Social Media Today reports that a state law in Missouri, which would have prevented teachers and students from communicating privately over the Internet on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter was temporarily blocked, but if the injunction is lifted, it could have national implications. The law, also known as Senate Bill 54 or the Amy Hestir Student Protection Act, aims to fight inappropriate contact between students and teachers, including protecting children from sexual misconduct by their educators and is named after a Missouri public school student who was repeatedly molested by a teacher several decades ago. Oh, dear…

I once read a Facebook Note where some teachers actively use Facebook to connect to their students, seeing that social media is an extension of the added responsibility of being a public figure. Though many stay away from Facebook for fear of ethical, moral and often times the fear of even very ridiculous allegations, one workaround I kept reading is to accept only graduates or those who are over the age of 18.

Of course, the online social media relationship has to stay online. Teachers must not invite students, graduate or even above eighteen, for example, to a dinner party. Facebook today has given us the ability to set privacy settings all the way to each message or link we share and post on our wall. One way is to use (friend) “Lists,” though having existed for quite some time now, has been elevated and placed at the left-column list above the Group and Page lists. Teachers can sort their friends according to user-defined lists, whether as generic as “students” to more specific like “Biology 101 SY2009.”

Long before the internet and the World Wide Web, teachers going beyond their normal paid hours to help lagging students have always been the best hero example for young minds. In primary and middle school years, just seeing my teacher staying in school to help my best friend improve his math skills was a very, very positive image that has stuck in my mind until this day (and learning later in life that those sessions were unpaid hours). Now that our world has expanded the use of the internet into social media sites like Facebook, why do people want to bar its use to enhance the ability of those “heroes” doing what they love to do without having to stay late at night in school?

I believe these naysayers are those who have not looked into social media in-depth before coming up with their conclusion that Facebook is bad for their children, and staying up until late evening in school with a teacher conducting extra remedial lessons is good. I’ve seen many similar instances in small and mid-sized businesses where the boss and owner bans Facebook because he thinks it decreases productivity. The word “think” is actually a public relations mockup; the real word the boss meant was “guess.” Ignorance of the law is not an excuse, as we have all been told. Is ignorance of social media an excuse?

I’ve encountered marketing groups of both big and small businesses setting up their Facebook Page and realizing later they have to disable wall posting from their fans (people who clicked the “Like” button) because many were reading the complaints of a few. “Huh? You’re scared of that? That only means you believe your business has crappy products and services, or everyone in your company doesn’t have the common sense and good judgment to answer back amiably, respectfully, correctly and every postively-enforced “ly” word we can both think of.” Don’t you know Facebook is actually one of the best, cheapest, unpaid means of delivering great customer service and care right smack in the eyes of thousands if not millions of your fans, another freebie for awesome public relations? Facebook and the rest of the social media sites are not print media to market and sell your product and service to the entire world; it’s a targetted, supercharged “Word of Mouth” medium that either creates or extends both social, educational and professional relationships outside of the coffee shop, the work place or the school.

If you’re a teacher, a school head, an academic institution owner; heck! If you’re even business owner, the head of a department, part of the strategic or executive committee driving and steering your organization – heed the voices of your customer. They’ve already been using Facebook and other social media sites long before you’ve even realized they’re there. They’ve gotten so comfortable with Facebook it’s now part of their everyday life; the use of broadsheet publications and TV has probably gone down BUT (strong emphasis on that word) these have not disappeared.

Are you waiting for your competitor grab the “first mover advantage?” Worst, are you waiting for someone to impersonate you, gain all your would-be fans before you enter the digital social world? I know our local, major utility company is scratching its head trying to figure out how to kick the living hell out of the the several impersonators who now have thousands of followers; only now did they realize and decide to create their Facebook Page. Sheesh!

Let’s go back to the school and their teachers. Would you rather your students learn stuff from other people? Right or wrong, Facebook can lead them to the wrong path, much like the impersonators we’ve all seen before (so far, only Twitter acknowledges legitimacy of individual and organizational accounts in its microblogging site if you can prove to them who you really are). Is leading them to the wrong path just the parents’ fault or is it also “YOUR” fault? I honestly believe the teacher, that greatest public figure of young people who adore their moms, dads and (secretly, usually) their teachers, should begin to learn and equip themselves with the benefits, advantages and power of social media as an academic tool so that they can bring their social responsibiliy in the physical world to the social media realm, where their students wouldn’t stop bantering and swapping information, more so, asking school-related questions.

There’s an impulsive way of entering social media for the educational and business organization, and there’s a more proper way of doing so. The challenge is finding that proper and right way of doing so; and the million Dollar question is will you decide to do so?

Sources: Social Media Today | The Facebook Blog | National Middle School Association

Photo above by clarkstown67 at Flickr.com

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Are today’s yuppies trying too hard to market and sell whatever it is they’re required to do? I ask this question because I always encounter the same faces at the street corner handing out colorful brochures, catalogs or flyers of a condominium up for pre-selling; and every day, I’m still asked to accept those flyers despite repeatedly telling them I’m not interested or not in the market.

I once interviewed one of them and was surprised to find out her daily quota for getting people to sign-up and give their full contact information is sixty. It was already past sunset when she approached me and as I began talking to her, you could see the sadness and desperation on her face – she was just shy of 30 contacts. How on earth is she going to meet her quota? “And why do you have a quota?” I asked, knowing that real estate selling is not a daily activity but a plus-and-minus numbers game spread across a month or more. It turns out she receives a monthly compensation on top of a sizeable commission if she closes a contract; somebody can dictate ridiculous quotas anytime and she can’t do anything about that. And why stand at that corner every day, or the mall booth? A friend of mine once told me that out of the corner-street and mall-booth flyering activities he did in a given period, giving away thousands of those back-to-back, sometimes-glossy sales paraphernalia, only three people became hot prospects; no one bought. Go figure!

In a recent “Social Media for the Workplace” training that I conducted, one question that came up involved customer complaints; and in that query, I was asked my opinion if it was better to disable posting on the wall of their Facebook Page for fear that others will read any complaints or nasty remarks. I revved up back to my years of dealing with customer service – the sound and practical principles behind it, not the call center function – and told the audience my most favorite customer service slogan: a complaint is a gift.* A short eulogy about that phrase just started coming out of my head and my mouth, emphasizing that I’d rather have someone tell me what’s wrong than keeping quiet yet stabbing me at the back (so to speak). Don’t dread complaints. Treat them as gifts you have a bigger chance of winning a forever-loyal customer. Customer service is not about the actual complaint. The true meaning of customer service is “a promise to deliver,” whatever it is you need to deliver to your customer, be it an answer, a solution to a problem, information, a replacement product or an additional service.

Recently, I had coffee with my young friend, probably three years in his working life, who started off as a sales rep of a technology company and for the past year has gone into the real estate business. He asked to meet so he could get counsel from me on the many things I do in social media. Our talk turned the other way, outside the intended topic. I hardly touched on social media marketing and networking because I realized from our discussion that my friend missed the primary step in marketing and selling: define your market first.

I was once consulting for an online newsmagazine company, whose general market was the overseas and migrant Filipinos, and that’s precisely where I began my work with them. “Who really is your market?” By that question I expected a long story describing a person, not a statistical narration with marketing graphs and lingos only Mr. Spock can understand. We ended up with a female named Maria and everyone came up with as much detailed information as possible, from the basics of age, marital status, kids, job, birth place and all, to lifestyle routines and habits, including aspirations and dreams. When we finished the detailed narrative, we had a three-page, single-spaced essay about Maria which we immediately relayed to every writer, graphics artist and photographer through a verbal, story-telling manner. What suddenly changed was a more focused effort from everyone to deliver content specific only to the likes and whims of Maria; anyone else reading the content was icing on the cake. In a few months, everyone saw the hits increasing, with RSS subscriptions, Facebook Page likes, and Twitter followers all rising. What we actually wanted besides these everyday web statistics was the amount of comments per story or article to increase, too; and it did! We didn’t need fancy marketing science but just a common sense understanding of what we wanted to achieve.

Going back to my young friend in the real estate business, I asked him what kind of market he was tapping into. He replied, “young families.” I asked why and he quickly quipped that the leisure place he was representing, which is at the outskirts of the city, provided a peaceful and private sanctuary for the parents and the kids to bond. “Say what?” was something I surprisingly silently uttered, being careful not criticize. “You mean to say these parents with kids ages five and seven and who are making ends meet should buy an expensive real estate property in your private leisure place of four hours driving distance so they can go there every weekend to bond?” Uh-oh.

If companies hire fresh graduates to represent them in the real world, isn’t it their unspoken duty to equip these young, new professionals with the wisdom, and not only skills, to know how to market and sell on a practical, real-life scenario? I remember the strategy that SGV and Company, an auditing firm, used when they hired fresh graduates: everyone was contracted to stay with and work for them for a minimum of two years at rock-bottom rates. However, the return of investing two years with SGV were tons upon tons of training that according to a friend of my Dad, only a trickle really leaves the company before the contract ends. After the contract is up, these yuppie accountants and auditors can opt to stay for the small salary and work their way up the partner level, or venture out into the job market and get a higher-paying job. So, for the latter types, they became accountants and analysts of non-accounting firms and companies. But here’s where the opportunity to SGV lies: these young professionals left SGV in high spirits, silently thanking their first alma mater for all the great training they received, in the classroom and out on the field. Guess who they are going to recommend to their new employers when external audits are needed?

If you are heading a sales or marketing department, or a head honcho of a small, mid-sized or large corporation, you need to go down to your ranks today and find out why things are not working the way they’re suppose to be. Chances are, your young professionals who are armed with enthusiasm and passion to start making a dent in the world are not being given ample, practical, common-sense training they should be receiving. The business world around you is full of people who have a decade or two of real-world experiences, both successes and failures, which can provide better counsel than just selling tips and techniques or team building exercises taken out of context of what you really do. A two-hour session from a two-decades-plus business veteran is not expensive but it can already do wonders for creative planning on what-to-do and how-to-do-it, and a half-an-hour, informal session is not a time-waster. Your front liners are bleeding to death, and they need your help now, before it’s too late. Pretty soon, they will realize it isn’t worth it and they’ll jump ship faster than you can spell Mississippi!

Though Sales is a world filled with people in love with making money, your young, eager professionals still have a lot of the idealism in them, wanting to be recognized as a success and, even better, a hero. By the time they get older, the need for making money catches up on the need for recognition; but then, if they started on the right foot, making money would just be a natural result of things.

Think about it!

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* I actually met Janelle Barlow in 1997 when TMI, her company, was asked to conduct its customer service training to the executives of a company I used to work with. After that session, it just made practical sense to preach all around the company that indeed “a complaint is a gift.”

Sources: Janelle Barlow Video | NuWire Investor | philjcking.com

Title photo by goang at Flickr.com

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I got to this topic after I read the blog of a former office colleague which I never knew he had one. I gave him some tips but noted that I could actually give him more based on my personal experience of experimenting and maintaining my blogs through the years. On a number of occasions, there have been surprising results and obvious mistakes I learned from.

I’m not a blogger who struck it rich by selling advertising space or being a luminary in the speaking circuit. In fact, I’ve turned down every “advertising for peanuts” request in the past all the advertisers had nothing to do with my blog’s theme, the topics I wrote about or even my intended market (of readers.) Those boxes to the right are all my personal ads or messages which relate to my blog categories. Maybe when the right one comes along, I’ll succumb to it. For now, I keep it to myself.

So, in the spirit of the “Hacker Ethic!” (read the Steven Levy book, “Hackers,” and you’ll know why I say it so), here are my top 10 suggestions to maintaining a good blog.

1. Focus and Stay with One Theme or Topic.

Our mind is a chaotic mix of thoughts, ideas, experiences, wants and needs. If you were to outline everything down, you’d probably need weeks or months to do so. Categorizing it is another task. There are just too many topics you’d like to express. That was my dilemma. I just loved expressing many things, not just one. I wanted people to know who I was through my writing.

The solution was to look for a blog theme that allowed me to display, in standard menu web site formatting, the few topics of interest I wanted to express and share. At the same time, I also wanted the normal menu options of “About” and “Contact Us” that you see in most web sites. This is because I always believe that habit is such a hard thing to change in people. The general public has been used to the standard look and feel of web sites, with their menu items at the top and summaries down below. Our eyes continue to use habitual methods of reading – start from the top-left and work your way down with a left-to-right scheme. Anyway, it took me a few days until I chose this blog theme which is something you can use only if you have your own web hosting package; this is not available in the free versions of blogging.

But before the “look and feel” issue was resolved, I already had general idea of why I was creating my blog: I wanted my clients to get to know more about me through my writing. For example, my business network in LinkedIn was able to read a few of my blog posts which enticed them to make the first move to inquire about my products or services. So, my blog is my marketing tool; at the same time, it also allows new acquaintances to get to know me and old friends to learn more about me. This is my main intention and the path to which my blog will continue to exist.

Workshop: Spend some time addressing this question: what do I intend to achieve through my blog? Once you’ve got the answer, start listing all the topics you’d like to express in writing with the answer in mind. Then, categorize these topics or, better yet, choose about two or three categories only excluding the usual “About Us/Me” and “Contact Us/Me.” The “look and feel” you choose will also speak out how you express yourself – choose what you like, not what others do. The rest follow – choosing a blog name, buying a domain name, deciding on free or not-free hosting, learning how to use your blog administrative functions and features, learning some basic HTML codes like centering and hyperlink-referencing. Practice makes perfect.

