I realize that a lot of opinions exist around this subject. In fact, a day after I recieved an email about this and decided to write a blog about it, Hubspot wrote a blog titled "Please Don't Start a Social Media Marketing Agency" that got a lot of people talking. But here's my thoughts:

No one should be relying completely on social media to get the marketing job done.

Yes, social media has a lot of value. As pointed out by the Hubspot article I mentioned, social media can help build SEO, it can help build a following with people who could help spread your message, search engines have started to look to social media to refine search results, social media is starting to be used for targeted advertising, and sales people can use social media to connect and nurture prospect relationships. But, social media only accomplishes these things to a degree, and it will not accomplish any of this unless done correctly.

My point: social media marketing can not stand alone. There is inbound marketing of which there are several components that includes social media. Relying completely on social media to market your business online will cause you to miss integral opportunites that lie with using social media in conjunction with other online tools as part of an inbound marketing strategy.

The internet opened a completely new can of worms in the marketing world, but social media is only one of those worms!

Learn more about inbound marketing!

I first published this  Seizing Profitable Marketing Opportunities on Technorati.

Less than 24 hours after meeting my new client, the proposal (pitch) I drafted to clean up the Gulf Coast was sitting on the Governor of Alabama's desk.

The day was 75 and sunny, my wife and kids were out of town and I had spent the previous 48 hours resolving work backlogs. Needless to say, I had my sights on landing my first small mouth bass of the season with my beautiful custom St. Croix five weight fly rod. However, being a consummate sales and marketing professional, I took one last pass of emails on my iPad on insure all the urgent and most of the important items were out of my inbox. Hmmmm, an email I was copied on by a client caught my attention and my marketing senses went off.

My client was one of the companies involved with a consortium of companies pooling their technologies to collaborate on cleaning up all of the oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. So, I took the risk, not expecting anyone to take me up on my offer and said, "If anyone needs help getting this deal done, I can work today." And within 20 minutes I had six different company profiles, a list of capabilities along with a plan to keep oil from getting to the shoreline, and a plan to clean up the shoreline if oil reached shore.

I won't bore you with details, but I will say that the other marketing companies that had been on the project were doing what most traditional outbound marketing companies do. They confused actions with results and completely missed the point of marketing.

The moral of the story? Marketing needs to drive sales actions and results. Marketing needs to be intimately dialed into pull vs. push mentality, seeking to add value and become indispensable. Screw brand building, getting market awareness and the like. Be it inbound or outbound, your marketing investment should always produce a measurable sales result, period. More importantly, more marketing professionals need to get off their laurels and realize our job is to make selling easier and we need to walk in the shoes of the sales team and help them get sales results.

People buy differently than they used to. We can’t continue “shouting” at consumers and think they’re going the listen...they won’t. Today’s consumer has power. They have caller ID, they have voice mail, they can fast forward commercials, and they have many other tools that allow them to ignore the many messages being “shouted” at them.

Power has shifted to the buyer and the buying process has been democratized. Consumers decide what they want to listen to. In case you’re not paying attention, the game has changed small business owners and CEOs. The expectation of the customer is that we empower them to choose us, so empower them to find you wherever they look (hint: 86% of people go to the Internet as part of their buying process [hint, hint: If you don’t think Sr. Executives are going there, think about their direct reports they send to do research for them, they go there]). Furthermore, customers expect a dialog and not monologue.

Since marketing is no longer about campaign and more about creating and empowering a dialogs with the customer, alignment is mission critical.This alignment is also critical because your sales professionals have direct access to the customer with social networking sites such as LinkedIn.

It is estimated the misalignment of sales and marketing costs the US Fortune 100 $225 billion annually. Based on my experience, I'm certain the same challenges face small to mid-size businesses. Executives can no longer turn a blind eye to the alignment of sales and marketing. The process for lead conversion, lead nurturing and sales execution need to be seamless any interruption in this sequence can have severe penalties on sales performance. Whereas, the next competitor from anywhere in the world is only a "Google" query away.

Three signs sales and marketing are not aligned and they are costing you big money.

1.Your company does not have the sales process in writing from click to close.

2.If a colleague asked you how your sales team is using social media to create and nurture leads and you don't know the answer.

3. If you ask your marketing leader what is the process for scoring and transitioning leads to the salespeople and they can't produce a written process or answer.

Certification Awarded by Inbound Marketing University Training Program

Hudson- 4/12/10 - Inbound Marketing University awards the Inbound Marketing Certification to Kallie Pechacek as part of its comprehensive Internet marketing training program (HYPERLINK "http://inboundmarketing.com"http://inboundmarketing.com). 


This certification acknowledges Pechacek's proficiency in inbound marketing principles and best practices. These principles include: blogging, search engine optimization, social media, lead conversion, lead nurturing and closed-loop analysis.

Pechacek joins an elite group of Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals. In total, 1,300 individuals have successfully passed the IMU program.

