Evolved Thinking

Friends, reader(s) and people who tolerate my rantings from time to time …

If you know anything about me, you’ll know that for better or worse, I’ve had my fair share of jobs. Trust me, it’s nothing I’ve ever wanted to be known for, but it’s an unfortunate truth borne out of a bad economy, bad choices or the dreaded “bad fit.”

So what the hell does all of this have to do with my headline?

My ability to feed my family and/or avoid crashing on one of your couches for any extended period of time is almost entirely due to social media engagement and networking … with a dash of reasonable skill in the areas of marketing strategy, social media engagement & content creation. And thus … the tie in to my headline.

Social Media Club PDX is bringing Social Stallion Joshua Waldman to town to show you how to discover those hidden job nuggets using social media tools and ways to pay it forward in true “You-Tweet-my-Back, I’ll-Tweet-Yours” fashion. Here’s the title and some eloquent prose from my social chum @unclenate, Prez of @SocialMediaPDX:

“Job Searching With Social Media For Dummies” author Joshua Waldman

“For anyone looking for a first job, exploring a career change, or just setting up for future success, social media is a proven platform for facilitating connections, demonstrating passions and interests, and ultimately landing the job. Joshua Waldman, author of “Job Searching with Social Media For Dummies” enables you to harness the power of the Internet to research and identify job opportunities, and create a strategy for securing a position.”

Other nuggets include:

• creating effective online profiles and resumes to sell your strengths
• maintaining your online reputation (and ensuring that employers who Google you like what they find)
• understanding electronic etiquette
• using the power of personal branding
• building your brand online
• avoiding common pitfalls, such as jumping into filling out a social media profile without a strategy
• getting to know Twitter, the only real-time job board with literally thousands of jobs posted daily
• using social media sites to uncover opportunities in the “hidden job market” ahead of the competition

This is your chance to meet some really cool and connected people as well as escape the job or the people you hate — for three whole hours! Just sign up already!

DETAILS
January 18, 2012 at 6:00 PM | $25 Online, $45 @Door | Limit: 100

Collective Agency
322 NW 6th Ave
#200
Portland, OR 97209

The Year of our Lord 2011 is a tough one to box in.

Is it the death or birth of innovation (Steve Jobs and the vision he left behind vs. the birth of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as Steve Jobs Jr.)? Or, the year that the world woke up by laying down in parks across our great land, taking the occasional walk around to find a TV camera — that is until Christmas and the cold weather rolled in? OR … just more of the same good, bad and ugly. The words Sandusky, Casey Anthony, and  Republican Idiot Droids like Bachmann, Perry Overdrive and painfully vocal news readers who should find a new script like Megyn Kelly left a dent in my brain that will be hard to hammer out in the coming year.

Only the Lord himself knows for sure, but one thing I do know, 2011 did a lot to activate my senses in a good way. I’ll boil it down to my Top 5 — one for each of my senses collectively and individually overloaded.

Enjoy! Numbers 2 through 5 are actually safe to do yourself. #1, well, take a look. Happy New Year! I hope we actually connect in human form in 2012!
Cheers.

1. Sight. “I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Garrett McNamara’s Monster Ride

2. Sound. “Pure Ear Candy.”
Blitzen Trapper — American Goldwing + Furr (yeah, I know only AG came out this year, but both were good to me in 2011)

Singles:

Lonely Boy – The Black Keys

Ain’t Fit to Live Here — Graveyard

Face to the Floor — Chevelle

The Ruminent Band — Fruit Bats

If I Had a Gun … Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds

Holocene – Bon Iver

Head is a Flame (Cool With It) — Portugal, The Man

The Suburbs — Arcade Fire

Get it Daddy — Sleeper Agent

Is And Is And Is — White Denim

Pumped Up Kicks — Foster the People

The Kooks — F*** the World off

Moves Like Jaggar — Maroon 5 (Admit it … this song is like crack on ecstasy!)

And … the Welcome back Award goes to Brian Jonestown Massacre after I finally heard them this year in the Boardwalk Empire intro with “Straight Up and Down.” Yes!

3. Smell. A Tie: Paul Mitchell Awapuhi Shampoo & Jonathan Antin’s Silky Dirt (R) hair product. These provide a complete Jedi Nose Trick at the start of every day that fools my brain momentarily into thinking I live somewhere warm and tropical.

