Stumbled upon Brian Clark’s recent article which nails some insightful points about social media marketing.

The most important conversation is not between seller and buyer, but between prospective and existing buyers.

I suppose many sellers would pay dearly to know what existing buyers say to the prospects. The catch is, they don’t have to wait until it happens by itself — it probably won’t, if there are no social objects the conversation can be built around.

And then comes the second step of social media marketing:

While social media marketing with content and conversation will bring you business, you’ll get more business the better you expressly point out the benefits of buying. More importantly, you should expressly ask people to do business with you.

Not an easy task, because, on one side, people are sensible to the sales efforts, and on the other side, people usually have no idea of buying anything unless told so. That’s why writing skills Brian talks about are so important. And that’s where lies a new divide of social media era.

As far as I know, nobody reads first posts. What a pity — some of them are worth reading or otherwise meaningful. Here are the first posts of blogs I read most. Although long forgotten, they are symbolic in a way.

Gapingvoid’s first post — titled “Contact” (isn’t it symbolic, with the focus on conversation his blog has?)

37signals — titled “Warm Idea” (isn’t their blog about user friendly ideas, after all? :)

Douglas Bowman’s first post is titled “Something New”, very modest for Bowman’s famous website, and is an interesting reading, especially in time perspective:

It’s with great humility that I hammer out this first post. Humility, because I enter the game way after many others. Humility because others have been practicing and polishing their writing on a daily — or somewhat daily — basis for x years times 365 days. The sheer size and breadth of some of their blogs makes me feel like I’m sitting down at a table full of experienced high rollers with only $5 of tokens in my pocket.

I sign to that.

Then, Seth Godin’s first post, back in 2002, strangely titled “Boring”. Perhaps that’s exactly the fight with boring things that makes Seth’s blog so interesting :)

And finally, what about Jeffrey Zeldman, the pioneer of the web? I don’t know how to find his first post, as blogs didn’t even exist when he started publishing his famous site, but here is the first page saved at the Wayback Machine, back in 1996, when I first started reading his site.

By the way, there even was a blog about first posts, alas, silent since 2005 (to much first posts or too few important ones?)…

My own first “post” was my entry in my guestbook, which one can consider as a blog prototype, in my homepage at Geocities Soho I created in 1997, in happy times of Web 1.0. It was a phrase of Meister Eckhart, a medieval German preacher, about life that just lives to live and doesn’t need any other reason. When I find the English translation, I’ll put it here.