Content management includes an editor to create outputs for email, Web, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, LinkedIn and other formats. On days when I have nothing else to be cranky about, I sometimes fuss at how business-to-business software vendors hijacked the term “marketing automation” despite its long and relatively honorable history describing systems for consumer marketing. Oracle ’s recent agreement to purchase Eloqua reinflamed that wound, since much of the commentary ignored Oracle’s extensive existing suite of consumer marketing systems. The system was also designed to scale. MORE >>

This isn’t about making it easy to react to comments on Twitter , add friends on Facebook , or research prospects on LinkedIn , which is how most marketing automation vendors are approaching social media. message boards/forums (such as LinkedIn discussions), wikis (such as Wikipedia ), video and photo sharing sites ( Flickr , YouTube ), and some mainstream media blogs ( The New York Times , Wall Street Journa l). Summary: Alterian's purchase of Techrigy marks the first integration of serious social media management with marketing automation. Others are sure to follow. Sparingly. MORE >>

Apparently (and I’m taking Acxiom’s word on this), this data is publicly available from most social networks ( Twitter , Facebook , MySpace , LinkedIn , Plaxo and some more specialized ones) once you know someone’s email address. Summary: Acxiom's new social media marketing tool gathers public data about social media links and uses it to segment email lists. It's a different, and arguably more practical, approach to helping marketers take advantage of social media. Acxiom last week released a new “social media marketing” solution called Relevance-X Social. MORE >>

Web behavior tracking, lead scoring, and social discovery (searching for and importing public data on LinkedIn ) are also available. When I first wrote about ClickDimensions in a February, 2011 post , the concept was intriguing – a marketing automation add-on to Microsoft Dynamics CRM – but the product itself had been available for less than six months and claimed barely 50 clients. Sounds like the idea has legs. The product has matured as well. The most important addition is a flow builder that supports branching campaigns. This is comparable to standard marketing automation products. MORE >>

The messages will be sent under the recipient’s own identity in systems including Facebook, MySpace , Twitter , LinkedIn and Digg. Summary: Treehouse Interactive has been slowly enhancing its marketing automation system with features that appeal to experienced users. Its new clients are larger firms and half are switching from another marketing automation product that they found inadequate. This might foreshadow attrition problems at other vendors. It’s been nearly two years since my last review of Treehouse Interactive. Here's an update. The big news is, well, that there’s no big news. MORE >>