I’m four pages into this week’s Advertising Age (billed as “The Agency Issue”) and the cover story, How to save the troubled agency-marketer relationship, has a sidebar from Kimberly-Clark CMO Tony Palmer. Second in his list of  the “five pain points in the marketer-agency bond” is the fact that agencies and marketers have not found [...]

In case there’s still anyone out there who believes social media/social networking is: a fad for kids for B2C, not B2B instead of a pervasive shift in how all people communicate with each other, now comes yet another eMarketer report, Social Network Ad Spending: 2010 Outlook , that should put those beliefs out to pasture. [...]

There is none. But that doesn’t make links from Wikipedia worthless. First, let me explain why Wikipedia links have no SEO value. Wikipedia has one of the highest pageranks you can get – it’s usually at the top of the search results for anything located in it’s massive database. Because of this, Wikipedia is well [...]

Why a Loyal Customer isn’t Always a Profitable One, an article in today’s Wall Street Journal, posits: To be considered loyal, it shouldn’t be enough for a customers to feel a bond to a company, or to simply stick with the relationship. It should also require certain actions, or shopping behaviors, on the part of [...]

A passage in a recent eMarketer article, Magazines Run Online, reminds us once again why ‘quantity’ isn’t the end-all, be-all. “Years of inflated circulation rate bases have backfired,” says Ms. Krol. “Magazines chased volume, banking on a larger set of readers to justify advertising rate increases. Unfortunately, that bloated universe of readers often proved less [...]

One of my colleagues, Rene Ryan, called my attention to a blog post on BusinessBytes, a small business technology blog. The Death of the Elevator Pitch highlights the fact that the “elevator pitch”–the supposedly succinct description of a business offering that marketers could use to entice a prospect when time was tight–is on its last [...]

Below is a great slideshow from Bud Caddell, a strategist at Undercurrent. It makes a strong case for relationship marketing with the ideas that: there is no such thing as a captive audience, and “fans” (not awareness) are the only thing you should be focused on, especially in a recession. In order to be fan-focused, [...]

An earlier post about Facebook‘s user-base made the point that if you’re a marketer, and your target audience includes women or people over the age of 26, your audience probably has a Facebook account. An article in today’s Wall Street Journal is further proof of the mainstreaming of social media in general, and Facebook in [...]