Hubspot has a video series on YouTube that gives the impression that cold calling and other “old school” techniques will be replaced by this “new social media”.  There is one big problem with the video: Cold calling is not marketing. It’s Sales. Big difference.

According to Wikipedia,  “Marketing is a business term referring to the promotion of products, advertising, pricing, distribution channels, and branding.” It involves 4 P’s: Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement. Sales is “act of completion of a commercial activity.” Two very different things.

I get that Hubspot is trying to say that Social Media is about New Marketing, much like what Seth Godin wrote about in Flipping the Funnel. But so many folks in Social Media (the so called SM Whores) use social media for broadcasting, which is only different from current advertising because of the media. Guy Kawasaki admits to using it to broadcast, which I refer to as spam. And Duct Tape Marketing has a post on to automate social media, which Jason Falls had to counter as the exact reason social media will fail. Social media is about being authentic; building a relationship; and either having a conversation or telling a compelling story. It is not another avenue to puke at people.

Which brings me back to Hubspot’s videos. If my employee was reading the paper waiting for the phone to ring, I would fire his ass. That mentality is no different than if I put up a new billboard or a full page yellow pages ad. For Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing to work, there is a lot of work going on: Twittering, responding, blogging, videotaping, interacting, Facebook, etc. There wouldn’t be time to read the paper. And I would argue that all of those methods are akin to cold calling and face-to-face networking. And likely the results will be similar for most businesses. In the case of service businesses (and especially consultants like many of the social media “experts”), social media would work better. But will it sell an oil change or a PBX?

I knew spam was profitable. Otherwise it would have stopped long ago. Researchers have found that the Response rate is 1 in 12.5 million spam messages sent.

A single response from 12 million e-mails is all it takes for spammers to turn annual profits of millions of dollars promoting knockoff pharmaceuticals, according to an unprecedented new study on the economics of spam. [Washington Post]

Here’s the results in a nutshell, “After 26 days, and almost 350 million email messages, only 28 sales resulted,” [DSLReports]

I blog for a trade journal; a trade association; my clients and here about sales & marketing. (Soon I’ll be blogging for another industry media group; the industry being telecommunications). Last night at the AMA Tampa Bay New Media Night, I sat with 11 people to discuss blogging. We were led by Deana Goldasich from Magnetic. The only bloggers at the table did NOT work for corporate. My eyes were opened to how difficult open communication is for corporate. Lawyers, PR, executives — all have to review and approve.

Blogging is about having a conversation about your industry, marketplace, customers, products and services. It needs to be Authentic.

It does not need to be 2-way. Most of my conversations happen off the blog in email or phone calls. (Rarely do people want to “go on record”).

Marketing is about Story-telling. Blogs and New Media are just another way to tell the story to a different audience.

Deana’s suggestion was a book, The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil. I went searching for the top corporate blogs and found this list for 2007, 2006, and 2005. (I could not find the top 10 list on Technorati, but then I did not spend much time looking either, since Google is my best friend ever!)

I found a couple of resources for the PR and Corporate people:

1. Top 10 Risks for Corporate Blogs
2. New ROI of blogging report from Forrester

We ended the night discussing whether blogging was over. My opinion is that companies that do not reach out to their community / customers / marketplace will have to compete on price alone. Consumers want to hear authentic stories about how their purchase is helping the world or makes them smarter or high-class (plainly, the purchase needs to be justified). Traditional Media doesn’t work as well in our changing and fragmented culture, so New Media will have to be incorporated.