-
- News
- Books
Featured Books
- smt007 Magazine
Latest Issues
Current IssueBox Build
One trend is to add box build and final assembly to your product offering. In this issue, we explore the opportunities and risks of adding system assembly to your service portfolio.
IPC APEX EXPO 2024 Pre-show
This month’s issue devotes its pages to a comprehensive preview of the IPC APEX EXPO 2024 event. Whether your role is technical or business, if you're new-to-the-industry or seasoned veteran, you'll find value throughout this program.
Boost Your Sales
Every part of your business can be evaluated as a process, including your sales funnel. Optimizing your selling process requires a coordinated effort between marketing and sales. In this issue, industry experts in marketing and sales offer their best advice on how to boost your sales efforts.
- Articles
- Columns
Search Console
- Links
- Events
||| MENU - smt007 Magazine
Social Media and Thought Leadership
January 21, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
What do you have to say about offshoring? Reshoring? American competitiveness? The future of manufacturing in America? Do you have an opinion? People want to know what you think. After all, you do this all day, every day, and you’ve been doing it for years. You have an informed opinion. This is how you establish credibility with your audience and it costs you nothing. It shows you are thinking beyond your company’s day-to-day needs. Why aren’t you sharing that opinion? Why aren’t you thought of as the industry leader on China? On quality? On delivery and logistical issues? On technical areas in your business? On the difference it means to your customers if the price of gold doubles, or if the European union goes kablooey, or inflation takes off, or any other of a host of factors that matter to your prospective customer? You have an opinion and as someone who’s been in the industry a long time, it’s a measured opinion. Why are you keeping it a secret when you have social media as a medium to let everyone know? Let’s say you take your area of expertise and you put out blog posts, or tweets, or posts on LinkedIn Groups for the next six months. Who are those readers going to see as an industry leader? Some faceless conglomerate or you? Who do people like doing business with? The leader. Oh, I’m not saying that everyone will line up zombie-like and shuffle in to purchase from you, but being thought of as an industry leader gets you recognized, it gets you in the game, and it gets you considered. Set your own area of expertise by finishing this sentence: “We are the company that is the industry expert on______.” You must be seen by your prospective customers as the foremost authority on this subject. The operative phrase there is “be seen.” Whether you really are or are not the foremost authority may be debatable; it’s all about what your prospective customers think matters. It doesn’t matter whether Apple is or is not the real industry leader in user interface design for consumer electronics as long as their prospective customers think they are. In figuring out what you are the industry experts in, use these two guidelines: First, it must be tangible and you must be able to prove your expertise. If you say you are the experts on logistics and on-time delivery you better be able to back it up with hard statistics audited by an outside agency. Just saying you are always on time is like saying you’re the best looking manager in town. That’s open to...interpretation. Second, it must be something that your customers will value in a business sense. It may be both informative and interesting to your customer that you are an expert wine taster and can recommend the best estate pinot grigio for this year, but that’s not going to drive any business your way. What you need to do is to give your prospects information they can use--whether it’s on a hard tangible directly applicable area like quality, delivery, design issues, or manufacturing. You can also take a different approach and do something like the offshore/re-shore ideas I talked about at the beginning of this column. Instead of being the industry guru’s on something directly related to your product or service, you can be seen as the forward thinking company that people want to work with. Next week I’ll talk about the benefits of thought leadership and offer guidelines for how to go about establishing yourself as a thought leader. Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media. He has over 25 years' experience in high-tech sales and management, most recently as general manager of a PCB manufacturer. He can be reached through his website www.practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.