Marketing

Imagine you're walking down a city street heading for a vegan restaurant that you've heard good things about. You get to the address only to discover it has gone out of business. Hungry and disappointed, you pull out your smartphone and wail to the Twitterverse, "Veggie Delight is closed! I'm starvi...

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

The holiday season is upon us; even those uninitiated in the ways and means of retail can see it in the Halloween decorations and candy that are now so plentiful on store shelves. For the initiated -- that is, anyone who expects to make a buck off of the holiday shoppers this year -- not only is the...

Commence earlier this month debuted version 5.5 of its CRM application with key enhancements including a new internal chat system, new Microsoft Word and calendar integrations, and a click-to-dial feature on mobile phones. Commence provides an array of CRM tools, including salesforce features and, f...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

Real-time bidding holds numerous benefits for mobile marketers, but there are downsides to the ad technology as well. In particular, the dominant theme to that downside is that RTB -- at least for mobile ad formats and mobile platforms -- is still in its early days. More specifically, while the tech...

With its ability to match ad-inventory supply and demand in real time against the attributes of any given viewer, real-time bidding is starting to make its way into the delivery of mobile ads. For marketers, it can be a very good thing. When it works as it is supposed to, it makes mobile marketing m...

It's a fact of life in market research that the success of any survey will depend at least in part on its accessibility to the intended respondents. Toward that end, Qualtrics has released Qualtrics Mobile, a new app designed to help reach respondents on the go. Qualtrics Mobile works alongside the ...

Do you remember walking by telephone poles at downtown intersections 10 or 20 years ago and seeing them covered in fliers, placards and notices? If it was a really popular intersection, there were probably several layers of paper pinned, tacked, taped and stapled on top of each other. If the telepho...

It's no longer uncommon for marketers to customize the messages they send via email, but such personalization capabilities haven't typically been extended to Web content. Enter Silverpop, which last week released a beta version of Smart Content, a new product designed to enable just that. Smart Cont...

Real-time bidding, or "programmatic buying" as it is sometimes called, is remaking the online ad industry with its approach of matching supply and demand of ad inventory in real time against the attributes of any given viewer. Now this trend is starting to creep into how mobile ads are delivered. Fi...

When the expected surge in mobile video advertising arrives, it's not just consumers who will have adjustments to make. Rather, marketers will also have to make some changes to accommodate the growth in this up-and-coming format. In this new world, the motto will be "short and sweet" -- as in 15 s...

SugarCRM and BroadVision have teamed up to integrate their respective products -- SugarCRM's namesake CRM app and BroadVision's Clearvale enterprise social networking platform -- to give users a fuller view of what is happening in the enterprise, the companies announced this week. This is not a full...

Millennial Media announced on Tuesday that it will acquire competitor Jumptap in a stock transaction worth approximately $225 million. Under the terms of the agreement, Jumptap shareholders will receive approximately 24.6 million shares of Millennial Media. The combined company will be able to offer...

As an onslaught of mobile video ads threatens the digital advertising landscape, it's sobering enough to realize that more than a few brands are not fully prepared. Even more concerning, however, is that our wireless infrastructure is not ready for it, either. Perhaps worst of all, consumers do not ...