“Social selling” is getting a lot of press these days. Unfortunately, that means there’s also a lot of bad advice out there.

Google the term and you’ll get numerous hits on the imperatives of social selling along with strategies for building social presence to reach prospects, and software that mines social media for their digital footprint. Despite the numerous posts that urge sales to use LinkedIn, or caution sales not to misuse it, in my experience, some sales groups struggle to keep their LinkedIn profile updated, much less have a Twitter account or strategy to use either for social selling.

But, social selling is not just about salespeople connecting with buyers on LinkedIn (though that’s important) or sending out tweets that demonstrate thought leadership (though this can help.)

Social selling is about leveraging social media and technology to do things both sales and marketing should already be doing in order to do them faster and more effectively. It requires deep collaboration between the two departments around gathering and sharing data about prospective buyers, as well as using that data to engage them through social media. At its core, social selling requires you to do these three things:

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Survey of college students by Leftbrain’s Jared Childs aligns with recent Harvard Business Review discovery that most social activity on mobile devices is done at home and not on the go.

It’s safe to say social media has changed the way the modern world works. If you weren’t convinced by LL Cool J’s repetitive Twitter plugs during the Grammys, then here are some stats for you: The number of Facebook users is predicted to climb to 1.5 billion this year, Twitter is putting out close to 500 million tweets per day, and, as of November of last year, the number of daily Pinterest users has increased 145% from January 2012.

After immersing myself in usage statistics, I was curious as to how my peers compared to national trends. So, I put on my lab coat and goggles in search of 50 guinea pigs (no animals were hurt in the making of this survey) and surveyed my friends on their social media use.

What better way to put out a survey on social media than by using social networks? I sent out the survey through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The respondents’ ages ranged from 19-51, with 76% in the 19-24 range. The majority (64% ) were female.

It seems my peers are, in many ways, on par with national trends when it comes to using social media. Much like the rest of America, smartphones were the device of choice (84%) for viewing social networks amongst my peers. Despite the heavy use of mobile devices, however, the respondents aren’t using social media on the move. The majority of people were most likely to use social media either while watching TV (49%) or in bed (26.5%)!

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This week I had the pleasure of presenting at the very first Content Marketing World! It was very exciting, a lot of great content marketing, social media experts and authors attended and spoke about the industry and how it’s evolving. There was a good combination of motivational (get out there and do it!) speaking as well as plenty of how-to, practical advice to get your content marketing efforts in order, and aligned with revenue goals.

One of the presentations I gave was on more of the tactical side. I spoke about 21 ways to distribute content. Originally it was from the perspective of “I have all this content, now what?” but I really felt strongly about emphasizing the fact that content distribution is really a discipline that needs to be considered much earlier on, when you’re in the content strategy phase. If it’s something you think of after the fact, the success of your content marketing programs may be at risk.

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I‘m excited to announce that Barbra Gago — formerly with Genius.com and Cloud9 Analytics — is joining Left Brain as a key member of our demand generation strategy team.  Barbra brings great expertise around inbound marketing, content marketing, Website information architecture design, social media and how to leverage all of these elements for integrated, buyer-centric, buyer-driven demand generation.  So welcome Barbra … and read on for her first blog post on leveraging social media in B2B demand generation.  ~ABN

Social media – alone – cannot drive the type of scale B2B demand generation results that most enterprises need.  But when social media is combined with other buyer-targeted content and programs – especially as part of an inbound engagement model – it can serve as a critical multiplier of your efforts.  Moreover, it can enable you to engage with your buyer at phases of his/her decision-making process that other mediums cannot reach.

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