4. Touch. The Kindle Fire — Finally! Something that responds well when I poke or swipe at it — and keeps coming back for more! It is worth every damn penny for that reason alone.

5. Taste: The Beef Brisket Flatbread w/ Onion Rings Tongue-gasm from Eat This! in Portland, Oregon 

EAT THIS! Even better now that it's loaded it with Onion Rings!

Seriously … no, SERIOUSLY … so good you make happy noises with every bite.

To an equally activating 2012.

Happy New Year!

Mark

Marketers! You are me. And I am you.

We fight the same fight for relevance and acceptance in a corporate setting by trying to blend the right message or narrative with the right piece of “engaging” content, wrapping it in a creative execution that entices people to act. An overly complex (by design?) cadre of strategies powered by tactics, bolstered by words and images and measured — for better or worse — by how our actions correlate to revenue.

At the end of the day, we will succeed or fail based on our answers to two simple questions: “Does what you do every day help sales teams close deals?” and  “Can you prove it?”

AN ENABLER BY ANY OTHER NAME
Perhaps, in an effort to not be judged so harshly or more directly tie our roles to $, someone, presumably in marketing, coined the term “sales enablement.” This term, by the way, used to make me feel a little like a bespeckled dweeb (see inset photo) who writes the quarterback’s term paper to avoid getting beat up.

I come from a land and time that was no friend to enablers. They were the parents who replaced discipline with a candy bar to avoid the meltdown in a supermarket. They were the boss who kept  his under-performing nephew on board as a favor to his single-parent sister. They were the spouse who didn’t put his or her foot down after the other spent one too many nights out on the town.

The enablers I know rewarded laziness or just plain bad behavior. This may come across like I’m picking a fight over a word. Maybe I am. But from where I sit as a marketer, words are everything.

Maybe Geoffrey Moore’s power words like Engagement and/or Empowerment are more palatable to me personally, but regardless of the sheen we put on it as marketers, we all need to deliver something that can be directly tied to someone else’s ability to sell something. Or else.

SALES ENABLEMENT/EMPOWERMENT/ENGAGEMENT =  PEOPLE HELPING PEOPLE
In the digital age of ubiquitous personal publishing and sharing — as well as the rapid proliferation of devices to consume and distribute this fire hose of knowledge that is always on — my view on enabling, or more specifically, sales enablement has softened a bit. Now it’s less an indictment of a person’s bad habits and more of a realization that helping people find what they need, streamlined by proven processes and fine-tuned by purpose-led technology may be our saving grace.

Whether you are in competitive intelligence, marketing communications, public relations, product or solution marketing or are responsible for driving the global marketing strategy for your company, you need to be a curator and distributor of actionable knowledge. Those who take the role lightly by sending sales reps one-size-fits-all newsletters or alerts, and content not aligned with the buyer’s journey are at risk of being viewed as expendable instead of indispensable.

With modern software applications it is now possible to arm sales and account people with the critical information they need at the point of prospect or customer engagement. Regardless of the type of information or where it lives, be it product information, hyper-relevant web news, customer order details, help desk activity and more can personalized and delivered in the the context of a prospect or customer record. Welcome to the age of automating the Troglodytic manual tasks of hunter, gather and filterer to simply deliver personally relevant knowledge that contributes to revenue.

HOW ATTENSA CAN HELP
A brief commercial, yet completely factual, interlude: For me personally, the Attensa StreamServer simplifies and speeds up my most time-consuming tasks by finding, filtering and delivering immediately valuable information to me that gets more targeted to my preferences, and therefore more immediately actionable, with every use.

For you, the sales enabling marketer, the Attensa StreamServer can do the same by making your marketing department the knowledge epicenter for your organization responsible for connecting people in your own department, in sales and throughout the company with the knowledge that drives business results and better relationships. What’s more, you’ll have the data to prove it.

To see how all of this works, take a look at the Attensa Solution Overview, or download our latest white paper A Framework for Reducing Information Overload in the Enterprise. Reach out to me directly if you want to learn more.

Until I interrupt you again, Viva La Enablement!

Mark

@MarkAEvertz

This post was enhanced from a previous Attensa post on May 23, 2011 ^ME