Summary: Social media and access for sales people were the two big trends among demand generation vendors last year. All aimed at showing the activities of selected leads, typically by showing overviews and trends, and then letting users drill into details. At least three vendors added or enhanced features to use IP address to identify the company of anonymous Web visitors, and/or to look up prospect names and other data about those companies in directories But enhanced reporting was the most common improvement of all. Could marketers finally be ready to spend on measurement?

But none truly automates social media management, which is what's ultimately needed. Social media is this month’s Trend of the Year. It lets marketers or sales people specify companies and individuals to monitor, and then scans media including social networks (LinkedIn, Facebook), public forums (blogs, wikis, Diggs, Twitter), paid sources (D&B, Zoom, Jigsaw,) and Web pages for information about those entities. Many other vendors let Summary: marketing vendors offer several types of social media applications. But no one knows how best to use it, which has led to a wide range

The question is to reach that senior executive, especially in non-technology fields (where you get less of the geeks and trend setters), how do you reach a C/VP level target? The best lists we've seen for the money are from Jigsaw hands down. You can go the next step too, even with a good Jigsaw list, by doing list validation and cleaning. Social media is all the rage right now, and it should be. It is shaping how people communicate, how companies and people brand themselves, how we educate ourselves and how we grow our network.

This can be integrated with Demandbase and Jigsaw to download the names of contacts at those firms. Eloqua provides interesting graphs of activity trends. This is THE big industry trend right now, so much so that we’re probably due for some clever nay-saying. Summary: Marketo's new Sales Insight ranks prospects for sales people, based on recent Web and email activities. It lets Marketo sell seats to sales departments, which could be more lucrative than selling its core demand generation system.

We checked the companies out with the LeadLander Jigsaw link, and were able to identify 2-3 marketing contacts per company. Seeing a trend in what pages a company visits gives you specifics on their interests The Jigsaw link is very nice, especially if you have an unlimited Jigsaw license, like Green Leads . We thought it might be interesting to augment our thought leader interviews with some demand gen product reviews . We are keeping the reviews independent--actually using the products/services, and then critiquing them.

We checked the companies out with the LeadLander Jigsaw link, and were able to identify 2-3 marketing contacts per company. Seeing a trend in what pages a company visits gives you specifics on their interests You can see what search terms they used to find the site. The Jigsaw link is very nice, especially if you have an unlimited Jigsaw license, like Green Leads . We thought it might be interesting to augment our thought leader interviews with some demand gen product reviews . We are keeping the reviews independant--actually using the products/services, and

The question is to reach that senior executive, especially in non-technology fields (where you get less of the geeks and trend setters), how do you reach a C/VP level target? The best lists we've seen for the money are from Jigsaw hands down. You can go the next step too, even with a good Jigsaw list, by doing list validation and cleaning. Social media is all the rage right now, and it should be. It is shaping how people communicate, how companies and people brand themselves, how we educate ourselves and how we grow our network.

We can also be confident that the feature trends I described in my review of 2009 will continue: better support for social media, greater access for sales departments, and more flexible reporting. Many demand generation systems already make it easy to look up data about prospects from sources like Hoovers or JigSaw and to infer the location and company of anonymous visitors from their IP address. Summary: the demand generation market will continue to grow in 2010, and it may attract some new, big competitors from outside the industry. But the real excitement will be features

Prospect Profiler’s claim to fame, so near as I can tell, is that it also presents summaries and trends of the prospect activity, per this very nice screenshot from Eloqua: I don’t recall the other vendors doing that. That would seem to be the general path that Eloqua and the rest of the industry are headed down, as part of the larger trend towards more closely intertwining marketing and sales activities. Eloqua yesterday announced Eloqua Prospect Profiler , which makes it easier for salespeople to review prospect behaviors that are captured by the demand generation system.