One of the most valuable areas to gain an understanding of is the current state of how your prospects actively discover your company and your solutions. The richness of insights that can be gained with a deep understanding of how buyers are using search is nearly without parallel. Each insight allows you to guide investments in a way that maximizes their effectiveness in driving your revenue performance. Basics of Discovery The first area to look at is the set of 10 or 12 “main terms” that buyers most commonly associate with your solution category or industry. Are you Being Discovered? MORE >>

A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter. While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. MORE >>

Content has long been a key driver of success for great B2B marketers in today's world. That's nothing new, and we've talked about related topics such as the content gap and the need to get more subject matter experts involved. However, one challenge that remains is how to draw attention to your content. Earning attention is certainly the best way, by steadily creating great content, winning over the hearts and minds of a loyal following, and having that loyal following share your message with still more audience members. That's a great way to build an audience, but it is NOT a fast way. MORE >>

A while ago, I wrote a piece on the next transition in communication that sparked a number of conversations. The idea explored in that article (and the explanation for the diagram on the right) was that the major search engines will next apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what. As they do that, it may become possible to have passive discovery of interesting conversations guided by the algorithms of Google and Bing and their analysis of vast amounts of social media data. MORE >>

Last week I had the pleasure of wandering the floor at Dreamforce, Salesforce.com ’s annual conference. As the SaaS conference of the year, it’s a great time to get a pulse on how everyone is thinking about the next few years. This year, I spent a lot of time talking with the exhibiting ISVs, both large and small, and as I did so, I found a few key themes that resonated. At Eloqua, we’ve been talking about Revenue Performance Management for a while now, and it was good to see that many of the themes that are driving that are common across other ISVs in the ecosystem. MORE >>