For a 21^st century person, it’s virtually impossible to escape “take action” commands. Whether through TV or print ads, mail or online, we are often told to act now or act fast or act often or all of these things. But this is not always in our best interest.

A few years ago, I sat in a plush corner office and tried to convince a college president it was time to join Facebook. The discussion was loaded with skepticism, but I came away with permission. To date that college has hundreds of Facebook followers as well as dedicated posters and bloggers. All these things would have happened someday, but we were past the point of wait and see.

Google+

Time will tell, but Google+ increased its membership in force late last year and into this one. It has surpassed fifty million users, so it may be the next social media giant. It might be the time for companies with savvy and workers tasked with social media duties to test Google+. Why not? It’s important to stay ahead of the curve, as vSA itself is doing by exploring this new offering and gauging benefits and drawbacks for clients. However, vSA is a strategic communications firm, and knowing how best to communicate, so we can support our clients, is our job. We often stand out as early adopters – on the “bleeding edge”, so to speak.

For the B2B companies that comprise most of our client list, we recommend a more measured approach.  Even in our response-oriented, clickable world, the best approach is sometimes to wait and see. When taking Google+ into consideration, we should remember the many social media failures. Ping, Yahoo! Buzz, Tickle, and MySpace are among the near-forgotten names. And Google had its share of stumbles as well with Google Buzz and Orkut. It’s also important to consider that Facebook and Twitter are already evaluating and potentially adjusting their strategies in response to Google+.

Google plans to benefit from its social media project by using Google+ into its searches. That’s getting ahead of itself, isn’t it? Google has received much criticism for this because its service hasn’t reached critical mass. My personal social media involvement started out with a wait-and-see approach, and maybe I was playing coy. Hundreds of millions of people use Facebook and Twitter regularly, but new social media competitors, variants and poseurs reveal themselves often.

So, what to do about Google+? It depends on your industry and the resources you have. It’s easy to spread resources thin across many platforms, and that’s not a viable approach. Keep in mind that the best strategic social media strategies incorporate frequency without annoyance, consistency without undue repetition and relevance in all communications.

If your company exhibited at ten trade shows ten years ago, perhaps you exhibit at five or six now. If you occupied half a city block with your new products and displays at the dawn of the new millennium, you may be getting by with less space. Or maybe your company has continued full steam ahead – with the caveat that results will be monitored very closely. Trade shows today can provide great opportunities. But they are expensive and so each one in which your company participates is no doubt expected to Produce with a capital P, whether the ROI is measured in actual sales generated at or after the show, new prospects gained, new alliances initiated, or great visibility garnered.

For future shows, you may benefit by going well beyond exhibiting and running a couple of ads.

Here are eight ways to make more of your trade show efforts:

1. Plan ahead to talk to a key audience. Up to a year or more before an important show, secure a speaking engagement for one of your key people. Talk about industry trends or innovations. Position your company and your speaker as thought leaders.

2. Get press before the show. Start several months ahead to assure that your company’s name and news are in the publications attendees will read before and at the show.

3. Generate more press while you are at the show. Make boothside appointments with editors and writers from key trade publications and blogs. Be prepared to give them a story worth telling.

4. Introducing a new product or service? Go a step further with the media: hold a press conference.

5. Get off the trade show floor to do some serious business. How often do you have this many distributors, customers and key prospects in one place? Organize an event: whether it’s a roundtable meeting for select advisors and customers to get input or plan next ventures, a breakfast or dinner to generate excitement about the year ahead or a cocktail hour to connect, a trade show is an excellent opportunity to enhance relationships.

6. Use social media intelligently. Twitter, Facebook and your corporate blog are good venues with which to let your constituencies know why they should interact with you at this show. Read Skyline’s good post on this topic for specific tips.

7. Go beyond selling. Show your customers, prospects, distributors, and other audiences that you are a partner and a resource for them. Introduce new training programs, partnering opportunities, Web applications, and more at the show. Showcase new interactive tools on giant screens at your exhibit – seeing is still believing.

8. Don’t file your hard work away. Don’t put your new leads, contacts and intelligence aside in the post-show scramble. It’s all too common to see gains lost when staff gets back to the office and gets busy. Make and adhere to a plan to close sales, engage with prospects, follow up with the press, and act on intelligence gathered.

We’d enjoy hearing what has and hasn’t worked for your company at trade shows – here or on van Schouwen Associates Facebook page.

A little background: van Schouwen Associates is not a New York advertising agency. van Schouwen Associates makes its home in far-less-visible Longmeadow, Massachusetts, right outside Springfield, close to Hartford, CT and reasonably adjacent to Boston. While it lacks Madison Avenue glamour, it boasts easy parking and two Starbucks outlets and is therefore an excellent location from which to serve clients up and down the eastern seaboard. We do a good deal of marketing and sales outreach, which is only right, since van Schouwen Associates is, after all, a marketing and public relations firm.

Still, every unexpected incoming inquiry is refreshing and welcome. In fact, we’re often surprised by the companies that find us, and by HOW they find us. We learn from their experience, and by learning, we can provide better support to our clients.

Aside from referral business, most prospects who find vSA find us on the Web. Like most of our clients, we want this to happen increasingly often, and to involve increasingly attractive prospects. Here’s what we’ve learned…

Lesson 1: SEO is tough when you’re in an overcrowded field and when the words often used to describe your services also have other meanings and are all over the Web (take marketing, public relations, consulting, strategy, and B2B as just a few examples of terms nearly as common as pizza or gas station).

Lesson 2: It’s sometimes surprising what prospects are looking for, and the very specific terms that allow them to find you. We’ve had people call from across the country because they Googled B2B Web applications for mobiles.

