We chatted with Deloitte & Touche Principal and Lead Interactive Advertising executive Tim Davis about the Facebook phenomenon. While it’s far too early to tell what kind of impact Facebook’s ads will have on marketing, Davis called it an “appealing move,” one that takes ads to a conversational place.

The move shifts the delivery of that advertising, with Davis noting such ads represent a pull model. In the first few years of online advertising, that model was a push, Davis said, as advertisers put as much in front of consumers online as possible.

Early advertisers honed their push models in those early years, and they wielded ads like a club. Naturally, few people want to be beaten with advertising, although considering the nature of the Internet, there are probably one or two fetish sites for that sort of thing.

Now, the consumer is more like the king when it comes to the advertising model. Push has its uses, but the pull proves more welcome for ads. It’s been a positive development.

The negative side, as Davis readily acknowledged, means the conversations people have about brands won’t be relentlessly positive. There will be negativity, but that’s something brands will have to engage.

“Transparency is an inevitable consequence of push advertising,” said Davis. “Marketers need to put themselves into conversations; they need to be brutally honest.”

We know what they need to do, but in the world of advertising, the question of who will fulfill this need is open to debate. Should it be the brand doing so? Its marketers? The ad agency managing a campaign?

There are more people at the table, Davis said, and someone there will have to manage the conversation. Going forward, brands and their partners need to decide who that will be.

We see this push movement and the need for conversational interaction as one that may drive a newer segment of the market. Our recent discussion of Buzzlogic suggested the kinds of tools the conversationalists will need to interact in the world of push advertising.

The survey was conducted by The Creative Group, a company that offers online job search services.

Making a good impression online when someone searches and researches you is imperative nowadays. You absolutely need to make sure that you manage your reputation online, which includes things such as making sure that positive things about you appears in the search engines’ search results. You can keep up with your online reputation by setting up “alerts”, which are available for free from Yahoo! and Google. You can be notified via email whenever a new web page or instance of your name appears online.

As you can see from the screen capture above, I’ve been handling my own personal online reputation for a while now. In fact, a search for my name at Google reveals about 75,000 results (this varies from time to time). Obviously, this blog, right here, is going to rank very well. But take a look at the other search results…articles I’ve written, others sites I own, and other stuff. If you’d like to monitor your own reputation, then set up a Google alert by going here. I recommend that you set several up for different versions of your name if that’s appropriate.

Fifty percent of advertising and marketing executives recently polled by The Creative Group said that they search online for information about prospective hires at least some of the time. Among those who search for information about prospective hires online, fourteen percent have decided not to hire someone based on what they’ve found.

The survey was developed by The Creative Group and was conducted by an independent research firm; it included 250 responses, 125 responses from advertising executives and 125 responses from senior marketing executives.

According to The Creative Group, advertising and marketing executives were asked

“How frequently, if at all, do you use Google or another search engine to learn additional information about a prospective hire?”

They responded as follows:

Always      19%Sometimes   31%Rarely      24%Never       24%Don't know   2%

           100%

Of those who search online for information about prospective hires were asked then asked:

“Have you ever decided not to hire a candidate based on information you found online?”

They responded as follows:

Yes         14%No          84%Don't know   2%

           100%

Dave Willmer, executive director of The Creative Group, said that professionals should keep all audiences in mind when posting information online. “Search engines make it quick and easy to learn about people,” he said. “If there’s something that you wouldn’t want a potential employer to know about you, don’t post that information in a public forum.”

According to Dave Willmer, executive director of The Creative Group, some hiring managers “search online to gain a better sense of a candidate’s industry involvement and interests.”

“Employers aren’t just looking for red flags,” he said. “They’re also seeking evidence that a potential staff member is invested in the profession, perhaps through participation in trade groups, or industry blogs or message boards.”

Here’s a list of tips for creating an impressive “digital footprint”:

Stack the deck in your favor.

Websites such as ZoomInfo.com allow users to post information about themselves, so consider including details about your professional involvement and qualifications on these types of forums.

Make the most of social networking sites.

