Sharing Information with Sales
by Kyle Flaherty on Jun.25, 2008, under Social Media
Social media is all about sharing information and using this information to engage in a conversation. We talk about this from an external standpoint a lot, in fact I would guess 90% of what I write here discusses the use of social media to communicate with audiences outside of our company. In my role, however, it is critical that I am also properly engaging with my most important internal constituent, our field reps!
Obviously our use of blogging, Twitter, Ning and Facebook is helpful, as are the ability to subscribe to our news releases and media coverage. But one thing we put in place this week is a very simple way to keep these folks up to speed on general industry news. This is obviously important from a competitive standpoint, but also just knowledge of industry trends and buzz. Nothing is worse than going into a sales scenario and the prospect points you to industry information that you didn’t have already.
It is so simple I’m kicking myself for not having done it months ago (perhaps my head is a wee bit full), but we finally created a shared Google Reader account that tracks everything that we need. Each morning our team goes through the news and hits ’shared’, sending that to our shared Google reader page. This page has an RSS feed and voila, the field has a means to get industry news all day long. What do you do to communicate with your sales teams?
–Kyle Flaherty
June 26th, 2008 on 5:58 am
Kyle,
This is something we are also working on for our whole agency. Have you found Google Reader to be efficient or would you recommend another program such as NewsGator or a wiki page?
Nice post.
-Rob
June 26th, 2008 on 6:09 am
Hi Rob,
I went through a tough transition with Google Reader (do a Summize search and you’ll find my issues) and I’ve used NewsGator and BlogLines in the past. But for sharing information like I discussed here Google Reader is definitely the best that I have used.
As for a wiki or even your own internal page, this is where I LOVE Google reader as well b/c I can easily build in my shared items into a wiki or internal web page. The one thing, and I think you are heading in this direction, is that only one person can really keep the Google reader shared items updated, whereas in a traditional Wiki you could have several people.
Here is a thought, have a few folks build Google Reader accounts for a client (internal and external people) and combine those shared feeds onto one wiki page?
Another thought I’ve had and others have been playing around with is using FriendFeed for this sort of stuff…I need to examine that in more detail.
Thanks for stopping by, see you on Twitter!
/kff