FTL: Do b-to-b organizations need to start taking steps to fully integrate social media into the system in terms of budget and new skill sets? Fitzgerald: Yes, but every business is going to have to make a determination as to how big that budget should be and any budget that they allocate to [social media] they should be doing it with a focus on the ROI. On average, b-to-b companies are still at the early stages of determining which social-media tools they’re going to standardize around. Dave Fitzgerald, executive VP, Brainshark. Buckle up. Subscribe to RSS. MORE >>

Guest Blog | Simon Phillips Every so often (usually in better economic times) businesses look at the cost of acquiring new business versus the cost of retaining existing business. When this analysis is carried out, businesses usually find that it costs anywhere from four to seven times less to retain business than to bring on [.]. MORE >>

In what might raise a few eyebrows, top managers check their personal e-mail (90%) slightly more often than their corporate e-mail (89%), according to a recent study. That’s That’s on top of regularly checking Facebook (55%), Twitter (40%) and blogs (23%). The study, which was conducted by People-OnTheGo, took the pulse of 1000 business professionals to [.]. MORE >>

Data Management Sales & Marketing Social Media Marketing Beagle Research BtoB BtoB's Media Business CRM data-as-a-service Denis Pombriant RPMDespite becoming the norm in the last few years, marketing automation still hasn’t provided the returns b2b companies thought they had bargained for. The promise of automation still seems to elude us,” said Denis Pombriant founder and principal analyst at Beagle Research. The problem may be velocity. Many of the sales and marketing tools that [.]. MORE >>

There seems to be a growing consensus that unless senior managers pick up their sales and marketing VPs by the lapels and tell them to aggressively pursue a social-marketing strategy that can tie back to goals and objectives, companies will continue to experiment in social media without any solid ROI. More than one-third of b-to-b marketers said there was low executive interest in social media in their company, compared with 9% of b-to-c marketers who said the same, according to a recent survey from digital marketing agency White Horse (per eMarketer ). Subscribe to RSS. MORE >>