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And in case you want to follow and learn more about the women titans of sales, here are some resources:

Saleswomen You Should Know

A great list to follow is this one – the women of SALES Shebang®:

Alice Heiman @aliceheiman
Alice Kemper @bestsalestips
Amy Palmer @fearbustinsales
Andrea Waltz @GoforNo
Anneke Seley @annekeseley
Ardath Albee @ardath421
Babette Ten Haken @babettetenhaken
Barbara Giamanco @barbaragiamanco
Barbara Weaver Smith @bweaversmith
Bernadette McClelland @b_mcclelland
Carolyn Coradeschi @ccoradeschi
Colleen Francis @cfrancisvoice
Colleen Stanley @EiSelling
Danita Bye @danitabye
Debbie Mrazek @debbiemrazek
Gretchen Gordon @BraveheartSales
Janice Mars @janicemars
Jennifer Leake @consultantsgold
Jill Harrington @JillSalesSHIFT
Jill Konrath @jillkonrath
Joanne Black @referralsales
Julie Hansen @acting4sales
Karin Bellantoni @blueprintsms
Kelly McCormick @kellymccormick
Kendra Lee @kendraleekla
Kristin Zhivago @kristinzhivago
Laura Posey @lauraposey
Laurie Page @lauriepage7
Leisa M. Erickson @LeisaMErickson
Lilia Shirman @B2Bguru
Lisa Dennis @knowledgence
Lisa Nirell @lisa_nirell
Lori Richardson @scoremoresales
Lynn Hidy @upyourtelesales
Maureen Blandford @maureenB2B
Melinda Emerson @smallbizlady
Nancy Bleeke @salesproinsider
Nancy Nardin @sellingtools
Trish Bertuzzi @bridgegroupinc

We are happy to share this piece from Alyson Button Stone – director of content at Nimble. Nimble is an intelligent relationship management platform created to help professionals build better relationships in a noisy, multi-channel world.

For the small business, looking as professional as enterprise-sized businesses is a decided advantage, and new technologies and new apps are helping. For most of us, the problem is one of focus and triage. How do you know what to do first, what to focus on, and then know how to find the best app for that workflow?

One thing that has has risen to top of mind for me is finding programmatic ways to help my team members build their personal brands to deepen relationships and build trust – in a way that’s still personal and scalable.

Let’s face it. There is no way to add an extra few hours to the 24-hour day. We’re just stuck with that cycle (thanks, Science…). So I’m always available when I hear about a way to save myself time while keeping my relationships vibrant. That’s where Postwire captured my attention – it’s a great way to do a lot of things:

• Educate, entertain, and inform your prospects and customers
• Share expertise about your product/service in a way that builds trust and credibility
• Create thoughtful content once and then share it many times (adding a personal touch before sending to make it unique to your recipient)
• Look like a technical wizard even when Postwire does the work
• Collaborate with team members and add to your “library”
• Get a beautifully designed marketing piece without hiring a branding agency

How, you ask?

With Postwire you can create an elegant, multi-media email. Send article links, documents, videos, audio files, pictures. Easily create this symphony from scratch (or pick it from your library of Postwires), then press Send. The compilation piece is always available in all its glory by clicking the link. Voila! Done. The recipient can forward it, share the link any way – and your messages are disseminated everywhere.

Think of it. Salespeople can sort their prospects into any segments they want and have a basic Postwire all set to send – let’s say for consultants. This basic piece could show a video tour, an ebook, a link to the FAQ, and one of your blog articles aimed at consultants. Start with this basic piece, thoughtfully created by you or your team and usable by all, then plug in any other content you want based on your personal relationship with the recipient to personalize the content just for them. (Don’t forget that you can correct the document, and update the information any time and your recipient sees the latest version…or leave it as is and place new versions in.

Now you can set up a contact management system to nurture your relationships with whatever group you want. Pull together a piece for your industry analysts, then periodically keep in touch with each of them to keep them up to date on the latest news. That’s what I’m currently setting up at Nimble — an outreach program for analysts that helps keep Nimble on their radar screens.

