Paid, owned and earned media. Those three words, often shortened to “POE,” have bounced around for years. And, like the contemplations of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, they have taken on new meaning with the collision of traditional and digital marketing strategies. In 2009 Forrester issued a report that outlined the world of interactive marketers in the digital space. Since then the volume of “conversation” has increased dramatically over the entire social landscape — to the tune of BILLIONS of posts each year. It’s about the death of traditional marketing. MORE >>

Salesforce’s purchase of radian6 raises fascinating, hard questions, way beyond just whether it’s the beginning of the “marketing cloud&#. It represents a deep existential question about whether marketing makes sense as a separate category from sales/services at all and whether the “marketing automation&# category is toast. Marc benioff has predicted the “end of email&# , which may account for why he hasn’t bought an email based marketing company.  And Facebook is well on it’s way to undermining the email paradigm.  movement. Tweet This! Digg this! MORE >>

By Sidneyeve Matrix , Contributing {grow} Columnist. We know that people prefer to connect with other people, not brands. Not too long ago, Mark wrote about how one of the biggest mistakes you can make in online branding is using a logo instead of a headshot photo in your Twitter profile. Coming out from behind your logo is a big step toward humanizing your brand, so too is using humor to engage, and giving your network a peek behind the curtain of your official brand message. Lifecasting. Storytelling. But if you’re like me, stories don’t just appear on cue when I most need them. MORE >>

BtoB Magazine announced their 2011 Social Media Marketing Winners and they missed a huge opportunity to show off these examples of B2B social media. B2B marketers are looking for good examples of social media, as our search traffic has shown us, and while these selections from submitted entries include detailed explanations of why they were chosen, as well as results of the campaigns, they don’t include links, screen shots or embedded videos. Examples of online successes really should include images and links so marketers can see what was done and learn from the campaigns. Read more. MORE >>

The debate regarding the value of social media to marketing is ongoing. On the one side we have the evangelists who preach that you just have to get in there and not worry about details like ROI. On the other, we have traditional marketers who are becoming more vocal in their demands for some kind of measurability. Brand marketing Research Social media marketing brand advocates brand loyalty Facebook social marketing social media ROI MORE >>