One of the things I’ve been thinking about is how this plays with the current issue of signal to noise or what Brian Solis calls the “Attention Aperture”?

It follows on from a chat I had with a client about timing for emails, which all sounds very low tech compared to Glass but there’s a link nonetheless.

We were sharing our experience of watching people on the train, in cafes, etc scanning through emails on their phones, cleaning up their inbox and generally checking in with social networks.

There’s so much stuff out there about when to tweet, when to send email, etc to get someone’s attention but everything points to the same thing: people dip in and dip out so you have multiple, micro-opportunities during the day to cut through the noise.

Of course, the problem here is every marketer’s logic goes… OK so I need to send more stuff more often, right? And the cycles continues.

More noise, less attention, send more messages…

Given this logic (and the reality of how this plays out online with marketers) the level of noise isn’t going to decrease anytime soon.

So, when you introduce a concept like Glass, which Google says they don’t have plans for advertising (errr… yeah, of course) I start to wonder how people will cope with having their social and online world augmenting their real world.

Probably they won’t even be considered seperate; I’m just showing my age here.

Will the even more personal nature of glass make it impossible to push your message to anyone? Will it increase opt-in and data privacy issues? Spam in my inbox is just annoying. Spam in my eye-line invades my personal space.

Or will many people accept a free pair as a price to receive ads and promoted messages from brands?

Whatever, it’s fascinating stuff for a Friday muse and when it takes hold there will certainly be changes that marketers need to consider.

It’s developed by Neil Rackham (author of SPIN selling) and KPMG and is designed to stop client teams slipping into “safe mode” and watering down ideas that make them feel uncomfortable.

This happens most within larger organisations where, typically, management is too often rewarded by playing it safe, not taking too much risk and thinking about achievable, incremental performance rather than transformational stretch-goals.

As the diagram above illustrates, the framework is based on two opposing concepts. One is SAFE, the other BOLD.

Each of these corresponds to an aspect of the idea or option being considered, which is it’s Scale, the Risk of achievement or failure, how innovative it is and, finally, how difficult it is to implement.

You can either create a scale across the horizontal axis, such as 1-10, with 1 being on the SAFE side, and score each idea; or you can draw it up on a whiteboard and place ideas/options up where they feel to you (this is a good exercise for team meetings).

The process is designed to stop the automatic move towards the SAFE side by challenging managers to actively consider how to take a more BOLD approach.

When it comes to marketing campaigns, we’ve found that it always takes something with an edge to cut through the noise and deliver outstanding results.

So, next time you’re thinking about your business development strategy, or evaluating options for marketing or sales campaigns, break out from your usual thinking and take a more entrepreneurial view of what’s possible.

It’s time to be BOLD!

But, the question is, “what is real insight?”

To me, “real insight” can be described in a couple of ways:

1. Information about your market that helps you make a more targeted approach.
2. Information that develops content which provides real value to your target market

Let’s explore this further:

Targeting – if you want to improve the way that you develop new business then you need to understand more about your target market.

Targeting is more that just segmenting data; you need to generate insights about your target market so that you understand both how to find them and how to help them find you.

Who are they? What do they have in common? What burning issues do they have? How do they describe their problems?

Developing this level of insight will help you with targeting in a number of different ways:

• acquiring data that accurately targets your market
• developing effective keywords for online lead generation
• understanding what events they attend
• monitoring press and social media for trigger events such as new appointments and company announcements

One advantage of generating real insight to improve targeting is that it makes your marketing more effective (and efficient) which enables you to do more with less.

Content – the other aspect of generating real insight is to develop compelling content that provides genuine value to your target market. This requires you to go deeper than generating insight for targeting purposes, but in most cases the same research can inform both aspects.

What’s in it for them? What are their peers or competitors doing? What industry trends do they need to know about?

Examples of content driven by real insight are:

• benchmarking industry peers with regard to key problem issues
• emerging trends that will affect their business
• surveys of what their customers want

This content is really agnostic of platform and ideally should be re-purposed to be leveraged across all channels.