I am bursting with Postwire ideas for my work life at Nimble. Our salespeople can use it to share news and product updates with our prospects, customers, and resellers. Our CEO can put together a curated collage of his latest interviews (video and audio) and share it with a reporter. Our dev team can have what amounts to almost a private portal to share documents on a project basis. Customer service can send pertinent articles for common questions. Our community manager can send information about an event so that it stays entirely organized. What a terrific tool this is!

With Postwire, the conversation stays right there adjacent to the content. A Postwire is always in context!

But I must tell you that it gets even better – like Nimble, Postwire focuses on insights. When you send out a Postwire, you can see exactly what happened to it – who opened it, who read it, who acted on it, who added to it. If your messages are effective, you can see that – and even more important, see which messages aren’t working so you can get things going in the right direction. The light is always shining on how your Postwires are being used!

All the statistics indicate that we buy things from people we know, people we trust, and people we can count on. That’s the thought behind Nimble, so I recognized right away that Postwire was a way to encourage that outcome.

Marcus Sheridan, The Sales Lion, built his successful in-ground pool business on the idea that if he created content that answered his customers’ and prospects’ most frequently asked questions, he would succeed. Recently he told me that “Frankly, I think everything comes down to one skill with content marketing: GREAT listening. If you listen well, you hear every question. If you listen well, you know the way consumers say things (their needs, problems, issues, etc.). If you listen well, you never, ever run out of new content to discuss.”

You know what your prospects and customers are curious about. Go ahead and give them all the answers with clever, clever Postwire (and, of course, Nimble)! When you and every one of your employees can be credible and add relevance to the relationships in your business, you are making your brand unbeatable!

Alyson Button Stone is director of content at Nimble.

Below are some highlights of the changes, but you can also check out the new Postwire Help Docs for a detailed walkthrough.

Updated Home Screen

1. The orange Quick Share button has been renamed New Postwire Page.
2. Brand new search.  Most searches return in under a second instead of taking 5+ seconds.
3. New navigation across all of your Pages.  You’ll also notice we removed the Activity Feed on the right hand side.
4. My Content has been removed.  All Libraries have been converted to Postwire Pages to simplify the user experience.  You’ll notice that we flagged all of your libraries as Favorites so they are at the top of the screen.  (You can also flag any other page as a favorite too)
5. A more clean and simple Page layout in the list.

Updates To Pages, Content, & Collections

1. We updated the “hover state” of the content items to include buttons instead of the gear dropdown.
2. There is a new button on content labeled Re-Post that allows page recipients to use your content on pages they create.  For example, Marketing creates page for Sales, Sales Re-Posts the content to a customer page.  Click here to read more about how it works.
3. You can now create collections on a page by dragging and dropping!  No more having to go to the content library to make a collection just so your page could be organized.  Click here to learn how to use them.
4. Many users were sharing each page with many people so the recipient list on the right hand side was getting out of control.  As a result, we removed the list from this screen.  The list can be seen when you click the orange share button.  Read more about this in the next section.

Enhanced Share Dialog

1. Many users were confused between private and secure pages.  We decided to make it more obvious what those settings meant.
2. The member list of the page is shown in the Share dialog instead of the right hand side of the page.
3. Members on pages can now contribute to the page!  This is one of the most requested features users have asked for.  Click here to read more.
4. Added some advanced page settings to enable some additional use cases.  See below.

New – Advanced Page Settings

• Share Button - If you want to send the same Postwire page to many different customers, you’ll want to hide the share button so they cannot see one another.  Or, if you have an “Invite Only” page and you don’t want anyone inviting anyone else, you should hide this.
• Re-Posts - It’s not likely that you’d want to turn this off because it is the main way you share in Postwire.  However, you may want to turn this off if you have highly sensitive or confidential content on the page that you want to make sure isn’t Re-Posted to another page you’re not aware of.
• Comments - Very similar to the reasons you’d want to turn off the Share Button.  If the page isn’t being used 1:1, you’re not going to want to see many different people commenting who don’t know each other.
• Copy - This is most typically used by internal teams who are creating templates for their other team mates.  THe internal staff can create a perfect template and allow others to copy it as a starting point.

