Recently, I attended the Tridion 2011 Partner Delta Training. In addition to GUI enhancements and integration with Smart Target, the content manager (CM) and content delivery (CD) have gone through some “under the hood” rework. Integrations with mobile engagement and the new, sleek online marketing explorer interface gives marketers and content strategists solid multi-channel plug-ins.
After Groupon turned down Facebook’s $6+ billion offer, the obvious happened today. Facebook launched the new version of “Deals” which incorporates the local business advertising and coupon model that is Groupon’s cornerstone. This new offering brings me to a question that we get continuously. “Is Groupon the 800-pound gorilla in social commerce?” I think the more appropriate question is whether Groupon is really social commerce at all.
I had the pleasure of speaking to the students at the Chicago Tech Academy (CTA) this past week about my career in design and preparing themselves for a future career in design or tech. The school was started two years ago with generous private sector funding from local organizations, including the Illinois Technology Association (ITA) and CompTIA along with support from businesses like Microsoft and Cisco. The goal of the school is to help prepare students for success in college and technology-rich careers through an immersion in the entrepreneurial and tech business communities. The program also includes a double helping of English and math courses and active community involvement from industry leaders in the form of internships and mentoring programs.
Recently (okay it’s been two weeks), I attended the Sales 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. As a former salesperson myself, I was keenly interested in mingling with sales executives to get their perspectives on the evolving role of marketing and technology in their everyday lives.
Not surprisingly, the typical chasm between what sales expects from marketing and their perception of what marketing tends to deliver still exists. Salespeople usually believe that marketing is solely focused on brand development, and what they consider a lead is misaligned with what a salesperson believes is truly a sales-ready lead.
SDL Innovate 2011 Santa Clara, CA—Having recently attended the SDL conference, one of the keynote speakers—Toby Bell, VP at Gartner Research— presented “Online Channel Optimization” which captivated the audience for two hours while he presented best practices and new research studies.
Well, not exactly live! DrupalCon 2011 has finally come to a close today—and I was too busy enjoying the keynotes, sessions and after-hours parties to update our blog about the happenings at this year’s event.
The conference was a great opportunity to see how the Drupal community has matured, how it continues to evolve as social media and mobile change and how we think about delivering content online. Dries Buytaert—the original creator and project lead for Drupal—kicked off the conference by discussing the future of Drupal and how the next version, Drupal 8, will be mark-up free so that it can serve data via XML or JSON as easily as it does HTML. This approach underscores the vision that content management systems must focus on delivering information to any device and any environment at any time.
Historically, social media strategies and tactics have been the domain of marketing and PR in the enterprise, however that trend is changing—fast. The number one question CMOs hear from their Sales executive counterparts is “how can social media help generate and nurture leads?” As social media marketing matures, so do the expectations of its real and immediate impact on the top line. In this issue of the ThoughtMatrix newsletter, we discuss the role of social media in the sales process.
As you may recall in October 2010, I switched from a PC to a MacBook Pro. Five months have passed and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with the switch. The Mac is reliable, fast and really a pleasure to work on. I have added a 23” monitor to extend my display and a Magic Mouse. All in all, I give the experience a 95/100.
In my original post that you can read here, (http://www.netwhisperer.com/2010/09/21/im-not-a-pc-and-windows-7-was-not-my-idea/)
I spent most of the time being critical of the shortcomings of Windows 7. Once switching to the Mac, my disappointment with an operating system completely disappeared. In writing this post, I tried hard to think about something I really didn’t like about the Mac and couldn’t think of anything. Well, one issue with Mac Mail, but nothing other than that.
With the Apple iPhone finally coming to a Verizon network near you, I started thinking about the different features it might have due to the differences between AT&T and Verizon. The more I thought about it, the more questions I had. I’m very curious to see what, if any, will be the pain points for Verizon’s iPhone. Since there’s only a week or so until launch and when we’ll really start to hear how it’s going, here are a few of the big questions, along with my thoughts on them…
SDL Tridion acquired eCommerce marketing company Fred Hopper (www.fredhopper.com) in January 2010. For the past year, SDL has been working on integrating Fred Hopper into it’s Web Content Management (WCM) system, better known as “Smart Target”.