Sites such as LinkedIn.com are good venues for learning about job openings and making new contacts. But be selective in who you allow into your network. Potential employers who have access to your contact list may ask these professionals for referrals.

Share your insights.

Posting your comments on industry forums or authoring online articles in your area of expertise is a smart way to reinforce your professional reputation.

Create your own website.

Along with showcasing industry knowledge on other people’s websites, you also can create your own Internet presence with links to articles of interest, and information about your skills and past achievements. For creative professionals, a website with work samples is especially beneficial, as many employers will want to see prior projects before arranging a job interview.

Be prepared to explain.

If there is unflattering information about you online that you cannot remove, be prepared to offer an explanation to employers who might inquire about it.

The Creative Group is a company that offers online job search services and has local offices in many major markets in the USA and in Canada.

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"Conversion Optimizer helps you meet your ROI objectives by automatically managing your bids according to a maximum CPA goal. By automating the bidding process, this feature helps you minimize your conversion costs while saving you time.

Here’s how Conversion Optimizer works: simply specify a maximum CPA bid and the Conversion Optimizer does the rest.

It uses historical information about your campaign and automatically generates optimal CPC bids for each auction. You still pay per click, but you no longer have to manually adjust your bids to reach your CPA goals. Since the Conversion Optimizer can choose a new bid for each auction, you’re provided with the additional benefit of spending money only on the search queries and sites where your ads are likely to convert. You can read more about how the Conversion Optimizer can manage your costs here.

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Anglian’s a British brand, and as just about every page on its site states, it’s been “[e]stablished since 1966.”  The company also speaks of “an annual turnover of £300 million,” or about $606 million – this isn’t a mom-and-pop operation.

Netrank may have a fair amount of work ahead of it, then (in terms of quantity), and the company has already developed a plan of attack.  “Netrank will undertake an SEO audit of anglianhome.co.uk to identify how the site can be developed to perform more effectively in search engines.  Netrank will also use its product Linkscape to map the online landscape for Anglian,” according to a press release.

“This product will help Anglian discover which sites it should engage with in order to increase the number of customers and build the reputation of the company,” the release continues.  “Through Linkscape, Netrank can identify DIY networks, online publications and home improvement communities which Anglian will target as part of their online PR activities.”

That seems like a reasonable approach, and, indeed, one that anyone hoping to perform a little SEO might do well to mimic.  If you hadn’t heard of Anglian before today, keep an eye out for the company in coming months – that may be as good a way as any to judge the success of this arrangement.

Wikipedia administrator (more like fact cop) Duvora, who makes a habit of confronting naughty editors, has put together what might be considered the canon of Wiki-rep management.

Those who feel they have been the victim of malicious vandalism aren’t helpless, there are numerous ways to go about fixing the problem. The obvious answer is edit the entry yourself, but that can be, potentially, problematic, as it can get you flamed by users or land you in an edit war.

Duvora, in two lengthy posts at SearchEngineLand detailing cases where editing and counter-editing were both necessary, explains that there are numerous channels that those with online reputation concerns can go through.

The first line of defense, she says, is to email the Wikimedia Foundation directly or via the Open Ticket Request System.

After that, here are seven options search marketers and reputation managers should keep handy:

1.    Put the article on the Watchlist
2.    Notify the appropriate WikiProject
3.    Notify the Counter-Vandalism Unit
4.    Request Page Protection
5.    Contact Administrator Intervention Against Vandalism
6.    Refer to Biographies of Living Persons Noticeboard
7.    For urgent problems, notify Administrator’s Noticeboard/Incidents

Duvora goes into great detail in both her posts at SearchEngineLand.   

Google AdWords has gotten wind of this simplistic approach to managing a PPC campaign with their launch of a “preferred cost bidding” feature.

Preferred cost bidding allows advertisers to specify the average price they would like to pay per click (a preferred CPC bid) or per thousand impressions (a preferred CPM bid) and let AdWords automatically work to achieve the targeted price.

