282: The Big Sales Audio Landgrab

<p>“Greg, you are everywhere!”.  I am often told this by business people here in Tokyo.  What they mean is that I am prolific on social media, video and audio.  Well, if you are in sales today and you are not prolific in promoting yourself, then what are you doing with your time?  It is an old saw in sales that “it doesn’t matter how many people you know, it is more important how many people want to know you”.  Fine, but how do you get that to work?  Afterall, there are only so many people we can meet in a month and naturally, we want all of them to want to know us.  The democratisation of social media and the free nature of the medium has changed many things in getting our reputation in front of many more people than we could ever physically meet in a month.</p> <p> </p> <p>I was always wary of social media.  I didn’t trust the platforms, so I avoided them until December 2011.  That year I made my first visit to San Diego in California to attend the Dale Carnegie International Convention.  One of the speakers was Jeffrey Gitomer, published author and sales training guru.  He was quite a character.  He was wearing a bright red shirt that from memory had his name” Jeffrey” and “Sales Dept” embroidered on it.  He was dressed like some guy who would be working at a gas stand pumping petrol.  Dale Carnegie is a pretty conservative organisation, so he had been told to tone down the profanity, but what he said was shocking to me.</p> <p> </p> <p>He asked the one thousand plus attendees “how many twitter followers do you have?”.  At that point he had over 30,000 and I had none.   On the plane back to Tokyo, I was thinking about what he said, so I made my first sceptical foray into the social media platforms. I found Twitter didn’t suit me as much as Facebook and Linkedin, so I tended to concentrate there.  I don’t post any personal stuff on these platforms. It is all business and I make sure none of it is controversial or embarrassing.</p> <p> </p> <p>Around 2012 I started publishing blogs on Twitter, LinkedIn and Faceb