Biznology

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by Frank Reed
Many people, including myself, have spoken about the death of sales as we once knew it. The ABC method (Always Be Closing) no longer has the same effect that it once had because people are smarter than that. People, in general, don’t like to be manipulated and the years and years of being burnt have taken their toll. We as a society are too smart to listen to just any sales person and inherently trust what they are saying. We also realize that many times that what’s in the best interest of the salesperson is not in the best interest of the customer. In other words, salespeople sell things that earn commission rather than trust but those days are drawing to a close rapidly.

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The mania has struck again for another new device. The. One. That. Will. Change. Everything. If you are a publisher, maybe you need to take notice. But if you are a garden variety digital marketer, the iPad probably won’t rock your world. To see why that’s good, check out my latest post on Search Engine Guide, “Why Marketers Don’t Need to Care About the iPad.”

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That’s your question, but it’s not their question. Customers want to know how they find the store that has the product they want for the right trade-off of price and convenience. Until now, that was not easy to do. Enter Milo.com, a free Web site that enables shoppers to research online and buy local—providing the best of both worlds. You can search for the product you crave online, just as you do with any shopping search engine, but the results have a twist: Milo can show the brick-and-mortar stores that have the product in stock, along with the price. So you can decide between driving ten more minutes and paying $20 more.

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If you’re in marketing, you’ve probably been tempted yourself. You’re not all that confident that what you are offering is all that exciting, so you might think that you need to fuzz things up just a bit. You might think that if you could fool people, just a little bit, into thinking that your offer was a bit better than it was–put it in the best possible light, yes, but maybe even a little better light than that. Unfortunately, the Internet punishes that kind of behavior, because someone calls you on your (slight) deception, and they do it publicly. All this was brought to mind recently when I was trying to download some “free” software by pressing the big button and kept ending up with the paid version, because the offer was just a little too good to be true. If you’ve been fooling folks just a bit, and you are wondering what the alternative is, check out my latest post on Internet Evolution, “Let’s Push ‘Delete’ on Big Button Marketing.”

I’ve heard people say that blogging is so over now that Twitter is all the rage, but I don’t buy it. (If you’re reading this blog, you probably don’t either.) I still get folks every day that ask me about what they can do to get started with a blog and I do my bext to help them out, but today I did a Webinar for the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) called “Blogging 101” (my slides are linked to the title) that provides a set of steps for how to get started and how to improve your blog once you are up and running. So if you’re not a MENG member (see what you are missing?), you can still take a look at the slides.