Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Cartoon courtesy of xkcd.com

OK, this cartoon is an admittedly cynical analogy to make to lead generation, but what the heck. I’m not suggesting that posters to LinkedIn and Quora are lonely or angsty, but I am saying that generating leads from them is frequently like shooting fish in a barrel. If you haven’t considered it before or don’t know how or just need need a kick in the pants to get going on it, then read on!

LinkedIn and Quora are two of the best kept secret weapons in lead generation. I’m frustrated on an almost daily basis when I see questions on those sites that are direct inquiries about a product or service that’s offered by someone I know (a client or colleague). These are softball pitches that should be knocked out of the park, but instead they fall with a soft thud and roll to the backstop. These are perfect opportunities to do the following:

• Practice the “social” part of social media – engaging in conversations
• Spreading your content and creating back-links
• Beginning a new relationship with a gift
• Bringing leads into your sales pipeline

Let’s get to it…

Step #1: Start Trolling

This step is fairly easy on LinkedIn. Their “Answers” feature is broken down into categories and sub-categories. Each of these is available via RSS subscription. For example, the Sales and Marketing topic contains eight sub-topics and two of them, in turn, have sub-topics.

LinkedIn Answers: Marketing & Sales (click on image for full size)

LinkedIn RSS feeds (click for full size)

Quora is still a bit new and hasn’t developed ways to easily monitor the questions without visiting the site itself. Part of the reason for this is that the topics are not predetermined by Quora; any user can create a topic themselves. As a result, you can select a much more granular set of questions. Additionally, you can follow other Quora users and individual questions. The main difference between Quora and LinkedIn is that Quora allows users to vote up and down other users’ answers and also supports threaded conversations.

Quora Topics (click for full size)

Step #2: Answer Questions

Once you come across a question that deals with your product or service, you have an opportunity. But don’t kill your sale! If you try to launch into a direct sales pitch, you’re going to turn everyone off and perhaps be flagged as a spammer. Instead, do the following:

• First and foremost, answer the question! It’s very frustrating to read through a list of answers that dart off into tangents, especially if those tangents are naked sales pitches.
• Second, include a link.
  • If you have an existing blog post or web site page that provides additional information, that’s great! After answering the question, say something like, “The following link contains some additional information that you may also find useful.”
  • If you don’t have an existing blog post or page, consider creating one. This is also a great way to generate ideas for blog posts if you’re stuck.
  • If you don’t have the time to create content to specifically address the question, then include a link to an appropriate “About” page for either the product or service. This is a last resort and should only be done if your product and/or service is directly related to the question.
• Third, invite the person to follow up with you personally. Most times, I’ll send this invite privately. You’d be surprised how many will do just that.

I’ve found LinkedIn to be very valuable for lead generation and secured a couple of clients from answering questions. Quora is a new experience and I haven’t landed any new customers yet, but I did have one of my answers featured on the Duct Tape Marketing blog.

What’s working for you? Any additional tips or tricks?

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.  This week’s theme is “Your 2011 Primer.” This week’s links take a look at some tips and trends to help get strategically prepared for 2011.

#5: Maybe next year…

Let’s get started with a quick pep talk from Seth Godin. “It’s not too late, it’s just later than it was.”

Link: Seth’s Blog

#4: 10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption

In reading this article, I am reminded of Clay Shirky’s theorem of technology’s impact on society: “These tools don’t get socially interesting until they become technologically boring.”

Link: RIA Journal

#3: 10 Business Models That Rocked 2010

What struck me in reading this article was how many of these models had been attempted before. It’s probably equally worthwhile to examine how these implementations succeeded when predecessors failed.

Link: TechCrunch

#2: Blogging Forefather Seeks to Re-Invent Blogging, Again

Dave Winer, inventor of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), is very concerned about silos. So he’s doing something about. “The important thing is that you and your ideas live outside the silo and are ported into it at your pleasure… You never have to worry about getting your stuff out of the silo because it never lived in there in the first place.”

