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.

Is it just me, or is business getting extraordinarily complex?

Oh, it’s just me?

I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that. Because here’s my thesis: nothing is easy anymore. Only the strong will thrive. Just as jobs for low-skilled labor are as scarce as flowers on Mars (or has that changed, too?) successful careers for high-skilled professionals in marketing, technology, industry, and the like are not for the weak of spirit.

Top five reasons why Work is So Complicated Now:

5- The oversupply of really smart people, devising new stuff. Innovations are everywhere.

4- Global everything, with all the cultural differences, language barriers, legal obstacles, and heavy competition that brings. (Leben ist schwierig.)*

*Life is difficult (German).

3- TECHNOLOGY.

2- Related to #3, new communication techniques, and a startling abundance of information sources, some of them reliable. Who can possibly read it all? Or remember 50% of what one would like to know?

1- Energy. And I don’t mean alternative. I mean the kind that you and I need just to keep up, let alone lead the pack.

How does a marketing professional serve clients brilliantly, especially when staffing is short, budgets are tight, and careers can live or die by short-term ROI? Few people can glide by for too long anymore without hard work. (And yes, I suspect that once, in a faraway time, perhaps the 90s, some mythical ad people could do just that. Probably they had talent, or charm. Something like that.) In a profession that has at times received and on a few occasions even earned the dubious distinction of being composed of hot air (yes, marketing, unfair as that may seem) the air has cooled, at least for the moment.

Now, working smart is critical. Just for starters, keeping up with industry news and trends is a marketing must. At vSA, we’ve become selectively engaged with Twitter, for example. We can use it to quickly get the word out about news of interest to important editors and our clients’ prospects. We’ve also seen that our clients can sometimes benefit as much by having customers make positive comments about their products on Facebook and post engaging videos on YouTube as they do from certain trade shows. More than in the past, we feel the need to monitor even relatively recent vSA work to assure that it’s up to the minute: for example, some Web applications we created to help clients sell online four years ago need to be updated… already and probably not for the last time.

But we have an additional responsibility as well. Outside of subjects that are clearly “of our industry,” it’s become more incumbent than ever to follow world news, fast-changing consumer trends, the mood of the nation, the day-to-day state of various segments of the economy, and more. Today I learned something more about Total Recall, a Microsoft research project based on the prediction that an archive of an individual’s digital data, largely generated without much of that individual’s thought, through GPS, cell phones, cameras, credit cards, health records and everything else he or she does, will someday create a pretty comprehensive record of that person’s life… and will thus change the way humans use and recall memory. Concepts like that, when they achieve traction (aside from being in my opinion pretty creepy) are always appropriated by business and marketing interests. So we marketers need to know about them. I also learned today that some prominent economists are concerned that the Obama administration has lost its way in pushing for regulatory reform of the financial markets and that these same economists fear that another economic collapse may be just scant (really scant) years away. Mmmm, hope they’re wrong, but better bear it in mind.

My point is that to be truly excellent as a high-level consultant in marketing today requires vision, diligence in meeting world situations face-to-face and the energy to continue to understand the ways people want to communicate now – and what these people want and need to hear. No hot air.