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b'The process of selling has changed, because the process of buying has changed. No longer do we wait for our phone to ring and to be interrupted by a pushy telesales or telemarketing person, or expect to find out about a product through advertising; today we proactively search for what want to buy. This change in the selling process has given social syndication\\xa0a key role in helping organizations to get the word out through a network of followers rather than randomly hoping to gain results from interrupting someone. This is the new age of social selling, which requires a new and differentiated approach using\\xa0social syndication\\xa0capabilities.\\nIt\\u2019s worth spending a few minutes defining what\\xa0social syndication\\xa0is before discussing how you can deploy it across your organization to drive more sales.\\nWhen social media erupted onto our desktops about a decade ago, most of us thought of it at most as a way to share family photos and amusing videos of cats. However, organizations like LinkedIn, SlideShare and a few others had a different goal in mind: serving business users in a very different way. While groups in Yahoo and other sites were already in existence, allowing professionals to exchange ideas, thoughts and peer reviews, there was no single unified platform available to promote the YOU brand - the brand that most deeply matters to most of us.\\nSharing a cool cat photo is entertaining, but sharing a high impact article with the potential to influence many people\\u2019s professional development is a more important opportunity to grow awareness.\\xa0Social syndication\\xa0plays to this intrinsic desire for professional growth by its core proposition of tribal or community enhancement: sharing of content that is relevant to individuals sharing common goals. The reason I use the word \\u201ctribe\\u201d is because the majority of social anthropologists are in agreement that many of our behaviors in social media - the need to share, self reflect, boast or display humility to a group - are a true reflection of who we are as humans, whose ability to feel alive and satisfied with our lives rides on our intrinsic need to connect and communicate.\\nThis innate human need creates a unique opportunity for sales people to move from an intrusive or interruptive telemarketing process, which is an innately negative experience, to a more needs-fulfillment based approach. This takes the fundamental premise that a buyer only buys what he or she (knows) they need. It follows that, before steps are taken to procure anything, the natural first part of any buying process is research, in the quest to understand what would solve someone\\u2019s needs = problems. Content marketing plays a huge part in meeting this need to understand before purchase, and a well-constructed social syndication\\xa0engine can work wonders in satiating this need and, therefore driving sales.\\nHow do today\\u2019s\\xa0social syndication\\xa0capabilities work? The ability to distribute relevant content, to anticipate and answer questions from potential prospects, and scale to a national or global level, can be met by a scalable and flexible\\xa0social syndication\\xa0engine. To meet these criteria, the core components of any\\xa0social syndication\\xa0engine should be as follows:\\n\\nConnection to existing social content- Most organizations today have multiple social channels through which they distribute content to their target audiences. However, the ability to auto connect to an existing stream of content, and then to amplify it via a distributed network, is a critical part of building your audience. It is not practical for all sales channels (direct or indirect) to create original, primary content, but with access to\\xa0social syndication\\xa0streams both direct sales teams and channel partners can distribute content easily and effectively.\\nAccess to a social syndication network- Any organization may have a few thousand followers through corporate social networks, but when you multiply those by tapping into the networks of direct or indirect sales t...'