Jumpstart Your Twitter Experience

January 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Twitter

Yesterday the Marketing Consigliere sent an email to someone he hopes to blog about in the near future, and he realized what he wrote about to this person would be good for many in his audience today.

Since Twitter adoption is gaining momentum, it makes sense to share some lessons to keep your microblogging learning curve shorter.

If you wish, you can go to the Twitter Fan Wiki and overwhelm yourself with its comprehensive list of apps, or simply cut to the chase and heed the Marketing Consigliere’s following advice.

To find out who is providing the most popular Marketing content, check out:

The Twitter Power 150 – A great list of leading Twitterers in the marketing space compiled by the A Source for Inspiration Blog; and

The B2B Twitterati – A solid list of B2B Marketing & Lead Generation Twitterers courtesy of the Ready Contacts Blog.

Other good apps for you to check out that work with Twitter:

Brightkite – Show people where you’re tweeting from – it’s plotted out on a map.

Does Follow – tells if a 3rd party follows another 3rd party.

Ping.fm – Simultaneously post to other social networking accounts you have.

Retweetrank – Check out how many times your “tweet” is being repeated by your followers and their followers.

Tweetstats – Analytics on your Twitter behavior.

Tweetdeck – like Twhirl, but can be a little overwhelming.

Twhirl – a great client to help organize your Twittering.

TwitterGrader – “grade” your Twitter presence relative to others in your geographic area – controversial in how it arrives at its rankings, but worth a try.

Twitter Search – track topics in the Twittersphere.

It can be time consuming but these tips should help.  Take your time, you’re busy helping run a company, after all!  Some people are definitely in “La-La Land” in the Twittersphere, but it can be a useful tool for businesses.   There is indeed a place for it in the B2B world – Check out the Marketing Consigliere’s blog entry for 2008′s “B2B Twitterer of the Year”

Get tweeting and learn all the way!

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, Blogging, Leadership, Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Cloud Computing & Strategic Information for CMOs

January 15, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Bob Gourley, whose blog CTOVision is geared towards CTOs, CIOs, and Federalistas, has shared a great whitepaper draft that I encourage CMOs to read and think about.   In “Cloud Computing and Net Centric Operations,” he sets the tone for where the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration (ASD NII) need to enable the best available technologies for mission critical tasks.  Like the C4ISR or Net-Centric warfare planners in the Pentagon, Marketers need to “deliver the power of information, and accelerate “net-centric transformation, using information as a strategic asset,” and ensure “a good return on investment” for their Marketing department and Sales department customers.

Cloud computing is part of this effort and companies like Salesforce.com and VMware are making it possible for both public and private sector.  As a Marketing Executive, you need to know about these trends – don’t assume the CTO or CIO can do this without your input – the data you gather and use is the lifeblood of your enterprise and drives all the other data that is used or created down the line.

Bob is looking for input on this document, and more industry perspective may help.  Once again, you are encouraged to read it.  From a Marketer’s eyes, it may be a bit dry and it may seem like a leap of faith to associate defense with Marketing, but the Marketing Consigliere urges you to remember: while your organizational objectives may not have lives at stake as does the DoD, there are certainly livelihoods at stake – that of your shareholders, employees and partners who depend on you to efficiently and securely move the information they need to make decisions.

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, C4ISR Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing, Social Networking, Web 2.0 Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

The 20-Year Road to Net-Centric Marketing, Part II

January 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The 20-Year Road to Net-Centric Marketing brought amusement to many readers who remember the “gold rush” of the “dot-com” era.  And the Marketing Consigliere wants to make one more observation about those seemingly long ago days.

The One to One Future

The One to One Future by Peppers & Rogers

In the early nineties there was an exciting book that created much buzz in the Marketing profession:  The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer At A Time by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.

This book heralded and age where marketers would go beyond the age of mass marketing and could know on an individual basis all the details about a customer and tailor a product exactly for them.  In 1993? Extremely visionary.

Now 2009 can be a watershed year for “1to1″ marketing as pretold by Peppers and Rogers.  With more net-centric marketing tools available to both enterprise and SMB markets, the power of business intelligence, CRM, and data mining can spread prolifically.

Neolane

The Marketing Consigliere is happy to see that they are still around and taking the lead.  An interesting event they are hosting in the near future is “Channeling Success: Optimize Your Cross-Channel Initiatives to Boost Marketing Effectiveness,” a webinar to run on Thursday, February 5th.  Neolane, a firm with a marketing automation platform, is the sponsor.  This should be a very worthwhile event so remember to brown-bag it that day.

Filed Under: Advertising, B2C Marketing, Business Intelligence, C4ISR Marketing, CRM, Data Mining, Marketing, Net-Centric Marketing, SMB Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Agencies That are "Getting It"

January 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

We have all heard about the problems facing the advertising world, but fortunately there are those in it that tacitly agree with the Marketing Consigliere about the opportunities derived from net-centric marketing . This is a well produced video of some of the agency representatives that attended the iMedia Agency Summit last month. Chris Arens of DraftFCB, Sherry Bennett of JWT Boom, Susan MacDermid of Real Branding, and David Shor of WongDoody gave terrific insight into what leading agencies are thinking regarding the leveraging of Internet technologies for their clients.

Filed Under: Advertising, Agencies, Net-Centric Marketing Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Il Sottovoce – The Whisper – XV

January 7, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Marketing Consigliere

Quando il gatto manca, i topi ballano

When the cat is not here, the mice will dance

Filed Under: B2B Marketing, CRM, Il Sottovoce - The Whisper, Leadership, Marketing Tagged With:

The 20-Year Road to Net-Centric Marketing

January 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

The Marketing Consigliere would like to take the opportunity at the dawn of 2009 to go down memory lane.  While much fuss is heard about Silcon Valley, the real center of the Internet universe was and still is the Washington DC area.

About 20 years ago, the academic and Federal government curiousity called the “Internet” found its way into the commercial sector.  Among the Internet leadership in the Washington, DC area that began taking advantage of this promising technology were three notable companies.  And AOL is not one of them; AOL used a proprietary protocol well into the Internet era, not TCP/IP.  So before they vanish from even the footnotes of Internet history, let’s remember who they were.

3 Pioneering DC Area Based ISPs

DIGEX, UUNET, and PSINet all were formed within a few years of each other and were some of the leading Internet Service Providers of the 1990s.  With some of the smartest network engineers in the world, they raced to cover the nation and the globe with the routers and switches that would carry packets from your desktop to somewhere else in the blink of an eye.  It was these companies who hired scores of young people to work in call center and help level the playing field for SMBs who needed to grow.

Twenty years later, these three pioneers do not exist as the scrappy startups they once were. UUNET cashed out when swallowed by WorldCom, DIGEX was swallowed by Intermedia Communications and then by WorldCom.  PSINet, compared to the other two, was an arrogant and ineptly managed company – the company went bankrupt in 2001 and its assets were sold pennies on the dollar.

The Marketing Consigliere had the pleasure of working for DIGEX and the displeasure of working for PSINet.  But he definitely is wiser for being at both and looks forward to the next generation of progress towards the network centric marketing world.  So as you trudge forward into this brave new world, remember the companies that helped blaze the trails…

Filed Under: Leadership, Net-Centric Marketing, SMB Marketing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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