 Updated Content Picker

1. Ability to choose recent content or browse pages in your account for content you want to post to your page.
2. Improved content search.  Dramatically improved speed and accuracy.
3. Changed the list view into a visual picker for easier browsing for content.

Click here to learn about more features on this dialog.

Activity & Notification Updates

•  Now that Libraries have been merged into Pages, internal sharers will have all the benefits such as Page View notifications & comment notifications.
• All pages will have detailed activity, including those shared internally.  Internal sharers will be able to see who in their company is viewing their pages and content.
• The Daily Digest has been updated to include content posted on pages.  Therefore, if you have a customer page where you frequently update content, they will receive the Daily Digest with these updates once a day.

Special thanks to all of your Live Chats, Support Requests, and phone calls that helped us to get to this point.  We want to hear your feedback on this release.  Make sure you take a look at the updated Postwire Help Docs, and don’t hesitate to do a Live Chat with us.  We can’t wait to hear what you think!

What this shift brings about is a new way to market, and a new alignment between account management and marketing. As every modern marketing department turns into a publishing company, clients and client-facing team members are overloaded with content, and email and intranets are not solving the content sharing and personalization problem. Email is an ineffective vehicle for sharing content since materials must be sent as attachments, which often get lost, ignored, or end up in spam folders. Intranets are used for internal communications, and they are hard to maintain and require IT support, so they aren’t meeting marketing and account management requirements.

What’s needed is one place for marketers to connect with account managers, and for account managers to connect with and clients and engage in educational dialogue. This way, marketers can curate useful content, account managers can customize and share this content with clients, and clients can absorb, reference, and re-share it with others inside their company. All of this should happen in one place. Conveniently, that’s just what we do here at Postwire. And we’re about to roll out a bunch of enhancements that are going to make all of this much easier.

Changes coming to Postwire

It is the goal of our upcoming product release to make it easier to engage, educate, collaborate with, and upsell your clients. Up until now, the strategy to do this has been salespeople and account managers communicating with clients on the phone and using email. These dialogues are tough to capture and reference, and even tougher for clients to share with others in their company (your biggest path to expansion). So here’s what we’re doing to help with that:

• Engaging Clients Online in a Single Referable Spot – Using Postwire allows you to create a private, personalized online resource for you and each of your clients to foster engagement and education that builds relationships and increases sales. In the new release you’ll be able to create pages even more quickly. Marketers will be able to set up templates for their client-facing teams, and then salespeople and account managers can copy the template, customize it as needed, and share it to begin the nurturing process.
• Delivering The Most Relevant Content – Marketers can easily upload and organize company collateral, presentations, videos, news items, and other educational content that client-facing teams can use to educate and nurture clients. With our new release, when permissions are set accordingly, everyone will have to ability to take the most recent content from marketing and re-post it on the pages of clients who will get value out of it. With this enhancement, sharing a new piece of content you’re alerted about via the daily digest email has never been easier. Just select the content, select the account pages you’d like to place it on, leave a comment about the content if you’re so inclined, and share it with the click of a button.
• Discussing and Collaborating, Internally and Externally – Activity streams, comments, and a daily digest of activity notification allow everyone to stay informed of and discuss content. An enhancement of the new release of Postwire is the ability to collaborate on a page, i.e. with permission, those invited to a page can add content to it. This is a great way for a marketing team to get together and round out new product information for sales to share, or for a marketer and an account manager to team up on a page for a client.
• Finding, Curating, and Sharing With Ease – Find a new piece of content? Add it to the pages of clients that care most about it! With Postwire, there is no need to include 10 attachments in an email when communicating with a client. Now you can nurture your clients with content, educating them as you go, while keeping everything – content, conversations, and other information – centralized and easy to access in Postwire.

