Please Disturb

Sadly, most "social selling" merely amplifies sleazy selling.

You see it on LinkedIn daily, as an ever-swelling spam tsunami floods your homepage.

Although they do themselves no favors, the buffoons behind the flood damage their brands more than themselves. Where they once had opportunities to drive away only handfuls of prospects in the past, now they possess a weapon of mass destruction.

It need not be that way, says LinkedIn strategist Kristina Jaramillo.

Social selling experts insist social selling is a lead-gen "volume play," Jaramillo says.

But it isn't.

Social selling's purpose should be lead qualification and nurturing.

"The focus should be on prospect development," Jaramillo says.

Simply posting about your product, your team, yourself or even your industry doesn't make you relevant to buyers.

You have to drill down to value; and, on LinkedIn, that comes in form of challenges to the status quo.

You need to publish "disruptive" content that drives changes in thoughts and actions, and, most importantly, "give prospects a reason to change," Jaramillo says.

You Can Thank Associations for National Days

July 6 is National Fried Chicken Day.

Marked merely to drive product sales—in this case, sales of chicken parts by fast-food restaurants—the hennish little holiday typifies most so-called "National Days."

National Days are PR stunts—or the vehicles thereof—that date back to the Roman Empire, when emperors declared micro holidays constantly, in order to keep the bread-and-circus-loving citizens of Rome satisfied.

Lupercalia, for example, was a micro holiday marked every February 15th. The Romans would celebrate the day by sacrificing goats, drinking lots of wine, and parading around in the nude, in hopes of banishing evil spirits.

We moderns prefer National Days that honor stuff we can buy: consumer goods like almonds, bourbon, cupcakes, eggs, hot dogs, pancakes, spreadsheets, towels, tubas, and underpants.

As of 2017, association marketers have spawned over 1,200 of this sell-ebrations, according to the National Days Calendar.

To apply for your own National Day, all you need do is submit it to the keepers of the Calendar.

"The buildup annually to a National Day is great," the application states. "News stories, increase in product sales, top of mind awareness and much more can be generated annually."

Great, that is, provided you're not a chicken.

The Marketing Seven

Ten years ago, you wouldn't find a CMO in most companies.

That individual has only recently escaped orbit around the COO.

As "the new kid on the block," the CMO often finds it hard to fit in and measure up to the C-suite's old-timers.

According to venture capitalist Tim Kopp, while CMOs are true mavericks, they all boil down to seven types—and no one type has all the skills needed to lead most brands today.

The seven types are:

The Thought Leader. This CMO can create a product category and evangelize for it. They're storytellers, speakers, and visionaries.

The Growth Hacker. This CMO "goes deep into Excel spreadsheets to drive bottom-up demand-gen programs," Kopp says. They often come from marketing ops or finance.

The Product Marketer. This CMO is fluent in tech-speak and adroit in pricing, packaging, messaging, and analyst relations.

The Brand Marketer. This CMO understands how to develop a brand's look and feel. They often come from B2C companies.

The Strategist. This CMO is "great at understanding where the company’s solution fits in the market, what key strategic moves to make, and how to approach important decisions." They're especially good at driving strategic partnerships.

The Culture Builder. This CMO knows how to engage employees in the mission of the business and rally teams to achieve departmental goals.

The All-Around Athlete. This CMO is the ideal type, "but good luck finding one," Kopp warns. They know enough to be dangerous in every area of marketing, but can only make things happen when they hire people who compensate for their weaknesses.

CEOs who want results from their CMOs must be careful to match company needs to the candidates' skills, and be willing to sacrifice some imperatives, Kopp says.

Getting Inside Attendees' Heads

B2B CMOs have struggled to measure events with the same precision they measure digital.

Mobile apps could change that.

Not only do they let exhibit marketers engage attendees and personalize events for them, many mobile apps can be used to track face-to-face engagement, and further nurture customers and prospects.

One example: Showcase XD.

This simple iPad app lets tradeshow attendees explore an exhibiting company's products—through videos, demos, photos, drawings, and other content—while visiting the company's booth.

Meantime, the app is gathering and sending the company "digital brain scans" of the attendee that reveal his or her actual interest in the products.

The company can use the analytics after the show to decide, among other things, what marketing automation score to assign the attendee.

One company isn't waiting for the show to end.

IBM uses mobile apps to track attendees' interests and harnesses Watson to make product and activity recommendations—such as downloading a trial code—on the spot, by comparing attendees' pre-show interests with the products they engage with at the exhibit.

While no one can guarantee a CMO ROI before an event, keeping tabs on attendees' interactions though a mobile app—and using the analytics to feed the company's marketing automation or CRM system—can produce real results.

Patriotism is the Refuge of Stooges

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: if we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.

― Carl Sagan

Hundreds of gun-toting "patriots" arrived this weekend at Gettysburg, to protect the national military park's Confederate monuments from desecration by leftists.

Although the leftists never materialized, blood was shed. One patriot accidentally shot himself in the foot.

The perfect metaphor, if there ever were one.

Patriotism is the refuge of stooges.

My plea to patriots this July 4th: read a freakin' history book (preferably not one published in Texas).

You might try Apostles of Disunion.

Illustrating the "real history" of the Civil War, the book recounts how a group of state-appointed commissioners from the Deep South traveled the upper Confederacy in 1860 spreading the secessionists' message: Lincoln, they said, would emancipate the slaves, and plunge the South into a racial nightmare.

During the next five years, 620,000 Americans would die, to settle the emancipation question.

The "fake history" took root after Appomattox, when disgruntled Confederate veterans began retailing the myth of the "Lost Cause" at their yearly reunions.

The war, they said, was never about slavery: it was waged only to defend the antebellum South, a moonlit magnolia paradise peopled by happy hoedowning slaves and their affectionate white masters.

These same propagandists made sure to regulate the history textbooks used in every school, while their dutiful daughters would later make sure to hype movies like D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation,” David O. Selznick's “Gone with the Wind'” and Walt Disney’s “Song of the South.”