We classify industry vendors into four groups: - micro business vendors (Infusionsoft and OfficeAutoPilot) - HubSpot (a category of its own because it’s not quite standard marketing automation and is big enough to treat separately) - enterprise vendors (Neolane, Aprimo, Silverpop, and Oracle) - core B2B marketing automation (everybody else: Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Genius, Act-On, et, al.) year ago, the three largest core vendors were Eloqua, Marketo, and Genius, and Act-On was an also-ran. For those of us who don’t get out much, that’s downright exciting. Myth busted. MORE >>

Among B2B vendors, Eloqua is the poster child for this approach. The marketing automation industry continues to grow quickly, with many vendors announcing their client bases have more than doubled in 2011. But there’s also a growing realization that many marketing automation systems are used for only simple tasks – often no more than email, landing pages, and CRM integration. For example, LoopFuse found that nearly twice as many used email and web landing pages as lead scoring. Surveys, like this one from IBM , show many obstacles to successful deployment. ease of use. automation. MORE >>

Summary: Eloqua10 provides much-needed update to Eloqua's user interface and a new reporting infrastructure for “revenue performance management”. Eloqua is slated to officially release its long-promised Eloqua10 system on November 21. Previous versions of Eloqua were very powerful but notoriously difficult to learn and use. One downside of the change is that some assets built in previous Eloqua editions will need to be modified, as will some reports. Unfortunately, Eloqua hasn’t released the actual reports that will be provided for RPM. MORE >>

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study ). But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems. recently took a quick tour of vendor sites to see what social features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the table below. MORE >>

Influitive founder Mark Organ was co-founder of marketing automation pioneer Eloqua. Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities ( Jive , Lithium ), monitoring conversations (Radian6 , Trackur ) and running promotions ( CrowdFactory , Nextbee ). Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data. See my December 8 post for details.) MORE >>