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Excite co-founder Joe Kraus has a new venture, and he likens the technology driving his new business to the Internet in the mid-1990s, when it was still "trapped in the land of the nerds." His new venture is the collaborative publishing tool known as Wikis. Just what is a Wiki, anyway? And why should you care?

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Branding is more complicated than it first appears. It is also much more than finding a clever name for something. Here are the key branding points to remember as demonstrated by marketing's branding of a hypothetical company called MidSize.

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Management wants more leads, but you can't get an increase in your budget. To meet their demands, you have to lower your cost per lead. You have to either increase response rates or cut your cost per contact. There are literally dozens of ways to accomplish those goals. Here are 10.

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Few rules are more widely quoted in marketing today than the 80/20 Rule, which states that 80 percent of your sales come from just 20 percent of your customer base. Intuitively, it makes sense. But this marketing interpretation of the 80/20 rule is actually flawed.

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In many organizations, corporate communications doesn't get a lot of respect. Why is that? And more importantly: How can you change it?

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There are millions of Web pages online that represent the "best guesses" of the marketing and Web experts who created them. A large number of these pages appear to be working just fine. Indeed, many are profitable and clearly deliver good conversion rates. But could they do better? Could the same pages have their design and writing tweaked to deliver better results? Nobody will ever know. Unless, of course, the pages are tested.

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You might have the greatest show on Earth, but if no one knows about it, nobody will see it. For marketing many kinds of entertainment — from video games to live theater — here's what works best.

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So many companies spend $25,000, $50,000 or $100,000-plus on a research study, only to give the results a cursory glance before relegating it to the "I'll get to that later" pile. Research studies usually collect dust because they fail to get the attention they deserve in the kind of format that leads to action. Here's how to change that.

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What makes a successful salesperson? Is it the right product? The right attitude? A certain mastery of a skill set? All those things help. But they don't go far enough to identify what makes for a truly successful salesperson.

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Evangelizing customer experience is easy; in fact, it's almost impossible to argue against. Preaching sermons on how to improve customer experience is also relatively easy. Engaging in case studies and brainstorming with clients about future possibilities is often a charismatic experience. But the biggest challenge for companies is making innovative, integrated customer experience a reality.

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At its essence, the marketing funnel is an effective tool to use in evaluating what activities you are successfully executing along your closed loop marketing process—branding, targeting, closing deals, and looking for ways to add incremental value to existing customers. Like most framework tools, it can enable you to identify, isolate and improve marketing black holes and/or upstream dependencies.

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A company's name can command a tremendous amount respect and equity with customers. Likewise, employees who possess a great amount of pride in working for a world-class organization can be a greater asset than sometimes realized. If companies can take these ingredients and begin to change the culture to one that "lives" the brand, the market will take notice.

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What do companies like Nordstrom, Jet Blue, Amazon and Dell have in common? They have built their brand value on providing a positive experience for their customers on- and offline. Successful companies match business objectives with customer needs. They combine ongoing testing, feedback and improvement cycles into their daily practices and invest in listening, learning and modifying the user experience to create positive returns in revenue and loyalty. This means user experience is not just a practice or a process—it is a philosophy. Here's how to accomplish the same.

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For decades, professional service providers—including consultants, accountants, lawyers and others—were reluctant marketers. They thrived in a cozy world where networks of personal relationships and word-of-mouth brought them enough new clients to grow a profitable business. Those days aren't gone, but they're fading fast.

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While getting people to enter your site through the home page of your Web site is ideal for conversion, occasionally visitors will enter through a sub-page, not designed for that same means. Marketers need to regularly utilize Web site analytic tools to keep a watchful eye on all pages, to make sure they are effectively converting visitors. Here's what marketers should know about the homepages they may not know about, and what they need to do to optimize these Web pages.

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Search engine optimizers typically label themselves as "white hat" or "black hat" to identify their basic philosophy, approach and methodology for SEO. As with most things in life, SEO probably isn't as much "black" and "white" as a spectrum of gray. And more importantly to marketers, the question isn't so much what's black and what's white but what impact can each approach have on your brand?

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It's the time of year when many businesses start thinking about sending their clients appropriate gifts to thank them for their business. There's no strict rule of thumb with gift giving, but here are some valuable ideas.

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The Web requires leadership if it is to achieve its full potential. Such leadership will rarely be given by senior management. Guess what: that means it's up to you.

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Expert search engine optimization is an ongoing process. It is a process of honing and refining, while simultaneously expanding. It is a process of protecting and bolstering while also minimizing the risk of setback. Recurring costs for search engine optimization should go primarily toward increasing the value of the campaign over time—not maintaining the status quo, or, worse yet, simply reporting on the state of the union.

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Even a small market share can be remarkably difficult to obtain with a new offering in a highly competitive market. A "shoot for the middle" strategy ignores that there are already plenty of competitors fighting over existing positions within the core of the market. But by owning an identifiable market position or niche that may appear to be on the fringes of the market, you may greatly improve your chances for survival and success.