Ok, so I am not the illustrious writer I wish I was, but I love to rant in short outburst about totally unrelated topics..so here goes.

Twitter Outages – Really? How many outages can a company have on a website on any given day? It’s not like they are passing on photos or files…it is 140 characters!

Facebook – Privacy is a big issue and these guys have dropped the ball. Their CEO has said in the past that people are dumb to give him that much info…have you changed your privacy settings yet?

The iPad – What a great device! I love watching Netflix, playing games, surfing the web, checking email etc on mine. My COO uses his to work on…really work. His favorite apps are omnigraffle, imockups and iwork suite. Good battery life and quick start ups are a plus as well. Will it take over the laptop? As it sits today…no. Give it till the 3rd generation and then lets’ talk.

LinkedIn – A mid-year prediction for everyone. Salesforce.com will buy LinkedIn and solidify itself even further as ‘the’ CRM of choice.

Trends – Did anyone see the news? For the first time, Facebook overtook Google as the number one US website for a week (roughly 7% of all website hits). With over 400 million users and growing, this company is on the move.

Search – We did a graph for a client yesterday showing that their #1 keyword/phrase wnet form 80K searches a day in 2004 to now under 40K searches per day, while during that same time span, Internet usage has more than doubled from 800 million users to over 1.8 billion.

So if the first thing you thought when you read the title was, what’s a sales funnel. Please stop reading and go back to cold calling your prospects. Now for the rest of us, why we might use cold calling as a tool, most professional sales people know that this is probably the least effective way to get an appointment. Here are some better ways to not only fill your funnel, but fill it with more qualified Prospects.

LinkedIn: Oh great, he leads with Social Networking. Yes, but not how you think. Why I think SN is somewhat overrated/overused – you can use LinkedIn as a tool. Think 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon and you will see how you can leverage your relationships for a warm introduction.

Targeted Direct Mail: Contrary to some experts, direct mail is not dead; but most of the time it is used improperly. Let’s start with your list; narrow, niche list are the best. Personalize, and track everything! (exclusive 800 number and purl’s or just a different domain name is a must!). Drive traffic to a microsite/landing page – NOT to you website home page. Test and measure – if your dropping to 500K people, it will pay for itself to test creative etc before you make the big drop. And finally follow up. There are many ways to do this, just make sure you have a system and then execute it.

Email Marketing: List rentals get abysmal open/ctr rates, but permission based lists still can ROCK. There are many ways to get the permission of your clients and prospects to send email to, but the content you send, is MOST crucial. Don’t just send an email to send something, have a plan and execute (I said that already I know). Proper testing is again crucial and will get increases to your conversion rates…guranteed.  Don’t be afraid to think outside the box, think viral, video, coupon, special offers etc.