The Funnelholic

I have resisted for the longest time becoming a news organization. I typically write what I feel. Guess what: I missed out. With the Focus.com platform, I can tackle topical issues particularly when I’m not sure I know the answer. (: For instance, I MUST not know enough because everyone tells me that Benioff could care less about marketing then he runs off and does THIS. I need to understand it. Here is what we have done, we reached out and got some of the most respected experts (All Focus Experts thank you) in the space to tell all of us what this all means.

I have 6 fundamental questions:

• Why did Salesforce.com buy Radian6?
• What is your analysis of the move?
• What is Marc Benioff’s plan? Where is Marc Benioff going from here?
• What does it mean to the crm/social crm space
• What does it mean for the social media monitoring space?
• Bonus:  What does this mean for the marketing automation space? (I invited Steve Woods from Eloqua purposely for this)

And I’m getting them answered in tomorrow’s roundtable teleconference: What the Salesforce.com/ Radian 6 Deal Really Means

I haven’t been this excited about an event in a long time. Here are the details:

WHEN
Friday, April 1, 2011, 10:00 a.m. PT/ 1:00 p.m. ET

WHERE
Toll-free Dial-In Number: (866) 951-1151
International Dial-In Number: (201) 590-2255
Conference Number: 4999006

Here is the crew (How big is this!)

Brian Vellmure is the principal and founder of Initium LLC, a strategic consulting firm specializing in increasing corporate value through customer focused business design. For more than a decade, Brian has been helping companies increase profitability through customer focused initiatives. He is an accomplished business leader, management consultant, and award winning and syndicated blogger. He is often referred to as a thought leader and pioneer in the emerging discipline of Social CRM.

Esteban Kolsky is the Principal and Founder of ThinkJar, an advisory and research think-tank focused on Customer Strategies. He has over 22 years of experience in customer service and CRM consulting, research and advisory services, and is currently advising vendors and organization how to extend customer interactions from the CRM niche to the entire organization in their efforts to become Social Businesses.

Steve Woods is the CTO at Eloqua and author of the book “Digital Body Language” which focuses on the transformation under way in our buyers and how we as marketers can respond. Steve is also deeply involved with the Eloqua user community, with whom he regularly interacts through the discussions on his Eloqua Artisan blog.

Michael Fauscette leads IDC’s Software Business Solutions Group which includes research and consulting in enterprise software applications, collaboration and social applications, software partner and alliances, open source, software vendor business models, cloud computing and software pricing and licensing. He also provides thought leadership in the area of social applications and the transition to the social business.

Mitch Lieberman is Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Comity Technology Advisors, and has 15 years of experience in CRM domain. He has the social business expertise to offer analysis and strategic advice to companies of all sizes, helping them leverage social technology to better manage their relationships with individual consumers and their business customers.

This one’s gonna be a blockbuster. You should be there.

Background: I just did my annual “You Bought a List, Now What?” webinar with Netprospex. Literally, spur of the moment, I made up a phrase: the “tweetable moment.” More background: Part of the presentation includes ways to create remarkable content. At Focus, we ask our writers include “aha!” moments when creating content. Well, I’m changing that to “tweetable moment.” PS, that got tweeted. I used it again tonight in my preso at the Sales 2.0 Conference, and then Lisa Gschwandtner brought up the term “tweetable moment” a couple times afterward. I realized: It’s on. Write that down.

Webinars, PDFs, blog posts, social media, guest posts, videos, slide share presos - the overall content itself can be shareable, but are you creating “tweetable moments”? Definition: Sound bites that are begging to be re-quoted in 140 characters or less - memorable and consumable. Frankly, I don’t think about and devise sound bites, and I am not sure the true master of the tweetable moment does either; truly tweetable moments come out naturally. At any rate, a “tweetable moment” is like adding a dash of Tapatío Hot Sauce to your content. Shake well and season to taste.

I present a webinar with Mark Feldman of Netprospex titled “You Bought a List, Now What?” that over the years has been one of the more popular presentations we have done together, as 1000s of people typically sign up. We are doing it again on Wednesday, March 2 and Thursday, March 3 at 11 a.m. PT (2 p.m. ET).  I have made some updates to the webinar and have new rantings on the topic (thus prompting me to write this post).

First, allow me to get on my soapbox. What we are talking about is outbound vs. inbound, or push vs. pull. The vast majority of chatter in the marketing blogosphere is about content marketing, earned media, inbound marketing, and so forth; in other words, everyone is advocating for pull. One of my good friends Adam Needles basically called outbound email “stupid s#!*” in our Focus Roundtable together. I am a gigantic advocate for pull marketing as well. I believe in the tenets of inbound marketing. Hey, who doesn’t want someone to walk into their store? But it’s just not realistic all the time. Sometimes you need to put out the sandwich board and entice people to come into the store, and if it works, why wouldn’t you do it all the time?

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