Category: Sales and Marketing

  • Selling is not the opposite of buying

    Customers buy software, but they’re sold promises.

  • Brand Conversations and Stock Performance

    About a year ago, we comparatively visualized conversations between two competitive brands of major sport apparel companies.  The network of communications of Brand A showed better potential characteristics for healthy and robust interaction. One year later, and more than 1,000,000 people talking about each brand, what do we see? Several million conversations later, we still see a deeply…

  • Comparing Online Brand Conversations (Sports Apparel)

    Over a long enough period of time, maps of who is talking with whom mostly look the same.  Many conversations start to overlap with each other, and eventually you see a large central core and any number of outliers. However if you look over short enough periods, you can see patterns of how those conversations…

  • Election Influence by 527’s: Browsable Map

    I wanted to put out what’s been done so far on making yesterday’s post more interactive. There’s an awful lot that could be better about this map. Particularly legibility of labels in the core (it’s just too dense). If you want to see names, I suggest looking at the edges of the map. Michael Bommarito…

  • Demographics Fail

    We forget, now that our reach is wide, that all purchasing is done by individuals.  Since we don’t know the individuals, and locating and selling to each and every one of them (us) is too expensive, we developed marketing to help us select the people, the individuals, most likely to purchase whatever we are selling. …

  • Sales Teams need Social Networks

    Effective use of social networks (SN’s) is closer to sales than it is to marketing.  You want to build momentum in the network, and marketing alone will not provide that. There’s a lot more to SN’s than better demographics, and given the abysmal value advertisers are are placing on Facebook (suggested $0.32 CPM vs. $1.15…

  • Social Networks and Sales

    From eponymous Social Network data alone, I can tell you who has, for any group, the most influence, who the leaders are, and who you need to convince in order to turn the opinion of the group as a whole. The question is are you going to be a trusted adviser, or a hard sell?…