You created a presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter placing your small business on the social media party grid.  Free word-of-mouth marketing was supposed to take over and the cash register start ringing.  It hasn’t played out that way, so what happen?

Social media platforms can provide the foundation for growth.  Social platforms can help you and your organization be found, find, and engage your target audience.

· Be Found:To be found during the “search” process when a customer or prospect has a need or desire for a product or service that your organization is capable of delivering.

If you are a technology vendor or CIO don’t panic.  Chief Marketing Officers still love you.  We continue to think about and are concerned with technology and data.  But I’m starting to spend more time with HR this year.  Yes, I’m concerned with whether or not marketing has the “right people on the bus.”  That’s a challenge that never ends, particularly when the business environment is constantly changing.  What I’m bringing attention to, and becoming more concerned with, is the individuals we don’t have room for on the bus.

Imagine that you’re attending a major conference.  It’s time to head over to the networking kick-off session.  You’ve got your business cards in your pocket and your elevator speech is locked and loaded.  You’ve brushed up on current events and read the speakers backgrounds so you are ready to keep the conversation light and engaging.

 

And then it happens; you run into a social buzzkill.  He’s looking at your name tag now…

 

A choke point is a strategic channel which could be closed or blocked to stop sea traffic.  At the Strait of Gibraltar, where Spain reaches for Morocco, only eight miles separate Africa from Europe.  It’s a strategic location that links the North Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.  When the world’s economy depended on merchant ships, control of Gibraltar meant control over the flow of products and profits to merchants throughout a large portion of the world.

Have your social networking messages sailed into a choke point?

The other night I told my wife that I might actually be a growth hacker.  She just looked at me and said, “You spend way too much time online.”

 

Sean Ellis, who is known for helping Dropbox grow in its early days, coined the term "growth hacker" in 2010.  In a blog post, he defined a growth hacker as "a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth."  In April 2012 the idea of growth hacking really took off when a blogger named Andrew Chen wrote a piece called “

Word-of-Mouth Marketing (WOMM) today is both online and through face-to-face interaction.  At times we think of WOMM in terms ofmarketing buzz, the interaction of users of a product or service that amplifies the brand and in some cases goes viral.

 

In reality, regular old everyday “buzz” is not as glamorous as we marketers like to imagine.  Recommendations from friends and family don’t often come with viral like excitement, but from a place of more practical experience.

 

This perspective was driven home for me during a lecture with some senior business students during their capstone marketing course.

Does your company encourage questioning in any substantive way? If so, does your company provide any training programs focused on guidelines and best practices for questioning?  In truth, many companies, whether consciously or not, have established cultures that tend to discourage inquiry in the form of someone’s asking “Why are we doing this?”  The impulse is to keep plowing ahead, doing what we’ve done, and rarely stepping back to question whether we’re on the right path.

According to Socrates, “Wisdom is limited to an awareness of your own ignorance.

The advertisement above is Sir Ernest Shackleton's recruitment notice for his 1915 Antarctic expedition.  His entire crew of 27 men did return.  But their adventure is one of the greatest survival stories in the annals of exploration.  Shackleton, his shipEndurancecrushed by ice in Antarctic’s Weddell Sea, led his crew to safety through a series of impossible journeys over land and sea.  What began as a journey of exploration became a 20-month battle to stay alive, demanding ingenuity, courage, and leadership.

A trim balding man in khakis with a button down shirt, the CMO looks the part he has played for so many years – the affable, hardworking executive who gets the job done.  It’s the 2015 sales kickoff meeting and he is setting in the front row with the rest of the executive team getting ready to address the troops.  He could still remember a time when these meetings required full business attire, there was no PowerPoint, and there were no smart phones or facilitated hashtagged social conversations with the audience.

I grew up in Grinnell, Iowa, a small town in the rural Midwest. It’s not exactly the place you would expect to find one of the most prolific scoring basketball teams in the nation. The “Grinnell System,” Grinnell College’s run-and-gun offense is considered unorthodox, even chaotic, but it is fun to watch.Grinnell teamshave led all playing levels in scoring for 19 of the past 21 seasons, while ranking first in the country in 3-point shooting for 17 of the past 21 years.  According to Head Coach David Arseneault’s book titled “