I’ve been a sales guy, marketer and executive for the past 20+ years. I’ve worked in mainframe and mini applications, hardware, a huge wireless startup, several investor-backed Internet startups and a couple of multi-national corporations. I’ve run a commercial printing company and now a major national marketing database provider. I’ve worked in England, Australia and the United States and I have friends all over the place in interesting places doing interesting things. Why am I saying all of this?

Quite simply, because even though I’ve got all of this varied experience, I’m still struggling to understand how the Social Media world is functioning, what its impact will be over time, and exactly what I should be doing about it.

It’s pretty intuitive to me that direct mail has shrunk quite a bit, along with printing and the paper industry, but it isn’t going to go away any time soon. Part of that shrinkage is the economy; regardless of how great we’re told the economy is doing, it remains to be seen whether the direct mail industry will stabilize and perhaps rebound in the foreseeable future. If anything, from what I can glean from peers within the industry, results are flat year over year.

So if results in our core business are flat and the big buzz is now Social Media, then what can be done to fully understand where this new paradigm is going to lead us? How can we leverage the tools of this digital frontier to become part of this shift, instead of being a pedestrian or road kill on the Social Media Digital Highway!?

Well one thing I’ve been doing is spending some quality time each week researching the emerging online companies who are laying the asphalt on that new virtual highway. I’ve looked at Stickybits.com, foursquare, SimpleGeo, Survey Monkey, Mail Chimp, SalesForce, HubSpot, iContact, slideshare, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, Jigsaw and all of the Google tools (AdWords, Alerts, Analytics, etc).

Slowly the fog of confusion is being raised, and I’m starting to get a clearer picture. But as I stand in the crossroads of that virtual highway I’m still not sure if what I can see through the mist is an oncoming truck ready to turn me in to Virtual Road Kill, or an epiphany that will enable me to fully integrate all of these amazing new tools and create a total solution for all my sales and marketing needs that will track, score, analyze, report and integrate everything in to some kind of perpetual motion marketing machine where all you have to do is pour in marketing dollars at one end, and revenue flows out the other end.

In the meantime I’ll continue to work closely with our valued customers to satisfy their every list and data need, so that the mail continues to flow and the USPS keeps the show on the real road!

Cheers Rich
CEO
Compact