For those that were looking for this information, check out this guide to Social Media for Sales. . This session, my favorite of the whole week, included two awesome marketers at Salesforce : Tricia Gellman and Rasmus Mencke. Tricia Tricia narrated the event and Rasmus gave a demo of Salesforce for Twitter. In the demo, we learned that while Salesforce for Twitter is part of Support Cloud 2 , it should be an important part of your marketing toolkit. The The application searches Tweets by keywords and then allows the Tweets to be added to campaigns or turned into leads.  . MORE >>

have invited our Panel of B2B Marketing Experts to reflect on 2009 and answer the following question: What was your aha moment in 2009 ? B2B Lead Generation Benchmark Study 2009. Google alerts pull a wide variety of information to you. My 2009 aha moment was when I realized the target market I was aiming for basically ceased to exist, and publishers, content creators and VP of sales and marketing were fast becoming “social media experts” At the same time, implementations of marketing and sales information portals were strong, despite the sluggish economy. MORE >>

Marketers who think this way, and truly work to provide valuable information to their audience, will do well. 2) Relationships, Education, and Nurturing: The trend in data becoming free (prediction 1) will work in parallel with a trend in information, of relevance to buyers, being expected to be free. 8) Information Discovery Measurements: As marketers begin to cede control of the messages they push out, and begin to act more like publishers without assuming control of the distribution, they will begin to look for measurements of information discovery as their key driver. MORE >>

This matters because social media are an alternative gateway to finding Web content: instead of doing a search, I can ask my online community for information or recommendations. Content is still important, of course, but its nature shifts from information that visitors consume to tools like widgets that empower them to share their enthusiasm with others. Summary: marketing has shifted steadily over time from passive to active consumer engagement. Social media is the latest stage in this evolution. Of all that research I mentioned last week , two pairs of facts stood out. MORE >>

Sometimes it’s What’s Missing That Counts I was reading MarketingSherpa’s 2009 Email Marketing Benchmarking Guide looking for useful metrics and tips. common theme in 2009 is that marketers need to prove the value of their marketing spend in even greater detail. Marketers need to go beyond just generating new subscribers but also to ensure that they maximize the investment of these new contacts by ensuring that the profile for this contact is accurate and contains the necessary information for further segmentation. Therefore email opens as an example is not good enough. MORE >>