The Sales Engineer

Yeah, we’re all watching it happen, trying to capitalize on it. More information is not better information. People more & more are lazy-ing themselves out of making any risky decisions. They want the same kind of assurances a conference room full of yes men and stakeholders would give them: Blame Management. As long as there is at least 1 person to blame if it is a bad decision (that is not you), then they say yes.

But now there is/are magnitudes more info (or rather data) for a single person to go through, and even the yes-men can’t go through it if pieced up-even if it could be pieced up. So what kind of decisions are there? 3 kinds, for us entrepreneur types:

1. Personal
2. Job/Productivity
3. Commercial

Personal: What products do I buy when filling up, or going to the grocery store? Think “consumer”.

Job/Productivity: What stock should I buy/sell? Which job is best for me to move to (a combination of Personal)? Where should I be investing? Is my 401k performing properly/well for this market?

Commercial: (think “provider”) Should I buy more widgets and stock-pile, or will their price go down in a few weeks and I should buy then? Is my company’s valuation going up or down? Where is productivity/efficiency (think “BI”, or “Green/Yellow/Red”, or “Executive Dashboard”, etc.)?

In all three “horizontals”, the data & information available to use in making these decisions is doubling every few months. It used to be that storage (cost) was the holdup, but now it is simply what some early adopters called “data mining”, which is a very poor way of going about it, but it is buzzword-worthy.

So what would you do (on any of the 3 levels) if you had all the information you needed, but it was somewhere in a mass of data that has more words than have ever been written by all humans across all time, and is getting bigger every day? You would want only one thing, and that one thing is the target of anyone ahead of this curve:

Making data into usable, actionable information.

If you didn’t know this 2-3 years ago, you’re already too late.

pat

:)

GMail recently took away the ability to have an RSS feed create signatures for us. Luckily I’ve been using Wisestamp (http://www.wisestamp.com) for years, and it is just the thing you need. With it, you can take the output of any RSS feed and put the text at the bottom of your signature in every email you send out.

http://blog.atcp.us/wp-admin/post.php?post=3049&action=edit&message=1

Above, I’ve created a simple signature in Wisestamp, and when you do this in the editor, you have some really diverse choices below. More »

Effective Twitter Marketing 101

Okay, I’m going to put it out there – I love Twitter! There, I said it. Twitter most of the time plays second fiddle to the social media giant Facebook. In my opinion Twitter is like the party where everyone is dancing and exchanging info, whereas Facebook is the party full of wall flowers or cliques. If you’re in network marketing and not taking advantage of this powerful social media site [Twitter] let me share with you what you’re missing. Most businesses and Network marketers are now using social media as a marketing strategy. This actually helps increase sales and cut cost in advertising and marketing. One of the most widely used is Twitter. Twitter is micro blogging at its best. Twitter is a creative way to express what you’re doing or in a Marketer’s case promoting in 140 characters max. Why use Twitter for business? Using Twitter for marketing allows marketers to get their message in front of non-stop traffic. Twitter has a multitude of members; an estimated 300,000 people join on a daily basis and there are about 60 million Tweets that go out per day…now that’s traffic!

How to use Twitter effectively for PR and Marketing

1) Become Attractive. What I mean by becoming attractive is, remember to use the rules of *Attraction Marketing and be sure to provide Content and Value. If your niche market is other Network Marketers then your content (blog posts, updates and articles) shouldn’t be about anything other than topics that pertain to leadership or the industry. There’s nothing worse than going to someone’s site and not being able to pin point exactly what they do. When you provide a link in your tweets you want the information to be so useful that it becomes worth retweeting or viral.

2) Stand Out. How do you stand out? Do what everyone else is NOT doing. If you haven’t noticed everyone is selling or promoting something on Twitter. In order to not get lost in the crowd, build relationships instead selling. There may be millions of tweets out there, but someone, actually many people are looking to make a worth while connection with you. Would you do business with someone that only looked at you a dollar sign? I would hope not.

3) Build your list. It’s nice to tweet quotes, and other empowering notes, but one of the main reasons your on Twitter is to build an effective following. Everyday there should be a tweet including a link that leads traffic to your blog or affiliate site; if not then you’re just wasting time.

4) Keep your followers intrigued…Be Creative. The quickest way for someone to “unfollow” you is to repeat the same tweet, over and over and over and over…get my point? Be creative, keep your readers intrigued, and be original! Maybe you can write your tweets in story form one day or in a poetic rhyme- whatever it is keep them following. With Twitter usage growing leaps and bounds on a daily basis, you must fight to get noticed. Make your 140 characters work for you! Yes there are only 140 characters (not words) so make them as powerful as 140 thousand characters. The power is in your tweet.

5) Automation. One or two tweets just won’t do. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands and can update on a regular basis, I advise you to “automate” your tweets. Sites like; Hootsuite, Tweet deck and Social Oomph, to name a few, help keep you tweeting throughout the day. Set aside time in the evening or morning, whatever works best for you and load your greetings (social Oomph) and tweets for the day. Automated tweeting is like having a virtual social media assistant. Be sure to check these sites daily for Direct Mentions (when someone tweets about you) and Direct messages that need your response.

There are a plethora of social media sites out there, but Twitter by far is one of the less complex ones to engage. The networking possibilities are limitless. Although it is a simple media format, it can be confusing to people new to the internet or mysterious to Network Marketers that never used this format before. As a Network Marketer, I didn’t get it at first, but being a part of a knowledgeable community like MLSP I was able to learn from six and seven figure earning Leaders in the industry. It’s like being in a room with all the celebrities you’ve ever wanted to meet. In ending…the most important key is to learn as much as you can about the industry. Be a student first, gain knowledge and then share that knowledge with other struggling Network Marketers.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/6169494

I couldn’t believe that I had to install Adobe’s FF/IE based installer to be able to then download/install the reader. I remember the time, not long ago, when the reader was a reader (just like the Flash Player, remember? Now you need Flash dev sw to get it).

I dug around, and found the link for all of us. The link is here.

Another moment of silence for the Macromedia Empire. You are still missed.

The term “singularity,” which is often heard today, comes originally from my field, theoretical physics. It denotes a point in space and time where the gravitational field becomes infinite. At the center of a black hole, for example, we might find a singularity. It also refers to a mathematical term where a certain function also becomes infinite. But the type of singularity that you have probably been hearing about the most lately is called “The Technological Singularity” and although its not a new concept, it’s definitely becoming more of a mainstream topic of conversation.

Countless books on the subject are being published on a consistent basis, and Ray Kurzweil just recently launched his documentary, “The Transcendent Man” which shares his vision of a world in which humans merge with machines and is currently screening in sold-out screenings around the planet, web forums, blogs and video sites.

More »