The Mobile Marketing Association, a trade group that represents more than 600 companies involved in mobile marketing, has released its global Mobile Advertising Guidelines.

The guidelines build on region-specific mobile ad guidelines published last year for North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The regional guidelines have been integrated into the global version, which includes new guidelines for text messaging. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Research Outlines Marketing Best Practices Based on Consumption Patterns of Blogs, Video, RSS and Online Networks

The study, The Rise of B2B Applications-Based Media, reveals that the usage of emerging media among IT decision-makers has increased considerably over the past year, with video and blogs experiencing the most increased usage for work-related information. This latest study is part of TechWeb's ongoing Business Technology Media Engagement Research series.

Key study highlights include:

-- Increased Usage of Emerging Media Applications: business technology decision makers are utilizing emerging media applications more frequently to obtain work-related information, as compared to last year.

-- More Growth Expected: business technology decision makers currently using emerging media intend to consume even more in the coming year - even those who are not currently using emerging media applications.

-- Engagement with Emerging Media Leads to Action: when business technology decision makers interact with emerging media, they continue to look for related information.

For more information on this research, email Scott Vaughan.

Answer: Most e-mail newsletters today look pretty much the same, so how can you distinguish yours from your competitors’? By using behavioral targeting to learn more about what customers want and giving it to them. B-to-b e-mailers work with shorter customer lists and often longer sales cycles than their b-to-c counterparts, but that doesn’t mean they should be tempted to oversaturate their most valuable customers with a deluge of nontargeted email. Behaviorally targeted messages provide better response and can even be credited with shortening sales cycles.

The easiest way to obtain behavioral targeting data is through Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

One of the reasons in-text has such strong appeal among users is because it's seen more as information than marketing. Here's why.

There has been a fair amount of interest surrounding in-text advertising as of late, and Vibrant Media has taken the pole position in the space.

In-text advertising -- for those of you who aren't familiar with it -- is essentially advertising that is embedded within the text of a page of online content. This is beyond simple editorial adjacency for display advertising. It is actually having an ad unit married to a word or phrase on a page, within editorial. The way it works is this: I'm an advertiser of, say, soap. I approach an in-text advertising provider and tell them I want to own the words "soap," "shower," and "clean."

The executed buy will be these words in articles or within content on sites the in-text advertising provider has relationships with all across the web, underlined and highlighted. Every time a visitor to a page -- with these highlighted words or phrases -- mouses over the highlighted text, my soap advertisement will show, popping up in a sort of "talk bubble," like those seen in pop-up video or a comic book.

Some providers of this sort of advertising, like ContentLink, do text advertisements. Others, like Vibrant, will actually run video.

Vibrant Media is the largest provider of this kind of advertising, with more than Read the complete article on online...

Using Trade Shows, Conferences, and Other Meetings to Create Profitable and Long-Lasting Client Relationships

It is important for technology vendors and solutions providers to remember that every single customer touch point presents a valuable opportunity to create affinity. And, events are no exception. By organizing your presence at trade shows, conferences, and other types of face-to-face gatherings with the customer in mind, your organization can leverage your investment in events to build affinity. This, in turn, will lead to the kind of strong, long-lasting relationships that result in optimumclient satisfaction and retention, as well as sustained profitability and growth. Download the complete CMP white paper "Events: Building The Bridge To Customer Affinity.

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.

Proving ROI, using new technologies and leveraging partner marketing were key topics at Red Herring's CMO 2008 conference in San Diego last week.

The conference drew more than 300 senior marketing executives, mostly from b-to-b companies, who shared strategies for competing in today's challenging business environment.

One of the hot topics was partner marketing, with presentations by several executives whose companies use channel marketing models.

Stephen DiFranco, corporate VP-corporate and channels marketing at chip maker AMD, discussed how the company has leveraged its partner channel to confront rival Intel Corp. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

E-mail marketing managers love to include quick surveys in their e-newsletters—so much so that they risk overdoing it.

Melissa Read, VP-research and innovation at Spunlogic, an Atlanta-based full-service digital marketing agency, believes managers send surveys too often, causing respondents to burn out on the novelty of providing feedback. Eventually, she said, they’ll stop responding.

“Surveys should only go out when you want to understand something about the business respondents,” Read said. Otherwise, “it will become the survey who cried wolf and the next time you really want to know something, respondents won’t be as interested in telling you.”

Paring down the number of surveys is a good start, she said. Read offers these other helpful tips... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: I am always amazed at the still-prevailing idea that list size trumps list quality. Don’t get me wrong: Volume is good. Every record in your e-mail address list has an inherent value that can be reduced to a dollar amount. This leads us to the idea that your database should be viewed as capital and should be treated just like any other useful marketing asset. So why, then, do so many marketers mix bad data into their lists?

A bad e-mail address can have a dramatic impact on your ability to market with e-mail. Bad e-mails come in the form of addresses from third parties (list renters, etc.), complainers who have not been removed from your list and dormant addresses—e-mail addresses of people who have not opened your e-mail in more than 90 days. ISPs view all with equal disdain. While it is not illegal to send to these “bad” e-mail addresses, doing so is a sure way to increase complaints and damage your sender reputation. It’s also a good way to waste money.

So how do you build your list and maintain quality data? Consider these tips: Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The subject of search engine marketing click fraud made headlines last year. Advertisers and publishers alike criticized the search engines for not doing enough to combat the problem. But the topic has not been in the spotlight recently. Does that mean click fraud is no longer an issue?
BtoB recently spoke with Dan Robbins, director of marketing at Lyris, a marketing software company, about click fraud and what marketers can do to avoid playing the victim.

