What is the first thing you think of when you hear the phrase “Social Media”? Is it Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube? When it comes to owning a space, these companies have quickly become the “Kleenex” of social connectivity. But, what is the first thing you think of when you hear “Enterprise Social Media”? That one may take a little longer.
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While at the Summit last week, I spoke with countless folks about their current sales and marketing challenges. More specifically, we spoke about what “Game On” would mean within their organization in the coming year. Over and over again, the answers focused on helping sellers improve their conversations by getting the most important information in the hands of their customers. We’re all struggling with the same challenge. We know the information that we need lives somewhere in our company in nine out of ten situations. We also know that it’s more often NOT the powerpoint deck or glossy marketing brochure that we’re looking for. We simply need that one nugget of information – a competitive tidbit, a customer success story, some key product information – that someone out there knows cold. But what happens if we don’t know who the right expert is for a specific question or situation? What happens if that person who seems to know everything resigns tomorrow? What happens if the folks in the field continue relying on the same one or two people – or worse, the same old materials – because they don’t have the time or the connections with the many subject matter experts that live in the home office or elsewhere around the globe?
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A few months back I wrote a piece for one of our SAVO Newsletters and I would like to share my insights again here.
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When I sat down to write this piece I thought about doing something along the lines of why B2B organizations should be embracing social media. This is something I believe strongly in as the social media guy here at SAVO. However this topic has been touched on quite a bit lately, and there are great blogs out there already like Mashable that can give some good insights on this topic. (Also, if you haven’t yet seen it yet take a look at this recent YouTube video from Socialnomics and the data behind the explosion in social media, it is worth a look.) However, after some thought I decided it might be more valuable to give a little insight in to why we are doing it at SAVO.
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Even the most top-down, buttoned-up organizations are harnessing Tribal Knowledge from the field. Check out how this article from the New York Times about how U.S. Army is using the Tribal Knowledge of its 140,000 members of the Army’s online forums to re-write its field manuals.
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