To complete the Inbound Marketing Certification, Pechacek completed 16 in-depth classes covering each facet of inbound marketing and passed a comprehensive certification exam. (View the full list of classes: HYPERLINK "http://inboundmarketing.com/university/classes"http://inboundmarketing.com/university/classes)


The courses are taught by a knowledgeable faculty of professors, including New York Times' best-selling author Chris Brogan, Google's Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik, Internet celebrity Gary Vaynerchuk, best-selling author and international speaker David Meerman Scott, and more. (View all professors: HYPERLINK "http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university/professors"http://www.inboundmarketing.com/university/professors)

This certification is administered by HubSpot.

About InboundMarketing.com
InboundMarketing.com is an online community and certification program for marketers. The site's content teaches a new style of marketing that emphasizes business uses of social media, content creation and search engine optimization for marketing. InboundMarketing.com is hosted and moderated by HubSpot, Inc. Register for InboundMarketing.com at HYPERLINK "http://inboundmarketing.com/user/register"http://inboundmarketing.com/user/register.

About HubSpot
HubSpot, Inc. provides Internet marketing software that helps businesses get found online, generate more inbound leads and convert a higher percentage of those leads into paying customers. HubSpot's software platform includes tools that allow professional marketers and business owners to manage search engine optimization, blogging and social media, as well as landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics. Based in Cambridge, MA, HubSpot can be found at HYPERLINK "http://www.hubspot.com"http://www.hubspot.com. HubSpot's free marketing tools can be found at HYPERLINK "http://grader.com"http://grader.com.

So...the day starts at the butt crack of dawn 3:45AM. The typical life of a small business owner. Trying to get billing done, invoice, study my craft and prep for a prospective new client meeting before 9AM.

I shower and cruise to Starbucks, but the address in my GPS led me to a warehouse where Starbucks apparently used to be. I happend to catch a glance of a Caribou Coffee out of the corner of my eye and head there as my back up. (What is sad is this use to be my first choice before they went public).

I plow through a few emails and decide to take a break to grab an oatmeal. I place my order for oatmeal and I get a "what type?"  I reply, "What do you mean what type?" The Barista looks at me with a blank stare...Good question, I know we have a lot of choices.  Aaargh!

While this young woman was very kind to cure my illiteracy and read my twelve choices off the menu, I was sadly reminded why my once favorite place is now last on my list behind Starbucks, Dunn Brothers and a local hole in the wall.  

So here is the lesson for small business owners in the context of my blog, Epoch.

Don't Follow, Lead. If you do follow, blow the competition out of the water!

Caribou has 500 stores and Starbucks has 9,000! Caribou Coffee is so much smaller and nimbler, it should have been the company to offer coffee in a packet you can take on the road. Or, being an outdoorsy coffee shop, their food selections should resemble those items that take you back to where the Caribou hang. For example, I would offer a breakfast sandwich called a Crystal Creek Sunrise Scramble, inspired by some customers trip they had camping at Crystal Creek in the Tetons. If you are going to follow, make sure you are clearly better than the competition. Note, more is not better. If I was running Caribou Coffee I would have hired someone to create an out of this world gourmet oatmeal, instead of the undercooked crap from a packet I'm eating right now. This would be more consistent with their attempt at "fresh baked" pastries in the store.  

One more non-coffee example: iPods were not the first to market, but they clearly were superior to any media player on the market when they hit.

Build a Community. Human beings buy stuff, not demographics.

I use to feel like the folks at Caribou Coffee were my buds. When I went into the Caribou this morning at 5:30AM, there was no one but me there. I did not get a greeting from the two people that saw me walk in.  

I will go one step further and say that if you go to the corporate Website, there are no invitations to follow them on Twitter, Facebook or the like.  Once again, this suff is free, and social media is the easiest way to stay dialed in on the market and your brand. 

I would totally leverage inbound marketing to keep a pulse and inspire my community to help shape my offerings.

Be Authentic and Avoid the Mushy Middle. Mediocre is a Horrible Aspiration!

Starbucks always has been a kind corporate, sleek refined more upscalish coffee shop. Whereas Caribou is a rough and tumble back country type of experience. However, you would never know this other than the little bits and pieces of Caribou and rustic stuff in their decor. Being a kayaker, backcountry camper Caribou used to be the place where I could go to escape with my buds. Now they are a toned down chain trying to appeal to the masses and not doing very well, based on their financial performance.

To summarize, authenticity, the ability to innovate on a dime and create an intimate community is the biggest game changer small business owners and CEOs have.  I'm certain if Caribou would embrace these truths they would post stronger financial earnings and they would again become my first choice.

On October 7, 2009, Hubspot made Teicko Huber, Principal Consultant & President of Focus to Grow, a certified inbound marketing ninja. 

Hubspot, is a web-based inbound marketing system that helps small to medium sized businesses get found on the internet by the right people, and then helps convert these people into leads and customers through landing pages, lead intelligence and marketing analytics.

After 4 helpful hours of consulting with Shaun Pinney, a Hubspot consultant, Teicko completed the Hubspot Onboarding process of setup, get found, convert, analyze & repeat.

Now a Hubspot Certified Professional, Teicko has mastered the features and functions most valuable for Focus to Grow and its clients.