If you’re experienced enough to remember B2B tech lead-generation pre-Internet, it was the dark ages of marketing. Tiny budgets. All direct mail, trade shows and conferences. Little influence. It was difficult to make any connection between leads and sales. The marketing function was typically so divorced from strategy and relegated to a pure marketing communications […]
Your company might already be active on the big three social networks of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but don’t overlook StumbleUpon. It’s reminiscent of the Digg-Myspace era, but it hasn’t faded away; in fact, this link-sharing network can prove incredibly valuable to B2B marketers. In case you aren’t familiar with StumbleUpon, it was founded in […]
What is cloud computing, really? If you are confused by all the talk about moving to “the cloud” and having trouble pinning down what that actually means, there’s a reason for that: Cloud isn’t a technology, it’s a metaphor. At one time, users had no fancy software on their computers, just simple programs […]
Google+ turned three a few months ago. Once deemed a pale copy of Facebook, the platform has grown by leaps and bounds and is now part of the major seven which include Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. While many B2C companies have jumped on the bandwagon, the same cannot be said of the B2B segment. One […]
They may not have replaced Starbucks yet, but those teal David’s Tea cups are dotting communities across North America. Call it a true Tea Party, where the main winner is a humble Montreal company that has grown to become a Canadian success story. A story that every firm can learn from, no matter their vertical. David’s Tea […]
Memes and hashtags, hashtags and memes … two of those words you see everywhere online. Like any culture, digital has its own vocabulary, set of customs and understood behaviours. What do B2B digital marketers need to know about two of the biggest, the humble hashtag, content categorization and discovery tool, and memes, tiny pieces of […]
In 2009 Time ran an online poll for person of the year, and to the astonishment of 99% of the planet, somebody named moot took top spot. That’s what happens when you found a site that gets 2 million posts and 20 million visitors a month. You may never have heard of 4chan, but since […]
The strangest thing about fiction is it can become truth. Especially science fiction. Twelve years ago Stephen Spielberg’s version of a Philip K. Dick future rolled across movie screens, a powerfully detailed vision of a technology-dependent society where murder is eradicated, and the state and corporations are using tech to continually surveill citizens. Minority Report […]
There’s a new offering from the Googleplex that appears small but could be seismic, released without a lot of fanfare. It’s a new way for sites to generate revenue called Google Contributor. What we know so far: What is it? It’s a type of distributed subscription model Google is calling crowdfunding (though it is not […]
It’s hard to avoid the term big data if you work in B2B, but ask anyone who isn’t an analytics geek what it means and you’ll get blank stares and “you know, a lot of data”. Like most buzzwords, big data has become so generic a phrase it’s meaningless. What do people mean when they […]
Your boss or your client wants to run a new B2B marketing campaign. And try some new things. And they’ve heard Reddit is big. What do you do? Start here. First of all, is it big? Yes. Nothing major happens on the web without Reddit noticing. That may seem like a grandiose statement, but it’s true. […]
B2B tech is getting smarter. Back at the dawn of internet time, you had boxes and routers and a network was ‘managed’ by plugging and unplugging things. Each device had its own brain and each component had to be individually managed, and like Christmas lights, an entire network could be dependent on one faulty connection. […]
Doritos-flavoured Mountain Dew, the food hybrid that launched a thousand headlines and a million winces. Attention sought? Mission accomplished. But don’t believe Pepsi expects to actually sell any; this is an example of the dark marketing art known as stunt marketing. Stunt marketing has a long history, stunt product development a shorter one, mainly in food […]
Back in 1983, a MB of memory was almost $2k. Storage was a growth industry. It stayed a growth industry despite dropping prices, when in 2004 Google shook up the industry by offering a gigabyte of personal email storage for free with Gmail, then Google Drive. Dropbox and Box followed suit for business, both experiencing […]
It’s a polar-vortex-kickoff kind of Monday! Three stories to warm you up this morning: 1. Keynotes and events: There’s no longer a reason why you can only find white guys to speak at your conferences: introducing FRESHSpeakers. Check out this Fast Company profile. 2. Content marketing: Every audience is different, but there are some great guidelines […]
If a press release were to fall in the forest, would anyone hear it? That’s a question I’ve asked publicly for many years, and I’ve long believed social media would be a significantly disruptive force to public relations and press releases. When I was getting pitches as a journalist, the volume of garbage-filled press releases […]
The Chief Marketing Officer of 2014 is busier than ever, and cultivating customer loyalty is a top priority. A 2013 poll of 285 marketers revealed that the cost of customer retention is increasing: digital marketers spend nearly as much to keep buyers (45 percent) as they do to gain new ones (55 percent). A 2013 […]
I grew up watching all kinds of sports with my father, and to this day I love baseball. Though my brother, the other sports fan in the family, says baseball is ponderously slow, there’s something about its rhythms to love. I remember as a kid watching the larger-than-life baseball heroes of the ’70s and ’80s, […]
One of those reassuring little white lies we tell ourselves as marketers is this: People make linear decisions. It’s simpler to draw straight lines about people’s behavior, so to date we have typically pushed people through carefully scripted marketing processes. But does that really reflect people’s actions and the ways they find information? Of course […]
As the winter blues start to spread across the Great White North, what better time to recharge and reinvigorate your business acumen? Conferences are a great way to jumpstart your creativity with panels with talks and ideas from experts in digital, social and startup culture. November has a great crop of important tech and business […]
