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New IBM Lab Explores the Science of Personalization March 15, 2013 
IBM pushed deeper into the customer experience space with the launch on Thursday of its Customer Experience Lab. The lab brings together various elements of IBM's expertise, technology and staff to integrate mobile, social, cloud, Big Data and advanced analytics for its users.
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The Time of a Mobile Ad's Life, Part 2 March 14, 2013 
Does it matter what time of day a mobile ad is displayed? If a generation's worth of lessons learned from email marketing mean anything, the answer is... maybe. Truth is, there are coherent arguments to be made on both sides. However, as marketers intensify their aim at mobile devices, the balance is shifting to the side that believes timing matters.
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Subscriptions, Social and CRM March 13, 2013 
"Who is the customer?" It's a great question, one that my managers liked to ask when I was a young sales representative. Like all great questions, it got to the meat of the matter with an economy of words that were impressive as much for their brevity as for thir meaning. The customer's identity is often far from obvious, and it's why professional sales and marketing people obsess over it.
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Algorithms for Rent: The Price Is Right March 12, 2013 
If you've been in the market for almost anything recently, you've probably noticed price fluctuations. You place a bicycle on your Amazon wish list at one price, only to see it shoot up a hundred dollars more a few days later, then drop to a hundred less a week or so after that. Everything from airplane tickets to apartment rentals seems subject to dramatic price changes from one day to the next.
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FirstRain Showers Sales Reps With Real-Time Intelligence March 12, 2013 
FirstRain has debuted FirstRain for Touch, an enterprise customer intelligence application built for the Salesforce Touch Platform. "What we did was create a component version of our application that was then easily dropped into the Salesforce.com Touch platform using their SDK," said Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain.
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Avaya's New CEM Platform Makes Everyone a Customer Agent March 11, 2013 
Avaya unveiled the latest iteration of its customer experience management platform last week, introducing new analytics functionality and a multichannel focus on communication. The new platform's big-picture mission is to foster holistic customer service -- an experience that will become a differentiator for that business, said Laura Bassett, director of product marketing for Avaya CEM and emerging applications.
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IBM's Big Bet on Cloud Analytics March 08, 2013 
A growing number of established and emerging software and technology vendors are
seeking to take advantage of the convergence of Big Data and the cloud. None has made
a bigger bet than IBM. Since 2005, IBM has spent more than $16 billion on 35 acquisitions to boost its analytics capabilities. The company is hoping that this investment will generate approximately $20 billion in annual sales.
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Enterprises to Show CRM the Money March 08, 2013 
CRM will be a top spending focus for enterprises this year and next, according to a Gartner report. What's more, CRM will be THE top spending focus -- edging past the behemoth category of enterprise resource planning -- based on a newly released survey of IT investment priorities for 2013 and 2014. Following CRM are ERP and office and personal productivity tools.
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Unlike Buzzwords, Relationships Will Always Be in Vogue March 07, 2013 
The jargon of an industry is a good indicator of where the mindset of that industry is at any particular moment. Think of terms like "the cloud," which are set upon by marketers and subverted to their ends until the meaning has been wrung from them. For many in IT, the cloud is a place that solves many of their routine problems, sight unseen.
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Let's Hear It for The Ecosystems! March 06, 2013 
Could we have a moment of sustained loud noise for all of the companies that form the various ecosystems around major product lines? I mean it. The ecosystem -- and maybe not even social -- is the story of the last five years. While many of us have been talking up social, the ecosystems have been adding immeasurably to the customer experience.
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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?
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Demandbase Tech Targeting Trims B2B Marketing Waste March 04, 2013 
Demandbase has incorporated a new filter in its Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising platform. The filter, called "Technology Targeting," lets users target and personalize display ads based on the technology they use. In other words, users can now include the specific criteria of 'technologies used' as part of their campaign targeting requirements with the Demandbase platform.
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Benioff's Social Proof February 28, 2013 
Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a relatively small group -- less than 1,000 -- rather than at the Jacob Javits Convention Center, which can accommodate the maintenance facilities for a squadron of F18s.
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Hackers: The Flies in Social Media Marketing Ointment February 25, 2013 
Did you hear? McDonald's has just acquired Burger King! Also, someone at the company apparently has a potty mouth. Another unusual and unexpected corporate trade also happened last week -- Cadillac acquired Jeep. These events, of course, didn't really happen. In both instances, hackers gained control of the brands' Twitter accounts and began sending out false and sometimes very offensive tweets.
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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.
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Sage Made a Wise Decision February 20, 2013 
I liked what Sage did last week in agreeing to sell off some non-core assets to partners, and I am most interested in the decision to sell ACT! and SalesLogix. The move reduced Sage's bullpen of CRM solutions from three to one -- and that's the right number for this market.
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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.
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3 Bad Habits to Unlearn for SCRM Success February 14, 2013 
For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said that sales of software for SCRM topped $1 billion in 2012.
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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.
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The 2nd Screen's Super Bowl Coup February 12, 2013 
It has been a week since the Super Bowl, but its lessons for marketers are becoming increasingly clear. At the top of the list: The synergy between the mobile channel and the overall campaign is getting tighter. Another lesson gleaned from this year's big game, courtesy of the New Orleans' Superdome's short-lived blackout, is that old fashioned quick-witted thinking never goes out of style.
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