Recently I presented on digital marketing strategy to a group of venture backed companies and was surprised by one data point I uncovered in preparation. Compared to current growth rates across various marketing channels, email is the only one demonstrating growth. In a recent US Email Marketing Forecast Forrester Research predicts that double digit growth [...]

A lot of marketing VPs in Silicon Valley these days are looking for new ways to grow their brand and generate demand, but there is very little space in their budget for new programs. For them, social marketing holds a lot of promise, but at the same time it’s a big unknown and many companies [...]

A lot has been written about social media as a conversation tool, but from my perspective there still seems to be a great deal of misconceptions about what this means. This came across in a case study I saw at a marketing roundtable discussion in Palo Alto, CA, a few weeks ago.
The context of this [...]

Social media gives marketing the ability to talk to people with whom they might not ordinarily have a chance interact.

The social Web is second only to the product ownership experience in its ability to influence opinions about a brand, and it’s no place for handshaking experts. It provides marketers a valuable opportunity to personalize their brand in ways not possible through traditional public relations or corporate marketing. So get personal and productive, be attractive and interesting, and develop multiple points of affinity between your target customers and your brand via the social Web.

The average tenure of a CMO today is 28 months. That’s right — just over two years according to a report issued by Spencer Stuart, and described here by Frank Reed in a recent WebProNews post. While this is up slightly from last year, it still makes the CMO job one of the shortest-tenured roles [...]

On his Influential Marketing blog Rohit Bhargava caught my attention this morning with a great title for his entry — Customer Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter.  Rohit makes the point that particularly in commodity markets, companies would do well in their efforts to compete for business by cultivating satisfied customers, building loyalty, and then developing advocates who [...]

There was a subtle, but tell tale shift in the wind in Silicon Valley last week. It came via a relatively innocuous promise imbedded in the Service Cloud announcement from Salesforce.com. 
First reported by Anthony Ha of VentureBeat, Service Cloud christened “the era of cloud computing” and came with some fanfare – a stable of pre-briefed [...]