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. This accounts for most of the work and most of the cost. 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. Like any traveler, I’ve returned home with some new perspectives. Here are some observations - consumer marketers have to build databases; B2B marketers don’t. But many B2C products leave them out. MORE >>

The importance of their work is obvious enough that budgets and senior management support are generally available. Mixed marketers, working in traditional channels, still struggle with budgets, metrics, and senior management. 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. Still, preparing the slides gave me a chance to scan the surveys in my archives, which was entertaining in its own little way. But I didn’t look carefully at how they compare. MORE >>

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study ). But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems. recently took a quick tour of vendor sites to see what social features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the table below. MORE >>

What else were vendors working on last year? Last week's post took a horse race approach to data from our newly available B2B Marketing Automation Vendor Selection Tool (VEST): who’s ahead, who’s behind, and who is coming on strong. But that’s more important to industry insiders than the marketers who actually use these systems. Real marketers care about what the systems can do. The VEST survey, covering nearly 200 items per vendor, answers that question in glorious detail. You need to examine the report itself to see answers for individual products. Let’s start with the basics. MORE >>

Marketing automation vendors have mostly worked on making it easy to post and share messages and to capture social data. Marketers recognize the potential reach of social media, but are rightly frightened that they can’t control the message. Most social marketing applications sidestep the issue by focusing on creating communities ( Jive , Lithium ), monitoring conversations (Radian6 , Trackur ) and running promotions ( CrowdFactory , Nextbee ). See my December 8 post for details.) Influitive tackles the control issue head on. Advocates can accumulate points and exchange them for rewards. MORE >>