If you missed it last week, Cristiano Ronaldo (92.3 million followers on Twitter) walked into a press conference at Euros and moved two bottles of Coke (287.8K followers on Twitter) and told the people in the room to drink water.

The social media blew up in support of Ronaldo

So what?

$4 Billion was wiped off the stock market value of Coke.  See The Guardian article here. 

Nobody likes advertising and product placement and nobody likes "bad" brands. All of us want brands to support healthy eating, living and brands that support societal issues. 

But more so

Brands have to understand there has been a shift.  Social media has changed the world, it has changed business and its changed society.  By fighting against social media is like pushing water up hill.

According to research from Simon Kemp, with 4.33 Billion people, (55.1%) of the world's population, active on social media today, it isn't going away.  Half a Billion people have joined social media in the last 12 months that is 16.5 new users every second.

What does this all mean for sales and marketing today?

How about if I said, I can take you to a place where all your prospects hang out, would you go?

I can pick you up in the car tomorrow and you can hang out there having conversations with them.

Sounds cool?  Or you going stay here and you try blasting people with cold calls (tele-marketing), emails and adverts?  You want to hang out in a place where all your prospects hang out, right?

OK, let's go.  Here it is, just click on this link

When you arrive, what would you do?

Grab a coffee and go up to the first one and start a conversation?  Of course you would.

Or would you walk in and shout "buy my stuff, because we are great".  Of course you wouldn't, as somebody would call security.

That's the difference.  Selling on social is ...... social.  You have conversations with people.

Research shows that people are on social to be ..... social, they are not there to read your brochures.

You don't go up to people and pitch to them as people will call security.

The great thing about social is that there is no "prime selling time (PST)", you can have as many conversations as you want.  One of my customers, does his prospecting between putting the kids to bed and when he goes to bed.

It's time to bring your demand generation into the second decade of the 21st century and it's time to "start fishing where the fish are" ...... on social.