2. Allow Comments to Create a Conversation

When I started experimenting on blogging, I allowed anyone to write a comment without approval – it just got posted right away. Then, when my blog probably became more visible in search engines or people saw precisely which country was reading my blog the most, I suddenly started seeing comments that had nothing to do with the topic; in fact, most were just message-advertising their product, service, web site or worse, porn sites.

I quickly enabled moderation of comments on my blog and subjectively decided which to allow or trash and delete. For a few where the comments were good but included HTML snippets like “<a href”, I simply erased the code, retained the phrase beside it, and approved the comment. Because of this, I had to reserve at least fifteen minutes a day to manage the pending comments.

In addition, I also realized that there were probably “bots” (web-oriented programs acting like robots inserting predefined comments into blog sites) that were maliciously and automatically pasting comments on my blog posts without human intervention. So, I decided to add a Captcha plug-in, an HTML snippet you can plug into your blog setting or profile to make sure all the comments are being written by human beings, not a bots.

On the brighter side of comments and in the spirit of the slogan to which I named my blog, “The Internet is all about Conversations,” I managed to make a few new friends by way of a string of responses originating from the reader’s first comment, sharing and expressing one’s thoughts, ideas and even principles in life regardless if it were conflicting with me, and allowing other people to learn from the comments and responses the get to read at the bottom of the blog post. So, always respond back to the person who wrote a comment, regardless if it is a praise, complaint or criticism. “After the storm comes the rainbow” speaks well of cordial and respectful responses to even irate or critical comments; you’ll be amazed your once critical reader will suddenly become one of your most loyal subscribers.

This is the major reason why blogs became popular. There were many diary-formatted types of web-based user applications in the past but Blogspot (and its predecessor) forced the issue about comments, and that paved the way to a lively, very real interaction between the reader and the writer. Without forcing bloggers to allow comments, blogging wouldn’t have been that popular.

3. A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

Newspapers have been around since the early 17th century. In the 20th century, photographs have always played a key role in its popularity. After black and white editions came colored versions of the newspaper. In the advent of the Internet, web sites are often a replica of publications – words with pictures. Today, blogs also mimic the newspaper or magazines. Relevant ones, that is.

I also chose the blog theme to which I’ve been using since Day One because it forces me to place a photo or image at the start of my blog post, automatically resized if it doesn’t have the perfect dimensions. If I don’t have the right image, I usually edit one before I come up with the final version. In every photo or image I use, whether I need to or not, I always credit the owner by his, her or the entity’s name, and the reference web site address, i.e. Flickr.com, Facebook.com. Where do I get these photos and images, you ask?

• I source out publicly-available photographs in the internet that doesn’t need licensing;
• I use my personal photographs or images;
• I borrow someone else’s with their permission;
• I use the ones that come with programs and applications I buy and own, i.e. Microsoft Powerpoint comes loaded with photos and images;
• I buy one from the stock photo suppliers in the web if it’s affordable.

Pictures don’t just lure your blog visitor to read your posts; they are also important when you or your social media network share your blog post in social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, and social news web sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, to name a few. When you or your readers share the link of your blog post, the photo or image inserted in your blog post forms part of the shared link. Hence, the same effect of “a picture paints a thousand words” lures the person to click on the link and read your blog post.

4. Tags are Important for Future References

Tags are index terms that search engines and social news web sites use to discover your blog. They index it (or tag it) so when that tag item is used for listing or searching the tag, your blog comes up in the list. The more hits your blog receives for particular search engines or social news web sites, besides tagging, the higher the ranking of your blog post in its list. So, tags are important. My rule of thumb for tags is that if the word of phrase doesn’t exist in my blog post, it doesn’t get tagged. This, however, is not a strict blogging rule.

Rather than explaining tags comprehensively, it’s best you read more about its intricacies. Try reading about tags in Wikipedia, especially section 4 entitled “Advantages and disadvantages.”

What tags have done for my blog is bring it up higher in the food chain of the search engines, so to speak. Today, my top three popular tags to this blog are “call center,” “Kunnect,” and “Pekson.” In my other blog, www.miniphilippines.com, 11 percent from the thousands of total hits this blog has encountered all originate from the search engine phrase “philippines typhoon.” This is because in 2009 I blogged so much about typhoons Ondoy and Pepeng that I ended up with thousands of hits per day during those separate yet unforgettable events. So today, every time someone searches that phrase, the blog post about either typhoons comes up on the list of top links. Not that it’s relevant today but it catches the attention of a first time visitor which may lead him or her to browse or surf my blog for any post of interest.

What you can do that I’ve never attempted (yet) is to approach companies or organizations and offer them line advertising, graphical box advertsing, or even a box advertorial inside your top blog posts. Again, it’s your call if you’d like to impede something outside the theme or topic of your blog posts.

5. Add a Social Media Plug-in

There’s a famous phrase about Facebook which I’ve used in my social media training poster. It reads, “If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan.” I wrote that last year and I don’t know if it’s overtaken a few more countries in the list; I’m guessing it has.

Adding a social media plug-in like AddToAny.com allows your reader to share your blog post across the dozens, if not hundreds of social media and social news web sites. Doing so also increases the popularity of your blog post, not to mention the number hits.

6. Add a Visitor Counter

On top of what your blogging application provides you regarding statistics, I also find it good to know where my readers are coming from. I got stuck using FlagCounter.com because I didn’t have time to go looking for something better; FlagCounter suited my needs. The only thing I did was reduce the size of the FlagCounter HTML snippet to 18×18 pixels, small enough not to be noticed but big enough for me to click into it when I need statistics by country.

Today, this blog gets read by 34 percent coming from the USA, 30 percent from the Philippines, 4.9 percent from Canada, and from 66 other countries. Though I sometimes pinpoint the Philippines as the place of my professional or personal experience in many of my blog posts, it is also my writing intent to try to be geographically unbiased so that people from other countries can relate to my words. Hence, more people outside the Philippines are actually visiting and reading my blog posts. That’s good because that is my intent and it is not a surprise to me. The same holds true for www.miniphilippines.com which gets 50.2 percent from Philippine-based visitors and 49.8 percent from 152 other countries (25.6 percent are coming from the USA and 6.8 percent from Canada, as the top two countries below the Philippines.)

7. Advertise Your Own

As I mentioned in the beginning of this article, I’ve only placed personal ad lines and boxes in my blog because any of these always relates to the theme, categories and topics of my blog site. I have had little less than 10 percent of my visitors clicking on these ad boxes for which I have no idea why they do – I can only guess interest or appeal of graphics as two probabilities. Yet, ten percent of the thousands of hits reveal some hundreds of clicks – which is still a good thing!

So, if you do some type of business or work part-time or otherwise, you may want to advertise those on your blog. In the past, I’ve advertised my high school’s events, my friends’ blogs and events, even my ex-wife’s business, and maybe a funny quip or two to let my readers know, “Hey! I can also be funny!” Just make sure it relates to you as the owner of the blog, or the blog’s theme, category or topic. Anything out of context can confuse your reader or worse, alienate people not to go back to your blog anymore.

8. Create a Facebook Page or Group

What’s the difference between a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? Read my previous post, “Facebook in the Middle.”

Whatever your decision is, the reality that more and more people are starting their day with Facebook is something to consider. This social media behemoth has now replaced many of the habitual news web sites we used to start our day with, like Yahoo.com or some specific news web site. The joke goes that, if before, when people wake up in the morning it’s the newspaper and a cup of coffee; nowadays, it’s Facebook and anything to drink. LOL!

Search popularity of being on the top list as a Facebook Page or Group still belongs to normal, everyday words used in the name or label of your Facebook Page or Group plus the number of fans or members. So, name it as how it relates to your blog. For example, one of my business web sites is www.kunnectph.com and this relates to a WordPress blog site. However, the battle-cry I’ve used for this freelance business has always been “Talk is Cheap!” So, I’ve aptly named or labeled the corresponding Facebook Page to “Talk is Cheap!” while retaining the Facebook Page’s username to simply “Kunnect”.

In the past, I thought of marketing myself by creating a Facebook Page which bears my name in both the label or title and the username. Guess what? I had about five fans over the course of a year. You think I’d be famous right away? The point is it was a wrong move. Last month, I deleted the Facebook Page that bore my name and created a new one using “The Internet is All About Conversations” as the label or title, and the username is shortened to “internetconversations.” Today, I have dozens of fans without any marketing; just the simple interest of people liking my Facebook Page. It’s a good start!

9. Create a Twitter Account

I have two Twitter accounts – one each for MiniPhilippines and Pekson.com. Anything that has to do with the Philippines or Filipinos anywhere in the world gets tweeted in the former. Anything else I would like to share to the world uses the latter account. Then, I add icons or buttons on my respective blogs to link either Twitter accounts – but not both! Again, don’t confuse your visitor or reader. If they land on your blog, show them the way to the right and appropriate social media site, like your Facebook Page or Group, or your Twitter account.

Why Twitter? Thousands, if not millions of people are actually using Twitter to search specific words in tweets (or those 140 character messages) and hashtags. If you happen to be one of them, there’s a good chance that a Twitter user will click on the shortened hyperlink found in your tweet and land on your blog. You can also install a plug-in (called a Widget) that lists the latest tweets you’ve sent on your blog page.

10. Adjust but Don’t Quit

Like any successful endeavor you or other people have done with their lives, both professionally and personally, intent, focus, desire and the will to succeed forces you to continue despite any setback. It’s same goes for blogging. Even if you shifted jobs and are now neck deep in work with your new employer, find the time to keep adjusting, enhancing and writing for your blog. The moment you stop, you will begin to lose your followers or readers.

I’ve had a few false starts with blogging. I think there were about two blogs I started with gusto but failed to motivate myself to continue and lost the interest. But here’s another surprising story – it is (again) about MiniPhilippines. There was a time not too long ago that precisely as I had described in the previous paragraph, I was neck deep with work that I didn’t post anything for three weeks. Yet, this blog site kept getting the number of hits I didn’t expect. Why? Because I’ve had the blog for a little less than two years and with so much content and tags filed and indexed in cyberspace, the number of daily hits didn’t drastically fall. It was still being visited especially by the new ones. After seeing this, I began cornering myself to start posting again.

In Summary

There are thousands of more tips and suggestions on the web on how best to maintain your blog and make it successful. Google it and you’ll be overwhelmed by it. My intent is to let you know it can be done even with as little as a few hours per week. Just don’t stop if it means well for you to start expressing yourself in writing; and blogging is the easiest way to publish yourself for free. What I wrote is based on my experience, not someone else’s. Others will have many more to add to my list.

In closing, my peers and I, young or old, would always tell each other in the past that once we retire, we will either teach or write a book or do both. Now that you have this online activity called blogging and the resources for blogging abound like fresh water in Canada, wouldn’t you think that everything you write today can actually be compiled to resemble a book in the future? All you need to do is to start writing it.

Ahh, blogging. There comes a time when “you can’t live without it.” So, have fun expressing yourself or your business!

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If you and your business or organization would like to learn how to engage using social media networking and marketing the right way, I conduct a four-hour crash course entitled (click) “Social Media for the Workplace.“

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If you take a stopwatch and record the time you spend on web sites, you might notice that Facebook takes an unprecedented amount of time you spend on the Internet over the rest of the other web sites combined. Indeed, Facebook has now topped the charts in terms of daily usage (see Chart of the Day: Facebook’s Unbelievable Effect On The Rest Of The Web). Of course, there are contraries to the rule where a rare few of our friends even bother to browse their Facebook account on a regular basis, much less join the social media behemoth. Still, it is very certain we will soon be communicating and collaborating altogether through Facebook.

So, in the spirit of old “Hacker Ethic” of sharing information to everyone else, here are a few things you may want to consider using to fully utilize it as your means to creating conversations with your network of peers and acquaintances without having to use other applications, cloud or otherwise.

Your Facebook E-mail Account is Now Available

One of the last vestiges of online tools outside the purview of Facebook is everyone’s ability to send and receive messages by e-mail to each other. Now, Facebook has opened that gateway, giving all its users an @facebook.com account, and completing the list of online messaging tools for networking, communicating and collaborating with family, friends and acquaintances.

This means you do not need to get out of Facebook to conduct your e-mail activities. You can send messages with file attachments (though I have not tested the maximum file size that you can send). It’s funny that Facebook has decided not to allow you to encode the “subject title” and just uniformly entitles every message that you send to an e-mail address as “Conversation with <Your-Facebook-Profile-Name>”.

For now, I suggest that you keep your business and professional life outside this e-mail tool. As Facebook has been since time a memorial, you can use your @facebook.com account within the bounds of your social life.

Please go to the Facebook Help Center to learn how to set up your @facebook.com e-mail account.

Groups and Pages – Which One Is Better?

The answer is “both.” After going through so many changes and iterations over the years, today’s Facebook Group and Facebook Page work so differently from its inception. Let me explain the differences and how you should and can use these for your marketing intentions.

First, memorize this:

Facebook Group is to a “Country Club” as Facebook Page is to a “Celebrity.”

This is my personal description because this is exactly how you are going to use either community tool as a means of networking to the entire Facebook world without having to be their “friend” in Facebook.