For example, a benchmarking study could be delivered as a presentation at a breakfast event along with speakers from the study. It could also be provided as a downloaded report and turned into an infographic for social sharing.

The key point of both these areas, targeting and content, is that they need real insight to deliver. Yes, insight can sometimes be quick and dirty, but genuine “real insight” requires an investment of resource.

However, if you really want to open doors with new business opportunities, that investment is necessary.

One wag quickly added that “If you have to ask to be followed, you probably don’t really have what it takes to lead!”

And that’s actually very close to the truth.

If you’re asking to be followed (rather than being followed because you’re contributing original and innovative ideas) then you’ve really got it all screwed up.

The problem is that this person (who shall remain anonymous) wanted to get more followers without actually being worthy of being followed. They’re simply trying to game the system rather than actually adding value through providing real thought leadership.

And, to my mind, this is one of the problems with B2B social media, whether it’s LinkedIn or Twitter; too many people are just putting stuff out there for no reason other than they can.

It’s like an arms race – “if everyone else is posting updates 3, 4, 5 times a day… then I’ll do it 6 times a day.” Once you get in that game then you know quality is going out the door.

One of the reasons that it’s so bad is that B2B social media is seen as one big “Marketing Channel” – and a free one at that!

If you want to get an article published in a magazine or newspaper then you really need to make sure it provides real insight for the audience. But if you’re a marketer in a company paid to put out content (and there’s no editorial barrier to overcome) then guess what, that’s what you’ll do.

Will it be great content? Will it be original, inspiring “thought leadership”… unlikely.

To publish on LinkedIn you just push the share button.

In fact, when you’re sharing a blog on LinkedIn using a social widget the default setting is usually visible to “anyone”; it might as well say “I don’t care”.

To me, that’s the key issue driving low-value content (spam) on LinkedIn.

I don’t see this happening anywhere near as badly on Facebook (from a personal perspective) and that’s because people actually think more about their reputation when they post to their friends.

It’s ironic that even though Facebook posts typically have some pretty colourful language and borderline comments (or is that just my Friends?) I still think people genuinely think about why they’re posting more than your average social media marketeer on LinkedIn.

And maybe more than your average “Thought Leader” too.

It’s something that frustrates me when I see the so-called LinkedIn Gurus offering to show you their “secrets” when it’s little more than just how to set up your profile.

And, as a dyed-in-the-wool sales person, I’ve had to adjust my mindset over time to understand what really works (and what doesn’t) in social media.

I recently read an excellent book on this, The Infinite Pipeline, which not only provides practical advise on the subject (forget the Gurus – buy this book) but also addresses the shift in mind-set needed.

For me, a stand out point from the book that helps with this mind-set shift is thinking about “communities not contacts”.

As the authors say in their book:

Don’t think of contacts as isolated CRM records or phone lists to which you have appended some personal details. Instead think of them as a community, with you as the community manager. Constantly be thinking of how you can connect the people you know for mutual benefit.

This is a fundamental change in mind-set for most marketing and sales people (I know, I’m one of them) but it’s essential to understanding social media.

It goes way beyond thinking about “opt-in” data and “permission assets”, which most companies treat as permission to simply push messages out.

When you look at engagement levels within many LinkedIn Groups at this time I still don’t think that the vast majority of people get this.

Many people are just pushing out their message rather than thinking about the value they’re providing.

As I’ve posted before, this endless fire-hose stream of low-value marketing content is becoming a blur.

The answer is in building real communities that add value to everyone.

It’s about thinking about how you can offer genuine insight and solve problems, rather than being the person at the party who just wants to talk about themselves.

Well, I’ve got news for you… most of them simply aren’t there (yet).

On a recent LinkedIn post by Richard Branson, Why aren’t more business leaders online?, I read that according to an IBM Study, only 16% of CEOs currently participating in social media.

IBM’s survey was conducted through face-to-face interviews with 1,709 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders around the globe.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, there are plenty of CxO groups on LinkedIn – one of the largest (the aptly named CxO group) has over 80,000 members – so there must be plenty online.

Well, not quite.

