Marketing Software

Two powerful and parallel trends are underway in marketing. First, marketing is becoming more human. This is the social media revolution. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn groups, etc., are thriving with real dialogues, between real people in organizations and real constituents in the market. This pushes marketing as a whole to be more real — customers aren’t abstract models on a whiteboard, but splendidly diverse individuals with emotions, opinions, and microphones. What used to be a …

Marketing more human, more computerized Continue Reading »

Ever since reading that article in The New York Times about Wall Street-like data analysis being applied to Madison Avenue marketing — what I would call computational marketing, as a nod to computational finance — I’ve been searching for more stories about that idea. It turned into a bit of a nomenclature expedition. Computational Marketing A search for “computational marketing” in Google brings back ~1,000 results, with the first page being dominated by a single …

In search of computational marketing Continue Reading »

This past Sunday in The New York Times, there was an interesting article talking about the elevation of data and number crunching in advertising: Put Ad on Web. Count Clicks. Revise. Written mostly from the perspective of ad agencies, advertising is portrayed as undergoing a seismic shift from Mad Men to a mixed mission with equal parts creatives and finance quants (Mad Money?). “Where the data guys were once an afterthought in a marketing presentation, …

Madison Avenue + Wall Street = Computational Marketing Continue Reading »

I recently saw the movie Jurassic Park again. It’s about an island of cloned dinosaurs, intended as a kind of zoo and amusement park, that spirals out of control during a pre-opening inspection. Spiraling out of control is a euphemism for having ravenous pre-historic creatures devouring everyone in sight. (Remind anyone of their last budget meeting?) It made me think of marketing automation. One of the characters is a mathematician who specializes in chaos theory, …

Marketing automation and Jurassic Park Continue Reading »

It never ceases to amaze me how much there is to learn out there. Okay, there’s obviously an infinite amount of stuff to learn. But even if you carve out just the choicest subset of what’s most interesting and relevant to your passions in work and life, there’s still many lifetimes worth of potential learning in front of each of us. Some people may get depressed or bored with that. I actually get turned on. …

Pursuing computer science for marketing at Harvard Continue Reading »

Enterprise marketing management (EMM) software is, to a marketer-technologist such as myself, the Holy Grail of 21st century marketing. Like enterprise resource planning (ERP) for operations, its aim is to provide a holistic, integrated view of an organization’s entire marketing universe — an overarching umbrella that enables everyone from the distributed front-line up to the CMO to manage and optimize hundreds or thousands of parallel marketing initiatives across all of the firm’s channels. It’s a …

Enterprise marketing management and the vastness of online marketing Continue Reading »

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 »