Noise: What Is It Good For? Absolutely Nothing.

Let's be honest. We all want to make the sale. Whether it be selling medical equipment to multi-million dollar hospitals or selling a single glass of lemonade to that annoying neighbor who always seems to have a problem with the color you stain your fence, the end goal is to end the day better off than how you started. In a world shifting toward online marketing, the burden to make the sale has become exponentially lower. Gone are the days of door to door salesmen and marketers jamming their product in your face while you're just trying to enjoy the one meal a week that you managed to not burn in the oven (or is that just me?) Today, our fingers spend more time scrolling, typing and swiping looking for things than they do sifting through mail or flipping through the pages of a newspaper or magazine.

It now becomes the marketer's job to adjust to the inevitable and learn to adapt to new norms of online marketing, and more specifically social media marketing. Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Vine are taking flight and you can either stay and freeze your butt off or fly south and bask in the heat of the social marketing world.

But wait, it's not that easy. So many brands these days just get it flat out wrong. Joining the social media marketing world does not mean posting a video of a dad getting hit in the crotch with a baseball bat, slapping your brand on there, and then calling it a day. This is what I like to call "The Foreign Exchange Student" of social media marketing. You know, that new kid in your class who is trying really hard and thinks he's doing a great job, but in reality he makes no sense and is just confusing the crap out of everybody. Having a presence on social media is vital, but if the content is just making noise and doing nothing to build your brand, then you might as well move in with Tila Tequila and Paris Hilton in the Land of Irrelevance.

Marketing is all about having an end goal and taking different approaches, some direct, some indirect, in order to achieve that goal. My blog, Know Soliciting, aims to deliver today's marketing professionals with the insight needed to do exactly that. I will help you develop important and necessary tools in creating relevant and meaningful content for the social sphere and maybe even entertain you along the way. So join me or judge me, either way you'll be talking about me.