Answer: When a marketing program does not work, always go back to the basics of marketing 101: right target, right message, right timing, right channel.
Despite advances in scenario-based Web design created to track customer online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing campaigns, your customers are still bombarded with tons of irrelevant messages—often the result of batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped e-mail applications and outsourced e-mail service providers—each day.

If you aren’t getting responses, it is quite likely that your customers view your correspondence as spam, rather than relevant or valuable information, regardless of whether or not they have opted to receive your e-mails. Relevance is key in e-mail. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

How do companies innovate successfully?

They can spend the most money, hire the best engineers, develop the best technology, and conduct the best market research. But unless their research and development efforts are driven by a thorough understanding of what their customers want, their performance may well fall short — at least compared to that of their more customer- driven competitors. John Schiech, president of the DeWalt division of Black & Decker (the division that makes power tools used by professional contractors), put it simply. When asked what made his com - pany so successful, he responded, “It’s engineers and marketing product managers spending hours and hours on job sites talking to the guys who are trying to make their living with these tools.”

This insight represents a further amplification of our ongoing research into the costs and value of corporate innovation. In 2006, as in the two previous years of our annual study of the Booz Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 — the 1,000 publicly held companies around the world that spent the most on research and development — overall corporate revenues among these companies increased 10 percent. Once again, their overall spending on research and development also rose, to US$447 billion this year. And as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance. This document presents only a summary of the available research. Download this Booz Allan Hamilton report...

Second Life has been called virtual reality and said to work like a 3D social network, heralding the emergence of the 3D Web. But all these terms fall short of accurately describing this unique environment. And the baggage they bring with them menaces literal-minded marketers looking to exploit Second Life's huge potential for reaching and engaging with qualified customers.

Baptie Online has invited John Jainschigg, Executive Director of CMP Metaverse, the virtual worlds consulting and custom events business of CMP Technology, and Fiona Gallagher of Sun Microsystems to share their insights, experiences and the interactive opportunities to reach target audiences.

This webcast is hosted exclusively on Baptie.com, the leading community of sales and marketing executives in the technology industry. To view this webcast archive, you must be a member of the Baptie community. If you are not yet a member but qualify, you should register on the baptie.com site.

For more information about CMP's Metaverse services, email John Jainshigg, Executive Director, CMP Metaverse.

The attached document contains the questions, and their answers, that were posed to John Jainschigg from CMP and Kathy Mandelstein from IBM during the September 26 Webcast "How BtoB Marketers Can Achieve ROI in the Virtual World of Second Life." Download the complete Question and Answer document. Contact John Jainschigg, Executive Director, CMP Metaverse for more information about creating a virtual presence for your company.

Here is a summary of the questions contained in the document:

* Does SecondLife provide aggregated audience/user data or demo cuts
somewhere on the site? If so where?

* Would recommendations/best practices be applied to Playstation
'Home' coming up in April?

* How many attendees can attend an event on Second Life at one time?

What's the role of Second Life for business? What steps can marketers take to explore these new online communities, invest wisely and achieve outstanding results?

Join John Jainschigg, Director of CMP Metaverse, and Kathy Mandelstein, Director of Worldwide Developer Programs for IBM, for best practices on securing strong ROI from metaverse investments. CMP is the only global multimedia company registered as a metaverse developer, and IBM is one of the largest and most successful users of Second Life, and a strong proponent of 3D virtual reality as a strategic tool for collaboration, customer engagement and marketing. Moderated by Kate Maddox, Senior Reporter, BtoB Magazine and Media Business. View the webcast archive....

To receive the complete list of questions asked on this webcast, and the answers, email John Jainshigg, Executive Director, CMP Metaverse.

As VP-strategic marketing and business development of CMP's Channel business, Kate Spellman knows how to reach IT decision-makers. Prior to her current role at CMP, she was the publisher of the company's SmallBizResource .com; she has also served as senior VP- corporate marketing. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

If you are looking to grow your channel revenue, then you probably agree that it has become
extremely difficult to differentiate yourself from the competition. Especially when your
competition, like you, communicates to partners or solution providers (VARs, integrators,
consultants, etc.) that their products provide the most advanced technology, the highest reliability
and the overall best quality and value in the marketplace. If you are only using your products to
differentiate, then you’re going at it the hard way. Download this document…