About Jeff Chapper Chapman

• High Performance Digital Sales & Marketing Strategies
• Management Consulting for a Post Television Age

"Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part,
the result of trying to do today's jobs
with yesterday's tools."

- Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
The Canadian Expert on
media and communications

[For the full list of Chapper's blog topics, scroll to the bottom of his profile page]

Founder and president of Chapman & Associates (C&A), Mr. Chapman is a university educated, professionally trained, award winning sales professional. Holding sales and sales management positions at DEC, IBM, and Oracle and with over 15 years of consultative sales successes handling multimillion dollar information and communication technology sales, Mr. Chapman has observed and studied the best-of-the-best in today's high performance sales and marketing best practices.

A trend watcher, online marketing sniper, and 'social media' specialist, Mr. Chapman helps companies automatically position their brands and systematically sell their offerings to appropriately targeted buyers through the unique use of contemporary information and communication technologies and sales processes geared to the internet age.

Automatically increase brand awareness, generate qualified leads, fill funnels and accelerate sales cycles. Sell => better, faster, cheaper. For superior sales results and unparalleled marketing accountability and ROI -> target the social and professional fabric of your customer's virtual world. To learn how, contact Chapman & Associates.

FREE 30-minute phone conversation: email me - Jeff Chapman - with your contact particulars for your FREE 30 Minute phone conversation and let's explore what all of this means to your future success.

Why a Blog ?

So there's "yours truly" in front of a terrifically famous hotel during a recent sales conference. In fact, the hotel was actually the setting for a MasterCard commercial a few years back. You might remember ...

A young newlywed couple, on their honeymoon, in a convertible, a scenic wrong turn takes them through the parking lot of this very hotel. They look up and around in awe.
She says, "Can we afford to?"
His response, "Can we afford not to?"

Good commercial. It stuck. Beautiful hotel. You might remember. In terms of marketing, creating memorable media is good.

Anyway, enough about the memorable mastercard commercial, for now. Let's talk about the new ways of being memorable. WHY the Blog ? 3 basic reasons.

1) Research
2) Fun
3) Sales

Let's explore ...

1) RESEARCH

Quick question. How did you get here ?

Did you click on a link from a bio ? Was the link in a business card, attached to an email that was forwarded to you ? Could it have been a blogger.com search or a search engine search ? Maybe it was a link from someone else's blog or from an online article you were reading ? Possibly, the link showed up in your inbasket, as a paid advertisement, embedded in an industry related enewsletter that you subscribe to. Or was it more traditional, like through 'word-of-mouth' for example ?

The point ? How people like yourself end up here is interesting to us at C&A. Gaining an understanding of how the masses (one-by-one) navigate the web is an important part of what we do - professionally. Knowing the trends of popular navigation habits helps us serve our clients better.

Online Buzz marketing, for example. It's one of today's most effective - not to mention FREE - ways of creating awareness and excitement about an idea - your company, your new service or your wonderful new product - again, FREE ! Buzz marketing is a concept that has been enabled and fueled by today's contemporary information and communication technologies and the tens of thousands of bloggers and even more blog readers. It's responsible for great ideas spreading like viruses, at the speed of light, through social media like the 'blogosphere' for example.

What's most interesting is that today's saviest business leaders leverage the blogosphere and other Buzz Marketing tactics to create a virtual hype machine that makes their ideas popular, that helps turn their companies from startup to $30 million hit - overnight. Want to know more, here is the Business2.0 article. Keen footwear is featured (and 3 others). A small team of seasoned footwear and marketing professionals start a company, take on the goliaths and win ! [Expired ? Send me an email, I'll forward you the article. A terrific read.]

As a result of our passion for innovation and desire to help, it's our business to always be asking, learning, researching how people, just like you, navigate the Net. To that end, this blog serves as one form of research into the 'blogosphere' again, so that we can help our clients stay on top, and ahead of their competition.