Link: ReadWriteWeb

#1: Can Google Get Its Mojo Back?

At this time last year, Google seemed unstoppable: so much so, that many of the news stories and blog posts were questioning whether or not they were too powerful and even advocating a Google-free existence. Just a year later, many experts are questioning whether or not they are in real trouble.

Link: TechCrunch

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Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five is about all things Internet.  It includes some interesting uses, abuses and threats that are not only worthy of mention but long term monitoring.

#5: The Answer Factory: Demand Media and the Fast, Disposable, and Profitable as Hell Media Model

I don’t generally use this space just to list “cool stuff.”  However, in addition to having pizazz, it seems to me that this model has some serious potential to become a game-changer.

Link: Wired

#4: Optimize LinkedIn Profile for SEO

Mike Volpe from Hubspot provides some very simple yet important tips for optimizing your LinkedIn profile (it led me to immediately make a couple of quick tweaks).  I am constantly evangelizing how important your online presence is, and this short tutorial is great for maximizing its effectiveness.

#3: China Blocks Wired.com With ‘Great Firewall’ – Updated

The conclusion from this article is that China’s algorithms for censoring the Internet were messing around with Wired magazine’s availability, which seems to be intermittently available.  The interesting nuggets from this article are the notations that China tends to block any sites with RSS feeds and blogs.  Why RSS feeds?  Because they are a push mechanism instead of pull.  In other words, it’s easier to track people when they have to visit a site to read what’s on it.  I know none of this is particularly shocking, but it’s important to understand what governments can do to encumber the Internet.  And before you start feeling too comfortable in the U.S. or E.U., read on…

Link: Wired

#2: Court to FCC: You Don’t Have Power to Enforce Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is the principle that your ISP (Internet Service Provider) should not be able to deliberately throttle back bandwidth for particular sites or protocols or otherwise interfere with them.  This ruling is about Comcast’s efforts to hamper use of the file sharing site BitTorrent.  Since these “torrents” are frequently used to illegally share files, there may not be much sympathy.  However, consider that Comcast has also been accused of interfering with Vonage as well, who is a competitor to their voice over IP service.  The courts and government seem to be setting the stage for an Internet that is going to be patrolled, regulated, fettered, and not at all like the one we are used to right now.

Link: Wired

#1: Senator Demands IP Treaty Details

This is a follow from last week’s story about the possible efforts by U.S. and E.U. authorities to deputize ISPs (Internet Service Providers) to be the Copyright Gestapo.  This week, we see that a U.S. Senator is having to file a Freedom of Information Act request to see the details of this treaty.  That the government is trying to hide information is nothing new, but the fact that this Senator is from the same political party as the current administration makes you wonder what’s in this bill that they don’t want people to know.

Link: Wired

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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Alec Baldwin's character colorfully presents his selling philosophy, "ABC: Always Be Closing."

Getting started with blogging and social media is intimidating to many.  It took me time to develop the confidence, skills, and habits that make it possible to deliver content on a regular basis. More than anything, it requires a 24/7 mindset that I call “ABC: Always Be Collecting,” which is a take on the fantastic movie Glengarry Glen Ross.

If you’ve never seen the movie, you can get a good sense of the plot from this seven minute clip of Baldwin’s passionate, insulting and obscenity-laced motivational speech.  Warning – there is some strong language in this scene.

“Always Be Collecting” means establishing a commitment and habit to always be thinking about collecting content for your blog, Tweets, and Facebook updates.  This mindset will only have limited effectiveness without a support structure.  I’ve included 4 tips to help you get going.

