Jerome Espinosa's book montage

We Are All Weird by Seth Godin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm weird myself, & that's why I enjoyed reading this book! And people who consider themselves weird need to find time to read this book that has been specially written for them. Nothing much is new about weirdness is found in its pages, except that it celebrates 'weirdness' in all its totality and far from what marketing specialists of old days had been crafting with their strategies and in implementing their tactics to sell/promote good and services to a worldwide market that continues to shift every moment.

You'll be helped a lot, as usual, if you've got a business background when you read this book because certain ideas found in it are strange and won't be of help if you're just reading it for the sake of reading it and because it's book by the venerable Seth Godin. Whew! That's a complex one, I must admit. Why bother to read a book when it's something you'd rather ran away from? But nowadays, if you want to continuously move on with your life, you gotta be weird. And this book will give you ideas on doing that, and in trying to make a business from your own weirdness. But you got to learn the basics as well in the process (which you'll be doing in your own style).

Godin proposes that the onus of marketing focus these days has changed from what was considered 'mass marketing' to a set more focused on the weird characteristics of people we meet in the streets and those we know personally (including our very selves) --- those people we usually offer our products and services. If you want to grow and build long term businesses, you may have to retrofit your usual marketing approaches to highlight elements of the weird but wonderful in your products and yourself. These approaches have been followed and pursued relentlessly by those who are in the market these days. You may still choose to do mass marketing strategies but you'll have to fold up quick because you'll be competing head on with so many like you (who use the similar approaches). Hence, it makes sense to discover, specialize on, pursue with, and celebrate the weird among us, so as to make it longer, more profitable being in the market. And start your efforts by reading this book first.

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Using Twitter for B2B Lead Generation

Twitter continues to be a smart way of of sharing fresh business development ideas with your B2B clients. Using 140-character messages, ‘tweets’ are quickly posted to everyone in your network. The postings support in creating strong awareness from among targeted clients who constantly look out for outstanding opportunities for their business.

1)    Register first your company with Twitter. Provide information just like you are registering as an individual. It’s just that in this situation, you have a real company with non-fictive details to share so that Twitter will approve your registration. Ensure that you link up this account with social networking sites you’ve decided to use, i.e. Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. in B2B lead generating. You may have to register your business, too, with these sites first so as to enhance this process.

2)    Build your followers by following your B2B clients on Twitter. Inform and ask your clients to follow you on Twitter. Share your Twitter account name too in your emails and always ask everyone to follow you on Twitter.

3)    Use hashtags, i.e. the character ‘#’ in between keywords that you would like to highlight in your tweets. They give signals to other logged-in members of Twitter that the message they’re looking at will lead to some prospects for their business. Each well-crafted message must carry juicy keywords regularly used in your activities with your B2B client-companies. Just make sure you don’t over-use it so that tweets won’t look like artificial and automatically sent-out messages.

4)    Automate the process of sending out tweets to your B2B clients. This will reduce the workload you have, which will enable you to sniff out other lead generating opportunities. There are leading and reliable automated tweet-sending services available around.

5)    A responsible and willing sales person has to be in charge as the lead person in sending out tweets from your Company. With messages originating from your sales group or from the higher ups, this person from your group takes charge. Also, make this person vet out unwanted or dubious followers of your Twitter account.

Make constant pronouncements to your B2B clients via Twitter. Better yet, make it an integral part of your communication process when sharing developments about your business.