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You can flip the 80/20 in your favor by devoting your marketing resources to creating a referral network that will compound in value year after year.

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Whether you're attempting to position a company or product as a category leader, gain permission from a community to make changes, or push a law through the legislature, PR needs to tell interesting yet believable stories that make the target audience consider a new perspective or see the sponsor in a new light.

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If you practice Internet marketing, you know the importance of a high-converting "landing page"—also called a promotional page, jump page, or squeeze page. Regardless of the specific purpose, one fact remains the same—you want the user to take some type of action. Here are seven landing-page best practices for increasing conversion rates and getting users to take the action you're hoping for.

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Let's face it: If we want to realize the vision of integrated marketing and strategic marketing, of a more collaborative and enjoyable work environment, of more stature and influence in our organizations, we need to let go of the old. Marketing needs a new MO.

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Does the hype of the iPhone equal runaway success? Is the game already won? Or will there be an equal and opposite reaction when possibility and excitement about the future gives way to reality, and inevitable issues arise with service, availability, bugs in functionality and unfulfilled expectations?

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The sales playbook captures your company's knowledge about its markets, value propositions, offers, competitors, and best practices. These are the very elements that fall within the marketing organization's domain, which is why marketing plays a strategic role in developing the playbook.

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Housing booms, dot-coms, high-tech, bio-med, religious fervor, Republican or Democrat regimes, peace-war—all of it... all the best (and worst) bubbles have, or will, pop on their way back to the center. In terms of the "Greening of America," we are currently on the thesis end of the pendulum, with a fair amount more left to go to reach the apex. And then the backward slope begins. The bubble pops at the top.

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Some 80% of available jobs are never advertised, and over half of all employees obtain their jobs through networking. The most important component of a successful job search is your network, consisting of friends, family, neighbors, acquaintances, teachers, and coworkers.

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Part 1 of this series discussed the evolution of customer reference programs and gave guidance on how to create a program that's a strategic asset to your company. Here, part 2 discusses the next steps of customer program evolution... and how to change corporate culture by focusing on customers.

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Recently, we have been seeing more and more emails that take the "instant best buddy" approach: You sign up for some information on a site, and minutes later you receive a breathless email and hear how the author has just taken his kids to the beach, but simply had to rush home and share some terribly important news about an upcoming product launch. It's tempting to dismiss these emails. But here's the thing: They work.

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The social media landscape over the last year or so has changed dramatically. Companies that were once skeptical about tools such as blogs are now blogging or considering starting one. Unfortunately, many companies that do so still have little idea of how to grow their blog into an integral part of their marketing efforts. Here are eight easy steps you can take to grow your blog's readership.

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Each year, we ask decision-makers at a group of 100 leading brands: "At pitch, what are the specific reasons for choosing one agency over another?" In the latest results, "good chemistry" ranked as the leading factor. Here's a full list of the top 20 factors.

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UCLA Professor Albert Mehrabian is best known for his 7%-38%-55% Rule. It states that 55% of communication is attributable to non-verbal behaviors like body language and facial expressions; 38% of communication is attributable to voice, including volume, tone, pitch, cadence, and quality; and only 7% of communication is attributable to the words used. Yet companies continue to pile on the Web text in the hope that search engines will index it and someone might actually read it... even though many Web site visitors merely scan for headlines, bulleted points, and captions.

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Over one-third of employers have eliminated a candidate because of "digital dirt"—information about you online that is either unflattering or inconsistent with the image you would like to portray. Digital dirt could be preventing you from getting interviews and ultimately landing your ideal job. So if you have digital dirt, it's time to clean up your act. Here's the three-step process.

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What if you never had to look for a job again? Try a job search role reversal: Instead of seeking out jobs, have them come to you. That's the future of career management—and for savvy careerists, the future is now.

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Landing pages have become the Omega-3s of Web marketing: if you're not using them and optimizing them ad infinitum, you're squandering your online ad dollars. Or so the landing page optimization crowd would have you believe. In the spirit of probing the pros and cons of this popular post-click marketing format—and, okay, doing a little tongue-in-cheek myth busting—we offer our take of the top 5 best and worst things about landing pages, in contrast to multi-page landing paths.

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Many Web sites offer a resource library for visitors—an area filled with articles covering relevant topics to the industry with which the site is connected. The articles may cover how to do something, or they may define an aspect of the industry, but they do not usually directly sell the company's products or services. While it's true that a resource library, on the surface, exists to benefit site visitors, it doesn't end there; it also provides benefits that can have a direct impact on any business.

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An effective online content strategy, artfully executed, drives action. Organizations that use online content well have a clearly defined goal—to sell products, generate leads, or get people to join a community, vote, or donate money—and they deploy a content strategy that directly contributes to reaching that goal.

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A use case, often created for product development, is commonly used to capture functional requirements. A use case provides one or more scenarios for how a solution/system/product/service achieves a specific business goal. From this perspective, then, another way to think about a use case is as a usage scenario. With a little modification, a use case can be transformed into an extraordinary sales-enablement tool.

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How rare is it to see a senior marketer from any professional service firm—even one as prominent as BearingPoint—leading a series of cutting-edge conversations that do not appear to be directed at just his internal colleagues? We checked in with Paul Dunay and learned the extent to which he has intentionally begun to "do things differently" and how positively it has benefited BearingPoint. Here is his story.