In the next day or so, the Marketing Ideas! e-newsletter will be published with the full interview of Kyle Flaherty, Director of Marketing for BreakingPoint Systems. While the newsletter will (of course) only go out to those that subscribe, there was so much good content, I wanted to share some “extra footage” with everyone.

So here you go … some great content from Kyle that didn’t make it into the newsletter (and if you want to see the full interview, all you have to do is join here or sign up with the form on the left sidebar of this blog – Kyle’s interview goes out at 8 a.m. CDT on Wednesday, June 17).

You are a fairly well-known for your use of social media. Is social media a solution that every business should be looking at?

“Looking at”…yes. Participating in…no. There is no reason for a business to not at least be listening to the conversations happening out there on different social media networks. It would actually be irresponsible to not at least be listening to what your customers, prospects, partners and competitors are saying. Now in terms of participating that is a much longer answer, but the short one is that you should listen for at least 30 days before acting and when you do be sure your strategic and tactical plan is in place.

When evaluating a marketing opportunity and idea, how do you evaluate which platform (or media) to use?

Go where your community already is hanging out. We figure this out conventionally through listening to conversations, but also with periodic surveys of our customers, partners and employees. Focus on where folks are already, otherwise it’s a waste of resources.

How do you delineate between marketing, sales, and advertising?

The connection between marketing and sales is obviously very strong, particularly in the B2B realm. We help sales communicate with prospects through our own activity and helping them with good collateral, event planning and more. We have created a sophisticated workflow for handing off opportunities to sales of course, starting with inside sales and moving through the funnel. Ultimately the line between the two should be connected strongly and sales should be requesting things from marketing on a daily basis and marketing should be asking sales what they need at the same time.