Tag: ROI

The One Truth Behind all Social Media Trends

It’s not that marketing has become a conversation more than a pitch, or that companies no longer control their brand message, or that customers trust peers more than manufacturers. All of that is true. But there’s something more fundamental.

Introducing Inbound Channel Marketing

Over the past several years, inbound channel marketing has grown to be one of the most influential approaches to modern marketing. Inbound marketing addresses a number of key challenges in marketing today, most notably the need to engage with customers in a more productive and sustainable way. ? Although inbound marketing has been growing by leaps ands bounds among both B2B and B2C businesses, it hasn’t yet taken hold in the channel, largely due to the challenges of scaling quality content for a distributed network of partners. Bits and pieces of inbound marketing have been adapted for the channel, such as social media syndication and content curation, but it’s high time for a true? Inbound Channel Marketing solution.

The One Thing More Important than Content

Twenty years ago when I was a couple of years out of college and dreaming up my first startup, the commercial Internet was just getting off the ground. I worked as a news editor and journalist at a mid-size daily newspaper and had access to the Internet through a Mosaic browser, where I could read the first online newspaper called The Nando Times. All of the market analysis at the time focused on content business models for the web, which is when I first heard the old saw “Content is King”. Twenty years of mind-bending evolution later, we’re still saying the same thing as if learning it for the first time. It’s time to move on.

Are Your Partners Really That Stupid and Lazy?

One of the most common refrains I hear among marketing solution providers in the channel is that any kind of partner marketing initiative must be blindingly simple for partners to execute. If you require partners to do so much as press a button from time to time, that may be too much to ask. God forbid you ask your partners to put some effort into their campaigns. The ideal scenario is for your partner to just open their mouth so your automated message can tumble out.

What’s the ROI on Social Media ROI?

The most fundamental truth of ROI: It’s nearly impossible to measure for marketing, it’s the wrong place to start with social media, and it’s a virtual recipe for social marketing disaster.

Five Reasons Social Media ROI Will Never Die

I’m a big fan of Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk). He’s one of the best voices behind ReadWriteWeb, and one of the few people that delivers consistently good reporting and analysis on social media technology. But Marshall’s recent piece on the supposed death of Social Media ROI really deserves a crushing response. … Read more

The Four Percent Solution for Agile Social Marketing

With technology selection, just adopt this simple truth: You are going to fail. So get it over with as quickly and cheaply as you can. The more time you spend planning some monumental RFP for an overarching social marketing platform, the more costly and crushing your failure will be.