It is our goal that these enhancements will help you better engage and educate your clients in 1:1 approach, so that you may become a trusted partner and be the place they turn to when they need cutting-edge information. We’ll be interested to know hear your response to these changes and how they affect your client interaction as we roll them out in the coming weeks.

If you are in a business selling consumer goods or a commodity business offering, then Marketing Automation is the most important and powerful thing you can invest in. After all, your product is probably well understood, so your goal is to be in the right place when the prospect is making the decision to buy. If your product is a disruptive or innovative offering where you have to educate your audience, relying on marketing automation alone can tank your business. In these organizations, the job of a marketer is not to go for the quick conversion. Their job is to educate people on the pain that their product solves and why it is better than the alternatives. After all, if you are the one doing the teaching, you have a 65% chance of being selected when the prospect is ready to make a decision. Marketers need to educate the internal team first, from the executives to the engineers. They need to especially educate the customer facing folks: sales, account management, client on-boarding, support, etc. And most importantly, they need to educate the market.

Savvy marketers are probably saying “Marketing Automation is how we educate the market. How else are we supposed to send them the right content with the right calls to action at scale without Marketing Automation?” The problem with marketing automation is that marketers of all companies are lusting after the latest recommendation tricks that Amazon, Google and Netflix are using to see if they can apply them to their business. The problem with this is that it sucks for your prospects if you are selling something that is disruptive. Prospects don’t want to hear about some generic eBook that you are offerring them because they match some characteristics. They want to talk to somebody. They want to learn and understand how it your solution can work for them. This is why innovative and disruptive companies typically have an army of customer facing folks on their team. Instead of making that army spend a large part of their day entering data so marketers can do more targeted campaigns, they need to embrace the power of the customer facing army. This army can do a way better job targeting, educating, and nurturing than any automated campaign could ever do.

The good news in this marketing shift is that marketers are producing crazy amounts of educational content. They’re publishing customer videos on YouTube, product demos on Vimeo, slide decks on Slideshare, several posts a week on their blog, 1-2 eBooks a quarter, and a number of webinars every month. Instead of spending weeks configuring Pardot, Marketo, Hubspot, or Eloqua and building sophisticated drip campaigns to share this content, marketers should instead take the time to train their customer teams on what they’ve produced, curate some great content that helps their team “get it,” and organize the materials for easy access so the customer teams can be evangelists and educate the masses. This lets content produced by the marketing team get in the hands of the people who need it most: the customer facing army whose job is to educate and help customers and prospects succeed.

Image courtesy of BinaryApe

These are the best of times and the worst of times for today’s professional salespeople.

On one hand, buyers have more information than ever before at their fingertips…literally. They are just a few mouse clicks away from finding out just about everything they need to know when researching the potential solution to a problem they are having, or finding something new that might help make their life (and their company’s profitability) better.

That makes things worse for sellers, because they are being cut out of the process earlier. According to various estimates, about 60-70% of any given buyer’s decision is made before they approach a seller. The tables have turned in terms of who has the real “power” in influencing buyers. In fact, over 90% of B2B buyers start their buying process online, based on findings in the 2013 B2B Lead Generation Report by Holger Schulze.

Yet at the same time, this actually makes things much better for sellers&nash;at least they ones who recognize the new realities and embrace online technologies for their benefit.

The Growing Gap Between Social Vs. Non-Social Sellers

There’s a growing gap between two camps of sellers:

• Those who actively use social media and online technologies as part of their sales process (e.g., for prospecting, spotting opportunities and helping people buy their products and services)
• Those who keep doing business “they way we’ve always done it”–which doesn’t include a structured, regular use of social media

For those who are using social media, the results are clear and positive. Social selling is helping top sellers close more deals, exceed their quotas and retain customers better, according to research by Aberdeen Group.

How Social Sellers Are Succeeding

Smart sellers know that in order to get “back to the front” of the sales cycle, they must become adept at using social media technologies. With buyers starting their search on Google and social networks like LinkedIn and Twitter, these sellers are wisely positioning themselves by sharing content and insight that resonates with their prospects’ pains and aspirations.