Lesson 3: Sometimes prospects find your company because they’ve asked Google a question and you’ve already put the answer online! Prospects will likely Google questions about how to solve a problem that your company’s product or service can indeed solve, and therefore your content marketing should be sure to ask that question, maybe even in an FAQ section on the company Web site, or in your corporate blog.

Lesson 4: Blogs, editorial/media coverage, social media, and other non-sales-promotion-y outreach are credible, well-read and visible, both in real life and on Google (vSA generally focuses on Google for SEO because it certainly holds the lion’s share of the search market; sorry, Yahoo).

Think content first, sales second. When you offer value and credibility, sales opportunities often follow.

Lesson 5: Willy Loman (Death of a Salesman) said it all the time. He didn’t benefit a bit from it, but your company may derive a modicum of wisdom from the classic phrase: “I was always well-liked.”

Be well-liked… or at least well-known. Show up on incoming links on the Web. Comment on relevant blogs and link to your business site. Get listed in directories. Use relevant affiliate links (relevant ones only please).

Lesson 6: Content rules. Make it meaningful. Make it authentic.

Lesson 7: Keep tweaking your online presence. It’s a rare company that can’t show up better than it does online. Except maybe Facebook or Google.

Remember the fax? Remember the print or TV ad campaign that reigned supreme as the “way to get the word out?” Remember direct mail when people actually read their mail while more than three feet away from the nearest wastebasket?

No, I don’t either. Even though I’ve been a marketing professional for nigh on three decades and an avid follower of consumer culture since about age three when I “invented” a toothpaste that would STILL BE STRIPED when you spit it out. (Unfortunately, I didn’t have the manufacturing facility to bring this fine toothpaste to market at the time.)

Remember when you sent a resume on nice paper, through the mail, to get a job? That’s gone, too.

Everything has changed, for obvious reasons we’ve hashed over forever (not included here!) and a few that are somewhat less obvious, even to those of us in the trenches:

• Companies now need brand advocates; it is no longer enough to independently trumpet about strengths. It is instead imperative that the people who could purchase or influence purchasing are enthusiastic about what you do and how you do it.

• Social media… it’s more than Facebook. And it cannot be ignored. Smart marketing campaigns send the same key message points across multiple media, in many cases including social media. This is true (albeit sometimes trickier) in B2B. Forget silo marketing.

• People’s access to information may not actually make them smarter, but it certainly makes them more easily informed. Or disillusioned. No longer is it true (if ever it was) that “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.”

• Content is king and queen. The way to break through the noise is to have something worth saying. Educate, help, solve, entertain. If you have nothing to say, go back to the drawing board and figure out why, because content-poor marketing is a waste of money and time.

Social media can be an excellent marketing tool for your company. It’s also a venue in which your employees are spending a lot of time, and every so often, someone makes a comment such as, “We deliver cold pizzas every Saturday night because it’s just too flippin’ busy” or “Rumor has it my boss is leaving the company – but he doesn’t know it yet.” Also every so often, an employee lets the competition know, in no uncertain terms, that they “stink” – or worse.

If you haven’t established a clear, written social media policy for your company, you can call your employees to task when and if you catch these indiscretions, but the responsibility for any damage done lies also with your firm.

Just as your company has, ideally, established standards for brand use, for dealing with the press, for giving (or not giving) employment references, for use of company computer systems and more, you must also establish standards for employees’ use of social media as it impacts your company.

Certainly, standards include the basics: don’t talk online about confidential company matters, don’t reveal new products, don’t discuss litigation, don’t harass or badmouth management or coworkers, don’t flame the competition – but there are many other considerations as well.

As a firm that has long been involved in supporting clients in developing and managing their messaging, vSA knows that the power of social media can be used for good or harm – even inadvertently. (“Facebook, are you a good witch or a bad witch?”) We work with clients to help assure everyone at their companies with access to a keyboard knows what’s okay and what’s not in terms of promulgating company-related information that could pop up on Google for years to come. We’ll share more on this topic in upcoming blog posts, and are available to consult with clients regarding both their focused use of social media and risk management techniques.

Imagine for a moment that the communication in question isn’t marketing. Imagine you’re at a social event, talking with a stranger you’d like to know. What will keep this stranger talking with you? Will allow him to become intensely interested in what you have to say?

Talk about a topic in which the other person is very interested. (“Oh! You collect spiders?”)

Not only BE truthful and sincere – project it. Interestingly, even when you ARE being genuine, people don’t always believe it, probably because they have been exposed to so much that is false.

Hear and respond to the other person. Answer his or her questions directly, rather than swerving back to what you wanted to say anyway. Eventually, you can get to your message, but don’t force the matter prematurely.

Inspire curiosity. Be interesting enough that the person wants to learn more, and to continue talking with you, and to resume the conversation another time as well.

Now – let’s get back to the discipline of marketing. The principles are the same, but the barriers are higher. When you have something for sale (or, shall we say, “skin in the game”) you face the challenge of appearing biased. Gosh, wonder why! So it’s all the more important to project that you are telling the truth. The type of communication we’ve described above is a slower, more authentic way to build relationships than old-school hit-me-over-the-head-with-it marketing. But IT WORKS. Banks and financial service companies need solid relationships with customers and clients. So do companies whose products require a major commitment of time or money, or a switch to a new technology platform. So does your company, I’ll bet.

Think about the many types of communication you employ – from speaking engagements to webinars, editorial coverage to white papers, social media to sales meetings. Each of these can be studied and, as necessary, retooled to more clearly and effectively speak in an authentic voice.

In a time when trust is rare and business is still recovering from a nasty year or two, is it worth your time to make sure your communications resonate? At vSA, we’re voting yes-absolutely-yes, and the nature of our clients’ communications increasingly reflects our focus on building trust as we build their brands and sales.