June 30, 2009

This morning I typed into Google the search term: VoIP (which stands for Voice over Internet Protocol) and I got 64 Million responses. 64 Million!! How archaic is that?

June 29, 2009

So I have just finished co-authoring a book called Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) due out this summer. It was a very eye opening experience to say the least. But the one thing it taught me was a profound respect for the Facebook platform.

June 24, 2009

One of the great things about the Facebook platform is that it provides you access to a large audience of over 200 Million people worldwide at a low cost. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a strategy in place for what you are trying to achieve.

June 22, 2009

Ok, let’s say you are searching the web for a new fishing rod. You find the right website but you are having trouble locating the right rod and reel combination. Frustrated you consider giving up but give it one last shot and decide to call the 800 number on the site. And instead of getting the usual IVR tree – you are prompted for your Facebook ID.

June 16, 2009

In a blog post last week, Dell revealed that it has generated more than $2 million in revenue from @DellOutlet, one of its many Twitter sites. Late last year, there were some headlines about Dell crossing the $1 million mark via Twitter and it’s only gotten bigger since then.

June 10, 2009

The short answer is – YES!

June 9, 2009

If you have never seen this web page http://twitter.zappos.com/ - you should! With legions of Twitter-ers on staff - 432 to be exact - Zappos make customer service look: easy, decentralized, and inexpensive. But that begs the question - what impact will Twitter have on today’s customer contact centers?

June 1, 2009

The most recent numbers from Nielsen indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in one month like in January, Twitter.com clocked 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month. But can that growth be sustained?

May 19, 2009

This isn’t a new problem – how to measure lead generation from online activity is as old as the web itself. Not everyone had a shopping cart on their website year ago either, so ways of correlating offline business with online activity had to be devised.

May 18, 2009

Here are some takeaways on a speech by C. K. Prahalad speaker at the World Innovation Forum.

May 13, 2009

Takeaways on a speech by Dr Vijay Govindarajan speaker at the World Innovation Forum.

May 11, 2009

Here's a case study on how GlaxoSmithKline is building an emotional strategy in its business
GSK was represented by Donna J. Sturgess at the World Innovation Forum.

May 6, 2009

Notes from a speech by Paul Saffo, Professor from Stamford University, the opening speaker at the World Innovation Forum.

April 29, 2009

Last week, I was interviewed by a technology services marketing team looking to improve their Demand Generation activities.

April 22, 2009

This past weekend, while writing a chapter of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, I was very impressed by the Marketplace on Facebook. The old marketplace was a owned and operated by Facebook but the new one is a much more elegant platform by oodle which opens it up to over 200 local and national sites affiliated with oodle.

April 8, 2009

I am officially up and running now in my 6th week here at Avaya and loving my new role. And what has been really interesting for me to see was the difference between organizations when it comes to things like social media.

March 26, 2009

Contextual

Now I know this isnt such a new statement - but consider these clues...

March 18, 2009

I was talking to a small business owner last night. They are in the middle of a very costly redesign of their B2C website and I couldn't help but ask if they had plans to set up on Facebook as well.

March 17, 2009

On Facebook you can’t be a Friend of a brand but you can be a Fan of a brand. While it sounds like a subtle difference, it is actually an important distinction.

March 9, 2009

So I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book The Outliers the other night and he goes into a discussion about violinists and on how long it takes them to become a master at their craft. So without spoiling the book for you – the bottom line was – it takes 10,000 hours to become a Master Violinist. This got me thinking about how it could apply to Social Media and how long it would take to become a Social Media Expert.

March 5, 2009

No matter how you look at things these days marketers are becoming more like publishers than ever before. And their tactics are shifting from more Outbound Marketing like email and direct mail to more Inbound Marketing using SEO, Blogging and Social Media.

February 26, 2009

I know I talked about this before on this blog but when I saw the data from RainToday’s Benchmark Survey of How Buyer Identify Professional Services Providers, I couldn’t help myself.

February 24, 2009

Every firm I speak to wants to better position themselves as thought leaders in their specific area of Technology. And for good reason – better margins, better awareness, better leads, more qualified leads. Moreover, it changes the dynamic of the conversation from one of WHO are you to HOW can you help me with my problem.

February 16, 2009

In David Meerman Scott's ebook Lose Control of your Marketing, he talks a lot about the spread of ideas. Note his ebook is a preview for his upcoming book called World Wide Rave, due out in March.

February 4, 2009

Okay so you are comfortable with getting your personal brand out there on the web. But periodically you are going to have to monitor, prune and synchronize it to keep it fresh. Here are a few tips for keeping your personal brand clean, organized and synchronized.

