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Amber Naslund, or @AmberCadabra as she is known on Twitter, coauthored “The NOW Revolution” (with Jay Baer) which details how businesses can get faster, smarter, and more social. In this video interview, she offers her take on the role of social media in B2B (business-to-business) marketing. She also gets very excited to the extent that we almost kiss after my question at 1:28, check it out!
Monday night in my Social Media Marketing MBA class at Chapman University, we were joined by Neal Schaffer, a Forbes Top 30 Social Media Influencer and Award-winning author for his books on using LinkedIn in a B2B (Business-to-Business) context for sales and social media marketing. Neal generously shared his views extemporaneously in a rapid fire fashion honoring his parents' New York origins. In so doing, he painted a very hopeful picture for B2B companies that embrace social media and offered a roadmap for doing so.
Had a very pleasant lunch meeting today in the city of Luleå in the province of Norrbotten in northern Sweden with Matz Engman, CEO of Luleå Business Agency (Luleå Näringsliv) currently busy marketing The Node Pole. Matz has had a multifaceted and intriguing career both as an executive in bigger corporations, as an entrepreneur, and even as a Swedish Elite League hockey referee. He had many stories to tell about the two-year sales cycle from initial contact to Facebook’s official announcement to establish themselves just an hour south of the Arctic Circle. Sounds like a challenging sales job to get one of the most iconic brands of our times up here. Ironically, he said that once they had fine-tuned their sales pitch, it was easier to bring Facebook to Luleå than to get a Stockholm-based company to set up shop way up north!
100 years ago, the personality and the perceived character of salespeople were key determinants of success as these traits would command both liking and respect.1 However, in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, Willy Loman complained that the sales profession was becoming “all cut and dried” and that you no longer could sell with “personality” or the personal relationships you have with your customers.
This week, Facebook made it clear that it wants to become the hub for even more of our online experiences through enhanced levels of integration with other services and serendipitous sharing of our real-time actions using the “open graph”. No doubt we will all drown in a sea of information overload if we try to keep up with everything that our friends are up to as Facebook literally is pointing a firehose full of detailed information about our online lives to anyone thirsty for information. Even obsessive Facebook lurkers and stalkers are going to find it difficult to keep up and may be gasping for some fresh air. The implication is that if all of us are going to share exponentially more bits and pieces of ourselves, we must find new approaches to deal with the information flow. Here comes some such ways:
After Wednesday’s Back-to-School Night at our kids’ Elementary school, I made it slightly late to a very educational and entertaining Linked Orange County event with Social media superstar Mari Smith at the Hilton Hotel in Costa Mesa. In what should have been a stop on a book tour (new release date October 25), Mari eloquently laid out the key elements of her upcoming book “The New Relationship Marketing: How to Build a Large, Loyal, Profitable Network Using the Social Web” (not an affiliate link).
In recent years, social media has 
played a key role in bringing about dramatic changes in business, consumer cultures, and even whole societies. Businesses are becoming more transparent and are also held accountable for their actions as citizens are empowered with more real-time and unbiased information. Consumers are (perhaps reluctantly) accepting a reduced amount of privacy as a price they are willing to pay as they feel the urge to share their day-to-day lives with a wider set of “friends”. Societies undergo revolutionary transformations as social media serves as the communication platform needed for collective action to be mobilized against oppressive regimes such as in the case of the 2011 revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
This has been a very intensive week with the “Business in Scandinavia Bootcamp” in preparation for the travel part our Chapman University MBA travel course starting early June. During 15 class hours here on the Chapman University campus, Clas Wihlborg and I briefed the group of 18 MBA students on topics such as:
I thoroughly enjoyed an inspired talk by Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) last night on his new book The Thank You Economy. I also treasured the opportunity for a brief chat with him about social media marketing and social commerce. Some of the points that Gary made last night:
Bryan Elliott (@BryanElliott) visiting my Chapman University MBA class in Internet & Social Media Marketing and sharing his take on social media marketing today as well as his intriguing story about first building a community in the Action Sports Industry and then broadening his reach with LinkedOC.com through which he has been able to accomplish such impressive feats such as hosting marketing godfather Seth Godin here in Orange County.