When you are trying to market yourself or your entity, it is better to create a Page so people can “Like” your page and follow every post you make, akin to a celebrity status. You give the freedom of choice to all Facebook users to “Like” your page, and promoting it is your followers’ decision to do so or not. A virtual “Word of Mouth” marketing transpires within your page as you bellow out announcements and campaigns that drive enthusiasm and excitement about you or your entity. Whether you’re a real celebrity or not, your every move in your Facebook Page should be to act like you are a real celebrity. Not doing so defeats the benefits of maintaining a Facebook Page.

Now, the Facebook Group is a different animal altogether. That’s why the analogy I’m asking you to use is that of a “Country Club.” This is a members-only community inside Facebook where people who form part of the group share a common interest. But instead of the freedom of join the group, members can add their friends without their permission. It’s like pulling your friends into the registration desk through a proxy signup. Once a member, the vertical menu items to the left of their Facebook home page lists the groups they belong to and a highlighted number displaying the total new posts posted in the group.

Where in the past you can message-blast using Groups, that function has now been transferred to the Facebook Page. Rather, Facebook Group members are notified of posts in the left-hand vertical list, including on-page and e-mail notifications, while both Facebook Group and Page posts will appear on your wall.

A word on the power of “The Internet is All About Conversations”: the moment you remove your followers or members’ ability to post messages, links and photos on the wall, you may lose their following or membership, not unless you already think of yourself as too famous a celebrity or a powerhouse business behemoth it doesn’t matter if they follow you or not.

Marketing and Selling in Facebook

If you are using both Facebook and LinkedIn, you should have come to the conclusion that Facebook is social and LinkedIn is business. But why is it that businesses still create Groups and Pages inside Facebook knowing it’s nothing more than a very huge cocktail party? Precisely because it is a very big cocktail party that many individuals of those business groups and pages want to get into the social networking and begin cold-calling, marketing and selling their products and services. Do you think LinkedIn is also a gigantic cocktail party?

Here’s the clincher: it is the individual, who works for the business that owns the Facebook Group or Facebook Page, that markets the products and services of the organization (non-profit institutions also need to market themselves). If it is the individual, then why bother create business-like Facebook Groups and Pages? The answer lies in community-building.

Communities are groups or clans of people with similar likes. Through human history, clans have developed organizational hierarchy to administer how the community should operate and collaborate. So, the more freedom you provide, the bigger your Facebook Group or Facebook Page grows. In contrast, the more policies you institute – barriers to open collaboration – the smaller your clan will be. Free will, freedom of choice, democratic values and all that jazz have been the founding pillars of the Internet and the World Wide Web; no one person or entity owns either. It is a collaborative effort to make the web work as it is today. So, why institute restrictions and barriers in your Facebook Group and Facebook Page, like not allowing members and followers to post messages on the wall or administering who should join (for Pages)?

Regardless of the Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages you created and manage, the idea behind using social networking to market is the sincerity of the individual to represent yourself or your entity so that members and followers develop “trust” to continue being part of your community. You have to be “real” when it comes to social media. You cannot be yourself in the real world but then become someone else in Facebook; that lie and deception will catch up with you and may spring the end of your long-term relationship with everyone – a list of members or followers which took you months, if not years, to build.

Facebook is Now Called Middle Earth

A huge caboodle of today’s online marketing happens in Facebook. From Groups and Pages to Apps and Links, most successful individuals and entities have realized the beckoning of this social media behemoth as the center of the online world. Fine if you have a web site that links each other, but run your web statistics over and over again and you may come to realize a lot of the successful campaigns have started to emanate from Facebook. Once in a while people use Digg or StumbleUpon to, well, stumble upon your web site. But the lure of clicking that square-shaped, blue-colored capital letter “F” on a web site is more enticing than today’s RSS Feed or LinkedIn link. People have begun relying on Facebook as the single source of information that is relevant, useful and trusting. It is trusting because friends recommended it. Even the rare spam and virus-laden links from friends come up to be trusting, though wise friends immediately post a disclaimer, writing, “That wasn’t me!”

But be careful not to hard-sell or short-change people. Again, much as traditional advertising built brands out of trust so, too, shall your Facebook profile, Groups and Pages be built out of trust and sincerity. Market yourself as an expert on real estate, not repeated posts on the thing or item you are trying to sell. Market yourself into one specific business category. For example, many people who know me associate the phrase “call center” to my name. Most don’t know what it is about call centers I do – they just know this simple equation: Raffy Pekson = Call Centers. If you keep marketing yourself, your Facebook Group or your Facebook Page upon endless streams of many categories, people will get confused. Once confused, there goes your market. So, be extra careful.

As more people make Facebook their breakfast cereal and midnight snack, the entire world is now revolving around it. It is not an addiction – it is the new world order to which information is now being passed around. People of the older generation will disagree; however, statistics is already proving how Facebook is fast becoming the real portal to culture, ethnicity, habit and lifestyle. Though Google is trying to pounce on Facebook with its recent introduction of Google-Plus, I still believe the Facebook habit is one that’s as human as ice cream – habits die hard!

Are you taking part in the biggest cocktail party in the world? Have you established your real estate space in social media? Heck! Are you still relying, hoping and praying that people will visit your web site “FIRST” before Facebook?

I kid you not. Facebook is now the central habit of so many people today. Facebook is their early morning news show, daily newspaper, gossip columns, corner coffee shop, community center and park. It’s the early-morning tête-à-tête with BFFs and a lot of LOLs, and the noisiest after-office cocktail party with the who’s who and who’s not. To be seen and heard is now more important than to see, read and listen. Social and professional opportunities will not anymore happen out of hope or coincidence in the social media world – you have to take part, be seen and be heard.

It’s not too late to start. But start correctly. Ask advise from people who you perceive are doing it properly. Investigate profiles, groups and page, and see who does things better than others. Experiment as I did since 2008, creating so many groups and pages, buying too many domain names, blogging left and right, and so on. You will find for yourself and from others what will click for you or your entity, and what won’t. Learn, adjust and continue.

And good luck, too!

Back in 2002, I used to work for Atlantic Tele-Center (ATC), a call center company with operations in Miami, Florida, Guyana in South America and St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. ATC was owned by the U.S. telecommunications company Atlantic Tele-Network, Inc. (Nasdaq: ATNI) headquartered at St. Thomas. VoiceLog, the largest third-party verification company at that time, was one of its clients and I headed the team that set up, managed and maintained ATC’s call center software in the cloud, then called Application Service Provider (ASP), for VoiceLog. This way, their at-home agents and supervisors (home-based workforce) could access the software by way of each one’s home DSL connection and home phone. Besides managing technology for VoiceLog (IT folks call this managed service), we also provided 24×7 technical support to the entire at-home workforce, especially when at-home agent profiles were locked because of unanswered customer calls.

During a time when unified messaging was not available, support was also provided by chat through AOL’s instant messaging service. Supervisors would IM my team about VoiceLog agents who couldn’t receive calls or connect to the cloud-based software, and so on. Overall, the year-long project worked well and only minor issues ensued.

Fast track to today and Filipinos ask themselves why is it that almost a decade ago, at-home agent operations works well in the U.S. and it doesn’t seem to get a good head start in the Philippines. Despite the Filipino’s dominance in the call center world, with its advantages in American linguistics and culture (“as American as apple pie”), shouldn’t it follow that the country already began employing at-home agents a few years back? Or even last year or this year?

I’m sure there are a few of them out there but the mass culture of at-home agents never really took off in the Philippines and call center companies, big or small, still continue to rent enclosed office spaces lined up with tens and hundreds of workstations wired to dozens of servers and integrated into its global private network.

Let me describe five major factors that should seriously be considered to make the at-home agent program work for any type of business in the Philippines (not just call center companies), and how to implement each of these on a practical standpoint.

1. CONNECTIVITY

Though home DSL connection in the Philippines have improved that past decade, it is still not at par to provide the best quality VOIP service that large call centers want it to. It’s not speed that’s important – it’s uninterrupted connectivity between the home computer and the cloud-based servers. A majority of home DSL users surf the web, access e-mail, use Facebook or Google, but hardly run VOIP programs like Skype or Google Talk. This means only (browser) data is being fetched and sent between the home computer and the web servers their browsers try to access, not voice (data packets). The old stand-alone computer days of using Cyclic Redundancy Checks (CRC) is similarly being used when you surf the net – if your web browser cannot connect to the web servers, your browser will retry connectivity several times until it successfully connects. Some web programs like YouTube also buffer data to provide a near-to-seamless view of their videos. This is not the case with VOIP. VOIP cannot live with these packets of interruptions that are called “timeouts.” VOIP needs uninterrupted connectivity.

Photo by kirklau at Flickr.com

After having used most DSL and cable internet providers in the Philippines, including the wireless ones, I’ve stuck it out with Globe Telecom’s DSL because it has the least amount of timeouts during an extended duration of use. Globe’s DSL may not have the best burst of download speed but it sure beats all others with the least amount of timeouts in my locations – Makati and Taguig.

How Do You Do It: Your business must conduct connectivity tests between your at-home agent’s home computer and your service provider’s cloud-based VOIP servers. “Ping tests” are the usual first-level tests. More comprehensive tests may include measuring Jitter, QoS (quality of service), MOS (mean opinion score) and packet loss that assess VOIP quality (I always use MyVOIPSpeed test by VisualWare). The connectivity test has to be done several times, at certain points of the day, to get a better overview of your at-home agent’s home DSL connection. Never assume that your at-home agent’s home DSL connectivity is workable even if they are subscribed to Globe’s DSL; telecommunications companies in the Philippines have different degrees of connectivity that depends on location. Other internet providers actually do better than Globe at other localities.

2. VOIP SOLUTION

There were several small call centers averaging 5 to 10 seats that started using the MagicJack system during the time when the maker of that device did not limit the number of calls per day. However, after testing this solution, I found out that it hogged as much as 250 kbps during a call. That’s a problem for your at-home agent’s home DSL connection because even if they lease a 1 Mbps subscription (that’s the maximum download burst speed, not a steady stream), all home DSL providers’ 1 Mbps subscription plan only allow a maximum upload burst of 250 kbps (or one-fourth of the download speed). Maximum isn’t always available. Thus, there will be moments of poor quality of the conversation leading to timeouts.

Photo by avaya at Flickr.com

Hosted solutions (also known as SaaS) being offered today mean that all the expensive servers and its operating systems and application software required to run your customer sales, marketing, service and support operations are owned by a third-party provider and leases (or rents) resource time to you and your at-home agents on preset terms, i.e. monthly subscription. What you and your at-home agents just need to have is a computer running a web browser like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox where you enter the web address or URL of the hosted solution and do your thing. There are simple PBX hosted solutions and more complex hosted call center solutions out there, sometimes called cloud-based software or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).

How Do You Do It: You have to make sure that the hosted IP-PBX or VOIP solution your at-home agents will be using should not exceed 100 kbps both ways. Otherwise, it will be difficult to realize good voice quality during customer contact, just like the MagicJack example above. Remember, besides the VOIP bandwidth requirement, your IP-PBX, VOIP or hosted call center solution will also need to refresh your at-home agent’s screen, meaning additional bandwidth. Therefore, you must conduct voice tests through live test calls between your at-home agent’s home computer and the origination or termination points, i.e. calls originating or terminating in the United States, before you allow your at-home agent to accept or place live calls.

3. CULTURE

It’s not about discipline but more of the culture of the Filipino. It takes some time for a typical Filipino family to understand the difference between work and play, or the work-at-home mind-set. Doing work at home has always been somewhat of a taboo because family members see the humble abode as it is – a place to relax, get together with family members, and do things that are seen as personal and comfortable. Thus, conducting uninterrupted, continuous hours of work at home is not impossible but a challenge.

A well established, multinational call center company in the Philippines tried the at-home agent method and failed because the inborn Filipino culture and value system treated the home as a family’s turf. For example, when the at-home agent’s spouse demands their time, the former can’t negate that exact moment no matter how trivial it is, lest he or she allows that little issue to balloon into a marital World War III. It may take some time for the spouse and the other family members to form the habit of not disturbing the first-time at-home agent.

Photo by at ikaw_ay_pinoy Flickr.com

Another negative impact is ambient noise. A huge majority of would-be at-home agents do not live in posh, gated villages where the constant noise of pedestrian and vehicular traffic are almost non-existent. Lucky you if the at-home agent lives outside the city and in a place where the only background noise would be birds chirping. Many Filipinos do not have a sound-proof room in their house unless they so desire to build one specifically for this type of job. It would be one for the record books to hear a customer to ask the at-home agent, “What was that noise?” and we could only imagine the comical answer coming from your at-home agent, “Oh, that was a five-passenger motorcycle passing by.”

How Do You Do It: Always ask your at-home agent applicant to describe his or her workplace inside the house, specific to the details of construction materials used for the room including a rough-draft floor plan of the house, a vicinity map and where public transportation ply about, the volume of pedestrians passing by, animals living inside and near the home, and many more items you should consider before hiring the at-home agent. If you have a Sound Level Meter at hand, ask the at-home agent applicant to bring it home. Then, there’s also the interview about family members living at home, their routine and schedules, babies to tend to, kids to take care of after school, sleeping hours, and so on. In summary, you need to know the exact living and working conditions, and lifestyle habits of your at-home agent applicant down to the nitty-gritty detail so you know what to expect.