At Sales Performance International, we see 21st century sellers embracing a new role as Micro-Marketers. In other words, they recognize the imperative value in seeding content about their products and services online. They are therefore eager and willing to carve out time during their day to be active on LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, Google+ and other places in order to disseminate information and participate in relevant online conversations.

However, they also recognize that they have a lot on their plate and typically don’t have 8-12 hours a day to create long, highly polished blog posts, videos or podcasts. Instead, as Micro-Marketers they are curating and sharing the best content that their marketing and public relations departments create, as well as other industry information that will help educate and enlighten their prospects and customers.

Sellers understand that marketers are responsible for populating content (including product information and collateral) and building a Web presence using their own properties and third-party sites. As Micro-Marketers, sellers establish the value of these products and services in a tailored way. They convert marketing “product pitches” into buyer/seller conversations about how these products and services solve the buyer’s problems.

Newer tools like InsideView and Postwire make it easy for the salesperson to engage in a one-to-one or one-to-many dialogue with prospects, in order to share specific information that will help guide them in their decision-making process. This is crucial, as it still holds true that sellers who help buyers create a buying vision early in the process win more deals.

The idea of Micro-Marketing as a new type of “informal” marketing through social media is revolutionary for salespeople. Never before have they had so many powerful tools and techniques for reaching out to people who may benefit from their solutions. As the tools evolve, it’s up to salepeople to learn best practices for engagement through social media, apply them on a daily basis and measure the results.

Dan: Do you guys find that the conversation starts as a result of sharing content using things like e-mail blasts or as a result of people viewing things like blogs?

Answer: We have conversations start in many ways. Typically we’ll publish a piece of content (like a blog post, eBook, or webinar) and over time this will draw people into a conversation: they’ll visit our website, access the content, maybe attend a webinar, and then come to us with a question about our product if they think it may meet their need. At this point we’ve “been there” educating them, telling them about industry trends, how our product solves the needs of the industry, and giving them great, free information along the way. So when they’re ready to seek out a product to solve their needs, we have mind share. To help stoke these fires we use email marketing, which alerts people of the content available and often sparks social discussions. There are many ways to follow-up from this point, but we’ll normally wait until someone initiates a conversation based on our content and/or decides to try out our product.

Dan: Because buyers today don’t engage until late, should we focus on SEO to get on the “first page” of Google? Do you think frequent and relevant content will allow organic search results to get you there without loading up your website with search terms?

Answer: Dan is referencing the Forrester finding that buyers are “two-thirds to 90% of the way through their journey before they reach out to the vendor.” Plenty of people have a lot to say about SEO, and I’ll let you research those if you’re so inclined, but in the meantime I’ll give my very quick take on it. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a useful tactic to gain attention when people are doing research, but you need to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords and then based on these keywords, catering the landing pages to the buying cycle. It is certain, though, that frequent and relevant content is viewed as more relevant by search engines than a static website stuffed with keywords., which was more “SEO 1.0.” Combining all of this into one cohesive SEO strategy, though, is your best bet. But there are a lot of fruitful options out there, with SEO being one just of them.

Charles: say more about how Postwire is used and makes a difference

Answer: Softball question, thanks Charles. Postwire allows you and your prospects to make sense out of a world that is overloaded with content. Using Postwire, you (or content creators like your marketing team) can load content and organize it, for example, by buyer needs. When more content is added, you’ll be updated! Then, after you speak with a prospect, you can quickly create a page just for them, hand selecting pre-loaded content and adding additional content if needed. This allows you to tailor your sharing based on your discussion and based on the prospect’s stage in the buying cycle. Share the Postwire page—a graphically laid-out page with refined content—with your prospect(s), and you’ll get real-time notifications when they view it. You can comment back and forth on the Postwire page, and add content as they progress through the cycle.

brandi: i have great content its just hard to get through on the phone , and then you wonder if they even get the emails

Answer: Great content is an awesome start! You’re light years beyond most companies. Loading this content into Postwire (especially in a way that is organized around buyer needs) and inviting people to view it there will enable you to get notifications immediately when they view it. There are also great apps like Tout that will show you if your email was read.

