Marketing

Microsoft opened Convergence 2013 Tuesday morning with a keynote address from Microsoft Business Solutions President Kirill Tatarinov -- and the debut of an upgraded CRM application. With 11,000 attendees, this is the largest Convergence Microsoft has held to date, said Seth Patton, senior directo...

Does it matter what time of day a mobile ad is displayed? If a generation's worth of lessons learned from email marketing mean anything, the answer is... maybe. Truth is, there are coherent arguments to be made on both sides. However, as marketers intensify their aim at mobile devices, the balance i...

FirstRain has debuted FirstRain for Touch, an enterprise customer intelligence application built for the Salesforce Touch Platform. "What we did was create a component version of our application that was then easily dropped into the Salesforce.com Touch platform using their SDK," said Penny Herscher...

The jargon of an industry is a good indicator of where the mindset of that industry is at any particular moment. Think of terms like "the cloud," which are set upon by marketers and subverted to their ends until the meaning has been wrung from them. For many in IT, the cloud is a place that solves m...

There is a long-standing debate in the email marketing community about timing -- that is, whether time of day makes a difference in open and click-through rates. In other words, will an email marketing message sent early Monday morning be more likely to be opened than one sent Wednesday around noon ...

Demandbase has incorporated a new filter in its Demandbase Company-Targeted Advertising platform. The filter, called "Technology Targeting," lets users target and personalize display ads based on the technology they use. In other words, users can now include the specific criteria of 'technologies us...

Salesforce came to New York this week for its annual winter meeting with customers. The company had two goals: test new ideas, and gather customer input. The event was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a relatively small group -- less than 1,000 -- rather than at the Jacob Javits Convention Cent...

Did you hear? McDonald's has just acquired Burger King! Also, someone at the company apparently has a potty mouth. Another unusual and unexpected corporate trade also happened last week -- Cadillac acquired Jeep. These events, of course, didn't really happen. In both instances, hackers gained contro...

HootSuite has incorporated paid advertising into its dashboard for the first time with the rollout of HootSuite Promoted Products integration for Twitter. It allows users to buy Promoted Tweets and manage their accounts on the HootSuite dashboard. This is a significant step for HootSuite's users, ...

Intelliverse has rolled out a new cloud-based tool that monitors social media for brand mentions and responds when appropriate. IntelliBuzz is simple enough that a company with minimal IT resources in-house -- that is, a computer and an Internet connection -- can manage this outreach just using the ...

For the better part of six years, we pundits have been urging businesses to get social. Social CRM even has its own Gartner Magic Quadrant, and while the entries in that document are all over the map in terms of what they do, vendors serving aspects of SCRM are well established. Gartner itself said ...

It has been a week since the Super Bowl, but its lessons for marketers are becoming increasingly clear. At the top of the list: The synergy between the mobile channel and the overall campaign is getting tighter. Another lesson gleaned from this year's big game, courtesy of the New Orleans' Superdome...

Do your customers think of you as one of them? Do they think you truly understand their business challenges, their opportunities and what keeps them up at night? These are questions you should seriously consider, because in the extraordinarily demanding B2B sales climate of our post-recession world...

As a journalist covering technology, you get bombarded with material from PR people trying to get you to write about their clients. Although there are some stellar PR people, the majority of pitches I get are not targeted at what I write about, addressed to the wrong person, or make claims that are ...

I have been known to do things for money. I bet you have too, but doesn't it sound funny to put it that way? I just got off a phone briefing with Freshdesk, an Indian company with a subscription customer service and support system that it refers to as a "help desk." Freshdesk's got most of the bell...