Analytics

The Time of a Mobile Ad's Life, Part 1
March 05, 2013

There is a long-standing debate in the email marketing community about timing -- that is, whether time of day makes a difference in open and click-through rates. In other words, will an email marketing message sent early Monday morning be more likely to be opened than one sent Wednesday around noon or one delivered late on a Friday afternoon in July?

HootSuite for Twitter Gives Advertisers a Souped-Up Dashboard
February 22, 2013

HootSuite has incorporated paid advertising into its dashboard for the first time with the rollout of HootSuite Promoted Products integration for Twitter. It allows users to buy Promoted Tweets and manage their accounts on the HootSuite dashboard. This is a significant step for HootSuite's users, said Greg Gunn, VP of business development.

IntelliBuzz Helps Brands Keep an Eye on Social Media Mentions
February 15, 2013

Intelliverse has rolled out a new cloud-based tool that monitors social media for brand mentions and responds when appropriate. IntelliBuzz is simple enough that a company with minimal IT resources in-house -- that is, a computer and an Internet connection -- can manage this outreach just using the app.

Big Data for Marketing
February 13, 2013

The marketing funnel is not exactly a new idea. Neither are sales or customer service, though all have morphed considerably from what they were more than a decade ago when CRM began. Sales and service evolved organically, making incremental changes as markets transformed and new technologies became available.

NextPrinciples Makes Integration Paramount
February 11, 2013

NextPrinciples has launched Insight-To-Action, a social analytics and engagement product that integrates with a handful of CRM applications. The company is in talks with other vendors to expand the integration of the platform, said Ted Sapountzis, head of marketing and product management for NextPrinciples.

Cross-Domain Semantics and the End of 'Solution Sales'
February 08, 2013

Do your customers think of you as one of them? Do they think you truly understand their business challenges, their opportunities and what keeps them up at night? These are questions you should very seriously consider, because in the extraordinarily demanding B2B sales climate of our post-recession world, it's the vendor who can answer "yes" who will win the business.

Twitter Buys Bluefin to Solidify Hold on Second Screen
February 06, 2013

The tweets were flying this week, and not just about Beyonce and blackouts at the Super Bowl. Twitter was itself the subject of tweets following the announcement late Monday that it had inked a deal to buy social TV analytics firm Bluefin Labs. Terms were not disclosed.

Context: Customer Data's Secret Sauce
January 31, 2013

I had a call today from someone at a company that made a technology that helped inside sales people target the exact right prospects from a list of leads. She said she was using this technology to make the call, and assured me that this technology could make a big difference to the inside sales organization in my company.

Bronto Remarketing Engine Slices and Dices Retail Customer Preferences
January 24, 2013

Bronto Software this week released a significant update to its Bronto Marketing Platform: a remarketing engine that helps retailers link online and in-store purchases in order to create targeted email messages that speak to the individual user. New features allow marketers to collect data such as purchase history and then use that information to segment customers and create email campaigns.

Machine Learning, TDA and the Future of Invention
January 23, 2013

Ayasdi came out of stealth mode and told the world it had a new way to analyze big data, and I think the implications for CRM and social are very large indeed. The new way is called "topological data analysis" and hearing about it has the feel of hearing about relativity for the first time and learning that space is curved.

Reading the Signals: 5 CRM Lessons From Moneyball
January 17, 2013

With less than a month to go before pitchers and catchers report to baseball spring training, I'm increasingly thinking of the national pastime -- and specifically, about Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book adapted into film two years ago. For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the tale of how Oakland Athletics General Manager Billy Beane used data to build a competitive team.

Sales Productivity
January 16, 2013

We are at it again -- and why not? It's the start of another year, and people are doing predictable things like having kickoffs of all sorts of things. Many companies I speak with on a regular basis are briefing me on new product launches and engaging in a sacred rite of a new year: the sales kickoff. Both of these things make me think a lot. The messaging I hear in briefings is all about sales productivity.

SAP Gets Real-Time With HANA-Powered Business Suite
January 14, 2013

SAP last week released SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA, which marries its popular integrated applications with its high performance business analytics platform. SAP Business Suite is the largest application SAP has in terms of customers, said Ken Tsai, VP, SAP Hana product marketing at SAP.

Voice of the Customer: Analyzing What People Say and How They Say It
January 02, 2013

Call center software can now identify everything from anger to dissatisfaction in the voices of customers. Since call centers are all about voices, it makes sense to analyze those voices in order to provide better customer service. The field of voice analytics, in fact, has become a big business.

CRM Product Profiles: The Year in Review
December 28, 2012

CRM applications tend to embody a range of features, depending on the maker and the audience. Some applications are stripped-down products sporting a handful of features -- and only those features -- deemed necessary to the user. Other products have become de facto mini-ERP systems with their integrations into back-end systems and business analytics.

What Happened in 2012
December 27, 2012

Everyone has a year-end synopsis these days, and it's fun to see what each person deems important. Sometimes you wonder if you lived through the same experiences, but it's a good thing to recall everything one more time and maybe reconsider how you'll remember each. Here's my synopsis -- which is no more or less valid than anyone else's.

Predicting the Future Is Not for the Faint of Heart
December 19, 2012

I was doing some research in the Time Magazine archives -- the best ones I have seen, by the way -- the other day and came across this nugget from 1962: "Despite the discouraging results so far, many scientists argue that military-space research will ultimately produce an overflowing cornucopia of marketable consumer products, from supersonic planes to small nuclear reactors for home power."

Getting Over Big Data Fatigue in the C Suite
December 08, 2012

Recently while presenting the findings of a Big Data survey to an executive team, I was a bit taken aback when the CEO stopped me and said, "I'll listen to what you learned from the survey as long as you don't use those two words again -- 'Big Data' -- I've already told my team there will be hell to pay if one more person tells me, 'we ought take a look at what Big Data can do for us,' that may be the last suggestion they make at the company."

Rolling Out an Idea
December 05, 2012

Has the emergence of social technology been faster than the rollout of other advanced technologies like CRM and ERP? If it has, why? I have recently been reading a dense technical book from 1990 with the improbable title -- for CRM -- "The Rise and Fall of Infrastructures -- Dynamics of Evolution and Technological Change in Transport," by Arnulf Grubler.

The Big Data Marketing Gold Mine
December 03, 2012

It's become clear that the true political star of the 2012 election was Big Data. There is much that marketers can learn from its meteoric rise. Trumping the old-school, gut-instinct days of electoral politics, today's campaigns employ data crunchers who mine the campaign's database for clues on what it takes to engage supporters and motivate them to donate, volunteer and vote.