4. AGE

I mentioned previously of the well-established, multinational call center company in the Philippines experimenting with an at-home agent program and failing on it. Even before the year ended, they folded the project and absorbed some of the agents into their office-like centers. Some of the reasons for the failure were the factors I mentioned above. However, the other major factor was  maturity, or the lack of it. But it is difficult to measure maturity and so, the better way to categorize this section is to use “age” when recruiting at-home agents.

Statistically (based on the 2008 Philippine Contact Centre Industry Benchmarking Report by CallCentres.net), about 80% of the call center agent workforce in the Philippines belongs to the 18-34 years old age bracket where almost half are ages 18 to 24. Another related fact about the industry is that 60% of its employed population is female. In a closed office environment where team leaders, supervisors, managers and senior executives are physically near the agents, on-demand supervision is the norm and productivity can be managed on the spot. But at home, there are no supervisors or managers. The at-home agent is on his or her own to manage their productivity and discipline to the best of their ability. This requires maturity, and maturity generally grows as one ages.

How Do You Do It: Though it may seem discriminating to do so, it is reasonable that your best bet for hiring at-home agents should generally be no younger than 35 years old. Also, the female psyche of maturity still holds more weight because this gender group can do better in multitasking than its equivalent. Multitasking is necessary in a home environment and women are genetically good at juggling every activity at home, being born homemakers, generally speaking. A married spouse with no full-time job that’s about 40-50 years old (life begins at 40, eh?) will probably be a better at-home agent, especially if her kids are already in high school, attending college or university or best, in the daily grind of a job. True, there is always an exception to the rule. So, always use your good judgment and sound interview techniques to find out if a younger at-home agent applicant possesses the required maturity and at-home multitasking skils you so desire.

5. THE REST OF THE SKILLS

I’m not going to go through the other work-related, project-specific skills you need for your sales, marketing, service and support campaign, be it in a captive or outsourced corporate environment. You may be thinking of hiring at-home agents to conduct Philippine local calls, not necessarily in an outsourced situation where your agents receive calls from U.S. customers. “The rest of the skills” mean the ability of your at-home agent to express and communicate properly, common sense, technical skills, and so on. That’s up to you.

Photo by kingratt82 at Flickr.com

IN SUMMARY

So, the at-home agent idea can actually work in the Philippines (and probably other Asian or developing nation) if all these five factors are seriously considered and even enhanced. This makes work more available to the Filipino homemaker whose responsibilities have now been diminished – kids all working or married, spouse is still a workaholic and wouldn’t think of retiring, too tiring to get a part-time field sales job, and other things that makes your work-at-home program more appealing than anything else.

However, these are not surefire ways of successfully implementing an at-home agent operation. Motivation, skills training, professional development and a bigger sense of understanding about the at-home agent work have to come from you, and how to go about conducting these activities is another thing worthwhile to consider. So, don’t quote me as saying, “Hey! Raffy said this and that.” Based on my experience, knowledge and practical intuition, I listed these few, major items that need to be addressed before attempting to employ an at-home agent program. But if you become successful, do let me know so we can inform the entire country that truly the at-home agent program can work in the Philippines using “Your Way!”

One of the new things I recently did that’s been in existence for some time now is to get a USA telephone number, particularly a particular New York area code, so that my Mom can call me anytime using local toll charges. It took me about ten minutes to do it, only because it was the first time I did so. Now, people who probably wanted to talk to me from the United States can now do so without thinking out loud how much it would cost them to call me long distance. The hesitation to talk to me is gone!

Social Media is a great tool to market yourself to the global community. From LinkedIn to Facebook and Twitter, to name a few, it’s easy to use but not so easy to master. “Mastering” social media isn’t about the keystrokes, clicks and web pages you need to know to use; it’s knowing how to use it, sort of a “rules of engagement” kind of dos and don’ts in the social media realm. Examples would be the limit of Tweets or messages you post periodically (daily and weekly), the type of status messages and links you share, and so on goes the list. Before you embark on your social media spree, ask yourself this question: who do I want to be in the social media sphere?

Be yourself. First rule of social media is not to hide who you are – it’s to enhance the positive attributes about yourself. No one’s perfect in the world but if you lock your positive attributes to someone else, chances are there’s bound to be some compatible traits. LinkedIn allows you to create your professional credentials that permit people to conclude if you’re worth the employee or the business partner they’re looking for. It’s very easy to create a long and wonderful list that may eventually bore the reader; or using terms and descriptions that nobody really understands and, thus, not easily searchable. It becomes more difficult to create your persona on a medium such as Facebook because it is a very social channel rather than boasting your professional triumphs. Then, there’s LinkedIn Group, Facebook Pages and a whole caboodle of things to create. Read my “Social Media – If You Build It, They Will Come!” post to learn more about building your social media profile correctly.

After all the building and marketing in social media, what happens next? People usually search you out and begin the conversation with a message – or vice versa if the messaging begins with you. Here’s the clincher to a successful sale – stop the messaging! People are (generally) by nature devout conversationalists who seek verbal words over written ones. Our history is filled with stories of (flea) markets as the center of sales and marketing that necessitates conversations over written messages. The Cluetrain Manifesto describes it best: these markets are conversations. There are those who just can’t seem to express their thoughts and ideas on paper (digital or otherwise) and a verbal conversation becomes the key essence to striking a deal.

People will not even search the net to find out how much will it cost to call you long distance. The second best approach to a conversation is to call the person in his (or her) country of origin. The best is to establish a local telephone number in that country. As I mentioned above, I use Skype to lease a New York area code telephone number (called Skype Online Number). You can get metered charging from Skype for every call you make or every call made to you, or get an unlimited call package – that’s up to you and the volume of calls you might be doing. If I use my Skype to call a US number, my New York number becomes my caller ID, which is now an easy way for anyone to call me back. This scenario is a one-is-to-one means of using the “cloud” to create conversations to develop a business relationship.

But how about your business that needs a calling platform for your entire office, not necessarily called a call center, but a VOIP-based PBX system that’s also cloud-based and can be leased on a monthly basis? Easier said and easier done. Cloud-based customer contact solutions such as Kunnect have been giving both contact centers and non-call center companies – vertical markets as they are often called – the ability to manage incoming and outgoing calls from anywhere in the world – with the ease and convenience of the web. From intelligent routing of calls, interactive voice responses and auto-attendants, fully recording all calls, monitoring everything from the ease of a notebook while sipping Mai Tais on the beach, providing other cloud-based solutions that help manage your workforce to become better productive – the list goes on and on. So, instead of buying hardware and software that need years of return (on investment) for a business that caters to seasonal sales, marketing, service and support campaigns, it’s best to start with a leasing solution, a pure operational expense answer to your customer contact needs.

The point of all these is your ability to make it very easy for your customer, prospect or existing, to start having a conversation with you. Then, you need to make it very easy for your customer to continue the business relationship. The end of it all is to make it very easy for your customer to earn or gain from all these. The key to succeeding is to engage the conversation all throughout. So, stop those useless messaging; not everyone can write and express themselves in words like you – let them talk to you. “Talk is Cheap!” has been my battle cry slogan since I started using the cloud as a means to create conversations globally. Nothing that generates profit is free; you have to spend a little to earn a little, or more.

“The internet is all about conversations” and to begin the conversation means allowing your target market to have that one-click-fits-all method of calling you anytime, in his own sweet time, and his waking hours, not yours. Create the conversation immediately, not just for you but for your entire workforce, be they sales, marketing, finance, HR or a host of other work they do for your business, department or group. Because if you continue to dabble on pure messaging, someone else will already be talking to your customers. Don’t miss out on it.

I have been in love with technology all my life because my dad was a Mechanical Engineer by profession and at home he was Mister “Fix It!” As his only child, he made sure I was part of his everyday routine of fixing things in the house. Came the introduction of computers to me, I was blown away. From DEC PDP-8 teletypes and IBM System 360 to Sharp MZ-80A, Commodore 64 and Apple II+, my world of technology changed. While my career shifted from I.T. to direct sales and media publishing, down to broadband internet, telecommunications and, today, call centers, I will stick to the old adage of habit: once a geek, always a geek!

Fast-forward to 2010. After a challenging 2008 and tumultuous 2009, the end of 2010 became a career-turner, from a semi-entrepreneur type of work style back to the multinational corporate world. The latter is not a downside – it’s in fact a blessing both financially and professionally. And the one thing that helped me get to where I am is using social media as a means to market myself in parallel to marketing the products and services I (used to) represent.

You see, if you market a product or a service using your personal profile in Facebook and LinkedIn, people are also looking at who you are. If you take care of how you strike a conversation in the online social media sphere, you will do well promoting yourself. In the end, when things go haywire with the organization you work for or represent, you can always use “yourself” to find the next big thing. Be it another job, another client or love interest, online social media marketing and networking truly does wonders and behind all the things that people say good and bad about it – it really works!

Since 2009, I started experimenting in online social media, trying to understand how to use the “dang thing” for business, especially the small business. As some of my profiles will read, I am fanatical about small businesses, cloud computing, customer contact solutions, and social media. As a Country Rep in the Philippines of a Canadian hosted call center solution, I understood its market to be small and mid-sized outsourcers who need the cost-effective model of a cloud-based solution and its quick implementation method. I used the major online social media platforms a lot, including blogging, to market the solution and got many responses from it along the way. During these years, I also developed the knack to create and maintain other blogs that focused on my interests while continuing to use the power of online social media networking as a means for face-to-face networking.

Here are some key insights into my experience using social media that worked to my advantage:

Tasting the snowflakes in Salt Lake County, Utah – “They’re not salty at all… LOL!”

BE YOURSELF. Who you are in real life must equal who you are inside the online social media world. The moment you become someone else online, your real life friends and acquaintances will start questioning your sincerity. Remember, the world is getting smaller and you will never know who knows who until you meet them online, especially the friends of your friends. But don’t overdo things, like changing your status every five minutes because you’re moving from one place to another. At the onset, your network may find it entertaining. Before the hour ends, you’re becoming an irritant. Too many YouTube links or Facebook App updates also spoil the real you. Being a funny in real life is posting a joke at most once a day, not every hour.

Once in a while every week, I post a nice, cute, mind-boggling or plain-cheesy quotation, something I can say out loud to my friends and they will not find me queer. Once every two weeks I share a YouTube link – not music videos but something still relevant to me, my work and my interests. Every day I share a website or blog link that’s related to work or something about general business, cloud computing, outsourcing or social media.

BE CONSISTENT. My online network knows me consistently. In my LinkedIn Groups, I’ll never share a funny YouTube video or an obscene Flickr photo; rather, it’s always an article or blog about what I do or related to the Group’s interest or theme. The same goes with my Facebook friends and the Fan Pages I manage. There is never anything that’s off-topic. If it happens that human nature forces me to post something irrelevant, it will occur “once in a blue moon” and never repeatedly; at least, I know my network of friends and acquaintances will forgive me for doing so because it’s just too funny or too important. Behind all these consistent things I do, people who have never met me will find out that their perception about me online is almost the same as when they finally meet me. So, there’s no surprise to new, “real life” acquaintances and they have to adjust to the “real me.”

ALWAYS REPLY AND COMMENT BACK. When people post something on your wall, reply or comment back. It’s just like in real life: if people say hello and you don’t respond back, you’re a snob. There is nothing so different to online social media life and real life. People are human beings and by the natural course of things, they live life pretty much the same online and off. However, be careful not to publicize private matters. For example, if your friend posts, “I’m in love,” you don’t go commenting back “Jack is lucky SnOB!” not until your friend mentions the name. Reading behind and around the words, your friend is only being childlike or comical. If you’re itching to know if that’s really about Jack, send a private message instead. Again, put yourself in real life. Hearing your friend say those words in public doesn’t mean you have to shout your response; whispering your query is the same as a private message.

Commenting, replying and messaging is a perfect way of igniting good conversation with your online network. The rule of thumb is, much like in real life, try to have the last response; but my recommendation is “try,” not force the issue you must have the last say. Going back, I always describe the internet and online social media as all about conversations. Repeatedly having good conversations with new acquaintances is a business or job opportunity lurking in the back you will never know until you actually do something about it.

Seriously at work while in Las Vegas. Seriously?

RESEARCH BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE. There are people who would like to be my friend in Facebook. If I don’t know the name from Adam or Eve, I check the common friends we have. If the list is all over the place, I Google the person. If it still doesn’t ring a bell, I message the person and politely ask where we’ve met. If I don’t hear back after three days, I click “Ignore.” The point is, take care of your online social media profile. It has never been about the amount of people you are friends with online yet never have one single conversation with them.

I know of one person who kept accepting friend requests. Being popular, he used his personal profile as a means to fill up his network. In reality, he wanted followers, not friends. Today, he’s managing two or three personal profiles, with some followers belonging to two of his three profiles. He should have had the insight to create a Fan Page and allow people to follow him there. Only after creating the second personal profile did he think of creating his Fan Page. So now, he has four profiles in Facebook to manage; and all his Facebook profiles are mixed with real friends, family and strangers.

