Note: This is a guest post by Brad Shorr is Director of Content & Social Media for Straight North. See Brad’s bio at the end of the article. Participating in social media is time consuming, so it’s only natural that people look for shortcuts. However, some shortcuts become disastrous detours, and this is often what happens when a company relies on automation for significant portions of its social updating. Automatic feeds come in two flavors. Fully automatic feeds publish to a social media platform without any human intervention. Semi-automatic feeds require intervention. Redundancy. MORE >>

“On average (and with little variation among industries) customers will contact a Sales rep when they independently complete about 60% of the purchasing decision process.” ” This should be a wake-call for all leaders in companies who sell products to other businesses. The world is passing you by. Over half of the decision is complete before they talk to you. The Corporate Executive Board surveyed 1,900 buyers to uncover insights regarding purchasing behavior. “The survey results were surprising.” ”  That data should surprise and shock you. What do you think? MORE >>

Guest Post by {grow} community member Lauren Schaefer. This is Kate. She’s a hairstylist, jewelry maker, and all-around crafter based in North Carolina. Kate started her blog ( thesmallthingsblog.com ) exactly one year ago. And like most of us, it was a labor of love without a whole lot of “community.” ” In fact, for the first eight months, she had a grand total of seven readers. But between August of 2011 and today Kate has had over  10 million page views! How did she achieve this amazing success in just five months? Pinterest! ’,” she said. How about you? MORE >>

For many in B2B sales, from senior leaders to sales representatives, it may be a discouraging time.  If you follow conventional and social media closely, the storied demise of sales has been told many times.  MORE >>

Judging by the amount of online noise being generated, the idea of publishing content is no longer considered to be an "edgy" proposition for many vendors. But noise isn't going to help you meet your goals. The thing about noise is that we've all become adept at tuning it out. There's just so much of it that we've had to develop the survival skill of discernment. We've become very swift judges of what's useful and what's wasting our time. Time we have precious little of with all the social media interaction, email, meetings and job responsibilities. MORE >>