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With product marketing, your company will be able to prepare the sales channels to relate to the buyer and enable these channels to focus on the most effective messages and programs. You will be able to develop outbound marketing initiatives that move prospects into and through the pipeline to drive revenue and increase customer retention and loyalty. You will have people on your team who are always thinking about how to use what they know about the market and buyers to influence the product strategy. With this change, your marketing will be more than just selling and advertising. It will help you define the target market, position yourself as different and superior in that target market, and permit you to stay ahead of the competition.

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In Part One and Part Two of this series, the author discussed using "voice of the customer" (VOC) in defining innovative core products and services. The focus was on breakthroughs in the basic product, on hitting the home runs. Here, we take a different perspective—using innovation to acquire and retain customers once the core product or service is defined.

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Marketers love talking about products like the Swiffer or iPod, two colossal successes in terms of brilliance in innovation and new product development. In fact, rumor has it there are more consulting firms taking credit for Swiffer's development and success than can fit into the new Yankee Stadium. The puzzling question remains: Why aren't there more examples of unabashed new product successes?

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Work of any kind requires an understanding of the appropriate tools for the job, and social media is no different. Here are some suggestions for a starter set of social media tools. The actual applications will change, over time, because technology tends to do that. But the basic functions should evolve a little more slowly.

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Customer conversations are everywhere today—social networks, blogs, forums, and other social-media outlets. These are unbiased, unfiltered interactions that can deliver rich information about how your customers talk about topics that are relevant to your company and brand. Though it would be nice if people were to use your company's messaging in their everyday interactions, the reality is that for the most part they don't. Social SEO—tapping into how they talk about you and your industry so that you can determine how they will search—is the most effective and foolproof way to master that art/science/guessing game of picking keywords.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Online surveys are an increasingly common way to solicit feedback, but response rates are often quite low due to poor survey design, lengthy surveys, requests for personal information, or a lack of incentives for survey completion. So how do you ensure that people respond to your survey? Follow these seven simple rules of engagement.

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Whether or not you completely understand social media or social networking sites, the one aspect you must understand is that they are going to change the way businesses advertise. Facebook, in particular, is constantly evolving and improving its users' experience with new features and applications. As a result, Facebook is trying to change the way businesses market and advertise their products and services to potential consumers.

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The advent of new media poses some challenges for even the best PR professional.

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We all know some tried-and-true tips and tricks for building an email list. But there are five key points to consider and five glaring points to avoid when creating opt-in lists from the very start.

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Here are the 10 biggest business blunders, and advice on how you can avoid them sinking you (and your company).

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Marketing is suffering from a crisis of credibility. So what can marketers do to be seen as part of a machine that drives revenue and profits, not just the people who throw parties and buy swag?

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What do you get when you combine video, social networking, micromedia, and a very savvy French entrepreneur? You get Seesmic. Seesmic is a social network where the primary content is video. Users record video, post it to the site, and other users reply in video. It's new and it's red-hot. It's also a glimpse of the future.

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Whether you are campaigning to gain budget approval to implement your nurturing strategy or need to illustrate ROI for an existing nurturing program (or you are just trying to evaluate your current tactics) effective measurement of your nurturing program is critical. Outlined below are five steps to measure your nurturing initiative and start having it be viewed as a profit center rather than a cost center.

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A strong commitment to environmental sustainability in product design and manufacturing can yield significant opportunities to grow your business, to innovate, and to build brand equity. In fact, if you don't manage your business with respect to environmental and social sustainability, your business may not be sustained!

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Complex technical terms are often thrown around in the media or on blogs. Does the average marketer know what half of these terms mean? This series is aimed at illustrating (this is where the whiteboard comes into play) complex terms in ways that normal, non-geeks can understand. In this installment, we take a look at AJAX, which stands for Asynchronous JAvasript and XML. As a marketer, you don't need to know about Javascript, which is a programming language, nor do you really need to know about XML, which is a data storage standard. But the asynchronous part is what is interesting. It allows Web pages to behave in a more dynamic, application-like manner. Google's Reader, Mail and Documents all work with AJAX to make them work more fluidly for the end user.

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Is pay-per-click losing momentum? Are people numbing to pay-per-click ads as they have to banner ads? Is growth in the channel waning, or is it just maturing? Hear Steve Rubel and Alan Rimm-Kaufman debate the issue; Alan is a fan of pay-per-click, while Steve has his doubts.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Press kits are like business cards. If you don't have one, you have no way to make an introduction and no way to provide valuable information to people with whom you want to do business. A press kit is a collection of a few vital pieces of information that makes it easier for the media to tell your story accurately and with full details. By putting the power of your press kit to work, your company can enjoy more accurate media coverage, more exposure for story ideas, and more complete information through press coverage.

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LinkedIn doesn't pretend to be MySpace or Facebook. In the face of mounting competition and hype from rival networks, LinkedIn has stayed true to its mission of creating a network for business professionals. In this video tour, Matt Dickman focuses on what LinkedIn does well, and how you can leverage its strengths.

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In a recent blog post, Cymfony's Jim Nail wrote about a study that provocatively proclaimed that spending on conversational marketing will outpace traditional marketing by 2012. Is that even possible? To find out, Paul Dunay chatted with Jim and Pete Blackshaw, executive vice-president at Nielsen Online Strategic Services. What ensued was a very lively debate about whether marketers are prepared to support conversational marketing—and the answer isn't very pretty. As Jim and Pete point out, not only are marketers not using Web 2.0 tools to create a conversation, but to even listen effectively they need to overhaul their infrastructures—big time.

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Link building is the tactic of getting other Web sites to link to your Web site. Getting inbound links from well-ranked, reputable, and relevant sites means that your Web site will receive good rankings and a lot of free traffic. Here is checklist of actions you can take to rapidly increase the link popularity of your Web site.