In LinkedIn, I usually always accept requests for networking because I’ve never had any experience to excessive spamming. Most of the people I don’t know who I network with are usually in LinkedIn for the same reasons I am: business opportunities, knowledge-sharing, job hunting or anything that has to do with each other’s profession or industry. The only one irritant I encountered was someone who kept commenting unrelated messages in my posts to the Groups I belong to. Ninety-nine percent of the time he wrote things about himself so (he thought) that people who read it will be enticed to hire him on the spot. In a cordial manner, I warned him to stop and he quietly did.

Remember, you carry your personal profile “for life.” Regardless if you change jobs, careers, companies or even spouses, your online social media identity remains the same until you die. Deleting your profile and starting from scratch is like going back to the day your started your Facebook or LinkedIn profile – a slow climb through the years and something I myself wouldn’t think of doing.

Lastly, I only accept friend or network requests from people with real names, real profile pictures and at least a few dozens of friends already. If they were my real life friends and were just starting out, I’d have no problem accepting them right away. Personal profiles with company names get ignored in Facebook or the Facebook and LinkedIn Groups that I moderate. I have no choice with Fan Pages – they work just like Twitter.

IN SUMMARY: My boss (today) hired me a few months ago because he knew exactly what I was doing. He saw it in Facebook and LinkedIn. Some people in the same industry we belong to already commented (to him) about the brand of product I was carrying, which they saw, read or heard from the hundreds of posts and blogs I’ve shared in the past. He read the successes I made. The job he and his boss offered me was a blessing because it and they came in the right time. “Hope is not a method” is the title of a book I once read yet rings very much true in today’s everyday life. Prayers and your faith in God help but I know and believe God also wants me to do some action, not lay down on the bed the whole day praying.

Everything I did with my online social media profiles made it easier for people to find me and offer me a business opportunity or a job. It also allowed my kids to know what I was up to everyday without talking to them. Case-in-point, my entire high school batch relates my name to the phrase “call center,” with most of my network in Facebook and LinkedIn doing the same. Some friends already started to relate my name to the phrases “social media,” “Facebook,” “LinkedIn,” “cloud computing,” and “small businesses.” If there is an opportunity to meet face-to-face or call, I will attempt to do so only if the background of the person has something to do with what I do. Transforming online to real life is the final step to breaking ground on doing business together.

Bloggers Unite!!! At the inContact head office with Marketing Communications Director, social media guru and blogger, Heather Hurst.

Today, I work for a publicly-listed American company called inContact, Inc. (Nasdaq: SAAS, www.incontact.com). inContact provides a suite of web-based, subscription-based, in-the-cloud contact center solutions for every size and every kind of business, globally. Six weeks after being hired, inContact sent me and my colleagues to Salt Lake City, Utah, for a week of intensive training and meeting everyone at head office. Then, it sent us to Las Vegas, Nevada to attend their annual start-of-the-year sales kick-off conference, done at chic Red Rock resort-hotel, casino and spa. It was easy for me to accept inContact’s offer because it had everything I was looking for from my previous Canadian employer, in terms of the way they want to do business in the region.

The power of online social media marketing and networking isn’t just about companies, brands, products and services. The biggest impact happens to the person doing it. So, if you’re not in it, everyone else doing it is your competitor in life and job opportunities. If you’re in it, do it right. Good things from online social media won’t happen overnight – but, trust me, it will happen!

Online social media marketing and networking – “If you build it (right), they will come (for you)!” – it’s (right) (for you)!

Today’s times call for more creative ways of marketing your business, whether you’re direct selling for a conglomerate or running your own small business. People nowadays mention Facebook and Twitter as if it were already part of the dictionary. To wit, ever notice that writing the word “Facebook” in your Facebook wall-post results in a red-underlined, misspelled word? Yes, totally “Duh?”

But, as a small business owner, how do you market your product or service today? What medium should you use to generate the most of “value for money?” What’s better – online or offline marketing? Let me write my discourse in small business marketing through a series of questions that have been asked by many small business owners and their peers. Before I start, let me also offer my disclaimer: “Please note I am not a famous author of marketing books nor am I a coveted marketing guru consulting for industrial giants. Like you, I am a small business owner who has street-smart knowledge of marketing a business with a few books read on the subject matter.” Just making sure you know where I’m coming from.

Where Do I Begin?

Let it be known that I began my story with the theme song from a classic, all-time favorite movie. LOL! Continue the lyrics to the song for the next four words and you’ll get the hint of what I’m about to explain as one of the most vital component to marketing your small business.

Besides the fancy business plan and long-thought strategies, first things are always first: you’ve got to draw and describe the person that buys your product or service. Creating a generic description of your market that you guess will purchase it is not the best way, even if you’ve read 1,500-page text books about guerilla marketing and the like. You have to describe a very specific person, not a community of people. The moment you’ve consumed everything from your brain (and that of others) to describe this person, immerse this person into your business vision, mission, values and goals, and see if it fits. If not, you’ve got to rehash things with your sales, marketing, service, support and overall customer strategies to fit this person into everything that you do for your product, service and company.

I remember consulting for Planet Philippines, an entertainment and lifestyle, tabloid-sized newspaper that’s circulated to migrant and overseas Filipinos in 10 countries once-to-twice per month, for free (it derives revenue purely from advertising.) Planet Philippines is not a single corporate entity that prints and exports newspapers; rather, it is a franchised business where the owner of the brand provides content to its global franchisees, the latter of which locally prints and distributes the finished product within its community or city. Continuing on, I ventured to describe for Planet Philippines who exactly the reader of the newsmagazine is and came up with “Maria.”

Being female, Maria is 32 years old, married with two young children, ages 10 and 12, respectively, and living in the United States, specifically the city of Fontana in California. Both Maria and her husband are regular employees of their specific profession – Maria is a retail clerk at Walmart and her husband works as an X-ray technician at Kaiser Permanente. The daily work schedules of Maria and her husband is always different from each other so that one can bring the kids to school and the other one picks them up – Maria’s husband takes the early morning shift, ending at 3:00 PM, while she take the late shift, starting at 11:00 AM and ending at 7:00 PM. Maria and her family migrated to the U.S. when her kids were still very young, and they have been living in the U.S. for the past seven years.

Through the years, they’ve assimilated the culture of their new community but remained to have the heart of a Filipina and that of a Filipino family. They continued to speak in Pilipino (or Tagalog) in their rented house with their kids understanding what they’re saying but having difficulty uttering complete sentences. They met other Filipinos through their church and kids’ school, and expanded their network of other Filipino-American families as the years went by. Maria, typical of the Filipino mother, has always been busy multitasking for her family, from doing groceries to attending to the medical needs of her family and even making their weekend and vacation plans. The husband takes care of their cars, repairs of the house, and other “manly tasks” as Maria often quips.

Maria knows when Planet Philippines is available at the nearest mall and picking up a copy is part of her twice-a-month routine. She actually gets two copies and gives the other to her neighbor and best friend, also a Filipina-American but who never gets chance to grab a copy because of her off-hours work schedule as a nurse. Maria loves to read a printed copy rather than go to the internet, surf and read. For Maria, the internet is usually just for e-mail messaging with her relatives and friends in the Philippines, and for Facebook updates. She also subscribes to TFC only because of Wowowee (and that’s another story now that Willie is doing it in another channel). Maria and her husband can only afford to visit the Philippines every four years or so; with the other summer breaks her kids have, they try to tour some of the cities in the U.S. where they have relatives and can get free lodging from them.

Maria’s social conversations with other Filipino-American spouses are always about celebrity news and major events in the Philippines. Community news comes second, American entertainment news next in line, while sports and politics, regardless of country, always fall last. However, her husband loves to keep tabs of Philippine sports news and events, especially his school and college sports accolades, and Planet Philippines makes sure there an item or two about sports and politics in its content.

I can go on forever in describing Maria as the ideal customer of Planet Philippines but I won’t. The point is, this detailed description of Maria makes sure the newsmagazine’s content is focused on Maria and her family’s information needs; also, all the succeeding marketing efforts are always geared towards that description. Anyone reading the newsmagazine other than Maria is gravy. If there is a story that doesn’t really conform to Maria’s personality or her family but is interestingly popular, Planet Philippines makes its earnest decision to print it or not. If the newsmagazine has a new applicant for a franchised publisher, it evaluates the applicant’s city and its population, and interviews him on the merit of his intent why he would like to distribute Planet Philippines in his community. Everything that Planet Philippines does, it does so on the merit of Maria’s needs. In five years or so, it will have to decide whether to recreate Maria as the same 32-year old migrant Filipina-American or continue on with Maria’s life; or create a new newsmagazine for another Maria while continuing on with old Maria as she ages.

It is inevitable that you create the ideal buyer of your product or service and hone your efforts to effectively market and sell your product or service to this specific buyer. It is not the other way around. In my case, I market and sell a hosted call center solution in the Philippines from Kunnect.com. I don’t attend conferences and events where the big players of my industry go to because they are not my ideal Maria. I know very well that Kunnect in the Philippines is more relevant and meaningful to the small business call center – my Maria – the less-than-100-seats of voice-based outsourced call center companies. Paying large sums of money just to attract the big players will never be Kunnect’s cup of tea; just gravy. But I still touch base with the big call center companies through direct yet informal means only because they are still the pillars of my chosen industry; however, dreaming of many big, closed sales coming from this “large business” market is, well, a dream. Kunnect can’t deliver complex after-sale services that large enterprises require of an expensive purchase (i.e. 24×7 onsite support). It can, however, deliver simple, 24×7 “remote” after-sale services, much like many of the SaaS-oriented (software-as-a-service) and cloud computing providers out there. Though I am the official in-country sales and marketing rep of Kunnect, I can’t be all over the country physically presenting Kunnect to every prospect while managing a cadre of support engineers that can be whisked to a client’s site in less than an hour. Again, that’s too expensive to do. That’s why I developed my own simple website to be able to present Kunnect directly to my Maria in the Philippines (and Asia), the small business call center, without onsite intervention. The phone and the web are my best friends. I provide the “product + service” combination to my Maria at dirt-cheap, affordable rates but with a stable, simple-to-use product that doesn’t need too much client hand-holding during its set up and implementation, and has a good help desk system that’s remote, not onsite.

I also think of my alma mater, Avon. Direct selling for Avon means thousands of people starting out as independent, non-salaried dealers during the time they do not have much cash, and ending up to become successful millionaires. Avon sells its products through its network of dealers and distributors, not by way of retail malls and superstores. Though they attempted retail in the early nineties, it wasn’t a successful endeavor and they knew it wouldn’t be. The retail attempt was (and still is) a way to glamorize their products, not really make tons of money selling it there. Its marketing and advertising strategies may look affluent but that is its intention, being an “aspiration” than being direct to the market. That kind of marketing helps their dealer-network push their products to the latter’s customers beyond their social class and helps create more buyers. From Tweety de Leon to Lea Salonga and Angel Locsin, the celebrity-laden endorsers are all aspirational users of the Avon products that reflects what the customers of their direct selling network is. But inside the Avon company in the Philippines is a huge sales support structure very much knowledgeable of its direct selling network – what it wants and what it needs.

Do I Develop a Brand or a Product?

“Isn’t a product a brand?” Well, the soothsayers and naysayers will all have their book-length descriptions of product and brand, and both groups are still correct in their own thesis. However, for the non-advertising geeks of the world like us, product (or service) is the thing we manufacture and perfect while brand is the label we put in the product. Nike built a product first before it became a brand; Coca-cola did the same. Almost every large, successful entity today with a global brand started out perfecting a great product. Even Microsoft, at one point in their product-oriented life, built then marketed a stable MS-DOS operating system (the granddaddy of today’s Windows 7) long before it started its pooh-pooh “market then build” business way or so fashionably called “vaporware” – software that were not yet finished but were already being marketed as if it already existed.

Everyone wants to be popular but immediate popularity for a small business means lots of cash to gamble. Instead, as a small business owner, you should develop and perfect your product while marketing it directly to your Maria. Geographically, isn’t it more cost-effective to find Maria within your community or city before you attempt to go outside of it? I remember a few small business entities I joined that over-reached the limits of their marketing efforts to far flung places of outside the scope of service convenience – totally wasted money. For the few that were open-minded, we got back to basics and told ourselves, “Hey! We should first be the best supplier at our own community before we even trek outside it.” If you hold office in Manila, you should first saturate and own the City of Manila, so to speak, before you start spending valuable money marketing outside it.

One of the best examples of a large company in the Philippines that does this is BayanTel. You can easily subscribe to BayanTel’s internet plans within Quezon City and get better internet connection than getting it from their competitors. In fact, they can install your E1 line (a full 2Mbps bandwidth usually subscribed by multiple user companies) within 3 days, way faster than their nearest competitor’s timeline of 30 days. Go outside Quezon City and internet connection with BayanTel’s competitors (probably) becomes better, say Globe within the Makati CBD. The point is even if BayanTel doesn’t taunt the idea, they know they provide the best product with the fastest service within Quezon City.

Here’s a bit of trivia before I end this section. Did you know that Phil Knight, founder of Nike, and his merry band of offbeat co-founders used to buy and sell the Tiger brand of rubber shoes in the United States, exclusively manufactured by Onitsuka of Japan? They only sold rubber shoes solely for track and field sport and its (then) new lifestyle equivalent, jogging. Eventually, they came up with the Nike brand and Swoosh logo but still relied on Japanese technology to produce their new branded rubber shoes, still only for track and field, and jogging. Maria, to them and then, was a track and field, and jogging enthusiast! The rest, as they say, is history.

