
Marketing’s Renaissance
Marketing is taking CRM by storm; while we’ve all been fixated on social media, many companies — both vendors and end customers — have been acting more broadly by acquiring and extending marketing solutions. At the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 held in New Orleans in March, the company put a lot of emphasis on marketing. […]

Personas Are The Future of Enterprise Apps: Lessons Learned From Scribe Software
In any technology-centric company, product managers, engineers and developers who have their finger on the pulse of customers have the highest credibility and respect. Over time they also have the most success in their careers. This happens because their innate understanding of the customer is the most valuable currency there is to a development team. […]

Social business needs more sophistication
I was delighted earlier this week to discover Facebook is starting to charge brands to send messages to their followers. Perhaps this will spell an end to all those ridiculous competitions that encourage you to ‘like’ a product’s Face…

Cloudforce New York
So, just about a month after Dreamforce, Salesforce.com is coming to New York for one of its regional Cloudforce conferences. The event will be at the Javitz Center in Manhattan on October 19. Salesforce is expecting six thousand attendees. The focus of the event is supposed to be on the newly re-announced Marketing Cloud — […]

The Social Stack
Is it time to start talking about a social stack? If so, let me be among the first. This week in Boston HubSpot, a social marketing company, is holding a user meeting called “Inbound,” which I will attend, and this has prompted me to write out some ideas that I’ve been stewing on for a […]

Trends: The Battle For CMO Mind Share
Marketing and Advertising Budgets Are The New Land Grab Constellation Research, Inc. predicts that the global advertising market (paid search, display, and classified) will hit $125B by 2015. While IT budgets continue to stay flat, marketing budgets are up. Warc’s recent Global Marketing Index (GMI) entered positive territory in March 2012. Consequently, the heat […]
Small Businesses Need a Minimum Viable Marketing Strategy
I’ve taken to thinking that marketers should view marketing on the web as a product. As I said in my post on the Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing: Marketing is a Product that has a UX and Competes Like Any Other Product It’s easy to forget because we don’t charge for it that […]

Pitfalls of Free Content and Inbound Marketing
Let me start this article by saying it’s not intended to be a negative article against free content or inbound marketing. Rather, I want to talk about some of the strategic considerations when you use these tactics. I believe wholeheartedly that, properly employed, there are no better tactics for building your customer base and […]

Does the Internet Mean There Can Only Be One?
I read with interest today Hubspot’s coverage of their new monster VC round. They’ve raised a $32M Series D monster round from Sequoia, Google, and Salesforce–certainly an all-start cast. There’s a lot of interesting data in these announcements, such as Hubspot’s view of what market shares look like for the Marketing Automation category: If true, […]