I spoke with Google AdWords Product Manager, Guemmy Kim, who told me they had recognized “a market for this kind of control” and that preferred cost bidding would bring “more stability” to the costs of paid search.

Preferred cost bidding is designed to be an alternative to CPC or CPM and advertisers can opt in at a campaign or ad level. With today’s launch, only a subset of advertisers will have access to the new feature, but Kim says that all AdWords advertisers will have access by the end of next week.

While experience search marketers will prefer to manage their ads on a more micro level, this addition is a great option for those who have limited time and money to actively manage their AdWords campaign.

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First, the news. AOL has announced that it’s Advertising.com unit would manage advertising sold on the new online video site being built by NBC and News Corp.

Ok, now the mess.

1. Google owns 5% of AOL, yet AOL is involved in what might be Google’s biggest video competitor.
2. Will Advertising.com now exclude the management of video campaigns outside of this new venture? I’m sure Lightningcast will still want to work with video sites other than this new venture.
3. What happened to News Corp’s Fox Interactive Media? They just acquired Strategic Data Corp to provide ads to MySpace, why didn’t they use the same outfit for the new video site?

Headaches, headaches!

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1. Leverage the time-saving capabilities of Workflow within CRM.

2. Leverage the integration between CRM and Outlook so that project tasks appear in our users’ Outlook Task lists and Calendars.

3. Keep the process simple while still providing enough control to keep the project on schedule and under budget.

Here is what we chose to do to manage our projects. Perhaps it will be suitable for you, as well.

1. Use Workflow Manager to create a new sales process for client fulfillment/project delivery.

While we could have chosen to create a new project entity, we wanted functionality similar to the Sales Process workflow available for Opportunities. Unfortunately, the only way we could do it (without a lot of custom coding) was to use the Opportunity entity. Sales Process workflow is not available for any other entity.

We created a new Sales Process called “CF – CRM”, with a description of “Client Fulfillment – CRM Project Delivery.” This naming convention separates the project processes from the true sales processes (they start with “LC” for Lead Conversion). This is a manual rule, meaning that we manually apply it to the opportunity.

The project management Sales Process has various stages (Initiate, Analyze, Diagnose, Develop, Deploy, Operate, Close) that are based on the Microsoft Dynamics Implementation Methodology. You can use whatever you want.

The beauty of this solution is that you can have as many processes as you want and apply the correct process depending on the project.

For example, we could have a project process for Point-of-Sale projects, another one for Great Plains projects, and a third one for CRM projects. Each process could be customized with its own stages and activities.

Within each stage, there are the appropriate activities and milestones. For example, within the Initiate stage, we have tasks for “Create project charter” and “Schedule project kick-off meeting.”

If there are particularly critical or time-sensitive activities, then you might want to create activities to monitor the status of them and use workflow to escalate neglected or delayed activities to a manager.

You need to be careful about the level of detail and number of activities you create. Remember, this is NOT a fully functional project management application like Microsoft Project.

You can attach supporting documents or links to SharePoint documents to the activities if you need more detail.

2. Complete all stages and activities for existing sales process on opportunity.

You are now ready to start using the project management process you created in step 1.

If there is a true sales process assigned to the Opportunity, then be sure to close or cancel all activities so that the sales process is completed.

Keep the Opportunity open once the sale has been closed. We are going to continue to record activity against the opportunity.

3. Assign the appropriate sales process for client fulfillment/project delivery to the opportunity.

Now, manually apply the correct project management process to the Opportunity. The activities from the first stage will be created and assigned.

4. Complete project activities.

No go ahead and do the work. Activities can be assigned to individuals or queues. Tasks that are not on the project management Sales Process you defined in step 1 can be manually added to the opportunity.

As you complete each stage, the activities for the next stage will automatically be created.

5. Use the Sales Pipeline report or a custom report to keep track of projects.

Since we are using the built-in Sales Process functionality, you can easily run reports showing the progress of the projects. You will probably want to create your own custom reports using the standard Sales Pipeline report as a template.

6. Close the Opportunity upon completion of the project.

Once the project is completed and all activities in the project management Sales Process are completed, close the Opportunity.

