BTW 2: I have not included vendor weblogs: I will put those in a separate post. He covers lots of Marketing Automation vendors, he offers insights into usability of demand generation systems and covers various other topics. A couple of people recently asked me which blogs I’m frequently reading. So here’s the list. Please send me your favorite blogs, because there must be lots of great Marketing Automation blogs that I haven’t found yet! But regardless of the terminology, these are the blogs that I enjoy most :- ). Jame Ervin ’s @Work blog (@ jameane ). MORE >>

Marketing Automation vendors have done very little to automate Inbound Marketing activities. Lately, most vendors have added features to monitor anonymous traffic your site (the most recent announcements: Pardot , Marketo , Eloqua ). There are software vendors that focus only on Inbound Marketing or SEO automation. Hubspot - an early Inbound Marketing evangelist - is one of them, and so are Enquisite , Raven and SEOMoz (probably I’m forgetting at least a dozen vendors, so feel free to leave a comment). Message for Marketing Automation Vendors. MORE >>

Although I mentioned only email campaigns before, users can in fact import lists and then execute email, fax and voice broadcast from within Infusionsoft, or extract lists for direct mail, call center or other external vendors. This differs from other demand generation vendors, who nearly always host those pages themselves. Note: in July 2009, Infusionsoft dropped its implementation fees. Two economists are walking on the street. One looks down and sees a $100 bill. He points it out to the other, who says, “It must be counterfeit. At least it’s worth a closer look. MORE >>

Email marketing that integrates with Salesforce.com is provided by many vendors, like VerticalResponse , Boomerang , ExactTarget , Genius , Lyris and more. There are also some relatively affordable registration form vendors, like FormAssembly and OnDialog. Basic lead scoring features are built into Salesforce.com, and data quality tools are available from vendors like Ringlead , CRM Fusion and Datatrim. If you use a basic form vendor, you have to manually map the fields, and put the form on a landing page yourself. Smart or foolish? Background. What Is Your Take? MORE >>

Other vendors in this space apparently use more proprietary approaches. quick bit of poking around was enough to scare me off: there are many vendors in the space and it is a highly technical topic. The vendor is working on strategies to solve this problem, probably by retaining the overflow data and processing it later. In any case, the vendor is aiming to support one million records per second. I spoke earlier this week with SQLStream , which offers software to execute queries against data streams such as stock market prices, Web logs and credit card transactions. MORE >>