WhitepapersourceTM published an interesting report this month on how marketers are using social media. They interviewed 900 marketing professionals to better understand the social media marketing industry. A few key stats which came to light include:

81% of all marketers indicated the number-one advantage to social marketing is generating exposure for the business, followed by increasing traffic [...]

In a Nielsen Online blog published last week, Twitter clocked in at a mind boggling 1,382% year-over-year growth rate. It’s seemingly everywhere and quickly becoming part of our daily culture. We read about it online, in newspapers, and it’s talked about on television. Kindergartner to senior citizen, by the end of 2008, we’d all heard of Twitter.
Now, [...]

Geva Perry and James Urquhart, the co hosts of the Overcast podcast, have begun an interesting discussion on the end of million dollar Enterprise sales except for the mega-vendors (IBM, HP, Oracle, SAP… et al). The combination of web  downloadable or SaaS based ’try and buy’  software delivery models, subscription based pricing, the rise of open source and, lately, the [...]

I attended the Cloud Computing Interoperability Workshop in Arlington, VA this week. This was put together by Bob Marcus under the auspices of OMG (Object Management Group). The goal was to bring together the different standard bodies and key commercial vendor participants to jump-start a common approach to the building of cloud standards.
The diversity of the speakers [...]

BtoB magazine published an article last week on IDC’s imminent release of their 2009 Tech Marketing Barometer report. IDC gathered the data based on online, phone and in-person interviews with senior marketers at 44 global technology companies that represented more than $7.5B of annual marketing spend. Overall the predictions are sobering though a number of bright spots exist in [...]

This post is all about conversion. We’ll assume you’re already getting traffic to your website through any number of mechanisms including SEO (organic & paid), advertising, media links, WOM (word-of-mouth),  partner websites, etc.
First question: are enough of your website visitors converting (doing what you intend them to do by taking some action)? If not, what [...]

In a recent December 2008 study by B2B marketing research firm Marketing Sherpa, Email marketing to the in-house list ranks 2nd right after pay-per-click search ads in terms of lead generation ROI. While open and click through rates have been dropping slightly year over year (not surprising given the rising volume of email competing for attention), the gap compared [...]

In a game-changing article in the the Harvard Business Review, Philip Lay, Todd Hewlin and Geoffrey Moore offer a new ’provocation-based’ approach to make your sales pitch a ‘must-have’ instead of a ‘nice-to-have’. The authors cite the example of Sybase and the process they went through to elevate their sales message from one that focuses on the benefits of using a database to solve customer perceived [...]

As Cloud-based delivery models start to make their presence felt, a host of monitoring and management players are making their moves. The Cloud computing industry cannot realize it’s potential, without this important piece of the puzzle taken care of. After all, enterprise customers need the comfort and visibility into their applications and business services on the [...]

Cloud Computing has taken center stage in 2008 as one of the promising new technologies that will drive the next level of innovation in enterprise datacenters and infrastructure outsourcing. In 2008 we saw many players inlcuding the Internet heavyweights – Google (Apps), Amazon (EC2 and S3) and SalesForce (Force.com); and the traditional infrastructure players -  IBM (Blue Cloud), [...]