Conclusion

As you have seen, Microsoft CRM can be used in creative ways to help you best manage YOUR business. Using it for simple project management is a great illustration of the “Affordable Adaptability” of Microsoft CRM. Using this illustration, think “outside the box” to come up with other ways to use Microsoft CRM to support your business. Be sure to let me know what you come up with!

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Michael Cross is a Microsoft Certified CRM Professional with Small Business Systems LLC. Visit http://www.bturnkey.com/crm.html to learn how Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 enables your people to work the way they want to work, while providing you wih the data you need to increase the number of customers, provide the quality of service your customers expect, and increase your revenues.

There are lots of moving parts to a paid search campaign and for clients who put all their eggs (e.g., media dollars) into the paid search basket, riding the PPC rollercoaster means lots of hands on monitoring, maintenance and optimization so that flow of sales and/or leads doesn’t slow to a trickle.

In November 2006, The e-tailing group conducted a survey of 100 e-commerce executives to gauge how they handle the growing challenge of managing paid search. Statistics were revealing. Dubbed the “First Annual E-tailer PPC Stress Study,” the study contained some very interesting statistics.

Here’s a highlight of some of the juicier ones.

• 66% of respondants have been investing in PPC for more than two years
• 54% rank their teams at 7 or higher in terms of PPC sophistication (in a scale of 1-10 with 10 being the highest)
• Marketer’s spread their PPC dollars between Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask with 100% of e-tailers advertising on Google and a mere 27% advertising on Ask (think “opportunity” here)
• 40% of respondants manage over 5000 keywords
• Staffing for PPC management is handled in-house by the vast majority of marketers with 59% internal, 18% outsourced and 23% a combination of both
• 32% of respondants spent less than 5 hours per week managing their campaigns
• 33% of respondants spent more than 21 or more hours per week managing their campaigns
• 40% of respondants were satifisifed with insourcing PPC while 11% were considering outsourcing and 19% were very satisfied with their outsourced PPC management

There are a lot more statistics available from the study’s Executive Summary which you can download for free from the e-tailing group’s website.

A key learning from the survey was that PPC management for e-commerce merchants is work intensive and takes expertise. The paradox of paid search is that it’s so “quick and easy” to put a campaign up, but the complexities of managing the live campaign and obtaining sustainable sales or leads at a favorable ROI is the hard part.

Lauren Freeman, the e-tailing group’s president, sums up the issue succinctly. Ms. Freeman stated that many e-tailers in the study indicated that limited time to manage PPC campaigns and the availability of skilled personnel were key frustrations.

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Michael Pedone is the President / CEO of eTrafficJams.com, a search engine optimization and website marketing company <http://www.etrafficjams.com> located in Clearwater, Florida that specializes in getting targeted, eager-to-buy traffic to your site. You can catch him blogging at: <http://www.etrafficjams.com/blog/>.

How can you tell, midway through a sale, whether you’re on track for success or you’ve lost the deal?

How can you tell, in advance, that the sale won’t close… ever?

All prospect situations seem to be going along successfully until they aren’t. You work hard to find the prospect who has appropriate need and interest. You do your front end due diligence. You promote and pitch the product professionally. You follow the process of objections, time delays, surprises. You even project a time when the sale will close – much to your manager’s dismay. And you hope, hope, that this time all of your hard work will pay off. But it’s a guess.

There seems to be no way of knowing which prospect will actually close, and which one will disappear forever into choices you have no control over.

OUT OF THE LOOP

How do you end up being wrong so often? Most calculations state that from first prospecting call to close, only approximately 7% of your prospects will make a purchase. If that’s true – or anything close to that number is true – you’re wasting, say, 90% of your time. What’s even worse, you believe that you’re going to be successful until far into your time wastage.

I know I personally sometimes either deny signs that a sale might be going south, or arrogantly believe I can save the day somehow.

But the reality is, as outsiders, the only data you have is either data your prospect has chosen to share, or from your own best guess based on similar situations.