2) FUN

Chronicling one's personal life (for some) is 'fun stuff'. Blogging, for tens of thousands of people across the world, is a contemporary 'public' form of chronicling - a life, an idea, a trip, you name it. It's like a living-breathing photojournal and anyone can do it - again, FREE. For people like myself, it's an art form, a creative release, a way to keep friends and family up to date on personal developments, and a way to keep the collaborative communication juices flowing.

Similarly, for some, it's a fun way of posting and sharing professional opinions about new ideas, industry research, relevant developments and even past accomplishments and memorable times spent with clients.

For me, it's both. Part of this blog represents some fun - both personal and industry-related.

I've started something here for generations to come. We'll see, but with some constant feeding and careful nurturing, my family and clients (some of them are like family) will begin to notice, start asking questions, want to 'dial in' and maybe even feel like sharing their own tale or two through comments and feedack.

Hopefully, when my son Myles grows up and has a family of his own, and if blogging is still a popular form of communicating by then, his mom and dad will be able to follow his own family's developments in similar fashion. But that's a long way out, as fun as it is to think about.

So, there's a personal FUN side to this blog effort. Finally, to answer the question "WHY a BLOG?", there's a direct professional, functional component as well.


3) SALES

You can also think of this blog as an informal, interactive and searchable virtual 'shingle'. I'm an 'independent' businessperson. A freelancer. A consultant - specializing in high performance sales and marketing strategies for a post television age. So, that means on behalf of C&A, I'm always selling - and that means creating awareness through smart promotion.

Anyway, you get the idea. A blog can act as a 21st century way for buyers, all over the world, to find you and learn about what it is that you do. You're indexed and that makes you 'searchable' on the web. For more information, listen to IBM's leading edge thinker, John Patrick, discuss the relevance of 'Blogging' and 'podcasting' in this 21 minute 'podcast' conversation.

In our case, we use this blog as an informal destination for buyers so that they can learn that C&A is about marrying contemporary information and communication technogolies with sales process and marketing best practices to create high performance sales cultures. Using this blog, we are able to tell our prospects that we are a collective group of talented, international, new world collaborators, vigilant and on the constant look out for what works, what delivers results, what makes business sense.

A blog is a clean, searchable, unopposing, and subscribable way to share with the online public what you do. It's a form of the new social media available to any individual, any group, any company (did I say FREE ?!)

As a final thought, here's an idea for you. If you have someone in your organization, a crafty story teller, a technology biggot, a captivating pundit, a good communicator and someone who has a passion for writing, you may want to encourage him/her to be your unofficial spokesperson. Invite him/her to start his/her own blog. Ask him/her to create a professional section. Then invite your best customers to read his/her weekly column and to respond by posting their comments and feedback to the blog. It's a FREE way to begin the BUZZ. Alternatively, consider contacting us. We'll be happy to help you to tap into the hype machine.


In closing, I hope you find value in what you uncover here. Please have a look around. You will find personal info, hobbies, family developments, travel and of course, on a professional level, postings on trends for high performance sales and marketing in a world of new media, new clients, and new consumers in a post television age. The aim is to inspire innovation.

Best of luck, enjoy the posts and if you have any questions on how you might leverage the internet or other sales and marketing innovations, drop us a line. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you in advance for visiting. Come back any time, and of course, I welcome your comments and feedback.


- chapper

***WARNING***

Reader assumes full resonsibility for
unconscious absorption of blatantly embedded,
self-agrandizing promotional content.
Traditionalists, buckle up !
turbulence ahead.

New Media.
New Clients.
New Consumers.
In a Post Television Age.

[PROBLOGUE]

As much as some traditionalists might suggest that BLOGs are nothing more than a symptom of encephalogrossiosis [swollen head syndrome], blogging isn't just for the vain. Blogging is in 'full swing' and here to stay. The movement is hip ! The numbers are high. The trend in growing. And the amout of personal time people are investing into them is significant. Media giants have caught on. CNN is even 'on it'.

