Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Connecting the dots in an organization’s community requires a deep understanding of how community actually forms in most businesses. It’s not about Facebook pages and catchy slogans. It’s much more subtle and requires that you start thinking about organizational elements that you’ve probably never considered before.  I believe a business forms community through the following six elements....

Until last week, Jill Rowley was leading an effort to train about 23,000 Oracle salespeople in "social selling."

... Rowley believes that social selling is "transforming the sleazy, slimy, slicked-back hairdo image of sales" into one where salespeople are there to help companies solve their IT problems.

It's the next big thing in the enterprise tech world because IT professionals lean heavily on social networks to research tech products and to work with vendors, research finds.

It's also really important to selling cloud-computing services. Traditional software contracts tend to be focused on closing a sale and then getting out. The opposite is needed for the cloud: Software-as-a-service is a long-term partnership thing, so sales incentives need to be structured around making customers happy so they stick around and keep paying for the service....