Jordan: We have a ton of content, but we try to keep it organized.  Our biggest challenge is that we always have the impulse to customize everything, and that takes time.

Answer: Organization of content is no simple thing, especially when you have a lot of it. We’ve found a best practice is to organize it around the needs of the buyer so that when you identify the main purchasing need you can easily pick and choose pieces that most closely relate to the prospect based on their role and industry, for example. So this allows you to focus less on customizing each piece of content, and more on customizing content around the main buyer needs you encounter. You can then have case studies, video testimonials, sell sheets, eBooks, blog posts, and other content well organized and at the ready.

Nancy: I am working on content for a sale that is an “explanation sale” They need lots of infornation that is complex and perhaps tedious.  what can I do to engage and keep their interest?

Answer: We hear this a lot with many B2B salespeople. We’ve worked closely with one who had a similar problem and a sales cycle of 18 months. What we learned is that the sale takes this long because the main prospect on the other end typically has to go through many approval stages, which requires the input of many decision makers that need to come up to the same level of information as the main prospect. So what you can do to keep them engaged, interested, and advocating for you using a manual drip campaign to provide them with information that caters to the point of the cycle they’re in. An example “campaign” might look like this:

• eBook that describes solutions to an industry issue
• An overview brochure that discusses your product
• Sell sheet or brochure that reinforces how your product meets specific industry needs
• Spec sheets on a particular feature of your product that is of interest to the buyer
• Case study or testimonial video that caters to their specific need
• Pricing based on their needs
• An ROI calculator
• A proposal positioning document

And it could go on from there. Every time your company issues a press release that discusses a topic of interest. A new whitepaper. A video recap of a meeting you had with them. All of this can be contained on a personal page, where you can your prospect(s) can dialogue back and forth. If you do this in Postwire, you’ll be alerted when they visit the page and leave comments and questions, and they can even use the page and its contents to share with their team internally.

Corrine: Our internal process needs to be fine tuned so that content sharing is more seamless. How can we do that?

Corrine: How do we get our sales reps to understand the importance/benefits of sharing relevant content with their customers?

Answer: Two great questions that tie together, Corrine! In the new world of inbound marketing and sales, it’s not uncommon to have teams creating tons of content, but to have trouble organizing it and keeping the rest of the company informed about how and when to use this content, not to mention making sure everyone is using the most recent collateral piece. Simply put: even internally, sharing content can be a problem. Imagine what your prospects think — they’re getting pummeled by new content offers every day. At each stage – marketing to sales, sales to prospects, prospects to their internal team – the content you share should cater to the audience. In this way, we’re all content curators, and it’s our responsibility to make sure that people at the next stage receive and can consume our content as easily and seamlessly as possible. I would recommend working with the content creators in your company and having them organize content around the easiest way for you to access it (type of content, buyer need, buyer cycle stage, etc.). This will help ensure a more seamless sharing of all content.

In terms of getting sales reps to understand the importance of sharing relevant content during the buying cycle, you have a couple options that I can think of:

• Find a sales rep that is already doing this and having success with it. Have him/her host a lunch and learn session where they talk about how they use content, why they do it, and the success they’re having with it.
• Check the data on deals closed and the content that was shared during the buying process. You should see certain pieces stand out. These pieces may have helped overcome objections, close the deal more quickly, or provided other use. Share that with your sales reps to demonstrate the cause and effect.

How Sharing Works Today

Below is the dialog that you get when sharing a Postwire Page today:

This dialog allows the basics: it allows you to enter one or more email addresses, edit an invite message, and email an link to the page. On the bottom left, you can also grab a link to the page in the event you want to share using other means. From within Shared Libraries, we also have another way to invite people:

From within the Shared Libraries, you can add members but also set their access level to be a Contributor or Sharer.  Contributors can add and change content in the Library as well as share that content on Postwire Pages.

