Image via CrunchBase. am a retired IBM Distinguished Engineer. My wife says that makes me an Extinguished Engineer.) So, you might guess that I am fairly comfortable with the technical side of social media, but there’s one thing I don’t like, which is that technical people like to make up new fancy words to describe what they make, even if no one knows what they mean. One of my biggest pet peeves is in Web Analytics, where we’ve got names for page views, impressions, e-mail opens, and who knows what else, when they all answer the question, “Did someone see what I did?” MORE >>

Businesses use enterprise data and metrics to manage business performance and drive efficiencies across the organization. But when it comes to marketing, there has always been a bit of the “black box” effect. Marketing is the one major budget item that traditionally has been the hardest to understand and measure from a traditional business performance standpoint. Quarterly and annual reviews provide some idea of how the money is being spent, and frequency, reach, target rating points, media impressions and clip counting are among the longstanding measures of marketing effectiveness. MORE >>

Foursquare reached out to their users by making April 16 4sqDay. In this day, companies are encouraged to offer extra promotions to people who visit their businesses. Foursquare gets to thank their users and companies get extra Foursquare customers who are looking to cash in on extra deals. It’s a textbook example of using social media marketing to bridge the online and offline worlds. In this Future of Engagement episode, host Murray Newlands analyzes 4sqDay from a social networking perspective and has a few tips for brands looking to promote themselves on social networks. MORE >>

Content is king. As you’ve no doubt read in many places before, content is one of the core elements of B2B social media marketing success. Content is also crucial for lead nurturing , SEO and other online marketing initiatives. But producing content is expensive. Producing great content is even more expensive. What brands have done it well—and what can you learn from them? How can you recycle / re-use / re-purpose content to stretch your investment? What are the current best practices in content creation? What forms of content are most popular with buyers? So why not give it to them?” MORE >>

What makes brands vital, and what makes consumers associate particular brands with innovation? This question recently struck me as I read Roobini Aruleswaran’s great piece about Bose. She really captures what makes Bose a great brand in her first few paragraphs, as she retells her first encounter with their audio products, but her deep look into the company’s drivers of innovation is worth a peek. Now, marketers don’t have a ton of control over R&D (although that’s changing in some companies). Or do you consistently push the envelope by creating new categories? MORE >>