Marketing Software

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 »

While reading MapMyFollowers is a Great Twitter Data Visualization on ReadWriteWeb this morning, I saw this ad for a new graduate program offered by Columbia University: I know, the fact that someone paid attention to an ad is almost newsworthy unto itself these days. But what a fascinating program! I’ve remarked before that journalism is one of the few professions that’s suffering more disruption than marketing (for many of the same reasons). Here’s an attempt …

Is this the future of marketing education? Continue Reading »

Thanks to The New York Times article yesterday — What Did Microsoft and Adobe Chiefs Talk About? — there are a lot of rumors flying about a potential merger between the two. Although the hubbub surrounding this possibility is mostly about (1) the two teaming up to compete with Apple, particularly in the mobile space, and (2) the potential synergies between thousands of Microsoft .NET developers and thousands of Adobe Creative Suite users, I’m more …

If Microsoft acquires Adobe for online marketing Continue Reading »

Tomorrow (Tuesday, August 31) at 2pm Eastern, I’ll be presenting a MarketingProfs webinar, “Marketing in the Cloud.” Sponsored by Citrix, it’s an updated take on my post about marketing in the cloud from a couple of years ago. I’m writing this last minute, but if you catch this in time, you can join the event for free by registering here. Since my original post, marketing in the cloud has come a lot more down to …

Marketing in the Cloud Webinar Continue Reading »