One of the problems is that you’re basing your hopes and guesswork on historic patterns – buyers who have bought given the same fact pattern, or problems you know your product can resolve and seem to be a perfect fit. It seems logical that the new prospect should buy if they want their problem solved.

As an outsider to the buyer’s unique cultural norms and mental models, you have no way of going into the team or Problem Space of the prospect because you don’t live there with them. You don’t know their internal politics, or the complete set of people issues that must be managed; you don’t know exactly what is maintaining the problem that your product can solve – if the prospect knew how, the problem would have been solved yesterday’ (and why wasn’t it??); you can’t know all of the hidden agendas, the office politics, the historic problems that must be resolved before a purchasing decision can happen.

CHANGING THE POSSIBILITIES

Let me tell you a story about how assumptions get us into trouble. It’s not specifically about how a sale was lost without knowing why, but a story of how a sale never got to happen because the sales approach was wrong and the seller didn’t know how to recognize what didn’t work. It’s the same premise: operating from the assumption that the seller ‘knows’ what’s going on and doesn’t recognize his own approach as being part of the problem.

I know this tale intimately: it happened with a new member of my team who was recently trained and just getting his head around the difference between selling and helping someone manage all of the elements necessary for a buying decision.

My salesperson told me he was having problems getting a good response from a specific industry when he made cold calls. He was quite frustrated because he only had a finite number to call, and asked what he’d do when he’d completed all calls in the category without a sale. It was obvious to him that we were in the wrong industry, given the responses he was getting.

When I asked him what he was doing, he shared a scenario that made it clear that he was using conventional sales techniques, and hence received conventional responses. Here is how one of his conversations went:

Seller/John: Hello. My name is John from Morgen Facilitations. This is a sales call. Is this is a good time to speak? [So far, so good.]

Prospect: Sure. I’ve got a few minutes. What are you selling?

John: A new paradigm sales training. How are you currently bringing new thinking into your team to enhance their skills? [Good job, John. On the money.]

Prospect: We purchase scripts that we have designed especially for our product. We’ve used this scripting service for a long time, and we’re happy with them. They give us the results we seek.

John: So what I hear you saying is [Good so far.] that you are happy with a result that might be less than what you could be getting if you were using a different sales model [LOST IT. Told the guy he's stupid.]

Prospect: I’m really satisfied with our results and don’t want to change anything. Maybe you can call back in a year or so when we’re in the market for new training, and we can take another look then. Thanks for the call.

John did what so many sellers do: attempt to lead the buyer to the conclusion that they need the seller’s product, and in the process they don’t acknowledge the buyer’s success, historic decisions, internal systems, company politics, vendor relationships, staff comfort. And the prospect shuts down.

John’s final assessment was that the buyer wasn’t interested. It never occurred to him that anything he was doing might have caused the response, and he had no insight into what was really going on internally. Indeed, John had no way of knowing whether there was interest or not. The response he got was a buyer reacting to a stranger who attempted to get him to change to something unknown, and who told him metaphorically that his historic decisions were stupid. He did all he could do: he left the interaction. John set up the buyer’s response and blamed it on the buyer.

SUPPORT THE SOLUTION DESIGN

But look at the new possibilities if you have the buyer add in the considerations necessary for him to consider changing. Here’s what I would have said, using Buying Facilitation questions and summary:

I hear that you have a system in place that has worked for you over time and that you have been extremely happy with. What would you need to think about to consider the possibility of adding a new skill set to your current methods in case there might be even more success possible?

Other Facilitative Questions might be:

What would you need to know about a new model to recognize that it might fit into your values and brand?

How would you know that new material, such as we have, would even have a possibility of working in your work situation?

And, later into the conversation:

Given you’ve had the scripts in place for so long, how would you need to manage the team learning to ensure they could add something new without causing them distress or loss of revenue?

A prospect’s response to this exchange would be thoughtful, get him considering decisions he had made, and open up new possibilities without threatening existing internal systems.

With the proper decision directing questions the Facilitation process helps the prospect design a solution and direct him through the range of decisions he’d need to manage anyway if he were to make a change by purchasing your product.

