Marketing Software

Popped into a session hosted by MITX yesterday morning, What Can Marketing Automation Do for You? The panelists were Jim Williams of Eloqua, Christopher O’Donnell of Hubspot, and Bill Stone of RenaissanceOPTI. Given my interview with Steven Woods last week on marketing automation as a solution to the explosion of marketing touchpoints — as well as Eric Wittlake’s thoughtful commentary, When Did Automated Dialogue Trump Real Conversation? — I was eager to hear other perspectives. …

What can marketing automation do for you? #MITX Continue Reading »

There’s a fascinating debate raging in the DigitalNext section of Ad Age that captures some of the current “culture wars” on Madison Avenue between marketers (“mad men”) and technologists (“math men”). A few weeks ago, Kendall Allen wrote a piece titled: The Dangers Of Online Advertising’s “Math State” that begins with this shot across the bow: Ever notice that in online advertising no one talks about the message? It’s all about the mechanics, how an …

Is marketing becoming a math state? Is that good? Continue Reading »

This weekend, I caught up on my reading, including a Forrester report on Marketing Technology Adoption 2011 that was sponsored by Unica/IBM. (You should be able to find a copy on Unica’s Interactive Marketing Journey microsite.) There are a number of interesting observations in the report, driven from a survey of 137 customer intelligence professionals from around the world. (By the way, if you want to read more about this emerging field in marketing, here’s …

Carpe marketing technology — seize the platform, boys Continue Reading »

Earlier this month, I attended eMetrics and Conversion Conference in San Francisco, part of a “data-driven business week” federation of related events. One of the highlights was a keynote by Tom Davenport — author of the bestseller Competing on Analytics — titled “The New Quantitative Era.” Tom started with the observation that analytics teams are blossoming like flowers in Springtime throughout organizations. Web analytics, marketing analytics, HR analytics, supply chain analytics, predictive analytics, even actuarial …

Analytics: it’s not about the math Continue Reading »

Making the rounds on Twitter is a hilarious “infographic” by smarter.org and byJess.net, Why Apples Are Better Than Oranges, satirizing half a dozen different ways in which data, statistics, and visualization can be — and often are — thoroughly abused. As the soft art of marketing has been juxtaposed with the mathematical precision of analytics, fascinating hybrids of evidence and imagination have proliferated — often wrapped in very pretty illustrations. Want to keep yourself and …

If it’s in an infographic, it must be true Continue Reading »

Wow. Yesterday, I saw a demo of Tableau, a software package for doing “visual analysis” of databases and other raw datasets. I was amazed. That is one of the coolest pieces of software I have ever seen. In a nutshell, Tableau makes it incredibly easy to visualize the patterns and relationships in just about any dataset you point it at. These visualizations are largely driven by drag-and-drop and let you quickly explore and analyze data …

Visualizing marketing analytics with Tableau Continue Reading »

Later this week, I’ll be publishing a marketing technologist interview with Cleve Gibbon, the CTO of Cognifide. As a sneak preview for that, I’d like to share with you Cleve’s presentation from last week at the Adobe Partner Community Day in Barcelona. Cleve’s presentation — building a marketing technology platform for engaging global brands — offers some excellent insights into a “platform” view of marketing technology, especially around going from content management to customer experience …

Thinking of marketing technology as a platform Continue Reading »

If I had a litmus test for marketing technologists, it would be this: do you use Firebug? Firebug — in case you don’t know — is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that gives you a wealth of tools for peeking at, poking into, and debugging HTML, CSS, Javascript, and the underlying network activity going on in your web browser. If you’re a web developer, this is almost certainly already in your toolbox. But …

A marketing technologist’s Swiss Army knife Continue Reading »

The term “marketing technologist” is sometimes broadly interpreted as anyone who wields technology in the marketing domain. However, since everyone in marketing should be doing that to some degree these days, it makes sense to distinguish what a marketing technologist does above and beyond that. I’ve drafted a set of skills and knowledge that I propose delineate a marketing technologist: In the inner ring are eight areas of expertise that I think every marketing technologist …

8 things every marketing technologist should know Continue Reading »

The wonderful marketing folks at Eloqua, in collaboration with the amazingly creative team at JESS3, just released a gorgeous new infographic of blogs influencing the modern marketing space called The Blog Tree. It’s awesome. And I’m not just gushing because I’m on it. I’m gushing because I’m on it along with many of the blogs that I love and admire most. Seriously, this is a great list, beautifully visualized. Thanks, Eloqua and JESS3! P.S. As …

Marketing technology grows on a tree Continue Reading »