social marketing (blogs, social media monitoring, social media posting, community management, advocate management) Webinars (it seems odd to make these their own category but they’re still separate systems and don’t easily fit with Web site management or social marketing) marketing automation (direct mail, email, mobile, landing pages, web behavior, nurture campaigns, lead scoring, reporting; includes batch, trigger, and event-driven campaigns and real-time interactions) media buying (for conventional media: TV, radio, newspaper, magazine, outdoor, etc.) This is by far the broadest list. MORE >>

Neolane – provides multi-channel campaign management, realtime interactions, and marketing resource management. Entiera – a hosted system that offers outbound campaigns and interaction management. Provides outbound campaigns and real time interaction management as well as advanced analytics. The world clearly has more B2B marketing automation vendors than it needs – my master list of demand generation products includes two dozen. By contrast, mid-tier consumer marketers often have a hard time finding good options. Decision Software Inc. Only available as a service. MORE >>

The crown jewel turned out to be RightPoint, a pioneering real-time interaction manager since renamed Interaction Advisor. This is already a contrast to B2B marketing automation, where the database is part of the system and structures are largely limited to contacts, accounts, and marketing interactions. The model also contains segments (sets of customers or prospects), events (campaign triggers, which can be based on time, channel, behavior, queries, or feeds from external Web services), and packages (sets of campaigns used for Interaction Advisor). Neat trick. MORE >>

But this will soon be followed by more profound adjustments for touch screens, shorter view times, QR codes, special-purpose apps, gamification, social interactions, location awareness, and other mobile-specific possibilities. As I wrote yesterday, no one knows exactly what we’ll want from our marketing automation systems in the future. But it's still worth taking a guess at what looks likely. Here are some trends I expect will be important. Social Media. The first wave of marketing automation features for social media is now several years old. The second wave is just starting. Mobile. MORE >>

Probably the item that attracted the most advance attention is an iPhone version that supports interactive analysis; this also works for other Java Mobile clients like Blackberry. QlikTech released version 9 of its QlikView business intelligence software today. The product has been in public beta for several months, so the general features are well known to people who care about such things. It's cool (or ‘qool’, if you must) but not so important in the grand scheme of things. Of course, they still have to purchase a QlikView license.) API for real-time updates of in-memory data. MORE >>