#1 Intelligence

I am not referring to the ability to comprehend, but rather the collecting of information.  For me, intelligence is the oxygen that fuels my content generation.  These are my intelligence gathering tools:

• Barnes & Noble: I read, read, read, read…
• Google Reader: I subscribe to 210 RSS feeds and have read over 11,000 articles in the last 30 days.  However, keep in mind that “read” is probably an overstatement and it’s more accurate to say that I “scanned” those articles, looking for interesting content and then reading, bookmarking, and sharing as appropriate.
• Twitter: More and more, people are using Twitter as a source of “pre-qualified” information.  Because you are presumably following people you trust and/or in which you’re interested, then it stands to reason that links they share will be of interest to you also.  It’s becoming a real time news echo chamber that helps me stay on top of the latest tech developments and trends.

This is a shot of a hotel room I stayed in for two weeks that is still in the "hopper" waiting for a hotel room rant post that is coming.

#2 Raw Materials

Words are the foundation of all online content, but pictures and video constitute the paint, carpeting, furniture, etc…  Throughout the course of the day, I am mindful to be collecting pictures, screenshots, and video that may eventually be used in a post somewhere.

My BlackBerry Bold smartphone is absolutely indispensable as a raw material collection tool, as it is something I always carry and can take pictures and videos that are of perfectly acceptable quality for online use.

I use TechSmith’s SnagIt as a screen capture tool for grabbing screen shots of programs and web pages that may come in handy later on.  I also use Camtasia Studio for authoring and editing screen casts.

#3 Total Consciousness

Content collection needs to become a habit, which requires you perform the action at least 21 times.  Here are some tips to help ensure you remember:

• Write down the habit you’re trying to establish and post it in as many places as possible.
• Schedule your content collection ahead of time.  Obviously, you can’t really schedule something like this, but if you can put calendar appointments on your phone, then at least you are getting regular reminders that will help keep you in that frame of mind.
• Reward yourself every time you come up with a new blog idea.
• Concentrate on consistency rather than results.  In other words, don’t worry if the content you’re collecting is not of the quality level you’d like it to be.  The most important thing is to keep developing the habit and mindset, which will eventually become a habit that will result in more “aha” moments and better quality stuff.

My blogging tools of the trade

#4 Be Prepared

Assuming you fuel the content machine, collect the raw materials, and develop the proper habits, the last piece of the puzzle is being prepared to trap and keep that content.  I’ve settled on a system that relies on two tools; the voice recorder feature of my phone and a Moleskine notebook.

If you’re as scatter-brained as I am (and even if you’re not), then a voice recorder is a non-negotiable, must have tool.  I finally grew tired of ideas zipping in and out of my head as often as Tiger Woods… well, you get the idea.  I’d been telling myself for quite some time that I need to pick up one of those small voice recorder devices when it occurred to me that my BlackBerry had one built into it.  Now, I’m in the habit of carrying my phone everywhere, including some places that may be construed as a “too much information” moment, because you never can tell when your next blog idea will strike.  I had three in row occur to me when I was shaving the other day, and quickly dictated them to the phone’s voice recorder.

Eventually, the random thoughts and musings get transcribed off of the phone and into my blog notebook.  This notebook contains a diary of ideas for articles that is actually starting to grow quite fat.  I am gradually picking up the pace of my posts as a result of growing confidence that I’m not going to run out of content any time soon.  They key is to build up a healthy backlog of articles that can smooth the peaks and fill in the valleys.

These are just my ideas – let’s hear about your tips and tricks.  I’m not sure I’d recommend Dogbert’s approach:

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Making membership free will not, in and of itself, build an effective army. First, they must be recruited. This is where the long tail comes into play. Next, they must be equipped with the latest technology, afforded competent and inspiring leaders, and trained in effective tactics.

Recruitment

The “Long Tail” is a phrase attributed to Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson, who wrote an article in 2004 about “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” Engineers and economists would already be familiar with the numerical component of this phenomenon, known as the power law distribution curve or more colloquially the “80/20” rule. The transaction costs historically associated with institutions’ ability to organize people required that the focus scarce resources (people and money) on the top 20% of people who would contribute 80% of the work, value, donations, revenue, content, etc…

I think the current strategies are more focused on maintaining the 20% than pulling in the other 80%. It can be done now, because (assuming a freemium model) the transaction costs to the organization and barriers to entry for the members is essentially nil. One example (though certainly not the only) is the reluctance to embrace strategies that rely exclusively on Internet-based technologies. The reasoning is that not all members have broadband access or are active enough, which may or may not be true (show me the numbers). But the point is that it doesn’t matter. I submit that losing a few thousand members in order to gain a hundred thousand is a good trade. Sometimes you need to fire your customer and go find better ones.

