Steve Rubel has a positive post titled The Collaboration Economy that encourages marketers to face the current economic downturn as an opportunity to become more efficient, open, and collaborative. Those drivers have the potential to usher in a new generation of marketing technology, especially geared towards optimizing the communication and coordination between agencies and in-house teams. Rubel talks about using wikis, internal blogs, and microblogs — which I agree are a great start — to …

Marketing technology in a downturn Continue Reading »

At the risk of being accused of falling off the Cluetrain, I find myself increasingly wondering how much of a need there is in the world for social media management as a discipline and social media management software as a tool? I know, social marketing (technically, social media marketing) is all about genuine, authentic, transparent, distributed conversations. And somehow the notion of explicitly managing that process — especially using software to systematize or optimize it …

Social media management software Continue Reading »

Exponential growth in marketing is not just a colloquial way of saying, “wow, there’s an awful lot going on in marketing these days”. That’s true, of course, but I’m specifically fascinated by — and concerned about — actual mathematical exponential growth, where something doubles, doubles again, doubles again, and so on. Let me start with the legend of the chessboard, as adapted from Wikipedia: When the creator of the game of chess showed his invention …

Exponentials in marketing: watch out! Continue Reading »

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud. If you haven’t read The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company’s IT center — is becoming real. Fast. Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where …

Marketing in the cloud Continue Reading »