How Sharing Will Work In The New Design

As we merge the capabilities from Libraries into Pages, we want to keep the functionality without overcomplicating the experience.  In addition, we want to take the opportunity to enhance the experience where appropriate.

When clicking the Share button on a Postwire Page, below is a mockup of the dialog that you will see:

When you want to send an email invite to people, you simply click on the box to enter emails and you’ll see the following:

You’ll notice that it is very similar to the Page Invite dialog above, but you can select whether the recipients are viewers or contributors to the Postwire Page. Yep, you heard that correctly…you’ll be able to have multiple contributors to a Page, which is one of the most asked for features!  You’ll also see that you can change that for each person in the list, including the ability to change owners of pages:

Moving further down the dialog, you’ll see the ability to modify the viewing privacy levels. We released Private and Secure Pages last fall, but one thing we’ve learned is that most users are very confused by the difference.  We are redesigning this to make it easier to understand.  See below:

And finally, at the bottom of the dialog, you’ll see the Advanced Settings. Clicking on this link will give you access to some pretty cool features!

Let’s review the benefits of the settings one by one:

• Share Button – This will allow you to effectively hide the list of people who have access to the page.  We hear this a lot and since we have this feature in the Shared Libraries, we migrated it over.
• Re-Posts – Re-Posts is what we’re calling it when someone takes a piece of content shared with them and copies/posts that to one of their own pages.  Re-Posts are how your sales team re-shares the marketing collateral. In some cases, this is not appropriate, like when you share content with a client that you don’t want them re-sharing.
• Comments – Similar to the ability to hide the list of invitees to the page (handled by removing the share button), people have asked to remove the comments in some scenarios. Let’s say a sales rep is following up after a webinar with 100 leads, he may not want the recipients to see each other and will not want them commenting with each other.
• Copy – In the current version of Postwire, you can only copy your own Pages. We are frequently asked for the ability for Marketers to create a “template” for their reps to copy as a starting point for a Postwire Page.  By enabling copy, this use case can be easily handled.

We Want Your Feedback

Please comment below, hit us up on Twitter, or start a Live Chat to give us feedback.  We’ve done a lot of customer feedback sessions to get to this point, and we’re confident that we’re headed in the right direction, but we want to make sure we don’t miss anything.

I will post a video demo of our improved Collection feature early next week – spoiler alert: Drag & Drop to make a collection on the fly!

Flying home from Beaver Creek, Colorado after a recent ski trip, I started thinking about my recovery from a knee injury a few years ago. This time I never made it to the glades where I fell into a giant snow hole, but I did enjoy three days of groomed runs and fresh mountain air with family!

What does my passion for alpine skiing energize my interest for improving communication in health care?

Hobbling around after the accident led me first to physical therapy, then to the operating room, and then back to physical therapy. What was I missing? I felt like communication with my physical therapist was challenging, almost broken. I couldn’t reproduce my physical therapy exercises and I quickly became a frustrated patient!  I might have just thrown my hands up and hoped to figure it out eventually, but I wanted to be up and around on my two feet soon! Sound familiar? Apparently forgetting instructions and other information is pretty common and is playing out frequently in multiple scenarios.

I found myself looking for a better way to capture my exercises so that I could re-watch them, and imagine my surprise when I found out that my physical therapist Mike Roberts was looking to do the same! Simultaneously we both pulled out a Flip Video camera and my involvement with patient video started. The amazing very personal experience using video as a patient changed my entire professional perspective on communication in healthcare. You see, I am an emergency physician and never really thought of using video with my patients before my own experience.

My passion is to now spread the word, and to introduce using personal patient video across multiple clinical areas for patients in both the inpatient and outpatient settings.

You name it and there is a use case:

• Physical Therapy
• Occupational Therapy
• Speech Therapy
• Chronic Disease Management
• Diabetes Teaching
• Heart Failure Teaching
• Informed Decision Making Discussions
• End of Life Discussions
• Instructions from Clinical Psychologists
• After Care Instructions from a Hospital Stay
• Instructions from an Emergency Department Visit
• Asthma Inhaler Instructions
• Medication Instructions
• Wound Care Instructions
• Cancer Treatment Choices

As you can see, the list is infinite for patients and clinicians.

