While I will admit that I personally am more active on Twitter than on Facebook, I gave the “like” button a more prominent position at the top of the post to hopefully even the score a little bit. A few months back, with Facebook’s announcement of a “Like” button for the web, I decided to run a quick, highly unscientific experiment to see if B2B content was “likeable”. Put more simply, is B2B content as likely to be shared in the social atmosphere of Facebook as it is to be shared in the more hybrid social/business atmosphere of Twitter. MORE >>

Much like Amazon’s book recommendation systems which looks at “people like us” and sees what they are interested in, Google and Bing may soon be able to accurately detect and show specific conversations that are most likely to be of interest to each person. A while ago, I wrote a piece on the next transition in communication that sparked a number of conversations. The idea explored in that article (and the explanation for the diagram on the right) was that the major search engines will next apply their computing and analysis horsepower to understanding who is talking to whom about what. MORE >>

Whether it is segmentation, personalization, lead scoring, lead routing, or marketing analysis, if you don’t have clean and consistent data, your efforts will be built on the shakiest of foundations. Data as a Foundation for Great Marketing Today’s best marketers are building their creative campaigns, precise segmentation, accurate lead scoring, and relevant personalization on a base of great data quality. Data is key to all your marketing efforts. However, when thinking about your marketing automation efforts, data management can often be an afterthought. MORE >>

Likewise, if certain sales reps are doing a poor job in following up with the leads they are given, this will also show up in the analytics of lead disposition when a MQL to SQO conversion ratio is calculated for each sales person. One of the most controversial and challenging areas of any revenue engine is the hand-off process from marketing to sales. It is this transition that bears the brunt of all the inter-organizational process differences, motivation differences, and politics. Quality, however, is often a more important indicator of eventual success. MORE >>

First, an understanding of digital body language allows us to determine where in their buying process each person is. Another key view of your outbound communications would show your email frequency – how many times you are communicating to each person in your database – to indicate if you are having any over or under-communication challenges. The old adage of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is as true in marketing as in any other discipline, but in marketing there is often a challenge of defining what one wants to measure. Response, is also critical to measure. MORE >>