Do I Market Online or Offline?

I’m going to assume you’ve got your product and service strategies perfected to a tee with the perfect description of your Maria, and you have all the internal processes needed to continue to enhance your “product + service” combination all through the life of your corporate entity. If you are dependent on someone else to manufacture and service the product you are selling, let’s assume they are doing the same thing with their product that you’re reselling. If not, better look for another product, lest you fail because despite your creative marketing prowess, your product still, well, “sucks.”

Many online soothsayers of the small business industry say that being on the web puts you at level with the large enterprises – everyone has the same footing in terms of marketing messages and graphics. But despite that, it still boils down to how conveniently accessible is your product to Maria. Can Maria call, order and have it delivered within the hour? Can Maria find it in her favorite mall? Can Maria surf the internet, find your website, and buy online? Online marketing may be the cheapest way to market your product but beware of cheap activities – they also tend to deliver cheap results. Think about the online matchmaking sites. If it’s free, you get lots of obtrusive flack; if you have to pay, you get nearer to the right partner you’re looking for. The more you pay, the better the kind of person you’re matched to. I know of a friend who found the love of her life at Match.com and, after a year of courtship, have recently married each other, not for money, but for real love. The thing is, they both paid for the service.

Let’s talk about the world. If Maria is a person who lives outside the Philippines (or your country for that matter), marketing your product in the World Wide Web will be more cost-effective than having to go through tri-media means (published media, television and radio) in foreign soil. But also consider the limitations of internet marketing and social media networking and marketing. Single-digit-percentage results from the numerous online “hits” you have is something common when you advertise with Facebook or Google. (An exception is being geographically located in a First World country like the United States.) Online advertising is not a one-time deal; there is a learning process you have to develop, especially the first time you use it, and you have to tweak your ad copy until you develop more prospects out of the hits. For example, when your Facebook ad is clicked, will you get better results when your prospect goes to your website, blog or Facebook Fan Page? Again, personify Maria and see how she reacts to either three. But then, social media marketing is not a one-time thing – it’s an ongoing, daily activity planned out in the beginning and adjusted through the period of execution. There is no start-and-stop activity to social media marketing, not unlike telephone marketing campaigns that run for a month or so then you evaluate and proceed with next-steps activities. Social media marketing also has its business partner – social media networking, a daily, continuous activity done not only by a few of your marketing reps but your entire organization, even your lowly accounting clerk.

If your product is for local consumption, say the Philippines, rethink your online marketing strategy. Though internet penetration in the household has gone up over the years, still, many people access the internet in their workplace or the internet cafés. The affordability of buying and leasing an internet system for the home – computer plus ISP connection – still rests in the middle-to-upper class of the country’s social spectrum. Even if there are about 18 million Filipino users in Facebook, overall activity is still not that high compared to First World subscribers. Traditional media, mobile text-messaging and the telephone are still the popular means of prospecting in the Philippines. Even if you consider the social class of Maria, you will eventually need to conduct a combination of offline and online marketing for your product – you will still need to bridge the gap between the traditional and social media.

For online marketing, there is web marketing and there is social media marketing. Web marketing simply takes your corporate or product-oriented website to the mainstream of the World Wide Web while you devour search engines and news sites for footprint presence, paid or otherwise. This is where SEO activities (search engine optimization) comes into the picture, a pursuit that’s not a one-time endeavor but altogether an ongoing web activity of competitive comparisons and website tweaking. If your product is more global than local, then the effort to conduct yourself in the web becomes bigger. For local presence, the smaller the type of market, the smaller your effort for web marketing becomes. A sari-sari store (a home-based, very small, over-the-counter retail store by the street in the Philippines) is simply an offline market than online. A door-to-door delivery of your product is more open to online marketing.

Social media marketing, on the other hand, becomes more content and conversation driven than web marketing, though sometimes web and social media marketing overlap especially in a pure online business venture. You connect, network and socialize with your chosen web networking sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, in the guise of marketing your product. In my humble experience doing the above, I’ve concluded that many of my prospects were not my friends in these social media websites I actively participate. It is the network of friends and acquaintances of my friends, sometimes leaping two hops or more that become my Maria. This meant I should market my product to my friends in Facebook or the like in a very subtle way than being face-to-face direct.

But which social media website do each of us choose to use to effectively market our product to our Maria? Let’s take my chosen industry as an example – the almost half-a-million call center workforce in the country. Their online presence began with the height of Friendster as a popular social media for the young and yuppies-at-heart (I had to use that term to include myself – LOL!) If you think Facebook is their primary means of social media activity today, think again. Mom and Dad actually invaded Facebook earlier than they did, or the parents were more active than the kids. Also, many Friendster-savvy call center agents still cling on to their first social media love simply because it’s too darn difficult and time-consuming (or totally blind as a bat) to transfer their photos and profile, and begin anew with links, testimonials and a host of other features that Facebook may have. For Maria being a call center agent in the Philippines, if I had to choose just one social media website to market my product that’s most appealing to call center agents in the country, I’d prefer Friendster over Facebook. It’s not about the popularity of the social media website – it’s where Maria actually spends more time.

If Maria likes to read interesting content in the web or at social media sites, then “interesting” also has to be “meaningful” and “relevant” to her lifestyle, be it work or personal. You can’t push your product to the face of Maria – she’ll eventually snub you on day-one. Rather, write or blog the generic equivalent of your product while placing it at the sidelines of your blog. I call this MGB – Marketing in the Guise of a Blog (okay, so I invented the acronym – we all do it all the time.) The same goes for Facebook; rather than label your Fan Page “The Best All-in-one Glorious Toothbrush,” name it as “My Toothbrush, My Teeth” or anything that describes it as a special interest group who adorns their teeth and the toothbrush that most appeals to them than a bunch of people who will (future tense) love to use your new yet publicly unknown “Glorious Toothbrush” product. The more generic the phrase or title, the bigger the possibility of people joining your Facebook Fan Page without even directly marketing the existence of your page to them. But remember the time your Maria has with the internet – it’s not as if she’ll be online all day long. Go back to how you described the personality of your Maria down to her daily schedule of activities in life. That schedule becomes your embedded routine when you interact you’re your Maria.

In the End, a Conversation Still Wins Over Messaging

My personal website – this blog – is plastered with the word “conversations” between the title, sub-title and most of my posts. That’s because I am a strong believer that no matter how the internet was invented and is used today, the winning formula for online success will always be the site that provides a more convenient means of developing real conversations with its community of visitors, loyal readers or members.

If you Tweet something, be prepared to respond back to every direct message (called “DM”), especially a simple “thanks” for re-Tweeting (labeled “RT”) your Tweet. If someone comments on your Facebook post, comment back all the time. In Facebook, you’ll notice that the more comments you have, the bigger the chance of that post appearing in the “Top News” stream of your member’s wall, the default wall when one opens his or her Facebook for the first time. The same goes for Friendster testimonials, LinkedIn comments, Plaxo replies and a host of many other social media websites. The conversation you create with a single person becomes more meaningful and relevant to him because he knows that the next time he comments, he expects a reply from you. People are still people even with their online self. When they say something to someone like you, it means well for them to receive a reply.

But why stop at just writing messages, comments and replies? If you can create a face-to-face conversation, won’t you grab that opportunity? Last year, I experimented upon messaging and responding to those who commented on my posts at LinkedIn by asking fifteen minutes of their time to meet me at the Starbucks nearest to their workplace. Half responded positively, and then half of these I actually met for coffee (see my story why I chose Starbucks as the best venue for meeting). I usually offered a my service to them, to find out if I could re-market their product for free on my blog or become an independent reseller paid only by commission when I close a sale (or as an affiliate marketer.) During the face-to-face conversation, I of course introduced what I was doing as a freelance entrepreneur, including a show-and-tell of my product.

Many of these fifteen minute conversations turned out to be half- or one-hour discussions. I included a “who am I” story-telling section so that my new acquaintance gets to know me better, expanding from the web profile they read. I made sure I presented only one core competence, say networking marketing, and one product, like Kunnect, the hosted call center solution I’ve been marketing in the country, that I valued more than the others. Choosing one or two competences and products made it easier for them to remember me; presenting a mother load of capabilities will make them forget me – “what the heck does he do again?” Quaint chances of messaging each other in the social media websites after that meeting made them good referrers and reference people to their own network – they always knew what I was all about. Even my high school batch mates relate my name to the term “call center”; when in need of advise regarding the industry, “talk to Raffy Pekson.” Awesome!

Your online conversations, multiple instances of comments and replies on several topics, have to be transformed to a face-to-face meeting. Only then will your social media acquaintance be transformed into a real transaction. Marketing’s overall goal is to generate sales. Marketing without the intent of a sale is an expensive hobby and not reality. Somewhere along the way, there is always an opportunity to monetize what you market.

If my social media acquaintance is not in the country, I call them up. I balance the cost to call overseas versus the benefits I derive from it, be it a short-term advantage or a long-term gain. For example, I’ve had an online acquaintance that started back in 2002 when the term “social media” didn’t even exist and kept my using my BMW (another acronym? Click here to find out what BMW means) to make sure I was abreast at what we were both doing in life. I kept in touch with him at least twice each year. In 2006, I e-mailed him to introduce what I was doing – setting up an 80-seat call center in the Philippines. Lo and behold, that e-mail message turned into a telephone conversation which led me to get Reed Business Information (or RBI), the largest trade publication company in the United States, as my most prestigious client for the call center. As it turned out, the VP for Operations of RBI was his good friend. Whodathunk? Yes, who would think that a casual acquaintance through the web and very rare telephone conversations turned out to be a huge transaction four years later.

Turn your social media conversations into real, face-to-face or verbal conversations. Gut feelings and intuitions always come in to play when two people are talking to each other, and those factors tremendously add to the emergence of a viable transaction – the introduction of your Maria to you by your acquaintance. Whether it does or not, that person will be glad to have talked to you directly and, in earnest, he or she will keep you in mind when an opportunity for your product falls on his lap or even just passes him by. The personal and professional “you” always do mix all the time, even way back before the advent of social media networking and marketing. Even your primary education classmates may now be primed up to be your customers, or their friends, thereof, only if you kept in touch with them and they know what you do.

Thank goodness for Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Wozniak, Mark Andreseen, Jerry Yang, eGroups.com, Plaxo, Ryze.com and a host of others who became first in their fields so that we now have MacBooks, FireFox, Google, Yahoo! Groups, Facebook and LinkedIn in the internet and the World Wide Web.

In the continuing legacy of the internet, it is and will always be about conversations. The better conversation is verbal. The best is face-to-face.

Photo above is a studio shot of the (funny?) sales and operations managers of Group C of Avon in the Philippines, headed then by Connie Arboleda (holding the teddy bear).

My former colleague, mentor and past country manager of Avon in the Philippines, Malu Dy Buncio, now Chief Business Development Strategist at Mansmith and Fielders, Inc., recently popped an image-poster announcing her two-day pubic seminar on the dynamics of direct selling. For those who are thinking of entering the wonderful world of direct selling, I urge you to spend a little cash and time for this two-day seminar. Malu will not only thrill you and drive you nuts about direct selling (oh, how I miss listening to her); she’ll make sure you walk your way out of the seminar with a real, no nonsense plan. For more information, please go to the Mansmith web page of “The Dynamics of Direct Selling” or click on the poster below.

Anyway, this announcement from Malu got me thinking of my glory days working for the number one direct selling company in the Philippines (do you have to guess?) where I discovered the finer lines of managing thousands of independent dealers, not to mention learning to remove pride and ego by singing and dancing in front of everyone during sales rallies and assemblies. I mean, when do you get the chance to sing “Rapper’s Delight” in front of 800 people at The Music Museum? LOL! Those days have gone and passed but Avon was the pinnacle of my experience in the art of managing a direct selling organization and I owe many subsequent successes I’ve had to the people I worked with in direct selling. The fact is many of the things I will mention in my story came from pronouncements of Malu during her long tenure in Avon, not to mention also being the precursor to Avon in the Philippines – Beautifont.

In the interest of my love for the small business, I’d like to put this story in the same perspective that any new direct selling endeavor often starts as a small business and ends being a huge success, sometimes beyond your wildest dreams. All you need to do is “begin.”

Why I made my way into Direct Selling

I was first and foremost an I.T. geek or nerd long before anyone even heard the phrase “information technology.” It used to be called EDP (electronic data processing) and then transitioned itself to a more sexy term, MIS (management information systems). I spent seven years holed up in an office facing humongous CRT screens of “green fonts over black background” and programming my time away using Cobol, Basic, Pascal, C and xBase. Then, a blinding glimpse of the obvious struck me: I have never heard of an EDP or MIS guy become general manager of a company – any kind of company. This was the era long before the internet crept into the common household and Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. Come to think of it, we were already excited just using Bulletin Board Systems (or BBS).

I pondered the thought some more and saw general managers coming from three usual places in corporate Philippines: finance, marketing or sales. Geez! Me do finance? I’d have to go back to school to do that plus pass the CPA exams and have a decade or so of grudging experience. I also quipped, “What the heck is marketing?” And so, the inevitable was obvious – find a job in sales.

