In the last 11 months, there have been tons of updates to our favorite social networks, several of which were extremely relevant for marketers and business owners. Many of them were just little tweaks, but a lot -- 16 in our estimation -- had a huge impact on marketers' jobs. The latter are the ones we want to highlight; not just to show how much can change in a year, but to emphasize how critical it is to remain agile as an inbound marketer so you can keep up with all these updates. Here are the biggest social media updates of 2012, and why they were so darn important to marketers. MORE >>

We’ve said it before: B2B buyer behavior is changing and it’s high time that B2B suppliers follow suit. In this interview with Brian Walker, former Vice President with research giant Forrester, now Senior Vice President of Strategy at commerce software vendor Hybris , we discuss the changing face of B2B buyer behavior and what B2B companies need to do to stay ahead. The setting is freshly released research from Hybris looking in to online buyer behavior and the current state of online retail in B2B. But how frightened should B2B suppliers really be? There is no need to be caught flat-footed.” . MORE >>

by Jason Miller To the folks out there who say that Facebook is not an effective lead generation tool for B2B, I will tell them that they need a new strategy. Facebook boasts the largest user base of any social network and it’s essential that you have a presence here or your business will simply be missing opportunities. Over the past few months I have been experimenting with different types of ads, new content, eye catching visuals, and tracking my success using Marketo and Facebook insights. As you can see, the cost went up along with cost per target. What’s the takeaway here? Hell Yes! MORE >>

We hope you’ll read and share this. It’s a unique occasion when we get to step back from the day-to-day of supporting our members’ decisions and reflect on where we believe the world of sales is headed. Across 2012, the Sales Executive Council had thousands of interactions with sales executives around the globe, held dozens of conferences and summits, and analyzed hundreds of thousands data points. As the world’s preeminent sales excellence research organization, we’d love to give our readers a sense of what we’re exploring and thinking about based on our interactions from 2012. MORE >>

A few weeks ago I went through the painstaking process of trying to find a decent list of IT contacts in the public sector. Of course I've been down this road a million times and typically I'll go the standard route and attempt to work through the traditional list vendors out there, but I only ended up netting about 500 total names. Then I went to a company that specialized in public service, but they could only provide nothing more than the chief of police and main number to call and no email. Plus they could only provide me the data on cd-rom, yikes! Bad move. I'll pass. Once again I passed. MORE >>