B y  Srinivas  Rao, Contributing {grow} Columnist. On two separate occasions and in two different ways  I’ve been discouraged from the pursuit of mass attention.  The irony is that it came from people who many of us consider wildly popular. Mass attention is almost unattainable and it’s not clear that you want it. – Seth Godin. There’s no value to working hard on being really popular. – Chris Brogan. Despite knowing this, the following question comes up over and over again. How do I get more traffic. How do I grow my audience? They got all the attention. They care. MORE >>

Photo credit: Wikipedia. The last 20 years have witnessed many success stories over the net: sites such as Yahoo!, Altavista, Geocities, AOL, Google, Amazon, WordPress, eBay, Hotmail, Wikipedia, MySpace, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Pinterest all had their days of glory. Some are still around, others fell into obsolescence, but each one of them changed the way users perceived and used the Internet. Vendors of enterprise software naturally followed suit and came up with a number of corporate solutions to mimic the capabilities of those popular online services. MORE >>

In this series, I am trying to uncover insights into the  Future of Marketing. To To help guide our path, to drive our plans and to help us all to start dreaming BIG! You’ve already seen my own  marketing predictions  on the  future of marketing. But now I want to continue to bring in ideas from the greatest minds, the thought leaders and the social business innovators in our industry. We have already heard Mark Schaefer discuss the future of search. And SAP’s Marcus Starke predicts marketing will start to be run more like a business. Tell us: who is Ann Handley ? Paperback 2012. MORE >>

We are warned. Gartner predicts 80% of social business efforts will not achieve intended benefits through 2015. There is a problem with that prediction and the perception it creates. In practice, social business is a huge Babylonian confusion. In order to know how to succeed, it’s essential to speak a common – business – language and to ask ourselves a few simple questions to start with. The lack of speaking a common language within the enterprise, let alone within the global context, is always a reason for failure. What benefits do we intend to achieve? No one cares. MORE >>

Marketers, encouraged by self-proclaimed gurus, experts and thought leaders, are increasingly misusing and abusing research and statistics when developing their marketing approach. Yes, market and audience research can be incredibly valuable. But when it is misused, even the best information can lead you in the wrong direction. Here are four mistakes marketers make when using market research data. Forgetting the Trend. Instead of focusing on the value, look to see if it is increasing or decreasing and how quickly is it changing. Key questions: Are you ready for the where the trend is going? MORE >>