Are you wondering if the relevance of so much of the “new” media, social media, anything-with-anyone-anywhere media is  primarily about how to incrementally improve your artifacts, publish them less expensively,  distribute them more broadly?  How’s this approach working for  you?

The  emerging truth is that turning a sales slick into a downloadable pdf isn’t much of a strategy.  It has become expected.  Likewise turning your customer service manual into a wiki…and enabling customers to text-message you when they have a problem.  And that tide of expectation continues  to rise.

How  do you understand what’s happening to your  business? So you can reorient your resources and allocate them toward what’s working best?

You’re being “factored” into smaller pieces;  you”re being “granularized;”  your piece-parts are becoming visible.  As universal connectivity sinks deeper into our consciousness, the way value is defined, shopped, procured, and supported is reshaping ever more established habits.

B2B companies are now well into this tipping point zone and in need of an update to how they understand and organize what they sell.

To put it bluntly, no one sells products or services anymore.

Everyone sells expertise. And expertise is kept fresh and relevant throgh experience.  And selling anything requires that you understand the needs of those to whom you offer your value. Many of the social tools that baffle you are today’s machinery of dialog.  And the way you participate is not to package your expertise into finalized products that you hawk, but to undertake useful goals, invite commentary on the attributes of how you plan to package your expertise, and share in-progress milestones with the group.

And so, the ways you used to acquire experience and understanding of what your customers needed was periodic research and occasional wandering around visiting some of  the bigger ones.  Now there are more tools, tools your audiences are using more and more.  Tools for talking directly with your customers, whoever you define them to be.