Marketers, if you’ve resolved to become more organized in 2011, take heart: you have a lot of company, including myself.

But “organization” isn’t as simple as buying a planner and calling it a day anymore. Now, plugged-in marketers have unending streams of information – blogs, newspapers, websites, magazines, TV shows, movies, books – vying for their attention. Any one of those bits of information might contain something vital – a hint about a competitor’s product, a key insight into a growing and untapped market, a sales lead – that could turn you into the office hero. Read More »

By Rob Hamshar

Scientia potentia est, the Latin maxim commonly paraphrased as “knowledge is power”, is as much a philosophy for gaining competitive advantage today as it was when famously stated by Francis Bacon centuries ago.  But in the elegant simplicity of this phrase lies its vulnerability to misinterpretation and misapplication.  One need only look at the rise and fall of knowledge management (and its current transformation with Web 2.0) to see how quickly this concept can lead you astray.

Just as the word “knowledge” is not qualified in this famous maxim, many people assume that more of any knowledge contributes to more power.  This fails to take into account that some knowledge is far more valuable because of its uniqueness or quality.  Or, perhaps even worse, it falsely assumes that all knowledge is worth the cost of consuming or managing it.   In most organizations, this remains a highly contentious subject.  For every white paper extolling the potential of knowledge management, I read or hear a story from one of our members about the unwieldy systems that fail to deliver. Read More »

We’ve now gathered information from over 250 companies on their social efforts via MLC’s Social Media Maturity Diagnostic.  While 90% of the participating companies are not seeing significant business results for their social efforts, a few social media exemplars are seeing big returns.

One of the ways exemplars are driving results is by using social to embed the brand into customer routines—the recurring “jobs” we do in our personal and professional lives.  These brands are using social to aid the customer across a whole range of sub-tasks that go into completing a routine. Here are a few examples: Read More »

By Whitney Satin

Sales and marketing leaders constantly look for ways to build greater alignment between their two functions.  But efforts to enact joint planning or sync activities across the purchase funnel stall right out of the gates if the two functions don’t first develop a shared view of the customer.

This may sound like an obvious first step but, more often than not, Sales and Marketing aren’t on the same page when it comes to having a common understanding of customer needs.  We often hear tales of Sales accusing Marketing of being notoriously slow and impractical when analyzing customer needs, while marketers argue that Sales “manages by anecdote” and misses broader trends across segments. This tension ultimately hampers the organization’s ability to truly meet customer needs and capture new opportunities as they appear in the marketplace. Read More »

Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo!, recently identified the volume of information flow as one of the largest challenges facing corporate leaders today.  In marketing, the issue is not simply one of volume but of information richness.  Well beyond the reams of rational data about customer click-thru rates, viewing behavior, etc., the emotion and human insight embedded in unstructured information available via social media (e.g., dialogues, comments, ratings) elevates this challenge for marketers above volume alone.  Read More »