The more I looked at the literature about understanding and remembering provider instructions, I knew this part of communication in health care was broken. Why not make as much of this information available for the patient in a very consumable and crystal clear medium?  Each patient is the star of their own show, and at a minimum the idea of using video makes everyone focus more on communication skills—both the giving and receiving of information. A true partnership of recovery! Providers get better and better using video as well. My physical therapist Mike Roberts improved the clarity of instruction every single time he took a clip of my exercises. While practicing at home I could watch on my computer and listen to his voice. This was amazing and I still practice many of the same exercises years later. Instant feedback for everyone makes communication crystal clear instead of a muddled memory! Video is a win-win for both providers and patients!

Following this discovery, I called a colleague in medical information technology, figuring there was some easy way to capture and send patient care video. Nope! Turns out this takes hard work and smart engineers to make it all happen in a safe, secure legal, HIPAA-compliant way. Fortunately I connected with a company called VisibleGains led by Cliff Pollan and Craig Daniels. With their team of top-shelf engineers they created an awesome application for capturing and sharing patient health information in a safe, secure legal, and HIPAA-compliant manner – the product is called Postwire! So, with the HIPAA software application in hand I plan to tell everyone I can through blogging, education, lecturing, and example to share the passion around improved patient communication and engagement. After twenty-six years of practice I am proud to focus on doing the basics even more with a little help from modern technology.

So let’s go to work and enable patients to revisit the visit!

Why Change Again?

When we first built Postwire, you could only use content that you added. So this meant that every user had to load all of their content before getting started. Last June, we introduced Shared Libraries. This allowed a central person (or group) to curate all of the content and provide it to anyone who signed up in their company. The Shared Library, coupled with the Daily Digest Email, meant Postwire would automatically keep everyone up to date on new content the company was producing. These features unlocked huge growth in teams using Postwire, because users in sales, account management, and customer support were able to quickly share the latest content with their customers. Evidence of this is that while 20% of paid accounts are comprised of teams, they account for over 80% of the total paid user base.

The Shared Library feature has been awesome for the organic growth of our userbase. I love watching the way Postwire spreads in companies once there is someone championing it. As more and more teams are collaborating in Postwire, we are getting the same questions & issues over and over:

• How do I share my library with others?
• Can I get stats on when people view and share content in the shared library?
• I can’t find anything in the library.  It is too cluttered.
• If I can add contributors to a library, why can’t I do that in Postwire pages?
• Can people re-share stuff I post on a page?
• etc.

Do any of those sound familiar?  For a product that thrives on user driven growth, we’re certainly putting up way too many roadblocks to build the userbase we have the potential to.

Where Do We Go From Here?

After brainstorming with the team on these issues, and coming up with band-aids, tweaks, and other ways to “patch” the issues, we came to a conclusion: We must redesign Postwire into a much simpler product.

We have learned that the main cause for many of the questions is due to a general confusion over Pages vs. Libraries vs. Collections.  With three places to organize and share content, users get confused about where they should post their content. As a result, we have decided to merge the best features of all three into one container for the content. This will solve several issues:

• An easier interface (with less moving parts) to enable users to quickly “get” Postwire’s purpose and value.
• A single place to post and share content.
• Providing the best features of Libraries to Page sharers, such as the ability to have multiple collaborators, the Daily Digest Email, and the ability to re-post content to a new Page.
• Providing the best features of Pages to Library owners, such as activity notifications on views and the comment thread.

When Will The Redesign Be Done?

We have been working on these changes for a few weeks now, and our entire product team is 100% focused on it.

In the meantime, I will be doing a couple of posts a week on this blog to describe some of the most exciting changes in detail. I look forward to hearing your feedback.

How Can You Help?

We have spoken to many of you about these changes, and have recruited some of you to help us validate and test the redesign before we release it to everyone. If you are interested in helping out, send an email to support@postwire.com to let us know.