In the mass media world, the relationship barely exists: customers use the product and, hopefully, like it enough to buy it again. This lets them initiate transactions, send messages, and in some cases actually change product configurations such as setting telephone features. Summary: marketing has shifted steadily over time from passive to active consumer engagement. Social media is the latest stage in this evolution. Marketers need to master new skills at each stage; as they do, advertising budgets will shift to take advantage of the new medium's increased effectiveness. MORE >>

It includes nearly 200 data points on 21 products, thumbnail sketches of each vendor’s strengths and weaknesses, and three industry quadrants showing leaders in different market segments. I released the 2012 edition of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST) report today, an event that deserves more hoopla that I’ve given it. The VEST provides by far the most detailed, objective information available on industry vendors. It’s also interactive: you can change the weights assigned to different items and watch the vendors zoom around the quadrant as a result. Myth busted. MORE >>

But many B2C products leave them out. d guess the reason is B2C marketers more often have the capabilities available from other sources, such as a Web content management system or Web analytics product. As you might have guessed from my recent list of B2C marketing automation systems , I’ve recently been spending some time helping consumer marketers to select vendors. This is more a return than a departure: although I’ve written mostly about B2B systems for the past few years, my earlier work was largely in consumer marketing. B2B systems are cheaper. B2C deployments are easier. MORE >>

Since then, the number of independent B2C marketing automation vendors has actually dwindled** as major and not-so-major products were purchased by larger companies to bundle into integrated suites or just use internally. To pick a couple more or less at random, these include a matching engine that selects among hundreds of news articles to find those most relevant to individual subscribers (a sort of dynamic-content-on-steroids that’s important to publishers) and tools to manage product give-aways and rewards for viral sharing (important for retailers). market. MORE >>

Some are now part of public companies, which don’t break out revenue or clients for a particular product. I’ve just finished the latest update of our B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST), available on the raabguide.com Web site. The VEST is our evaluation of industry vendors, aimed primarily at companies choosing a marketing automation system. The VEST contains a great deal of information that provides interesting (to me, at least) insights into industry trends. ll get to the 2013 estimate in a bit. First, I thought I’d explain where the figures come from. MORE >>