Actually on that point I always find it very odd that marketing almost solely in many companies own social media because social media in the main is not a very good brand to person communication channel. It’s a much better person to person communication channel. If you are the New York Yankees or the Liverpool football club it’s fine because there are people that want to follow the brand. If you’re a sexy brand like an Apple for example people want to follow the brand. For most business to business offerings you’re an accountant, you’re a solicitor, a recruitment company, a manufacturer. Actually people don’t want brand to person communications, they want person to person communications and sales people… that’s what they’ve always done. They should be on social and using that. You can see then that marketing and sales are blurring and they need to work much better together.
Dave Harries: If you’re in a situation where the marketing department perhaps does own the Twitter channel for your brand or whatever, how can you as a salesman influence that. Should you set up a parallel Twitter account or something like that?
Grant Leboff: Again it’s about working together and having congruency in everything that you do. Should the brand have a Twitter channel? Possibly yes but should sales people have a Twitter channel? Well if that’s where your customers are undoubtedly so. Then it’s a question of how do you create the right content, you’re not overlapping too much. Obviously people can be re-tweeting at each other’s posts but how do you make sure that you’re separating content, separating ideas, working with that. Can sales people create all the content themselves? Probably not. They probably need some marketing resources and help. You can just see how these teams have to work much closer together as the channels merge and the customer is all in the same place then they ever did traditionally.
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