I was the head of MIS in the Philippine licensee company of Jockey International which created other business units inside the company. During this time, Jockey Philippines recruited and convened a small team of experienced managers to plan, set up and operate a direct selling division. Being the top IT guy of the company, I became part of the planning team which included Millicent “Joy” Isaac and Naomi “Omi” Diaz. We eventually launched the direct selling unit and set up the first branch with myself handling automation and operations management. In a year or so, Omi left and the Operations Manager position in the direct selling unit became vacant, and I was asked to fill it in on a temporary basis while the owners looked for a replacement. After a week of its daily grind, I asked that I stay on a permanent basis. That started my direct selling career.

Two years in Jockey Philippines’ direct selling unit was great but my quest for learning more, especially on the sales side of the business, grew beyond what the company could provide me. So, I sought the help of two headhunters to find me a job inside the country’s number one direct selling company, Avon Cosmetics Inc. I moved into Avon in a lower rank, from National Operations Manager in Jockey to the Branch Manager of Avon’s Shaw (boulevard) Branch, with almost the same salary. That’s okay – the point is I’m in the best corporate university to get me a degree in direct selling, so to speak. I managed the third largest branch of Avon in the Philippines which, in two years, became number two in the country (Avon then had 21 branches nationwide), thanks to my able branch teammates in the likes of Arlene Nolasco, Tente Alday (now Country Manager of Mary Kay Philippines), Ria dela Vina and, of course, the original Big Brother when the TV show didn’t even exist, Jimmy Gatdula. We also had our mentor and the best group manager, Connie Arboleda, always patiently supporting our needs and our very diverse branch management team. After two years of grassroots experience dealing directly with the independent dealers and franchise managers of Avon, I moved to its head office to set up and manage the newly formed Customer Service Department, headed by another great mentor Tonet Rivera, now the Global-Regional top guy for Bristol-Myers Squibb and a budding pilot who writes about flying, together with his son, in their blog, Flying in Crosswinds.

But during my next two years as head of a new department in Avon, politics crept in, a good way in hindsight but not something I wanted for my career path. There was a new computer system being developed and implemented, and I was asked from the highest management realms to be part of the users group, the team that brought the practical ways of managing and operating direct selling branches. The history of automation in Avon always pulled good, experienced people from branch and support-unit levels, and involved them in the IT project. However, such projects usually lasted for a year or two, and by the time it ended, those branch sales and operations people already lost the original job they once had, not to mention a career path they started out with. Avon is a very good employer and in that respect, it usually created new positions to adopt these jobless champions of automation. Having that perspective in mind, I thought my carefully planned career path in Avon was gone. Then, a good friend recommended me to Personal Collection a.k.a. LTS Philippines, a competitor of Avon in the direct selling field, to head national operations. I took no longer than a week to decide, resigned my post in the IT project and immediately jumped into my new job. It only lasted a year to which the reason would need more paragraphs to relate; so, I won’t. After a total of seven years in direct selling, I spent two jobless months contemplating what to do before I eventually joined Mega Magazine as its General Manager. The rest is history.

The Beauty of Direct Selling

Mind you, I’ve never had the opportunity to be the moniker of the “Electrolux Man” gloriously singing, “I’m gonna knock on your door, ring on your bell, tap on your window, too…” But I invited myself to join two area saturation activities conducted by my Avon franchise managers to actually conduct the literal “knocking on the doors” activity: introducing myself as a representative of Avon (I couldn’t imagine calling myself an “Avon Lady”) and selling make-up and brassieres. On occasion, I would tag along in other area saturation drives but just observe than conduct the face-to-face cold-calling process.

After seven years inside the wonderful world of direct selling, I came to realize good things (and some not-so-good) about it. The most basic description and analogy to direct selling was that it was about personal selling: everything was face-to-face; 80 percent of the entire selling conversation was banter; relationships and camaraderie mattered more than today’s “business as usual” consumerism principles; it was a 9-to-9 job, especially on weekends; there was always an inviting commotion happening in our world almost every day – if not, our dealers would have left us; you learn the real “art of the sale” in direct selling and not from Donald Trump’s books; it was always “fun” almost every day; and it was also exhausting at times.

Despite all these things about direct selling, and running and managing a small or large organization of sales and operations people, one thing was very glaring – it was all about money. If money is not you cup of tea for a lifelong career, then direct selling isn’t for you. I remember my former IT boss telling me: “There are only three loves in the world which correspond to who you eventually become. For love of country, you become a teacher; for love of pride, you become a computer programmer or scientist; for love of money, you go into sales.” That’s what direct selling is all about for the millions of people who join the many companies in the industry – it’s all about money. It may be called “income opportunity” or any highfalutin description the creative marketer can coin, but the simplest, one-word term for it is still “money.”

“RITA” will help you succeed

To earn money in direct selling, you don’t pin yourself to area saturation drives and knocking on doors for the rest of your life. You must recruit people, commonly termed as your “down line.” In time, your down lines also mimic your success by recruiting their own network of people; and so the cycle continues. The larger your network of down lines, the better your income if the direct selling company you belong to acknowledges your down lines’ success to you. But things change and life for some down lines take a 180-degree turn, and so you lose some of these people along the way. To replace those who have left your network, you keep recruiting more people into your network. The famous moniker in direct selling happens to be the name of a woman – R.I.T.A. Simply put, it means “Recruitment Is The Answer.”

It’s like the job of the recruitment officer in a company, and you’ll never know when your best employee will decide to leave you. The recruitment officer continues to cull the labor pool for people with the right skills and competence, and puts them in an active file. For direct selling, RITA must not be in an active file – these new recruits must immediately join your network and you start teaching them how to sell great. RITA is a daily job, not a seasonal one. You don’t stop recruiting until you stop direct selling. It’s just part your job.

One of the most important acronyms I learned – R.T.D.M.S.

Okay, here come the acronyms again; but this is important. This time, it describes you entire role with your network and your direct selling business. In sequence, RTDMS simply means “Recruit, Train, Develop, Motivate and Sell.” These are the pinnacles of your work in your direct selling job. It is a cycle that you do every day. It is the process by which you become successful in your direct selling career. It is inevitable that you do all these, not just one.

We’ve touched on RITA as a means to continue growing your network while others inside it may falter and leave. “Training” your network, new recruits or otherwise, is an ongoing function. Many of your down lines cannot afford formal study about sales and many of them may not have gotten a college degree; and so you must fill-in that hole in order to better themselves. Training can be one-on-one coaching or group sessions. It can be short, one-hour bursts or whole-day, out-of-town sessions. However it is done, your content has got to be meaningful to them. From selling tips to effective on-time collections to recruitment blitzes and developing a growing network, it’s your job to teach them all these. The best method is obviously based on your experience of becoming a successful direct seller. Ask the help of someone who can assist in creating simple Powerpoint presentations or just talking points. Don’t create a written speech of the entire session – speak from your heart and experience, and with gusto! Sometimes, you need to attend good public or private training sessions – do so at your expense. What you pay for at these public training courses will return back to you in multiple folds if you apply it and teach it.

Photo by ericoebanda at Flickr-com

Developing your network means finding those rare down lines who can one day become great leaders like you. You have to be observant in finding these future leaders and give them more of your time than usual. You have to pull and convince them of your intention to groom them as a future leader of their network (under your network). Like a teacher, you have to create a simple syllabus of their development so there is a guide for both of you to follow. Some of your future leaders cannot be groomed – that’s okay. This means don’t just choose one – choose a few good ones. Besides money and pride of success, the basic thing we usually leave our children, network of friends, and work colleagues is education. The additional gratification for developing future leaders is their admission that you were responsible for their success, even if the direct selling company you work with does not financially recognize the leaders elevated from your network.

Motivation and inspiration may be intertwined but the point is to make the heart as energized as the mind. The psychology of successful people is always bred inside the heart and soul – the unconscious part of a being – that propels him or her to do great using his conscious mind. It is a daily role you play while you crisscross the many people in your network. Be it done on stage or a small group session, motivational speeches are usually impromptu. I used to buy those corny “Chicken Soup” books and other similar titles, and would index-card them according to title or theme. I made sure I wrote down the group to which I told my motivational story in each index card so that I don’t repeat myself the next time I’m called to talk. However you do things, you have to carry many stories with you and be careful not to repeat them else you start hearing snickering and pun smiles from your audience.

Selling does not stop because you have a network doing that for you. There are always people who will demand to buy only from you, especially your personal customers to which you have been selling to when you started your direct selling career. They may even recommend you, not your down line, to sell to their friends. Whatever the reason may be, your selling job is never over. Even while sitting in a restaurant you open your Avon catalog and glance at the neighboring table looking at you and your catalog, heck! Offer to show them the catalog and sell them. You’ll never know – they may become your top seller in the future. Like any good teacher training your down lines, keep your selling skills intact by practicing what you preach all the time. These instances are also good stories to tell your down lines during your motivational speeches.

Alone is not the answer to Direct Selling success

If you browse publications that show the successes of people in the direct selling field, you’ll notice that most of them are always married couples. Why is that? Simple: you can’t do all things successful, alone. “No man is an island” is alive and well in direct selling. You have to have a partner to help you achieve your success.

A partner doesn’t really have to be your husband or wife; it can be your cousin, brother, sister, parents or even your friend. At most, it’s always been a relative in the Philippines. But a spouse is usually best. The way it works is that both of you divide the many things involved in your direct selling business. For one, face-to-face activities such as recruitment, training and motivation are primarily in your alley. Back-office work like inventory management, credit and collection, computerization or automation, and a host of others belong to your partner who is usually not the type who can talk in front of hundreds of people, if not just a dozen, and can sell themselves about your direct selling business. Sometimes, these partners are also your drivers, collectors, distributors, coordinators, personal assistant, etc. Don’t put them down because of the type of job they do for you – they are as every bit important as what you do. Together, you bring totality in your direct selling business and make it even more successful because of your diversity in character and the division of labor you’ve both agreed to undertake. In the end, always reward your partner, whether with your time or money, because without them, you will greatly lose out and fail.

There are many upcoming direct selling businesspeople who think doing it alone is better than having to manage a husband or wife to help them with their business. History has been repeating itself that couples are the best type of business partners that make an endeavor succeed faster than you would think. If you are focused on your job, knowing the other always has your back, the chance of success becomes limitless.

Will your children willingly inherit your Direct Selling business?

Here’s one glaring thing that I have noticed in the great direct selling businesses in the Philippines – no matter how hard the parents try, the children are always never interested in inheriting and pursuing their parents’ direct selling business. For most, the children’s interest lies elsewhere. Why is that?

Think about it – when parents are financially good, their natural tendency is to educate their children in the best schools money can buy. These children grow up hob-knobbing with the children of other successful parents who live in posh residences and mingle only with the upper echelons of society. Well, generally speaking. If that or anything similar is the scenario with the kids, they will eventually develop interests that’s probably contrary to your direct selling business like a professional career in the medical or legal fields, hi-technology work involving computers and the internet, or other career paths.

Photo by rochell at Flickr-com

Direct selling in the Philippines caters to the middle-to-lower strata of social classes. This is where the ambition of wealth is more desirable in direct selling than asking the successful ones to abandon what they’re doing and join in. Children who have been bred and educated in expensive private schools tend to shun away from dealing with the masses of direct selling. The mere idea of speaking in the jargon that the masses can understand is already a feared activity, not to mention having to do everything that mom and dad have been doing during their growing-up years. There is a disconnect in terms of social breeding, education and ambition to be someone; if it were a life of corporate boardrooms where titans meet other titans of industry, that would be most appealing to the children. But a direct selling business isn’t anywhere in that spectrum. Though even more successful than many struggling corporate giants, the allure of neckties and chic corporate suits just doesn’t match the loose, very informal setting of direct selling. In the end, the parents end up giving their successful network to someone who has no blood relations to them – anyone they trust the most in their down lines.

This is a challenge to many direct selling companies managing successful and thriving networks – there is no succession plan within one network. The inevitable is that when the successful couple retires or is too old to work, the network is in chaos and immediately divides itself into many smaller pockets, and the former glory of the parent network withers away. I once attempted to convince Avon that employing automation as an incentive to lure the Yuppie kids of successful direct selling moms and dads is a gateway, not the only solution, for the kids to enter the direct selling domain. Once inside the business, it becomes easier for mom and dad to story-tell what they’re doing and slowly introduce the children to their day-to-day activities. They may set up a small office for the children where they can dress up in suits and chic corporate attires, but they eventually become personally involved in the business. In time, they realize the income potential, imbibe the work styles, assimilate the character of mom or dad, and continue the business when the parents retire. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, my proposals fell through the cracks of the mighty direct selling giant. “That’s how the cookie crumbles?”

In summary

Hey! For every story or article, there’s got to be a summary, right? So, let me jump right into it and rewrite everything in outline form:

• Much like any kind of job you do, you do it because you love it. Period. The moment you fall out of love, forget it. No matter how hard you try, you’re just dragging yourself into something you think is worth it but in hindsight you don’t give a crap about it. In the end, you’re bound to fail.
• Direct selling is personal selling as opposed to today’s mix of online and offline selling in the corporate sense. Think of it as social media selling – it’s always more a social encounter than business as usual. If you can’t socialize, you’re a dead duck in Direct Selling.
• Direct Selling, like any kind of sales job, is primarily about money before anything else. “Ewww! Money? Not for me.” Then don’t.
• “Recruitment Is The Answer” (or RITA) is only one answer to make it big. There are lots more I didn’t discuss.
• RTDMS is another “answer” of making it big in Direct Selling.
• “No man is an island” in Direct Selling success means you have to have your partner doing full-time work, too. Doing it alone is just too hard, creates too much anxiety and not worth the cake. Find the right partner, synergize and do it together, forever!
• Provide the best education for your children that your Direct Selling money can buy. But if you want them to inherit your Direct Selling business, you’ve got to start planning a way to entice them to join you. Forcing them to do so at a more adult age won’t make the grade. Create a succession plan – ask help from others if you need to – but make a plan, any workable plan.