This is the aspect missing from the selling’ model and what keeps sellers in the dark: buyers are fighting hidden internal systems that maintain their status quo and until they address these monsters they can’t buy. Anything that rears its head must be addressed, and whatever has been used in place of your product – whatever people or rules or relationships or politics or historic systems that have any touch-points around the decision to bring in a new solution – will keep the process from moving forward.

By having your communication based around product placement (and your information gathering and relationship building are all based on ultimately placing product), you remain out of the loop with no way for you to take any lead on the change that needs to occur within the prospect’s environment. The best you can do is to direct the buyer in the area your product can solve; you can’t get in there with him to help him formulate his own system of change.

HOW TO KNOW WHEN IT’S NOT WORKING

Here is what you’ll hear when the sale is going wrong:

• One of our partners just contacted us and might be able to help us straighten out our problem;
• We have a new initiative starting soon. We’ll need to wait until we’re farther along on the implementation before we can move forward;
• There has been so much change here. I’d like to speak with you again in 6 months when things have calmed down here;
• I think we’re going to continue using what we’ve got for now. Can you call in about 3 months and see if we’re ready then?
• The people who have given us our current X are coming up with a new product that might be able to do what we want. It won’t be out for 2 months, but we’ll need to wait til then to trial it.
• I’ll need to run this by a few more people.
• We need to make sure we’ve got the budget for this.
• We were thinking of a solution that is a bit simpler than what you and I have come up with. We’re either going to have to scale this back, or wait til there is budget next year.

Whatever the excuse, it’s built around an internal system that you are unaware of and can lead to surprises. >From where you stand, you can only see a problem that your product resolves. I recently heard a conventional sales person doubt that he, personally, would have missed a long-standing problem that delayed a large sale by years – even when the people who missed this issue were 5 very very senior partners of a well-established international consulting group who were partnering with every single “C” level exec. Oh the arrogance of our profession!

WHAT TO DO

Once you hear any of the above objections (or any others), you can actually get back in the game by using the Buying Decision Funnel and lead the prospect through all of the decisions that need to be managed in order to make a new decision. The Funnel will lead the prospect from strategic to tactical decisions that her entire system will have to address. We’re talking about CHANGE here, not just about solving the identified problem.

Remember that the prospect does not seek your product: she seeks to resolve a business problem and your product may help her do that. And she will not consider making a purchase until she’s tried every conceivable approach to solving the problem with resources already familiar to her (read up on the sequence of buyer’s decision making). Your new job is to ask systems-based questions that will lead the prospect to her own answers – not use information-based questions that will help her buy your product.

Here are a couple of examples to help you move the prospect through their decisions when you hear that the sales is stuck:

What I hear you saying is X and that your timing might not be what we first discussed. What would you need to know or do differently in order to have ready whatever needs to be managed in order to move forward when it’s the right time?

How would you know that my product would offer a solution that your team would be able to adopt and recognize as a reliable alternative/addition to what you’re currently using?

Of course, I can’t give you all possible Facilitative Questions here as they need to be formulated as per the conversation. Just note that when formulating the questions, include systems elements surrounding the perceived problem (including roles, rules, relationships, politics, vendor management, etc.) not just questions that help YOU determine a need’. Keep reminding yourself that your prospect has a much bigger issue than your product can solve, and that the only person who can resolve their issues are inside the organization.

It’s not rocket science, but truly demands a different mindset as Buying Facilitation supports the front end of the sales cycle that has been hidden until now. Indeed, it’s a systems approach to collaborative decision making and not a selling method.

You have had no choice but to base your closing predictions on the content of what prospects say, rather than managing the system that they operate within. But now you can help prospects manage their actual internal buying decision system. This will put you on the buyer’s team, uncover three times more prospects, and close sales 600% faster than with conventional sales.

Do you want to sell? Or have someone buy?

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Should you wish to learn more about this, go to www.buyingfacilitation.com and purchase my ebook Buying Facilitation: the new way to sell that expands and influences decisions

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