How’s this for a definition of B2B marketing automation? The use of technology to generate, nurture, score and qualify leads, and drive sales, using customized, multi-touch marketing communications tailored for each contact’s profile, level of interest, behavior or place in the buying process. Unfortunately it’s a mouthful, isn’t it? What do you think? Do you have a better definition of marketing automation? Do you see other benefits that marketing automation delivers? MORE >>

Summary: some published examples of "hard" ROI from social media. As part of the preparation for next Tuesday’s Webinar with 1to1 Media and Neolane (register here ), I poked around for some concrete examples of ROI from social media. Here’s what I found. Socialnomics blog by Erik Qualman offers a dynamic video with 33 “salient examples and data points” about social media ROI. The company expected this to yield at least one sale which would cover the entire annual cost of the program. million in tech spending by helping users share ideas on how to solve their problems more cheaply. MORE >>

A recent research study by IBM indicates that micro-blogging sites like Twitter can be a powerful internal workplace communications tool. The study said that despite the inherent simplicity, microblogs are evolving into a richly-nuanced medium for maintaining awareness, building relationships, and finding and sharing valuable information from internal and external sources. The study analyzed more than 5,000 microblog posts from a group of IBM employees who used both a proprietary internal tool to post and Twitter to post externally. BlueTwit was also used for social purposes. Why or why not? MORE >>

Tony Zambito is the founder, president and CEO of Goal Centric , a strategy consulting organization with a focus in buyer insight and buyer persona development. Tony and his partner, Angela Quail, originated the development of buyer personas in 2002 based on their work with Alan Cooper, who is largely credited with the origins of user personas for the design of digital products. Here Tony and I discuss the concept of and misperceptions about buyer personas, and what it takes to extract full value from them. What prompted you to develop the buyer persona methodology? to 2.0. " A. MORE >>

Earlier this month, after writing his final column for Inc. magazine, Joel Spolsky blogged about his experience in the magazine world. His feelings, clearly, were mixed: “Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words. look back on those Inc. columns and they literally don’t feel like mine. His problem is that his voice was changed. MORE >>