I recently gave a Web presentation comprised almost entirely of slides from different surveys. This was a bit of an experiment and, sad to say, it didn’t seem terribly successful. did weave the slides into a nice little story line – marketers know they need better technology, poor data is the root of their problem, and we know how to solve this – but even that wasn’t enough. Still, preparing the slides gave me a chance to scan the surveys in my archives, which was entertaining in its own little way. Many surveys ask similar questions, which gave me some choices during my preparation. MORE >>

But before presenting it, let's look at some other opinions. The original report presented these separately but I’ve combined them in a bubble chart: This is worth some exploration. This started as a post about Empathy Logic , a company that merges data from marketing automation, CRM, Web tracking, order processing, social monitoring, and other systems; lets marketers segment and select from this more complete set of data; and sends the resulting lists back to message delivery systems such as email and Web sites. So, yes, there’s a need for a company like Empathy Logic. MORE >>

In fact, Curata provides a complete system to not just locate the right content but also to organize and present it to the marketer’s target audience. It then presents them for manual review before being posted to a Curata Web site, which automatically adds them to appropriate indexes for future reference. Currently the system presents the articles in the sequence they are found, without identifying redundancies or even removing exact duplicates. Here’s an irony for you: the world is awash with content, but marketers struggle to find enough of it. MORE >>

It also needs ways to present the information so marketers can easily understand it. 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. These included making it easier to share emails and Web pages, tracking shares through embedded URLs, and monitoring social media conversations. The second wave is just starting. Video. MORE >>

This information is presented in a variety of standard reports, although, perplexingly, I couldn’t find one that related the cost of a campaign to the revenue from its respondents. Two economists are walking on the street. One looks down and sees a $100 bill. He points it out to the other, who says, “It must be counterfeit. If that were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up.” The point of the story, other than showing why economists are poor comedians, is that the market is not always perfectly efficient. At least it’s worth a closer look. User rights (i.e., MORE >>