This is a guest post by Tom Harris, Your Marketing Coach. Tom helps entrepreneurs and small businesses develop and execute marketing plans. He specializes in website usability and effectiveness.This is a guest post by Tom Harris, Your Marketing Coach. Tom helps entrepreneurs and small businesses develop and execute marketing plans. He specializes in website usability and effectiveness.

What do we all want for our businesses? More sales! But what do we need to get from people before we can have more sales? We need to get their attention! They’re not going to buy anything from us until we have their undivided attention.

David Meerman Scott, in a recent blog post, noted the four ways that we can get the attention of potential buyers, and I herewith borrow his thoughts for my comments.
The first way (the first B) is to BUY their attention. This is otherwise known as Advertising. We pay money and throw messages out, and occasionally someone notices a message and responds.

The second B is to BEG for attention, also known as Public Relations. We hire someone to write press releases and circulate them to their media connections, asking journalists, reporters, newspaper editors, reviewers, or whoever is interested to please, please, please write about us.

The third B is to BUG people. This is called Sales. We find individuals, wherever we can find them, and try to engage them in conversation (bug them), until they listen, and then maybe they buy something from us.

The common thread of the 3 Bs is that we are INTERRUPTING people to get their attention. Sure, maybe they actually really do want to buy our stuff, but we’re still using variously annoying tactics to attract their attention.

The final item is E. This is where we EARN their attention. The 3 Bs have been around forever, but this one is new. This one is not interruptive. This is the method of social media, where we create connections with people and develop relationships, and don’t try to buy, beg or bug, but rather create environments where people Know, Like and Trust us (KLT). It’s where we continuously publish information that has value to people, and we give that information away for free, and thereby establish ourselves as “obvious experts”. Then we don’t need to go find buyers, because they come to us.

This method may take a little longer to produce results, but the results, I will argue, are more “real” and more solid and potentially longer-lasting than those created by the 3 Bs. And, as a bonus, we might just make some friends in the process.