January 29, 2009

We live in an age of skepticism about all forms of consumption. The diffusion of our skepticism is accelerated by the Internet and makes the sincerity even more pressing.

January 27, 2009

Having taken on this new role of blogging on the Personal Branding Blog, I naturally have been looking at many of the other personal brands that are out there. A few names come to mind very quickly when you think about strong personal brands: Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, Steve Jobs (the only non blogger), Jonathan Schwartz, Gary Vaynerchuk.

January 23, 2009

Marketing’s mission is to somehow change a customer’s behavior. We try many things to affect that behavior: advertising, email, search, events, webinars... and the list goes on and on.

January 19, 2009

I work in a professional services firm and in order for firms like ours to differentiate themselves, they have to create perhaps hundreds of personal brands around individuals who understand niche topics extremely well. And since buyers have transparency through the use of search engines they can really get a handle on just how qualified any individual in an organization is to perform a given service for them.

January 15, 2009

Not all leads should be treated equally. In our business, for example, the sales cycle can be upwards of 9 months – so lead nurturing it critical to stay in front of your prospect during their journey from awareness to consideration to purchase.

January 8, 2009

A year and a half ago when I was researching how to start a wiki and looking for best practices in wikis – there was little information out there about it. So I decided to reach out to our internal consultant and found out there were already six wikis within the BearingPoint organization, all built to do collaboration for various teams!

December 23, 2008

I had dinner the other night with a buddy of mine who runs a company that produces major corporate events. You know the kind with a stage, lighting, stadium seating and a day or two of PowerPoint presentations designed to pump up the troops. Interestingly enough, he reported their business was off dramatically in that area. Why?

December 15, 2008

As the economy twists and turns with more layoffs mounting – having a strong personal brand is becoming ever more important from a career perspective.

December 10, 2008

The CMO title barely existed 15 years ago but it is already undergoing a significant transformation. There are some major shifts in landscape in which they operate: changes in Technology, Consumer Behavior and the Media Landscape. In a recent research report entitled Future Tense: the Global CMO published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, I hope to recap some of the most salient points of this paper as I see them.

December 8, 2008

These days many professional services and technology firms looking to differentiate themselves lean on an age old technique of creating thought leadership. But truly differentiated and provocative thought leadership is actually hard to come by. Most of the time, it is just interesting theory without any proof. Moreover, does the thought leadership actually drive the business and create sales or is it just content for content sake.

December 3, 2008

After my last post on the Media Budget Ratio I got a question out on the Marketing 2.0 community by Scott Zosel about how much should you allocate for Social Media in your budget?

November 26, 2008

Marketing is the interface a company builds to interact with the marketplace and the customer base. The marketing group, combined with the sales force, is the point in the company where the market understanding resides. This should be the group that drives the company, that sells the marketing vision and message internally, and if that is not happening or doesn't seem appropriate, there is something seriously wrong.

November 21, 2008

I think Seth Godin outlined marketing's Catch 22 best in his book The Purple Cow (and I am paraphrasing here): When times are tough the tendancy is to conserve capital vs. when times are good the tendancy is to not be aggressive.

November 19, 2008

Stop everything you are doing and listen to this podcast! Seriously, if you have never met or had the opportunity to listen to Avinash Kaushik, you must hear this podcast – I guarantee you will learn something!

November 11, 2008

Here's a case study from the Media Convergence Forum via Liz Cahill, VP of Marketing and Communications of Lee Jeans.

November 10, 2008

There is no doubt the speed of change in the media space is blinding. New tools become available to marketers and individuals alike nearly every week.

November 4, 2008

The Internet has eliminated the barriers of geography, cost and time. Social tools like blogs and social networking sites are helping crowds form around very discrete topics.

October 30, 2008

Here are the highlights of a Panel at the Media Convergence Forum featuring...

October 29, 2008

This is from John Strattion, EVP and CMO of Verizon Communications, in his keynote speech at the Media Convergence Forum.

October 28, 2008

Every once and a while you meet someone who inspires you to elevate your game to a whole new level and for me Doug Simon is that person.

October 22, 2008

Normally email and profit don’t go in the same sentence at least in the minds of most B2B marketers – but actually they should.

October 17, 2008

Environmental concerns are not new and Green IT efforts are gaining ground at many companies, both big and small. Of course, Green IT solutions are available to companies, but what else can businesses do to become more green? BearingPoint is searching for some new thinking on the topic.

October 14, 2008

Not long ago, Times Square was the epicenter of digital signage in the U.S. It may still represent the highest concentration, but digital signage is exploding and you see it just about everywhere now. In fact, digital signage is officially "the next big thing" for a lot of marketers.