Even when you look at the stats of this example group you’ll see that only 15% of the group members are C-level (Hmmm, I thought it was a CxO group?).

Take into account that LinkedIn identifies your seniority based on your profile information (and that the seniority filter on LinkedIn is still in beta) then that number includes every small start-up and micro-business where the owner is the CEO.

When we’ve conducted social landscape studies for our clients we’ve found that, in fact, far fewer that 16% of CEO’s are on LinkedIn. And those that are, typically they don’t join the obvious wannabe CxO groups (they’re typically members of alumni groups as well as a few select C-suite groups – you just have to know how to find them).

Also, it should be pointed out that groups which do have a high level of C-suite membership typically have low levels of engagement. Basically, they’re just too busy to gets their hands dirty with social media.

The reality is that social media engagement involves more than just one discrete market segment or decision maker. It’s about engaging with a mix of stakeholders and influencers which often include managers, consultants and (dare I say it) even competitors.

(I’ll post again about this as there’s some interesting stats around community composition and engagement levels).

So, in short, of you think that social media and LinkedIn is going to be a magic door that opens up to the C-suite in large organisations … think again (for now at least)

They’ve been around for some time but over the last 12 months or so they seem to have become more prevalent (which is probably an indication of how important LinkedIn has become).

I find this a real shame because I do believe there’s a lot that people can do to improve their success on social media.

But I don’t believe many of the self-styled guru’s who are hawking their “secrets” really know what they’re talking about.

Too many are just selling some advice about how to tidy up your profile.

I mean, please, is that really it?

When I look at the profile of many of these gurus they’re often stuffed full of ridiculous keywords in some vain attempt to “get found” on LinkedIn. They’ve basically abandoned any attempt at looking professional in order to bait traffic.

Is that how you want to look online? Desperate?

But, even when you’ve got your profile set-up, got your recommendations listed, etc - then what?

I’ve got news for you… the phone won’t start ringing just yet. Take it from someone who’d been listed in the top 3 for my key skills on LinkedIn (without throwing my dignity away)

No, you still need to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

If you’re looking to develop business on social media that means actually engaging with people, having conversations on relevant groups, sharing insights, reaching out to potential partners and – yes – even reaching out to potential clients and customers (but do not… I repeat DO NOT try selling to them when you do it).

It takes time. And effort.

But, getting it right will put you miles ahead of your competitors (and pretty much every LinkedIn Guru out there!)

It was in Gary Vaynerchuk’s excellent book, The Thank You Economy, where he recounts watching a teenager shopping in Best Buy:

I watched a teenager use his Facebook status to request recommendations on a Nintendo Wii game. He got feedback in real time, and used it to decide what to buy. Recommendations and contextual social search are the future.

This struck a chord with me because it’s exactly the same insight I had when chatting with a HR Director a few months ago.

We were talking about how he found new vendors and what was his view of how different vendors approached him through different channels, such as email, events, telephone, etc.

He said something that really struck me – he said that he rarely ever uses Google any more.

Basically, he said that he didn’t have the time to wade through the results and so he simply posted a question up on LinkedIn (in one of the groups he belonged to) and then just looked at who people recommended. Based on the feedback he got he would then contact 1 or 2 vendors.

In a way this is nothing more than accelerated word-of-mouth, which has always been the cornerstone of business development.

And, crucially, you can’t fake it.

You can’t hire an SEO firm to get you to the top as you can with Google.

Neither can you cost-effectively buy that position through PPC (Ads on LinkedIn, as with Facebook, have very low engagement and CTR)

In fact, in his book, Gary Vaynerchuk believes that the writing’s on the wall for SEO.

So, here’s my question: what would you do today if you thought that the future was about contextual social search and recommendations.

What if LinkedIn really did become more important than Google when it came to winning new business?

Notice I didn’t say “bigger than Google”; what I’m asking is what if it was more important in terms of being found by clients.

Or to reverse that thought – what if you used LinkedIn to find a solution or a new supplier rather than searching for them on Google?

Contextual social search is definitely happening right now. What do you think Google+ is all about (and so far, to me, isn’t really delivering)?

