I recently attended Charlotte Interactive Marketing Association’s quarterly meeting, at which controversial sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer unveiled his new book, Social BOOM!  The event was well attended by 200 professionals, and Jeffrey was a vibrant speaker as expected. Some of the IMA members would find the content a bit shallow (we already know that Social Media is worthwhile- now what?)  but I’m sure it was valuable for his followers who might not be into interactive marketing or social media.

There were some interesting points that he made, some of which I totally agree with, and some I didn’t. But he did what we wanted him to do: get us talking. Here are some of those takeaways.

1) Every element of marketing, branding, advertising and social media has at its core WRITING.  Right on. Or is it write on? 🙂

2) Allocate time to make sales at the best times when people are at ease – breakfast or lunch.  I tend to give contracts to vendors I connect with. There’s no better way to get a connection with me than over food. Salespeople and BizDev – take note.

3) Keep tweets business related. This makes sense as you are building your personal brand and you need to appear professional.  Creating value is very important so you want to provide relevant, valuable content. However, how many of us get business solely based on professional prowess? Not many. Most of business is done because of relationships. That means people have to know you. How do people get to know you if you’re just putting out ads or billboards all the time?  

4) If people don’t like you, they won’t connect with you…so become likeable.  OK so here’s where Jeffrey’s logic starts to lose me. Previously in the program, he said that he only tweets relevant business tweets that provides value to his viewers. Get it. He said he’s done like 237 tweets but has 50k followers. Not all of us have a syndicated column that provides a built in fan base that will follow you when you tell them to. We plebes have to build our follow base 1 twitterer at a time. 

But how do people like or connect with you if you don’t put out personal content?

How do you balance personal vs. professional posts and is there some magical ratio?  

5) When asked if he gets more value from Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, he replied that he didn’t know and that you must do all social media.  While I agree that you should participate in all forms of social media, I think you should do what you can execute well. If not, get the hell off that small. My husband pointed out that the reason he doesn’t know what provides the most value is that his Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts are all synced so the content is identical.

So I ask: is it worthwhile to have different content for each site?  In an environment where you are selling something (especially books), shouldn’t you be able to track exactly how many leads come from each source? It’s all about measurability of the different social media metrics.  You should know your cost per acquisition (or lead) for each marketing/advertising small. 

6) The truth hurts for a little bit, a lie hurts forever. Just ask Tiger Woods. I couldn’t agree more and has served me well in Public Relations. That reminds me of slight lapses in judgment like the Marc Jacobs intern.