Dave Harries: Grant I want to touch now on the importance of tagging and sharing in terms of articles and that sort of thing and how that relates to digital selling.
Grant Leboff: What it is, is this. Your best sales people, your marketers today are actually not you anymore because everybody’s got a channel. It’s the community you build around you. It’s those engaged people. I can say to you I’m really good at X but actually if a colleague of yours says he’s really good at X that’s much more powerful. How do we get people to do that?
One of the things we want to encourage people to share. Make sure whether it’s a Google plus one or a linked in share or a facebook like or a retweet on twitter whatever it is, make sure those mechanisms are available on your blog. Make it easy for people to share. The easier you make it the more likely they are to do so. That’s very important.
The other thing is about tagging is simply this. Tagging is where you tag people into your post where it’s relevant. Let’s say I quote a very famous marketer and say this is a fantastic quote, this is amazing. It wouldn’t be therefore silly for me to tag them into the post. So, when I publish it I tag their name as well. What that means is they see the post too. There’s a very good chance if I’m talking about them in flattering and nice way they’ll share that with their network. Now I’ve just suddenly got my article to a much bigger organization.
The thing about tagging is it is open to abuse. You shouldn’t tag people if it’s not relevant to them. You shouldn’t put people into articles merely for the sake of then being able to tag them. If it’s not authentic, if it’s not genuine, if it’s not real, actually you’re going to upset more people than you, you know, than it works for you. Then you’re in trouble reputation-ally and everything else. This could be open to abuse and I’m not suggesting you do that for a minute. I am suggesting that when it’s relevant. When you talk about somebody who’s well known in your industry. When you mention an achievement of someone or something else it’s not unreasonable to tag that person into the post and in so doing increase your likely hood of them sharing that as well. Therefore increasing your number of people that see it, the attention you get, and the engagement you have.
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