It’s also something that I see LinkedIn playing around with right now through the introduction of Endorsements.

This is the feature where your connections are prompted to “endorse” your skills with a simple click. LinkedIn has always had recommendations build into it’s platform but previously it was by seeking a written testimonial that you can show on your profile. Now, LinkedIn has made it easier for your network to effectively vote on your skills.

Why would they do this?

Well, there’s been some chatter on LinkedIn that the original Recommendations have somehow been de-valued through tit-for-tat testimonials. I’m not so sure about that being the driver since this new feature seems even more open to abuse (since it’s only a “click” rather than actually writing something).

To me, this looks more like the start of making LinkedIn more relevant through contextual social search, such as filtering results (and maybe even content) through endorsements from your network.

Looking for a freelancer? What if a LinkedIn search showed the people who your connections endorsed? Interested in latest insights about a specific topic? What is content was weighted by how many of your network thought the author was an expert in that subject matter?

So, my next question is, if you thought that this was true – what would you do differently than you are doing now?

Are you investing enough time developing your network on LinkedIn? Is your BD team actively connecting with clients and leveraging the relationships they are building?

Are you delivering genuine insight and value to your network in a way that positively positions your brand?

As Gary points out in his book, if you evaluate ROI based purely on what social media is delivering right now, then maybe you can still find reasons to sit back and see what happens.

But, if you really thought that this was the future (btw, it’s happening now!) can you really afford to be left behind?

And one of the main areas on LinkedIn where you can reach key influencers and decision makers in your target market are Groups.

LinkedIn Groups not only provide a platform to build relationships and brand awareness, they also enable you to share your expertise through dialogue and insightful content.

This, in turn, can amplify your message through social sharing on members own updates.

But with over 1.2 million  Groups on LinkedIn, whose membership varies from 1 to 744,662 members, here’s the key question – “Which Groups should you join on LinkedIn?”

For many B2B marketers and business development professionals the challenge is understanding which Groups to focus on.

With so many Groups and so little time it’s easy to waste energy and resource with a “dip-in, dip-out” approach.

To answer this question we conducted a study of 100 Senior Executives within large Corporates, a typical market segment that B2B Marketers and Business Development professionals want to reach.

We wanted to understand which Groups they belong to and, more importantly, how to identify where to concentrate your social media efforts.

Our study indicates that, despite the “long tail” effect common with social media platforms, it’s still possible to identify a short-list of Groups on LinkedIn that offer both significant reach and quality engagement with your target market.

To find out more you can download the report here.

Econsultancy has an infographic plus a link to download the full study here.

There are some interesting findings which resonate with our own research and experience of how to engage and develop relationships on LinkedIn.

Compared with personal social media platforms (ie: Facebook), users on LinkedIn are motivated by achieving goals directly related to their work. They see LinkedIn as somewhere they can access information to “do my job better” and is seen as “an essential part of being successful.”

The emotions connected with this are all about Achievement, Aspiration and Ambition.

This ties in well with a recent research piece we completed into the types of LinkedIn Groups that senior executives use on LinkedIn. There we found that the groups with highest levels of engagement featured active peer-based discussions revolving around specific job functions, rather than more general groups.

In terms of expectations, the study shows that LinkedIn users rated the top three things that they wanted help with as:

1. Improve myself professionally (15%)
2. Help me make better decisions (10%)
3. Gain advice/recommendations (5%)

So, what does this all mean?

Simply, if you are looking to drive engagement on B2B social media then you need to appeal to these higher emotional priorities.

Information that hits one or more of these criteria is more likely to be received positively and shared within one’s contacts. Providing insight, thought leadership and sharing best practice are all tactics that are likely to be successful.

From a marketing perspective this type of content can fuel traffic to landing pages and conversion events. Although, from a lead generation point of view, it suggests that any engagement with your brand is likely to be early stage in the buying cycle.

The study doesn’t indicate users are actively searching for solutions or vendors on LinkedIn (or at least that’s not their priority right now).

But, by appealing to the emotional motivations of your target market on LinkedIn, you can leverage the scaling properties of social media to amplify your brand awareness.