October 8, 2008

If you are an avid reader of this blog you will already know that I am fascinated with Virtual Worlds and Virtual Events – but I was never truly enamored with Second Life and was not in favor of it for business from the start. (Must have been that scary looking penguin that tried to strike up a conversation with me.)

October 7, 2008

How much should you spend each year on media? In business publications, online, radio, even TV? For B2B marketers this can be quite a quandary. But thanks to B2B Magazine – they have compiled a list of the Top 100 B2B advertisers and how much they are spending on each. (Link to full report.)

October 2, 2008

Because of Google, everyone today has access to research that we have never had before. So when you are considering a purchase, what’s the first thing you do? Google it. Therefore shoppers (B2C) and buyers (B2B) are armed with more data than ever before. And its going to get worse, thanks to social media.

September 30, 2008

A live interview with the CEO, Peter Friedman, from LiveWorld at Web 2.0 Expo about the launch of their new product called LiveBar.

September 23, 2008

Here are a few companies in alphabetical order I thought had shown some real promise at the Web 2.0 Expo.

September 22, 2008

This is a recap of a presentation by Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media from the Web 2.0 Expo.

September 18, 2008

Why do some ideas go viral and others don’t? Here's one reason: People who are “bored at work” are a network bigger than any major network, including CBS, NBC, and so on. If ordinary people see something online and start passing it around THEY decide what is popular out of main stream media. And today they can make a huge impact on a brand, according to Jonah Peretti, speaking at the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday in New York.

September 17, 2008

Drop.io's CEO Sam Lessin presented “A Brief History of Privacy in this Data-Deluged World” at the Ignite II kick-off of Web 2.0 in NYC.

September 16, 2008

Two years ago less than half of all consumers used search to find a local business. But today that number is upward of 74%!

September 10, 2008

They may not be the ones you think I mean. No not the internal customers or your bosses boss like the CEO, CFO or COO. I mean real customers of marketing. Let me explain …

September 5, 2008

Sharon McCarthy recently conducted an interesting survey of MENG members.

September 3, 2008

Sometimes I have to admit it is hard to keep up with all the new advances in social technologies. And when I hear the buzz about certain technologies getting louder and louder it often times prompts me to seek out the help of a trusted source.

August 21, 2008

Starting up a social network to support any business can be a challenge. These days it seems that there are a variety of new social networks popping up all over. To that end I have heard a new acronym YASN (Yet Another Social Network)!

August 19, 2008

So, I got asked this question on a call today with a fellow social media experts, and I just had to blog about the ensuing conversation.

August 12, 2008

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

August 6, 2008

When it comes to Social Media there has been tons of talk about those few influencers who are able to spread your message like wild fire. But finding those few influencers has been the proverbial challenge.

August 5, 2008

Why are some Buzz Marketing programs better than others? What makes one program more Buzz worthy than another?

July 31, 2008

File Sharing is very binary – either you share a file online or you don’t. Well not anymore! – enter Drop.io.

July 28, 2008

Sitting in on a PR meeting last week, I was pondering the thought of my internal consulting teams starting to blog and participate in social media when someone from across the room said Social Media is more relative to the younger demographics we have in our organization.

July 24, 2008

Twing.com, a property of Accoona Corp., is a free service that aims to help users search for opinions, information, and conversations that match their particular interest—however obscure that particular interest may be. The site encourages users to get in on the conversation by enabling them to find communities relevant to their interests.

July 21, 2008

It always seems that marketing metrics is a fertile topic to discuss and write about but after reading a few recent Forrester research reports I think they really helped me to crystallize how I am going to be tracking metrics going forward but they also gave me a sense of what importance I should give to each of them.

July 15, 2008

Does sales really care about leads? Maybe not.

July 8, 2008

Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center – there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that’s the shift that Nick Carr has built his book upon.

July 2, 2008

One of my goals this year was to do a study on reputation management. As we all factor in the effects of new media on our brands, I felt this was a topic with long-lasting appeal to every marketer.

June 26, 2008

B2B marketers with highly complex products and services have been given a gift in the last few years in the form of Social Media.

June 19, 2008

Classically marketers have always been protective of their content locking them up in PDFs and then putting a registration page in front of them. This behavior is known to have a 1 in 10 (10%) download rate, which isn’t bad by marketing standards. But on the flip side, that means there is a 90% leakage rate!

June 17, 2008

It should come as no surprise that the online gaming market is exploding. In fact, last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population -- almost 217 million people!

June 10, 2008

One of my most trusted friends and mentors recently joined a very intriguing company called – SuccessFactors (stock symbol SFSF). They specialize in HR software with a SaaS product that is second to none in the market.

