-customer-infographic-019227.php

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/forrester-ditch-the-funnel-go-for-the-customer-life-cycle-019290.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_retention

How to Measure Engagement:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-10-12/why-measuring-user-engagement-is-harder-than-you-think

http://www.marketingforecast.com/archives/22347/

http://sociallygold.com/facebook-insights/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engagement_(marketing)

How to Measure Expected User LTV:
http://insights.canopylabs.com/?p=81

https://www.custora.com/tour/feature_predictive_customer_lifetime_value_clv_retail

http://www.slideshare.net/BullsEyeInternetMarketing/calculating-life-time-value

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifetime_value

A process for translating insights from social media data into innovative and emotional experiences

“Facebook enables brands to find consumers in a place where they’re already spending a great deal of time. It is also highly precise: I can target users by location, language, education, employment, age, gender, marital status, their likes and interests and the size and profile of their list of friends,” says Sarah Blackman, digital planning and innovation director at Young & Rubicam in Berlin. (SOURCE: http://www.momentumreview.com/uk/how-facebook-stole-our-brands)

“At the end of the day everyone has the same amount of data because data is just people doing stuff. Converting that into insight is the point; that’s where it turns to magic,” Unilever CMO Keith Weed highlights the importance of having minds on the team who are looking for actionable points of departure within the data. (SOURCE: http://www.digiday.com/brands/brands-at-ces-say-dont-be-seduced-by-data/)

THE CLIMATE INTO WHICH SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSTS ENTER: A host of technology companies and techno-geeks are actively engaged in developing applications for segmenting the mass of data flowing in from social networks. Advanced agencies within the WPP network, such as Ogilvy, JWT and Kantar are increasing their analysis staffing. But the staff they are looking for are not just scientists. The social analyst has spent time in the networks and is merging an emotional sensibility with solid critical thinking skills. He believes the Internet is a real living organism and goes to work every day excited to put on his diving gear and encounter the denizens of the deep. She has an awareness that the most subtle shifts in one area of the Internet can cause a flood of awareness and action in unexpected communities, forums and in the minds of critical key influencers.

THE IDENTITY OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYST WITHIN THE CORPORATION: Major corporations and agencies must develop teams to leverage masses of social data and turn that data into stories, communities and new products/services. These teams will be filled with individuals who have learned age-old analysis techniques, as outlined in The Handbook of Market Intelligence from the Global Intelligence Alliance – http://www.globalintelligence.com/insights-analysis/handbook-on-market-intelligence. The teams will also be filled with individuals who know a new world is possible and do not bow to old-school oligarchs. I’m talking here about a Pirate Bay http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUHmE5nD3W0 and Hacker mentality. Finally, these are going to be teams with a yen for weaving the digital and the material realms together, such as the GoPro crew http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3PDXmYoF5U and Timothy Ferriss of 4 Hour Work Week fame http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/. Big agencies and corporations need individuals who can lead them out of stagnant forms of pride and into more “experiential” dives into the data.

A PROCESS FOR TRANSLATING INSIGHTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA DATA INTO EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE: Below is an exact process for translating insights from social media data into innovative and emotional experiences by hand. When we know how to do something by hand, we can begin to implement the machine where possible. In the end, the human is the last mile in effective communication. In the end, one-to-one is the way to transfer messages into the “right” ears.

1. Who do you know that has the most knowledge of a particular market niche? Ask him/her which trade publications, conferences, individuals and companies are the leaders. Make a note of these on a piece of paper with a pen or on a text document on your computer.

2. Get one copy of each mentioned trade publication.

3. Note the websites of each conference, individual and company mentioned.

4. Thoroughly study this initial list from your personal contact. Note down vendors, service providers, advertisers, authors, journalists, products related to these trade publications, conferences, individuals and companies.

5. Look within these same publications and websites for a “Top list” of companies, individuals and products/services.

6. Create an Excel spreadsheet of these trade publications and “Top lists”.

7. Discover the Twitter accounts of these Top list entities and other thought-leaders discovered in the trade publications and websites. An easy way to do this is to type the name of the influencer + Twitter into Google. Or search in the Twitter search field. You can also go the websites of these entities and see if there is a Twitter link at the website.

8. Use a solution that delivers a spreadsheet of all followers of a specific Twitter user, such as Simply Measured or Social Bro. Download the followers of every influencer you have identified in your initial offline research. http://www.simplymeasured.com or http://www.socialbro.com

9. Use the Sort function in Excel to sort the list of followers by Klout, Kred, Peer Index or another influence metric. In the paid version of Simply Measured you will receive the Klout score for every account. http://www.klout.com

10. Create a 2nd copy and sort by Listed (the number of lists an entity is on within Twitter).

11. Use the Filter function in Excel to further narrow these sheets by specific industry-related keywords within the Description (Bio) column.

