The June edition of Time Magazaine has a fascinating article on how Twitter is changing the way we live and interact with each other. In my opinion, as social networking evolves, companies and sales reps will have to adapt to stay ahead of the pack and at the top of their game.

But, hey, don’t take my word for it!

Excerpt:

“Twitter users have begun to find a route around that limitation by employing Twitter as a pointing device instead of a communications channel: sharing links to longer articles, discussions, posts, videos — anything that lives behind a URL. Websites that once saw their traffic dominated by Google search queries are seeing a growing number of new visitors coming from “passed links” at social networks like Twitter and Facebook. This is what the naysayers fail to understand: it’s just as easy to use Twitter to spread the word about a brilliant 10,000-word New Yorker article as it is to spread the word about your Lucky Charms habit.”

“Put those three elements together — social networks, live searching and link-sharing — and you have a cocktail that poses what may amount to the most interesting alternative to Google’s near monopoly in searching. At its heart, Google’s system is built around the slow, anonymous accumulation of authority: pages rise to the top of Google’s search results according to, in part, how many links point to them, which tends to favor older pages that have had time to build an audience. That’s a fantastic solution for finding high-quality needles in the immense, spam-plagued haystack that is the contemporary Web. But it’s not a particularly useful solution for finding out what people are saying right now, the in-the-moment conversation that industry pioneer John Battelle calls the “super fresh” Web.”

Make sure to checkout the full Time Magazine article here — it’s a must read!

What are your thoughts about Twitter? Do you see it evolving into a sales tool, a place to prospect, or is it just a waste of time?

Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

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The changes that online sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism are bringing to society and the sales profession is a favorite subject of mine. A recent Wired Magazine article dove into how the networked world resembles aspects of socialism — just not in the way you think of it.

Below are a couple excerpts from the article and my take on how this will affect the sales profession.

Excerpt:

“I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal, communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.”

The amount of information available online is mind-boggling — in this information lies tremendous opportunity if it can just be made actionable. To make this digital information actionable and useful to the sales rep it requires sharing it and creating a collective place where the information can be accessed. Companies like InsideView, Jigsaw, and MyWay Interactive rely on a business model that requires its users to share information to gain the collective knowledge of others — expect to see more collaboration, sharing of contacts and company specific information moving forward as it enables more effective selling.

Excerpt:

“But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation. Consider Craigslist. Just classified ads, right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.”

I guarantee that the sharing of information will make you a better sales rep — the forums that sharing can be applied to is virtually unlimited. On a small scale think internal company social networks that you can access for competitive information on how to beat your competitors. On a larger scale think of companies that are developing applications that allow you to share contacts and basic personal information — think SalesNexus, Jigsaw, Insideview, Linkedin and Facebook. How long is it until somebody develops an application that shares company specific information across partners and the channel? Not long — these are already in the works. The information gathered from many will be shared and accessed for the greater good through new and innovative applications that can be accessed through your CRM. Amazing stuff!

Definitely go checkout the full article: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online.

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