9 Ways Social Media Marketing Can Help Sales

1. Provide One-to-One Contact - The biggest thing social media marketing can do for sales is help create one-on-one relationships between customers and potential customers and the company. With the social web, people can reach out directly to people inside the company with questions and problems.
2. Increase Referrals – People are more likely to trust colleagues or peers over a company for purchasing recommendations. The social web puts people into contact with others who have already experienced a product or service. By facilitating these connections, marketing can make it easier for people to get feedback directly from other customers, increasing the chances for referrals, which usually have a higher rate of purchasing from you.
3. Increase Awareness – The first problem for sales and having customers even be aware of your products. There’s nothing worse than cold-calling a potential customer and not have them even be aware of you. Besides, we know that cold calling isn’t very effective without some sort of pre-qualification process. While generating awareness is certainly marketing’s first job, the social web makes this easier because it’s easier for people outside of the company to talk about you to each other.
4. Increase Demand – Related to increasing awareness, social media marketing can help increase demand for your products which really makes the whole sales process so much easier. If people understand what your products are and how they can help, they’re more likely to want them.
5. Educate Buyers – Educated buyers are usually much further down the sales funnel. The social web helps marketing reach out to potential customers to answer their questions and help them understand how your company can help them (and how you’re different from your competitors), making the entire sales process much easier.
6. Build Relationships – The social web helps people within your company build relationships with potential customers, as well as maintain relationships with existing customers. It’s much easier to approach a sales call if the person is already familiar with people in your company. They feel like they’re doing business with someone they know instead of a stranger. Relationships also help salespeople understand the needs of the potential customers, which makes the sales process more effective.
7. Generate Leads – One of the most difficult parts of the sales process is generating leads for new business. While this has always been one of the major jobs of marketing, the social web makes it easier to reach a larger audience than other channels. Social media marketing can also provide a lot of direct calls to action to generate leads.
8. Pre-Quality Leads – If done properly, social media marketing can help you engage with the right audience with the right messages and conversations. With a little work, more can be known about leads so that sales knows which are more likely to purchase.
9. Provide Insight on Customer Needs – By listening and building relationships on the social web, not only can marketing provide insight in general about customer needs, they often can provide needs for specific customers. This means that salespeople aren’t going into sales calls cold. When you know something about the specific needs of the customer, you can tailor your sales call around those needs, making it more useful for everyone involved.

http://sazbean.com/2011/03/04/9-ways-social-media-marketing-can-help-sales/

Teleportec

Teleportec has proven, high quality distance communication solutions designed to provide your organisation with a realistic alternative to travel. This unique technology enables people to appear live, life-sized within an apparent 3-D environment in a remote location and achieve eye-to-eye contact with all participants.
The system digitally teleport your image from your location
to a meeting, conference or event anywhere in the world. You will appear in
the room live, life-size, within an apparent 3-dimensional enviroment as if
you are actually there and have eye-to-eye contact with those present

http://www.teleportec.com/technology.html

Live from the Apple 'latest creation' event January-27-2010

Here it is folks, the Apple iPad. The screen is gorgeous, tilting is responsive, and the thing is super thin. Still, if you've used the iPhone before -- and you can see the two devices side-by-side here -- there's not a lot of surprises here so far. Here are some initial thoughts on the iPad:
It's not light. It feels pretty weighty in your hand.
The screen is stunning, and it's 1024 x 768. Feels just like a huge iPhone in your hands.
The speed of the CPU is something to be marveled at. It is blazingly fast from what we can tell. Webpages loaded up super fast, and scrolling was without a hiccup. Moving into and out of apps was a breeze. Everything flew.
There's no multitasking at all. It's a real disappointment. All this power and very little you can do with it at once. No multitasking means no streaming Pandora when you're working in Pages... you can figure it out. It's a real setback for this device.
The ebook implementation is about as close as you can get to reading without a stack of bound paper in your hand. The visual stuff really helps flesh out the experience. It may be just for show, but it counts here.
No camera. None, nada. Zip. No video conferencing here folks. Hell, it doesn't have an SMS app!
It's running iPhone OS 3.2.
The keyboard is good, not great. Not quite as responsive as it looked in the demos.
No Flash confirmed. So Hulu is out for you, folks!

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/27/live-from-the-apple-tablet-latest-creation-event/?icid=main|main|dl1|link1|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.engadget.com%2F2010%2F01%2F27%2Flive-from-the-apple-tablet-latest-creation-event%2F
http://www.engadget.com/

IPhone The New Software Game in Town

IPhone changes dynamics of game software industry
After years of building large, graphics-intensive blockbusters, developers are starting to make shorter, less expensive games for the iPhone and its phone-less sibling, the iPod Touch.

Technology February-04 2009

Facebook clocks fifth birthday
In five short years, Facebook has helped a global change in the way people keep in touch with one another.