As a technology sales professional, why not get technology to work for you? Mastering RSS (really simple syndication) feeds is a positive step in the right direction. For those of you who have not been properly introduced to RSS, welcome blogs into your life. At InfoWorld in July, columnist Chad Dickerson wrote, “These days, despite near-universal acclaim for technology, I have a real love/hate relationship with RSS.” His issues are with the “profound” way he utilizes his blog, served by his RSS feed. Dickerson tells readers, “Despite ‘only’ being XML, RSS is the driving force fulfilling the Web’s original promise: making the Web useful in an exciting, real-time way.”

There you have it from a techie who can further educate you in his article at http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/07/16/29OPconnection_1.html
He’s saying that blogs (web-logs) are better than email, better than phone, and better than PR on a Web site. Considered sociable media—real-time connections to customers, clients, your boss, your partner, new prospects, and other bloggers—blogs may be the first real Web-based tool offering real-time contact that works.

Blogging Weighs In.
Blogs may have had their start in the tech world, where software geeks used them to exchange notes on software or hardware issues in real-time. But they’re emerging as today’s answer to outwitting email filters and the push marketing of banner ads. A July 17th article in the Chicago Tribune, written by Alex L.. Goldfayn, puts the power of blogs in the spotlight. His article, “Blogs flex muscle in ‘viral marketing,’” reveals stats that are hard to ignore.
In the wrong hands, blogs can report on bad experiences that will ping all over the Web faster than Spider-man can flit from building to building. In the right hands, the company being blogged about above can head the controversy off at the pass by posting a solution or disclaimer on its own blog, assuring customers the issue is being handled. At this point in time, 11% of Web surfers read blogs, post comments, or engage in discussions with the blog writer in order to ask questions, learn new facts on a particular topic, or even gripe about products and services.

Naturally, consumers jumped on the blog wagon right way. Blogging about personal thoughts and musings, their writing was of little use to anyone but themselves or friends and families. In the last year, blogging has outgrown consumers. It’s rapidly becoming the communication medium for all, including technology sales folk. Just surf over to www.gizmodo.com and see how a good blog operates as a communications tool.

Tool Not Toy
While a few smart businessmen and women caught the fever and recognized the benefits of this truly interactive tool early on, the majority of businesses don’t blog. Despite the immediate nature of a blog to connect them to their customers in ways email and online marketing can’t, businesses are wary of this new tool. They seem to be avoiding it. A closer look reveals that blogs do what email marketing and other online marketing models such as banner ads and search engine pay per click ads try to do but don’t do very well. Blogs bypass filters, track click-throughs, and give customers a voice in the sales and marketing process.

This is because Blogs are PULL marketing. Blogs are customer-centric, by nature. They actively engage readers (customers or prospects) with the writers (company PR personnel, salespeople, or technical support). By giving the customer the OPTION of subscribing to read the blog, it PULLS the customer into the message, opening up opportunities for sales support notes, technical support tips, comments, and/or suggestions.

The blogger maintains control by posting relevant information gathered from comments posted by clients or customers, gleaned from reading other blogs, or adding links to significant industry changes written about in industry publications. In a perfect world, the sales blogger would post notes on the latest product updates, inform readers of glitches in the company’s hardware or software, offer solutions, provide a link to operating procedures, and encourage customer comments.

At the very least, blogging allows the salesperson to keep his or her finger on the customer’s pulse. A daily check of that pulse is a real-time indication of where the salesperson is succeeding and where she isn’t.

Blogging At the C-Level
When you stop to consider that business blogs designed for customer interaction are lagging behind marketing blogs and blogs that report on business trends, your mind should immediately begin calculating the benefit your blog could provide were it live today. Several sales blogs do exist where writers discuss what works and what doesn’t, but server-side sales is not represented among them. Searching blogpulse for blogs in the field of server-side sales returns a startlingly small number, somewhere around, oh, zero.

Blogs Getting Attention
Once you build a blog, other bloggers, customers, and search engines (Google loves blogs) will find you almost immediately. You will also get attention from competing vendors. You may need to clear the content of your blog with your boss, or the PR head at your company, up front. By all accounts, the PR head should be the one to start the blog, after which he or she should invite all sales professionals to add posts. The following business blogs are examples of what some bloggers are accomplishing using this form of interaction: a blog by an employee of Macromedia which discusses MS mobile standards; a blog about the NBA which connects players and fans from around the world; and the Channel Marketing Professional, where you’ll learn about “channel marketing strategy for executives and marketing professionals.”

Convergence of Communication
In June, Businessweek online offered a five-page spread of predictions on the digital convergence of the new millennium titled “Big Bang!” Surprisingly, it did not mention blogging, but it did state that this so-called convergence will cause a collision between “three massive industries.” America is noted as the trillion-dollar leader in the computer and software biz, followed by strong Asian roots in the billion-dollar consumer-electronics sector, and a trillion-dollar business sector including the communications industry that spans both continents. The inference is that wireless will command a large part of the dollars made from the convergence of all these technologies.

Meanwhile, someone has to talk about them. Someone has to explain convergence to clients and customers. Someone has to service and sell the servers that will be powering this “explosion of innovation.” It should be you in a blog following the explosion’s fallout, especially as it impacts not only your bottom line, but the bottom line for all of your clients.

The prediction is that “these nascent networks will speed up by an average of 50% per year,” and that “every bit of digital information, whether it’s a phone call, a song, a Web page, or a movie [or a blog], will flow among these machines in the very same river of data.” Shouldn’t you be grabbing part of that power for yourself? You have the hardware knowledge, you have the products, you have the customers, and, I’m sure you have a list of prospects. Get in front of them using a company blog.

Servers and Clients:
Your Blog or Mine. Blogging will be passé in another year. The hype will disappear, but the value won’t. Voda One, a division of Westcon Group, and an Avaya partner, announced in a July press release at www.integratedmarketing.com the decision to “help its resellers make the transition to selling convergence solutions from Avaya Inc. for the SMB space.” Plans are to use “a new set of training and support initiatives, as well as [giving resellers] a chance to win a lease on a new Jaguar automobile.”

The training initiatives may not be blog material, but the chance to win a lease on a new Jaguar is. How much more compelling and far reaching would this offer be if the company announced it in a blog that generated hundreds, maybe thousands, of relevant eyeballs? What if YOUR blog could get the news in front of YOUR Customers. How good would that make you look?

In a report out of eChanneling.com, posted July 7th, the Yankee Group noted, “There is no one channel to reach the SMB market, and any equipment vendor that is solely dependent on one means to [reach] its market faces many challenges.” The article notes, “the complex dynamics of the SMB market require a thorough vendor multi-channel strategy.” Alan Thwaits, author of the article, reports that the SMB market has four critical questions when approaching a technology purchase: how it will save them money, how it can improve productivity, how it gives them a competitive advantage, and how quickly and easily it can be put into service.


No one doubts convergence is happening. But nowhere in these articles or press releases do we see the need to provide superior communication at the customer level. The kind of communication you see in a blog. Unlike instant messaging, or chat, a blog does not require two parties to be at their computer at the same time in order to exchange messages or information. Nor does it require opening email to read. It merely requires CEOs and CFOs to read it at their leisure, which, we discovered a few paragraphs ago, is a multi-tasking effort for these executives. Comments will follow, emailed, phoned, or in the comments box of the blog if it’s turned on. Why? Because, like salespeople, C-level executives are sociable, too.