My Mom and I in Miami

Today, I am what I am thanks to my seven years of in-depth and hands-on experience in the three direct selling companies I worked for, the longest and best of which belongs to Avon. From a geek who often replied in single words, I can now express and describe a single word in multiple paragraphs and have no qualms speaking to large groups of people; besides the awesome “people and sales management” skills I learned. If you intend to be general manager one day, you’ve got to make “sales” part of your career itinerary because it simply goes a long way in molding you to the right future head of a company, large or otherwise. Direct selling is here to stay; you can’t discount the fact that it offers the lowly poor an invitation to succeed if he or she puts their heart and mind into it. It’s the fastest way to make money – for everyone!

If there’s a book entitled “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff,” someone ought to write “Don’t Sweat the Direct Selling Stuff.” Direct selling may be part of your destiny – today! So, find out if it so.

Ending this, I leave you with my favorite ten, two-letter words that make up a great, inspirational sentence. “If it is to be, it is up to me.” Awesome indeed!

Referenced websites:

Dynamics of Direct Selling
http://www.mansmith.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=177&catid=27&Itemid=17

Mansmith and Fielders, Inc.
http://www.mansmith.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1&Itemid=35

Tim Berners-Lee
http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/

World Wide Web
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web

Jockey International
http://www.jockey.com/

Jockey Philippines
http://gtvl.com/

Avon Cosmetics, Inc.
http://www.avon.com.ph/PRSuite/home_page.page

Flying in Crosswinds
http://tonetcarlo.wordpress.com/

Bristol-Myers Squibb
www.bms.com/

Personal Collection a.k.a. LTS Philippines
http://www.philippinecompanies.com/companyprofile/36840/lts-phils-corp-personal-collection-

The Electrolux Man and Other Stories
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Electrolux-Man-Other-Stories/dp/0947062149

Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal
http://www.amazon.com/Trump-Art-Deal-Donald-J/dp/0446353256

Mary Kay Philippines
http://www.marykay.com.ph/mkpweb08/home.asp

Mega Magazine
http://www.mega-magazine.com/

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff
http://www.amazon.com/Sweat-Small-Stuff-small-stuff/dp/0786881852

How can the small business owner compete with large, multinational enterprises in the same market without having to spend so much money in setting up and maintaining a “customer conversation” infrastructure? People say “Talk is Cheap!” but simply said, it’s either complex, expensive or both. Beyond social media activities, the small business has to talk more to its customers in the most direct manner possible – verbally. The cost-effective way for the small business owner is to look for web-based solutions and rent it cheap. This article attempts to explain that “way” in simple, non-technical terms the small business owner himself (or herself) can plan, implement and succeed.

In today’s wired world, the dreams of online marketing, social media networking and social media marketing don’t necessarily amount to high revenues and low expenses, which ideally equals to great profits. Many large companies spend thousands, if not millions, trying to use the World Wide Web in the most imaginative ways; and in some of those ways, their web activities become controversial or, worse, provocative. But even if they result in negative publicity or results, these corporate giants still have enormous cash to dispense – all they need to do is juggle money between departmental budgets. This is not the case for the small business owner.

Online, Offline or Both?

Here are some questions to ask the small-office, home-office (SOHO) businessperson or small business owner with little cash to spend:

• Is the effort to market your products or services on the web way too much?
• Are you getting just a trickle of interested customers rather than higher as you projected?
• Is your market not responding to your message blasts – e-mail, text, content, articles, blogs, tweets and the like?
• Heck! Does online marketing and social media activities even work? (See also “Bridging the Social Media Generation Gap in the Workplace”).

Here’s another question I always ask small business owners when they start talking about imaginative or über-ly creative online campaigns:

“Don’t you think the simplest customer campaign is to just talk to your customers?”

When I wrote the word “talk” above, I meant a verbal exchange of words, not message-blasting your customers to nirvana. Don’t messaging them and expect so many enthusiastic replies back. It’s not about great copywriting or blogging and assuming everyone will click “Contact Us” right away. The world as history writes about it depends on conversations, “the oral exchange of sentiments, observations, opinions, or ideas” (as defined by Merriam-Webster), to improve or enrich society.

A Customer List is a Goldmine

Your online world is already ripe with many telephone numbers you can use to establish a one-on-one relationship with existing and prospective customers. The telephone directory has hundreds of thousands of contact information you can import based on area codes, zip or postal codes, cities and so on. You can also buy customer lists in a variety of digital formats from many providers like directory companies and list providers. Getting a customer list of your market today is so much easier than the heydays of rotary-dial telephone systems. The web is already a golden place to search for list providers.

Implement Bite-sized, Chewable Customer Conversation Campaigns

Your sales, marketing, service and support campaigns do not have to be so complicated only experienced employees knowledgeable in telemarketing, service and support, and sophisticated technologies are able to provide the right result. Chopping a large, maybe complex customer program into bite-sized pieces is the best and fastest way to implement it because even the inexperienced employee can perform wonderfully if given the chance. This is something many corporate entities have been doing, like creating levels of sales pitches between the frontline people and the sales closers, or escalating service and support from simple Q&A short sessions to expert-based long discussions. What you need to do is establish the groundwork for multiple yet simple tasks according to the level of expertise of each of your existing employees – or yourself. Going beyond the present capabilities of your workforce only means hiring very experienced and expensive professionals to do it for you. For starters, that’s not prudent. You and your team will eventually develop the skills to be able to drive more complicated customer conversation campaigns over a given duration. For now, keep it simple and develop from experience.

Find a Workforce You can Afford Or Use Your Existing Ones

Manpower is not as difficult as it seems to get – just make sure you’re not looking for someone who’s got a decade of sales or engineering experience and paying them minimum wage. Even if you “up” the ante on sales or performance commissions, employment-driven people still make it a point to get the best fixed monthly income. There are a lot of people out there without a job who can deliver customer service, telemarketing and up-selling with good, not mediocre results. Chances are, some of them may develop the knack for it over time and can become your best asset in the long term. Given the right tools, direction and support, you’ll be surprised how much value they will bring given that one-time chance.

Don’t even dream of creating a home-based group of telemarketing reps because it (still) doesn’t work in the Philippines or many places in Asia. Culturally, the average Filipino in his humble abode is an undisciplined person. He (or she) is way too comfortable in his house that it’s distracting to be doing telecommuting work productively. The efficiency of running a good team is still dependent on the traditional office environment. In fact, many experienced call center agents (you can tap into) welcome going back to daytime work even if it means lower pay. In my 26 years of work experience, I can state for a fact that the overall work environment is (generally) still a better come-on than higher pay.

The Right Office Tool is the Least Expensive One

The right tool for a productive employee conducting your sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaign is simply composed of an office table or cubicle, a PC with broadband internet and a USB headset – that’s it! This setup alone already gives so much productive power to your sales and marketing rep. Broadband internet would mean giving each PC at least 100 kbps of uninterrupted internet connection – uninterrupted because the main use of the PC is to call and receive calls (voice), not surf the web (data). If there is an interruption of connectivity in data streams, the web browser program simply retries connecting to the website. In the case of a voice-over-the-internet (VoIP), one second of disconnection means one full second of a blank conversation – there is no retry. With regards to the USB headset, it’s far more superior than buying a headset that connects directly to the PC’S sound card.

Setting up a local area network (LAN) is optional. The easiest thing to do is connect all your computers to the digital subscriber line (DSL) or internet modem provided by your internet service provider (ISP). In a common setup, you need to buy a multiple-port router so that your employees’ computers can directly be connected to the ISP’S modem. How many ports should the machine have is up to you. Now, if you want to set up a LAN, you need to confer with someone who’s adept and experienced in setting up these office networks. Consider maintenance of your LAN especially when things go haywire inside your network.

Wi-fi connectivity is not suitable for uninterrupted VoIP conversations. Wi-fi has a more complex job of connecting your computer to the internet using radio frequency; once there is interference from electronic machines and appliances, you will encounter those one-second gaps in repeated or multiple times. Surfing the web using wi-fi connections is fine, but not for VoIP.

The Power of the Automated Dialing Solution

VoIP, the wonder technology that today allows people to verbally communicate with each other through computers just like a telephone call. There are free and not-free solutions on the web which allows you not only to contact a person between computers but also call them on their fixed line or mobile phones. From the old-world DialPad.com of the late 90′s to today’s Skype, Yahoo Messenger and Google Talk, these free and not-so-free web solutions provide a simple, manual-dialing platform for your small business to start talking to your market. However, if employee productivity and efficiency is a key factor to the success of your sales and marketing customer conversation campaign, sophistication in function and use has to be the norm.

Normally, a small business buys a public broadcast exchange (PBX) machine that’s physically connected to its fixed lines. This allows employees to call and receive calls by way of traditional phone lines. Of course, you can connect multiple telephone units to the PBX machine even if the number of fixed lines (from the telephone company) doesn’t match the number of employees. But PBX machines provide little efficiency that doesn’t allow owners and managers to analyze employee productivity for a given campaign. That’s where the sophistication of an automated dialing solution comes into the picture.

But sophisticated solutions are usually expensive if you buy everything and set it up as if you’re going to use it 24×7 for a decade. For a small business owner, that’s not frugal, not even practical. Many small businesses need to run short-term sales and marketing customer conversation campaigns that provides an interim leeway to compete with large enterprises without incurring excessive expenditure. What the small business owner needs is a “call center solution” that he can rent, not own; a solution he can use but only when he needs it, and not pay for a long-term contract when in some months that solution is vacant or unused; and a solution that’s cheap.

There is an available subset of “call center solutions” that is web-based where the small business can conduct sales, marketing, service and support calls with its customers. Usually called a “hosted” solution, it is also part of those web applications categorized as “cloud computing” and “software-as-a-service or SaaS.” However, many hosted solutions are based in First World and developed countries and access to local, Third World telecommunications infrastructure (local landlines and mobile phones) are expensive.

Enter Kunnect, a hosted call center solution that’s capable of providing small businesses with a web-based solution and access to local incoming and outgoing calls at inexpensive rates. It is able to commit small businesses to conduct automated-dialing telemarketing activities to Philippine-based landline and mobile phones, including calling about any telephone number in the world. It can manage all incoming calls from any country in the world; it can also manage all incoming local calls within the Philippines for free (meaning no per-minute charges) because the small business already leases several landlines it can reuse – it just needs an intermediary machine to route the incoming analog calls to Kunnect’s digitally-oriented VoIP servers. This hosted call center solution now provides the small business owner all the power that large call center (and non-call center) companies use, such as but not limited to automated-dialing (also called predictive dialing), automatic call distribution (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), 100% recording of all types of calls, live statistics and reports, pop-up scripts per type of campaign, integrated customer relationship management (CRM) modules, and much more. In fact, because it’s web-based, the small business owner can monitor, control and manage all his sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaigns from any place in the world that has internet access – at home, in the beach, in a hotel, and so on.

The last piece of benefit in using a hosted solution like Kunnect is the type of contract it provides the small business owner – no long-term contracts. If many technology providers continue to force the small business in a long-term contract with pre-termination penalties, Kunnect eliminates all that because it knows the practicality of the business – customer conversation campaigns are usually short-term. In fact, customer conversation campaigns don’t happen one after the other; there’s usually a gap in between campaigns to allow the small business owner time to respond, analyze, evaluate and tweak his customer conversation campaign for the next type to come. Kunnect provides the small business owner the ability of a “start and stop anytime” because that’s just the practical way for the small business to conduct business – a “win-win” scenario in all fairness of the business world.

In Summary

The small business owner now has power to conduct simultaneous sales, marketing, service and support customer conversation campaigns mimicking the likes of Citibank, huge real estate companies and an arsenal of other industry giants. It does not need to spend so much in setting up a complex infrastructure; it can rely on what computers and internet access it has today with a few minor adjustments. It doesn’t need to spend so much to maintain something it sometimes doesn’t need to use – start and stop anytime is the best service offer for the small business entity. It doesn’t have to hire experienced yet expensive people if it can simplify the operational context of the campaign into chewable bits and pieces together with a web solution that allows one to do so. It doesn’t have to hire a battalion of technical experts to manage and maintain the solution – it’s simple to use, understand and manage.

The world is getting smaller because of the internet and especially due to social media networking and social media marketing websites and tools. But, at the end of it all, any business still needs to verbally talk to its customer before it can deliver its products and services to their doorsteps. Telecommunications rates are not just the only factor to decide what kind of solution to get – the overall efficiency of the entire campaign, including the productivity of the people involved and the tools it uses are what matters most; because without that kind of efficiency, no matter how cheap the rates are, chances are the entire customer conversation campaign will never generate the right results – results being the magic formula of Revenue – Expenses = Profit.

“Talk is Cheap!” That has got to be your new mantra today.