If you've ever watched 'The Situation Room' with Wolfe Blitzer, you know what I'm talking about. 'BLOG-Reporters' do nothing but track the instantaneous pulse of the planet. If you haven't seen the blog report, keep an eye out for it.

If you're "C" or "VP" level sales and/or marketing, take note. The BLOG is an example of a kevlar thread being woven into and augmenting traditional marketing and advertising programs. Blogs are permeating your consumer's virtual universe. And it pays to know which BLOGs your audiences are dialed in to. More on this later.

In terms of what you are reading here and now, the fact is, today's professionals are using this medium to MARKET themselves. This is especially true if selling and marketing is what you do. And why not ? How better to market and sell yourself ? A BLOG is knowledge worker's 'hip' way of hanging out a [virtual, dynamic] 'shingle'. It's indexed, searchable on the web, provides do-it-yourself dynamic editing (including updating via a cell phone), and offers an opportunity for feedback. It's a new secret weapon.

As complex and real-time as the world has become, for those in the know, sales and marketing is easier than ever ... thanks to the new secret weapons. Secret weapons ? What secret weapons ? The "contemporary information and communication technology" secret weapons.

SECRET WEAPONS

Coke, GM, Disney - big brands - all using secret weapons. Web Sites. Search Engine Marketing. Podcasting. Interactive Branding. Web sites that 'work'. Digital brand-positioning strategies that 'drive traffic' to campaign specific web landing pages. Instant SMS cellular phone promotions and contests. Digital billboards. TV commercials to drive behavior. Loyalty marketing. Repurposed TV commercials that play inside online journals like Forbes.com, Businessweek.com, and Business2.com email bulletins or RSS feeds. Automated lead generation tactics for web seminars ... on and on and on.

In fact the biggest and most profitable brands of the world are moving millions of (additional) dollars each year to newer, more interactive forms of media to capture new markets and stay relevant in the minds of their current customers.

The nice thing about these secret weapons is you don't need to be Coke, GM or Disney to take advantage. But you will need a new outlook and a new breed of sales and marketing team. AND That's where Chapman & Associates (C&A) comes in. C&A is high performance Sales & Marketing for a post television age.

Sales and Marketing Strategies

We deliver (integrated) sales and marketing strategies geared to the elusive 18-34 year olds who last year spent more time on the internet than watching television. To be sure, this 18-34 year-old age range doesn't accurately describe the breadth of the demographic of the new world digital consumer. From a psychographic standpoint, you'll find people of all ages, from all socio-economic and cultural backgrounds spending more and more of the media-consuming time online.

C&A develops and deploys sales and marketing strategies for its clients that uniquely leverage contemporary information and communication technologies. These strategies are designed to transition their brands into the virtual universe of today's knowledge worker and digital consumer. Our clients quickly realize that this digital universe opens up an entirely different set capabilities, an entirely different value proposition, through an enabling world of 'interactive branding'.

As you learn about these capabilities, these secret weapons, you'll see that not only can sales and marketing work together, today's sophisticated knowledge worker - your decision maker and consumer - are increasingly expecting sales and marketing to work together.

You'll also see that sales and marketing in today's REAL TIME world is nothing more than a game. Unlike traditional sales and marketing, today's world of sales and marketing has a scoreboard. It's real. It performs in real-time. It's uber-accountable. There's NO financial interpretation. It's easily and instantly tracked. With the new secret weapons, it's pass or fail time every minute after sales-and-marketing minute.

Today's sales and marketing best practices deliver up-to-the-minute results and are available to see anytime, anywhere - and are even being sent (real-time) to show up on the VP's or CMO's Blackberry or SmartPhone for example - whenever he or she hits the button. Don't believe it ? Need some proof ? Want to see this in action ? Want some secret weapons of your own ? Would you like your own sales and marketing scoreboard to go with it ? Want to charge up your sales force and give them some fun at the same time ? This and more in the playbook for the new generation of leaders.

Have a great day ! Stay tuned.