June 5, 2008

An interesting study from the University of Texas recently showed that the typical information posted on social networking sites – favorite books, movies, music, and quotes; major; hometown; and similar personal items – doesn’t always give others an accurate impression of you.

June 4, 2008

Many marketing teams are being asked by senior leaders in their organizations why they aren’t using the same cutting edge tactics as some of their competitors. When is it right to use cutting edge tactics? When is it right to use traditional tactics? When and how should you integrate the two?

May 28, 2008

What if you placed a call to GM and the CEO answered the phone? You would think perhaps this company is too small to suit my needs. This is why the bigger a company gets the more faceless they become because they layer on infrastructure to foster a certain perception.

May 19, 2008

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

May 15, 2008

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it.

May 6, 2008

When marketers design a marketing campaign – we typically design them for “rational” buyers. But do buyers ever act rational? And what about us?

May 2, 2008

My wife loves to travel, and spring break for my kids is always the perfect excuse to get away. But this time was different; for over a year my wife had been planning a trip to Turkey with a family we tend to travel well with.

May 1, 2008

Over the past few years marketers have been working on tracking conversations about their brands on the Web. (You are tracking and listening, aren’t you?) But once you have that in place, then what?

April 28, 2008

Lots of brands are finding out the hard way that there are plenty of conversations taking place about them online. For good or bad. Many brands choose to ignore this. But hope is not a strategy.

April 21, 2008

Ok, here is something I’m wrestling with: Can a community be successful with low brand awareness? If you are a big tech brand like Dell or Microsoft, you have no problem launching a community. In fact, many of these organizations have several communities.

April 9, 2008

A growing trend in B2B marketing today is in the realms of “lead nurturing” and “lead scoring.”

April 8, 2008

I can’t get an idea out of my mind that I think is profound for this social media age. Recently I blogged about giving your customers and prospects the opportunity and the permission to start a dialog with your brand. Here’s the important follow-up to that idea – don’t do it with banner ads or other roadblocks!

April 3, 2008

Harvard Business School professor John Quelch once said, “The purpose of marketing… should be geared to changing and reinforcing customer actions rather than customer attitude.” I recently revisited this quote and feel it still holds true. But in the age of social media, it is likely to come under siege.

April 1, 2008

Is the press release dead? Well, not really. But there certainly is a new wave out there – the social media press release, or SMPR, spawned by Todd Defern and the folks at SHIFT communications.

March 24, 2008

Thinking about buying media? Well, it’s no longer just about ad space or traditional print. Today media has to “sing and dance.” It has to have a tight connection to the brand at the same time it distributes the brand with rich experiences online through social media – social networks (like Facebook), videos, podcasts, RSS feeds, and maybe a widget.

March 18, 2008

More and more these days it seems that the raw material for technology firms is less and less the silicon chip (oh so 1990). Instead, the startup has replaced those tiny wafers in the 21st Century.

March 13, 2008

I submit that it is! Please hear me out. When I say Ralph Lauren, Nine Inch Nails, Vineyard Vines, GAP – or even Apple – you get a sense of a very homogeneous type of person. You get a picture of exactly who I mean and the “lifestyle” that brand portrays. When I say Ralph Lauren, it’s like reading the preppie handbook.

March 10, 2008

Brand building and reputation management are two sides of a coin. What brand managers do to build their company’s reputation can come crashing down overnight with the keystroke of an angry blogger.

March 5, 2008

You can run but you can’t hide for long from social networking. At some point or another you will have to sign up for one (or probably more) social networks. But recently some early adopters have said they want out completely – the equivalent of unplugging entirely from social networking. To them I say – Get a “social” life!

March 3, 2008

Nothing focuses the sales force on sales like a quota. But what does a CEO use to focus Marketing? Can Marketing really begin to source leads for Sales? And how can you really optimize the relationship between Sales and Marketing?

February 28, 2008

Having a steady stream of content is more important than ever. Podcasts, blogs, videos, communities – all are very different types of content. And there is no such thing as "sharing" in the content realm.

February 25, 2008

Personally I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. So it was scary to me to read the title of a recent Fast Company article, “Is the Tipping Point Toast?”

February 13, 2008

When marketers use the word “campaign,” it tends to suggest an initiative to get a message out to a targeted group of constituents. It also implies there will be a beginning and, somewhere down the road, an ending. This kind of thinking creates a danger zone for marketers when it comes to social media. Let me explain …

February 11, 2008

How do you enable legions of bloggers if you are a company like Microsoft? What policies and procedures do you put in place? What approval process can handle thousands of blogger posting each day? Who owns the corporate blog, Corporate Communications or Interactive?

