This was requested by GirlPie

We talk about how social media like blogs and podcasts and social networks will help us grow our business, and yet, there are several ways in which we’re hampered. Some of our customers won’t provide testimonials. Others will take a while to actually execute a project. Still others have stumbled onto your site, and it’s up to you to keep them. Let’s talk about these prospects, first.

Who Are Your Prospects?

There are, of course, tons of ways to think about who your potential customers might be. David Meerman Scott talks often about buyer personas as a way to better understand who you’re hoping to reach. And in my examples below, I’ve only picked three types of prospective new customers. You have many other people interacting with your media, and it’s up to you to balance your efforts such that they align with the relationships you need.

Here are three prospect type examples:

Private Customer

In the example GirlPie provided, her customers don’t really want to refer her. This means she has a Private Customer. You could say that SEO and search marketing professional often have Private Customers as well. In these cases, your audience doesn’t want to tout your skills, because they don’t want to admit their prior weakness, or have other reasons to stay quiet.

Newcomer Customer

Some of us have customers from larger companies who are very new. They’ve been tasked with adopting an online strategy, or a social media marketing plan, or something like this. These customers are browsing the web, grazing through keynote searches, and hoping to gather enough information to convince their senior team that they understand enough to make some starter moves. This audience will recommend you, but only after they’ve launched their project (and sometimes that’s a long while after you could’ve used their recommendation).

Clean Slate Customer

Several people find their way to your site by way of search. Perhaps you rank high in Google for blog topics (that’s my constant #1 search term), and so someone searching for topics for their blog will land on your site, and wonder what to do next. In these cases, these potential customers might need a bit more content and guidance before they become actual prospects (and remember, we’re talking business in this post, not community and other reasons to do social media).

Reaching These Prospects

In all three cases mentioned above, different tools will have a different impact. Here are some suggestions:

• Private Customers - consider an email newsletter with discrete information that reinforces your benefits. In that newsletter, encourage forwarding. Email is much more intimate than a blog setting. Consider a private online pay forum that allows for anonymity, if that’s also useful.
• Newcomer Customers - along with your media posts (blogs or podcasts or the like), create specific-to-their-industry informational documents (or recordings or presentations), with an eye towards empowering your contact with information that will convince their senior team to take action.
• Clean Slate Customers - In many ways, the simple answer here is to provide great content that’s useful, evocative, and invites further inquiry. From there, if you see any responses that match your business offerings, reach out. Send an email. There’s no harm in exploring a potential business relationship, should you see signs that a person has a need you can help fulfill.

You’ll note that I didn’t mention social networks much in this instance. The way I use social networks is to build relationships. I do any business prospecting by way of the media I create. I’m on the networks to connect, to be helpful, and to learn new things. Hopefully, that distinction makes sense. If not, ask me to define that better, and I will.

Business Isn’t Evil

The social web has enabled all kinds of new opportunities to communicate. Business and sales are just one portion of a large spectrum of ways we connect and transact. As with everything you and I talk about here, it comes down to clarity of purpose. If you’re selling something, state it. If you’re looking for customers, talk about it. If you’re there to educate, that’s fine, too. They’re YOUR tools. Use them the way you want. Just be clear and open about it.

What’s your thinking on all this? Have I identified your prospect type here? If not, tell me in the comments, and we can open the question up to the community. What’s your thinking?

—

The Social Media 100 is a project by Chris Brogan dedicated to writing 100 useful blog posts in a row about the tools, techniques, and strategies behind using social media for your business, your organization, or your own personal interests. Swing by [chrisbrogan.com] for more posts in the series, and if you have topic ideas, feel free to share them, as this is a group project, and your opinion matters.

Get the entire series by subscribing to this blog, and subscribe to my free newsletter here.

Photo credit, Jurvetson

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When you lose a hard drive on your computer, it stinks. When you lose two in a few month’s time, it really stinks. When your computer makes a weird “grrrrrrrr” sound and goes black, and won’t boot up even the little tiny apple, well, that’s deadly. That’s how things started out for me in the morning.

By 10, I’d called my boss and asked for a new laptop. By 3PM, I had it in hand. Tonight, when I had a moment, I pulled out my external storage drive, plugged it into the shiny new Mac, and turned it on.

It took an hour to restore everything to the last good save (a week old, but not horrible).

Because of the way these last several weeks have gone, I’ve learned a few things that I want to share. This might prove useful to you in a few ways: one, if your computer dies. Two, because this is the way I think things will move in the future.

Life in the Clouds

SEVERAL of my most used applications exist as web applications that I can reach via a browser:

• Gmail for email.
• Google Calendar for appointments.
• Google Reader for news.
• Evernote for notes.
• BatchBook for contact management.
• Flickr for photos.
• Blip.tv for movies.
• Google Docs for documents.
• Picnik for photo editing.
• del.icio.us for bookmarking.

It turns out that most of the apps I use in a given day exist on the web. But here are some exceptions that I would need if I had to rebuild another computer from scratch. (Note: this is a Mac list).

• TextWrangler - for complex text editing and text scripts
  
• Cyberduck - for FTP
  
• Adium - for IM client
  
• Skitch - for screenshots
  
• Keynote - for presentations
  
• Firefox - web browser
  
• Evernote - the desktop app side
  

The rest are all good to have, but I could live with just those and the built-in apps that come with a Mac.

Takeaways

What I’ve learned over the past month is that I can do lots of stuff on the web from any browser (have to remember that firefox bookmark sync addon - what’s it called?). I’ve learned that backups are important, and not to go more than a few days between them. I’ve learned that Time Machine for the Mac is a really powerful backup tool.

Further, I’ve learned that I need to get a file storage space on the web, too. The few things I lost access to involved files in progress in my documents area. I have most of them, but lost a few between backups. I’m going to check out a service like Mozy for storing some of that for me. That will complete that part.

How about you? What’s your experience been in this regard? Are you doing any of this differently?

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Project Dogfood is the latest thing I’m working on at CrossTech Media. It’s a project where you’re invited to come talk about which social media elements a company should consider adopting. In this case, because the whole premise is to “eat our own dogfood,” we’re starting with a revamp of our own New Marketing Summit website for an event we’re running in October.

I’m working with David Meerman Scott and Paul Gillin on this project. David and Paul are co-chairs of the New Marketing Summit event, and after a conversation I had with Nick Saber (my president and colleague) snowballed into a much more animated conversation with David and Paul, we find ourselves at Project Dogfood.

You’re invited to create an account (the platform we’re using to talk about this all is Jive Software’s Clearspace platform), and jump into the discussions. Though we’re talking in this case about one of our own websites, I feel the conversations will be broader in nature, and will be of interest to web technologists, marketers, attendees of conferences in general, and social media evangelists. Think about it: we’re going to transform our sites based on recommendations and interactions with the community.

That will certainly give us opportunities to mess up in front of you, but hopefully that means the project will be a learning project.

When it’s all said and done, it’s something we’ll talk about at the New Marketing Summit this October 14th-15th at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. But further, the methodology we come up with from the process and through your participation will be something we can talk about and share with people looking to transform their own sites and online marketing efforts.

I’m excited about this because it’s a chance to do more than just blog about it. We’ll implement things, test them with you, and learn through conversations.

What do you think?

Stop by Project Dogfood and check us out.

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