The Golden Rule for Marketing

Golden RuleMarketers are looking for a way to get attention, to get their message across and ultimately to get an advantage over their competitors.

Marketing has become a bad word to many. As a marketer you may even cringe in certain settings when you are asked what you do. Unfortunately, you know the feelings toward marketing is sometimes justified. Even some of the best brands fall for the worst marketing tactics at times. [Read more…]

12 Surprising B2B Marketing Spammers on Twitter

Twitter Favorite SpamCollecting followers is so last decade. It is easy to make arguments against simply trying to build up your following count and the tactics that are often used:

  • Purchased followers aren’t real. Fake follower sites can reportedly tell if you followers are real or fakes and fakes are a sign that you have been buying followers.
  • Mass following is frowned on by Twitter and if carefully managed, your follower ratio eventually makes you look like a spammer.
  • A smaller group of followers genuinely interested in you and paying attention to what you share is far powerful.

But what if there was a way to get more followers without paying to promote your account through Twitter, hurting your follower ratio or filling your stream with an excessive number of tweets?

Apparently, then its different. [Read more…]

Email Best Practice or Recipe for Disaster?

Email TipsYou strive to improve the performance of your email marketing. You test exhaustively. You pore over every benchmark and research study.

Subject lines, call to action, offer, design, images. You examine everything in your bid for more opens, more clicks, more leads and more sales.

These recent statistics and anecdotes point to a clear way to increase email open and click rates, but read on before you decide to test these approaches. [Read more…]

B2B Email Lists: How Publishers Use (or Abuse) Your Email

In B2B marketing, and particularly in enterprise technology marketing, publishers lean heavily on email lists for lead generation programs, including whitepaper and webcast promotions.

B2B email lists also still command high rental rates ($300+ CPMs are very common). Both directly or indirectly, email continues to be an important vehicle for B2B publishers.

But when you rent an email list, purchase an ad in an email newsletter or run a lead generation program with a publisher, do you know how much the publisher has used (or abused) their email list? [Read more…]

The Thin Line Between Social Media Marketing and Spam

You can share. You can publish. You can broadcast. You can spam.

Today, communication is more accessible than ever before. Anyone with an internet connection can email or Tweet.

With more people publishing and more competition for our attention, free and easy-to-use communication channels lead to spam. Even well-intentioned individuals, marketers and publishers can fall into the spam trap. [Read more…]

No!! LinkedIn Just Went Klout On Us!

If you have viewed a LinkedIn profile in the last couple days, chances are you have seen a new box at the top of the page prompting you to endorse the individuals skills.

Here is a screenshot of the endorse box on one of my connection’s profile page:

With one click, I can endorse Lauren’s skills in these five areas simply because we are connected. But wait, there’s more! Scroll down the page and there is a prominent call, again, to endorse Lauren!

Is this really a good idea? [Read more…]