February 6, 2008

Everything on the Web today is becoming more distributed. Sales applications, human resource applications, even marketing applications. This works well for us, because it’s easier to implement functionally important applications without knocking on the CIO’s door to ask permission. And it’s great news for these aps from a speed and timing perspective.

February 4, 2008

You can’t pick up a magazine these days and not see the words: Web 2.0. Social networks. Social media. Mobile computing. And the list goes on. But how do you make sense of these emerging trends in marketing?

January 30, 2008

Whether you work in the mailroom or sit in the C-suite in a big company, you most certainly have heard about the media revolution now underway. Social media is here to stay, and knowing what’s happening in the vanguard is important for everyone in the media business today.

January 25, 2008

A strong brand helps to communicate that a company and its offerings are relevant and uniquely able to meet customer needs. Most companies today pour millions into brand-building campaigns to generate that external awareness, which in theory can speed up the sales cycle. This has become the accepted norm, taught to us by the very advertising agencies we hire.

January 22, 2008

A recent issue of Wired magazine highlighted a company creating “alternative reality games,” or ARGs. If you missed the article, go back and read it – it is a must read!

January 17, 2008

Cost per click, cost per acquisition, pay per click, hits, time spent, unique users, unique visitors… the list goes on and on. With a bevy of systems and channels for marketing, how does a marketer make sense of it all? Well, fuggedabout metrics and start building your behavioral targeting systems – ASAP!

January 16, 2008

Do you do traditional customer research? Do you find that the loudest person in the room tends to skew the results? What if you had a research network you could tap into at any point in time to get feedback?

January 9, 2008

Online reputation management, be it a personal reputation or a corporate reputation, has become a growing issue for marketers over the past few years. Groups are popping up devoted to helping you manage, and in some cases clean up, your digital reputation.

January 7, 2008

You can't hop into a cab, step into an elevator or walk down the street without passing someone using a Blackberry, iPhone or other type of mobile device. Business professionals, students, police and even your kids are connected every second of the day.

December 18, 2007

The debate over how to make money with podcasts began shortly after they were rolled out. At first, the natural inclination was to do pre-roll or post-roll ads on podcasts – much like existing media such as TV and radio. But some very successful companies have ignored this strategy. They have developed their own business model that has allowed them to earn money from their passion. Here are 9 ways to make money from podcasting...

December 11, 2007

Imagine an event where all the content is delivered online, either "live" or recorded. This “virtual event” is delivered with an easy-to-use, game-like interface, and it includes features for social networking. (MarketingProfs held such a virtual event last June, and it's poised to announce a second one soon.)

December 5, 2007

PR professionals have been on the front end of all media relationships for a very long time. But the advent of new media poses some challenges for even the best PR professional.

November 29, 2007

Have you ever had a flash of insight in the shower, when you’re brushing your teeth, or even just before you fall asleep? If you want to know more about this serendipity, then you should learn about “strategic intuition.”

November 20, 2007

Is pay per click losing momentum? Is growth in the channel waning? In a recent blog post, Steve Rubel wrote “I am calling a top to this market now. There are five reasons why a pay-per-click advertising recession looms!”

November 14, 2007

In a recent blog post, Jim Nail, chief strategy and marketing officer at Cymfony, wrote about a study that provocatively proclaims “Spending on Conversational Marketing will Outpace Traditional Marketing by 2012”. To find out if that’s even possible, I got together with Jim and Pete Blackshaw, executive vice president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services. Like Jim, Pete is wary of the “conversation” hubbub.

October 31, 2007

Eduardo Conrado and I met up at the MarketingProfs conference at the beginning of October. I really liked his approach to using thought leadership in the positioning of the Enterprise Division of Motorola.

October 24, 2007

Is microblogging the latest fad or the next big thing? Microblogging is just like regular blogging, except it’s limited to 140 characters. The leader in the space is Twitter .

October 18, 2007

Through a classic Google search on her name, marketer Stephanie Fierman found some unwelcome entries.

October 8, 2007

In the new world of work, your reputation is the only accepted currency. Whether you’re looking to move up the corporate ladder at your current organization, find a position at another company, make a major career change, or start your own enterprise, you’ll no longer be hunting for your next position. Instead, opportunities will come to you.

October 2, 2007

As author Chip Heath told the audience at the Marketing Profs conference in Chicago this week, “In a market where it is difficult to be heard – only the sticky messages will break through.” One of the reasons for this is that “common sense” is not sticky enough for people to remember.

October 1, 2007

This morning at the MarketingProfs Conference, Stephanie Miller led a discussion on How to make your B2B email programs scale for higher impact throughout the customer lifecycle.