
Salesforce Acquiring Exact Target? Good Move (With A Question)
Ever since Salesforce launched a fully-working and functional version of Service Cloud (about three-four years ago) following the tiring attempts to build it itself for five or six years (which they later gave up to acquire Instranet – learning along the way that acquisitions work better than building-up) we have been waiting for something like […]

Advocacy: The New Currency of Marketing
Who do we ultimately turn to when we need to make important decisions in our lives? That’s the fundamental question at the heart of so much today when it comes to media, influence, and ultimately, marketing. What’s more, the reliable sources of trust today are currently on the move. We are in an era where […]

Predicting the Future Not for the Faint of Heart
I was doing some research in the Time Magazine archives (the best ones I have seen, by the way) the other day and came across this nugget from 1962: “Despite the discouraging results so far, many scientists argue that military-space research will ultimately produce an overflowing cornucopia of marketable consumer products, from supersonic planes to […]

Rolling Out An Idea
Has the emergence of social technology been faster than the roll out of other advanced technologies like CRM and ERP and why? I have recently been reading a dense technical book from 1990 with the improbable title (for CRM), The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures — Dynamics of Evolution and Technological Change in Transport, by […]

More on Election, Social and Marketing
I tried to wait a bit before commenting on the election and the Social CRM implications partly out of respect and in part to give everyone a chance to rev down. And these observations have much more to do with social media than with any political party or policy initiative, so please believe me when […]

Social Marketing — Right Idea for the Times
You might be tempted to consider social marketing just another idea in an endless stream of things dreamed up by the software industry (and pundits like me!) to generate more business. Well, you’d be right about some of that but I’d like to argue that the idea is more than hype and is, in fact, […]

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 — […]

Marketing May Not Be Dying, But It’s Certainly Changing – Right Flo?
Not surprisingly, many marketers were outraged, offended & upset by the recent Marketing Is Dead essay in the Harvard Business Review. Personally, I thought the piece was (intentionally) overstated – but directionally correct. Marketing isn’t ‘dead’ (as my fellow Enterprise Irregular and friend Maggie Fox asserts) but there’s no doubt things are changing – quickly. […]

Is Social Marketing Replacing Content Marketing – or Enhancing It?
Interesting post by David Strom on ReadWriteWeb this past weekend – Blogging Declines Across the Inc. 500. As stated in the UMass Dartmouth study behind the headline: Fifty percent of the 2010 Inc. 500 had a corporate blog, up from 45% in 2009 and 39% in 2008. In this new 2011 study, the use of […]

Social Business Predictions for 2012
It’s that time of year again. Enterprise social media has had an impressive ramp-up in 2011 as well as being well-poised for a banner year in 2012. However, along the way, social business has become a very broad topic indeed, covering a wide range of topics that ranges from social marketing and Social CRM to […]