12. Use the Filter function in Excel to narrow by Location.

13. Combine the filtered results from whatever setting is important to your research question from each sheet into one “Master” workbook.

14. Rank the entities in this workbook by your chosen Influence metric (e.g.- Klout, Kred, Peer Index) or Listed to indicate global awareness and influence scoring.

15. Ideally, you will narrow this massive Master list to 1000 core influencers. Now download the Simply Measured Klout Audience Analysis for every single one of these influencers (thought-leaders). Go through the exact same Sorting and Filtering process and combine into a second Master list (this will be much larger). Now you have two concentric rings of influence you are able to connect into through content-marketing, direct-marketing or other selling strategies.

16. Take this work further by creating a book called “The Core List” in which you reveal core information for each of the 1000 core influencers: their bio from LinkedIn, all of their social links (find these through their Klout profile and further research, their top 100 influential followers within that specific market niche and their contact info (phone, email, address).

17. Now you are ready to study this core list and know who is leading the conversation in your market niche. Take the time you need to listen to each person and jot down observations on what they are saying and working on. Use a leading social monitoring tool, such as Brandwatch, Radian6 or Sysomos to augment your listening. http://www.brandwatch.com OR http://www.radian6.com OR http://www.sysomos.com

18. Create a list of 10-20 questions for the top 100 influencers in “The Core List” and send this to them via email. This is your focus group/survey for the market niche and will give you invaluable insight.

19. Create observations on the content produced by members of your core list. Add, as an appendix, all of the data organized by location, relevant social links discovered via listening, and metrics/statistics for the industry. This report, if concisely written and properly documented using best-practice research techniques, will be THE most comprehensive ever done for that market niche.

20. Create an Editorial Calendar with channel-specific ideas related to the industry. This Editorial Calendar ought to include specific marketing actions, online & offline channels for marketing and industry-specific publications in which to publish material. More on editorial calendars and a sample editorial calendar here: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2010/08/content-marketing-editorial-calendar/

21. In addition, create a Media Plan that reveals regions, online channels and audience sizes. This plan will inform an advertising spend. Use SEMRush, a keyword tool for deciding where to spend advertising dollars. http://www.semrush.com/

Share Your Experiences and Story with the World

“Social-networking sites, blogs, online discussion forums and online journals represent modern arenas for individuals to write themselves into being.” ~Theresa Sauter

YOUR JOURNEY IS A GIFT: Your unique journey through the world of human soul work has tremendous value. You’ve seen life in a way no-one else has. And, at the same time, you’ve had an experience that many others will identify with. Share this!

Your first step is to train a video camera upon yourself today and begin filming 60 second segments of your experience. Here are the best camcorders for this year: http://bit.ly/Camcorders_2013

Write down 20-30 questions that your life experience answers or speaks to. Design 20-30 short pieces about these questions. Write a few paragraphs on each. Here’s a great book of questions to jump start this process: http://bit.ly/big_book_of_questions

Then film these over the course of the day. Consider visiting a location and dressing in a way that communicates the flavor of this specific piece. Two cool sites about film locations: http://search.reel-scout.com/ AND http://www.movie-locations.com/

Look straight into the camera and speak to your audience. Imagine your best friend or your child. Speak to your audience with this level of care and love.

Review and edit the pieces.

Over the course of the following week, expand the initial paragraphs into a blog piece for each one.

Tweet lines from each blog piece with trackable bit.ly links back to your blog and the video pieces on Vimeo or YouTube.

Discover an audience for these pieces through the use of social monitoring tools and audience discovery tools.

a. http://datasift.com/
b. http://www.netvibes.com/en
c. http://www.ubervu.com/
d. http://www.brandwatch.com/
e. http://www.mutualmind.com/
f. http://attentio.com/
g. http://www.sysomos.com/
h. http://www.visibletechnologies.com/
i. http://engagor.com/
j. http://www.ethority.net/
k. http://simplymeasured.com/
l. http://www.semrush.com/
m. http://www.egrabber.com/leadgrabberpro/
n. https://www.recordedfuture.com/

Get these video pieces in front of audiences who are already talking about this topic.

As they respond, engage with each person individual and speak with them. Connect in social networks and meet up with these people in person, if possible.

Some will want to work with you in a variety of ways. Do it. Work with them.

Expand your circle of influence, share what you have to share. The world needs you in 2013.