How to Reap the Fruits of Social Media Pollination

The next time you share something on social media, think about bumble bees.
When you think about it, sharing on social media is a lot like bees carrying pollen. People who come across remarkable content spread it across the web, resulting in fertile discussion and the birth of new ideas -- just like pollen gives birth to new fruit.

But while this amazing phenomenon transpires in social media, businesses often fail to harvest the fruits of their labor. They fail to move their website visitors down their sales and marketing funnels by converting them to leads and sales.
Of course, social media is first and foremost about people and dialog. But if it is being used as a business tool, you should get some business results from it!

Here are some social media tips that you can apply at the top of the funnel that will help you move people lower down the funnel.

1) Be relevant to your business

We talk about being relevant in social media, especially when it comes to Twitter. However, if the content you're sharing and the dialogs you're having are not relevant to your business, where is the value to your bottom line? Share content that is fun but also share information that will attract relevant business visitors to your site. They are out there!

2) Be greedy for traffic

Very simply, create your own content. While it is cool to share and retweet the content of thought leaders (I'm guilty); do your business a favor and write your opinions down as a blog post every once and while and share your response! You will build your brand and thought leadership and drive traffic to your own site!

3) Use calls-to-action to facilitate conversion

I cannot stress this enough! You've done all the hard work for months building up followers, fans and friends. You've spent countless hours writing some remarkable content, engaging with them online and bringing them back to your site. How are you converting the relevant visitors to leads? A simple call-to-action at the bottom of your blog posts or on your website pages can help get you those leads your business needs!

4) Make it easy to share your content

Piggy backing on the previous point. Why not make it easy for your visitors to spread that around? A simple button like the one below can help gain you new followers and attract new potential customers.

5) Build the right bridges

When starting out in social media and networks it is common to follow friends, family and co-workers. More than a few people I know are obsessive about having a ton of followers. However, it is important to cultivate the right kind of follower and friends base. Quality is important. Once you reach a certain critical mass quantity might become a factor, but in the short term the right people is more important than lots of people.

To sum it up for all you hard working bees, it's great to fill the top of your funnel using social media, but if you're in it for business reasons, make sure your pollination results in some fruit that can be harvested!

How have you been using social media to help with generating leads for your business? Please share your thoughts in the comments section!

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Sleuth outwits Sotheby’s in £750,000 art coup

Published: June 29, 2009

London - AN expert from the Antiques Roadshow has identified an unknown landscape put up for sale by Sotheby’s for between £10,000 and £15,000 as one of the earliest works of Thomas Gainsborough, worth £750,000.

Philip Mould pieced together clues that convinced him the painting of a Suffolk view being offered at auction was created by one of Britain’s greatest 18th-century artists.

Mould, who values fine art on the BBC1 show, chose to bid for the landscape over the telephone so as not to attract suspicion.

He paid £50,000 for the painting, which Sotheby’s had described as of “the English school”. It is now valued at about £750,000.

“As soon as I saw an online image from the sales catalogue, I thought it might be Gainsborough,” said Mould. “It was the way the light was painted, and the sandy ground in the foreground, which are trademarks of Gainsborough. But we needed to do some rapid sleuthing before the sale a few weeks later.”

A vital clue for Mould, who runs an eponymously named gallery in central London, was the tiny depiction of a couple at the front of the canvas.

The expert spotted that they looked similar to a drawing Gainsborough had made of himself and his wife Margaret. Now held by the Louvre in Paris, it was created less than a year before the mystery Sotheby’s oil painting.

Working with his colleague Bendor Grosvenor, Mould set about trying to discover the painting’s provenance.

The building on the left of the picture, which shows Ipswich, a mere village in the 1740s, provided another clue.

Christchurch mansion, which is still standing, was owned by the Fonnereau family, who saw Gainsborough, a local teenager, as a promising artist and lent him money to develop his talent. “In return, Gainsborough put the Fonnereau house into his picture,” said Mould.

The BBC valuer and his team of art detectives finally turned to the painting’s records of ownership. In 1824, it was sold for £43 by Evans, a Pall Mall auction house. The vendor was George Nassau, whose father, Richard Savage Nassau, had been painted by Gainsborough in 1750 and was another family friend.

All these clues persuaded Mould to bid for the painting. The fact that its guide price was pushed up to £50,000 suggests other bidders may have also twigged that it could be a Gainsborough.

Mould, who has recently published a book called Sleuth: The Amazing Quest For Lost Art Treasures, cleaned up the picture and showed it to a group of Gainsborough experts, all of whom agreed on its authenticity.

“I simply knew it as soon as I saw it,” said Diane Perkins, director of the Gainsborough House Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk. “The clinchers were the couple, plus the family links with Fonnereau and Nassau.” Two other Gainsborough experts also confirmed it.

Now Sotheby’s could face having to compensate the painting’s vendor for drastically underestimating its worth.

Sotheby’s Scaled-Down Hong Kong Sales Yield Mixed Results

HONG KONG—Sotheby’s wrapped up its five days of auctions in Hong Kong with a grand total of HK$691 million ($89 million).

The number surpassed the pre-sale estimate of HK$600 but fell well below the HK$1.77 billion earned in last year’s comparable sale.

“The financial crisis is still with us, so many potential collectors took a wait-and-see attitude,” Michael Wang, an art collector and chief executive of Humble House Art Space, told Bloomberg.

Highlights of the sales, which ran April 4–8 and included 1,700 lots in a variety of categories, were the sold-out wine auction and the record set by modern master Lin Fengmian.

Hong Kong is Sotheby’s third-largest market after New York and London. Christie’s holds its Hong Kong sales next month.

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