The benefits to a long tail may be self evident to anyone reading this, but in case they are not I will provide two anecdotes. The first is taken from Clay Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” which is, incidentally, the most profound book you can read on the subject of the “power of organizing without organizations.” Shirky discusses the fundamental misunderstand of open source software by Microsoft. They long fought against the concept of open source, calling it a myth that it was developed by thousands of programmers because only a few hundred contributed more than a few lines of code. He goes on to say, “It’s easy to see, from McGrath’s [Microsoft U.K. executive] point of view, why the open source model is the wrong way to design an operating system: when you hire programmers, they drain your resources through everything from salary to health care to free Cokes in the break room.” Microsoft simply can’t afford to pay a programmer’s entire annual salary for a mere two dozen lines of code. But what if that code fixed a buffer overflow vulnerability that put millions of computers at risk? Borrowing from the cheesy world of informercials, now how much would you pay? The point here is that when the transaction costs of organizing are free, so are the failures. You can afford the hundreds or thousands of failures in exchange for one game-changing success.

The second anecdote is simply an interesting description of Amazon.com’s business model. As one employee described it, “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.” That one takes a few moments to digest, but it’s the quintessential differentiator between atoms and bits, scarcity and abundance, costly and free.

Equipment

Once free membership and the long tail begin filling the membership hopper, the next step is to “arm” them with the latest technology. Much like the weaponry for a particular soldier is dependent on his or her mission, so to must our tool sets match the mission.

• Listening – Our members must have state of the art tools for listening to ISA activity in their preferred communication channels. These may include any combination of RSS, email, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, etc… And by the way, these will change from year to year.
• Sharing – When members have news to share or interesting ideas, there need to be easy and efficient ways to share that information. Again, there is no single tool or technology but ISA must be connected with all of the common platforms. Automated social media channels could be set up to mash up mentions on various networks.
• Collaborating – Every Department, Division, and standards committee must have its own shared workspace for effective collaboration. This could be done today for free using sites like Ning. They are currently being assembled ad-hoc, which is obviously inefficient and alienates ISA from the process.
• Publishing – In order to leverage the contributions of the long tail, members must have a platform to easily publish their work, accomplishments, opinions, and (perhaps) open letters to ISA leaders. There are a multitude of technologies available to do this in extremely interesting and profound ways. One of the simpler tools is simply to enable a blogging platform where all members get to publish themselves in a common area, perhaps by subject area. This is not unlike traditional user forums with a few exceptions. Blogs allow complex content and multimedia (images, video, and presentations), they are more easily indexed by search engines, and they are an easier platform to monitor.

Leadership

It is important not to look at the membership as one big mob, but as a collection of interconnected networks. Member Sally may be a cybersecurity expert in HMI systems and wireless communication with zero interest in the finer points of flow measurement and calibration, while Sam may be a pump designer who does care about flow, while Dan is VP of marketing for a large automation distributor and needs to a little bit about everything. With the proper tools in place as already described, these small networks will organize themselves and the leaders will naturally rise to the challenge. ISA’s job will transition out of the planning and organization business and into the coordination business. It will be important to provide these leaders with the tools, support, and motivation to succeed at leading their respective tribes.

Tactics

Some members will be right at home in this new paradigm (they will be the first generation of leaders). Others will need some training, best practices, guidelines, tips, and hacks. The better ISA can train the leaders in effective tactics, the more value the members will be able to provide. It’s not unlike training office staff in using Word and Excel.

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