Marketing Automation Services, Demand Generation, and Lead Management | Allinio
From time to time, Allinio has blogged about startup companies in the Marketing technology space, asking the same five basic questions for a founder or other executive to answer. This time is a little different. We’re talking to another interesting company, SocialToaster, and its Founder and CEO, Brian Razzaque (@razzaque). But not only as an interviewer…
The Marketing Consigliere prepared himself for Superbowl XLIII by reviewing his guest blog at Scott White’s blog, The Big Kahuna. He thought it would be interesting to see how far Marketing has come in a year.
This year’s Superbowl had some well announced changes such as GM pulling out of its long time sponsorship. Fine – not everyone was willing to pay $3,000,000 for a spot this year. While no agency stood out significantly among the crowd, there were definitely some bombs. Brand management professionals may need to think hard for next year. [Read more...]
Last week the 5th Anniversary of the CAN-SPAM Act passed by with little fanfare. To date, there been a handful of notorius spammers brought to court and successfully prosecuted under the act. This year there was an interesting service of justice when Sanford Wallace, the self-dubbed “Spam King” was fined along with a partner for $230 million to MySpace for using malware and promoting gambling and pornography to MySpace users.
Network-Centric Marketers who are naturally above these bottom feeders have generally known to respect the email boxes of consumers. No major brand or corporation has been successfully sued for violation of the act; for the most part, the corporate marketers know they can still send an initial unsolicited email to a prospect as long as there is a mechanism in the email for the prospect to opt-out. Campaign management has not been hindered by CAN-SPAM and neither has lead generation – SEO/SEM and other tools have allowed marketers to keep the potential deals flowing in.
But has CAN-SPAM really been effective? The Marketing Consigliere gets relatively little spam compared to other people he knows, but the topics are generally familiar to most of us – porn, pills, degrees, and somewhat peculiar to the mix are watches. The sidewalk hawkers of yesterday trying to dump knockoffs on pedestrians now seem to be sending daily reminders on getting Rolex and TAG/Heuer watches at a discount.
Do you think CAN-SPAM has worked or should the Feds come down even harder?
The Marketing Consigliere has set up a “lens” called ”C4ISR Marketing – aka Network Centric Marketing” on Squidoo and is trying to teach himself about whether it provides utility for B2B marketers. HIs “lens” (this is what you call your site there) is not a high ranking site in the Squidoo world by any means, but he guesses it’s better than a lot of others. For now he’ll tinker with it and learn.
Squidoo is the brain child of Seth Godin and was built by Viget Labs. The Marketing Consigliere think it’s a great concept and there is much more education to obtain on his part to leverage more value out of it. Here’s his question: It seems perfect for hobbyists, enthusiasts, consultants and the like, but can/should companies set up lenses like they set up MySpace pages and expect traffic either to that site or from that site for gathering data? [Read more...]
