Today the Blog Council unveils a disclosure . Before I get into what these checklists are designed to do, a word about what the council It is a volunteer group of designed for members to share insights and experience with each other. Period. We participate in monthly conversations to learn ... more

Sitting in on a PR meeting last week, I was pondering the thought of my internal consulting teams starting to blog and participate in social media when someone from across the room said Social Media is more relative to the younger demographics we have in our Of course the more ... more

If you've ever been on the receiving end of bad pitches, you know the feeling of sheer exasperation when yet another example of terrible PR arrives in your inbox. In that moment, someone could be excused for agreeing with the statement "Pitch=Spam." But it isn't true in a general sense. ... more

A property of Accoona Corp., is a free service that aims to help users search for opinions, information, and conversations that match their particular interest–however obscure that particular interest may be. The site encourages users to get in on the conversation by enabling them to find communities relevant to their ... more

Earlier this year, Michael Stelzner predicted a jump in demand for white papers by B2B marketers. That prediction is apparently coming true: financial and Internet-service companies are just two examples of B2B firms discovering the power of white papers. Why the white-paper mania? Stelzner cites the usual culprits—social media and the economy—as trend ... more

Last year, Forrester Research's Jeremiah predicted that 2008 would be the first time that we'd see companies begin to set aside budgets specifically for social media . Looks like Jeremiah was right, as three recent news stories seem to suggest that corporations are moving quickly into the social media First, ... more

After listening and reading for a few months now about the various ways to leverage as a marketing and professional resource, I went ahead and created a MarketingProfs group there. Less than 24 hours later, 1,002 MarketingProfs members have joined, and now, I'm inviting all of you to join it, ... more

Media Post's Marketing newsletter dated July 8, 2008 had an interesting column, titled, "What's That You Say?" In it were the Top 10 newly coined words compiled from various sources by those wacky folks at , the Chicago-based v. - As the economy continues to hit consumers' wallets affecting their ... more

This week Dr. Allen Weiss talks about Value-Added Relationships in this recording from the MarketingProfs Business-to-Business Marketing , June 2008 in Direct Link to Show length From the conference Most companies believe they should be building long term with all their customers. They call these Value-Added and they indeed can ... more

It seems that South Carolina is not the place for gays to vacation. The state just doesn't want them. A UK poster ad campaign, planned to coincide with London's Gay Pride Week, was pulled once Republican state Sen. David Thomas of Greenville heard about it and called for an audit ... more

Consumer product industry watchers have known for some time that P&G's Febreze brand has been an unqualified success. Launching hot selling new products out of the gate is quite a feat in these days of market saturation, but developing new categories and then positioning products for success within them is ... more

In a couple of months I'll be speaking at a small business conference where I already 'know' many of the attendees, even though I've never actually met them. How is that possible? Because of For all the (deserved) criticism that myself and many others have heaped on Twitter recently, the ... more

Have estimated that the volume of data in enterprises of all sizes is doubling every two to three years. With the deluge of data, some companies are finding it makes more sense to discover and act upon patterns (i.e. customers who buy item X also buy item Y), rather than ... more

A few weeks ago, the folks at dropped by Heather Armstrong's house for a Wii Fit party. Armstrong, who is better known as uber-blogger , invited 10 of her friends and later blogged the event. An added bonus was that Nintendo gave Dooce 5 Wiis along with 5 Wii , ... more

Does sales really care about leads? Maybe If you ask Bill Binch, VP of Sales from demand generation provider Marketo, he prefers pipeline and bookings to leads. Ironically, as much as lead nurturing and lead scoring can help generate pipeline and revenue, by framing the discussion around leads too many ... more

My wife Kay and I own our own businesses, giving us flexibility in our work schedules. Last Friday, we went on a midday three-hour date. First, we exchanged (for the third time) Kay's not-working MP3 at Best Buy (but that's another story) and lastly we gathered some groceries at Trader ... more

Tim Brunelle is playing games. He decided to celebrate the one year anniversary of his agency with a game - Viking . You can play it alone or with friends. He is onto something. You can use an iPhone and iPod Touch. Having seen the iPod Touch at work when ... more

The lagging nose-diving) economy is creating additional dimensions of customer need that may well force many companies to re-think their value propositions. Here's a good case in My husband decided to take a road trip with our 17-year-old this summer. With gas at a national average of $4.10 a gallon, ... more

It's always tough to use the word "feminist" or "feminism" in a post. Those terms can seem to throw all sorts of people of both genders into a tizzy. So, why would I risk the possible comment backlash looking at how feminism applies to marketing, anyway? Let me tell I ... more

Was it Shakespeare who said "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet..."? It seems that the Bard didn't know what he was saying, if modern surveys are to be believed. At least, when it comes to consumer product According to a recent Wall Street Journal book review, ... more

One of the natural byproducts of Twitter's constant downtime, is that users are changing how they spend their time on the site. Many are simply spending less time there, and more time on other sites such as and . But I'm also noticing that the site is becoming less Earlier ... more

We all have the friend whose quirks are mildly amusing in person. But place them under the magnifying glass of social media and those minor quirks become major, hard-to-ignore annoyances. Or, as one friend recently remarked about an acquaintance of ours, "I'm embarrassed for him every time I go on ... more

Last week we unveiled the agenda for our Digital Marketing , which takes place this October 22 and 23 near Phoenix. While the term "Mixer" might confuse some .... Attention, folks! This is not a singles party for .... the description actually is more It refers to the "mix" of ... more

Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center .... there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that's the shift that Nick Carr has built his book We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift ... more

Weekly Reader, a publisher of materials for elementary and secondary schools, needed to improve direct mail renewal rates, which had been trending downward. A simple redesign and copy change worked to increase the response rate and orders for the fall school year. more