BtoB: Is click fraud still a problem?

Robbins: It depends on your vertical. In mortgage and finance categories, you’re paying a lot more for a click. For the lower end, general market is less of an issue. But marketers need to pay attention to it. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Kerry Smith is president of the Event Marketing Institute, a think tank that follows trends in event marketing through research, analysis and education. BtoB asked Smith to talk about expected developments in the events industry.

BtoB: What do you see as the biggest trends this year?

Smith: There's going to be a focus on a couple of things: First, experience mapping—recognition that when you're doing an event [you] understand who you are trying to engage. Often times, it's multiple people. How are you creating an experience around your event that will allow those people to find the appropriate channels to engage with you? You're going to talk differently to a CTO than to a CFO.

Another area is portfolio analysis. At company after company, they are looking across their entire spectrum of events, and cleaning out the closet [and asking] `Which ones are working for us, which ones are not, which ones are we not sure of?' They're going to start adjusting the dials accordingly.

And then there's this whole area of measuring everything—improving performance. There are no standards for measuring events, [and there are] different objectives for every company. As one marketer told us... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Chief Marketing Officer Council Encourages Adding Customer Affinity Index To The Mix

Customer centric metrics are taking center stage this year as b-to-b marketers pursue new ways to measure customer engagement, satisfaction and, ultimately, loyalty to a brand.

Measuring customer satisfaction is not a new idea, but as technology puts more control in the hands of users, marketers are seeking out the optimal ways to measure how successful they are with their marketing messages, products and services.

Marketers are divided on how best to achieve this. Some are using an array of metrics and other processes to come up with a view of how they're doing with customers, while others are trying to simplify the process by using a single metric, such as the Net Promoter Score.

The NPS, developed by loyalty expert Fred Reichheld, is a score of customer loyalty based on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend our company to colleagues?"

Marketing organizations are also coming up with new metrics to gauge the customer experience.

Last month [December 2007], the Chief Marketing Officer Council released a study on customer measurement... Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

B-to-b marketing budgets appear to be in good shape this year, with more than half of marketers expecting the purse strings to loosen up. While interactive tactics will gain from that increase and see the most growth, traditional media will still command the bulk of the budget. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Budget forecasters are predicting that spending on large events will be down this year. But that's not an umbrella forecast for all types of events. Instead, marketers intend to increase financing for smaller, more targeted meetings such as executive breakfasts and roundtables.

According to a recent study, "B2B Marketers' 2008 Budget Trends," by Forrester Research, which surveyed 369 marketing professionals online during September and October 2007, almost 50% of those surveyed said they would increase spending on executive seminars and events. That represents the largest projected increase among all marketing and advertising budget categories, including public relations, print advertising, direct mail and sponsorships.

Assessing intangibles

"These marketers understand that business decision-makers rely on peer testimonial, face-to-face gatherings and outside authorities to help them assess intangibles like legitimacy, credibility and trustworthiness—factors difficult to convey in both online and traditional activities," according to the report.

Although 27% said they would increase spending on trade shows while 22% said they would decrease trade show spending, survey respondents did admit to spending more on large, trade-sponsored events then any other budget category.

However, according to the study, "Client conversations and other anecdotal stories show that b-to-b marketers waste money when they scurry around last minute to staff the booth and expect show-related traffic, or a favorable booth placement, to produce leads. B-to-b marketers who fail to build interactive campaigns that preview show-specific offers, invite attendees to on-site executive briefings and continue booth conversations via e-mail should look to spend their money elsewhere."

Analyst Laura Ramos, a VP at Forrester and the principal author of the report, explained that marketers are moving away from large events, but added, "they told us that one-to-one contact is still very important in the negotiated sales process that [is going on] in b-to-b marketing and selling." Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Search marketing continues to grow and morph, and by all accounts 2008 will bring more of the same.
A major player in the search world is Jeffrey Pruitt, exec VP-search at search agency iCrossing and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO). BtoB recently asked Pruitt to talk about current and future trends in search marketing and the biggest challenges marketers will face in 2008. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could figure out today what your marketing plan should look like in six months? Crystal balls don’t exactly grow on trees, so we’ve asked two industry experts—Jordan Ayan, president of SubscriberMail, and Joel Book, director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget—to weigh in on what’s coming in 2008. Here’s what they said.

1) More CRM integration, especially with software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.
2) Increased use of automated tools.
3) Closer alignment of marketing elements.
4) Using rich video with e-mail marketing.

Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The customer is very much on the minds of leading marketing executives these days. Across numerous research initiatives undertaken by the CMO Council, marketers collectively indicate they are spending more time and resources than ever before on understanding and engaging with their customers, including increased investments in customer communities, CRM systems and processes, and customer intelligence and analytics. The CMO Council has been a champion of these efforts, advocating a more disciplined, measurable and integrated approach to marketing, anchored by greater knowledge and more meaningful interaction with customers and customer markets. Now we believe it is time for a new measure of marketing performance – called customer affinity – that looks beyond old brand metrics to support marketing in its critical role of building customer-centric businesses. Register to download the free Executive Summary or purchase the full report from the CMO Council's Customer Affinity Website.

[Note: CMP was an underwriter for this CMO Council study.]

Answer: Addressing e-mail received while out of the office for extended periods of time can be one of the most frustrating phenomena in business today.

People subscribe to receive e-mail communications that are relevant and useful to them in their day-to-day jobs, but when those messages stack up in the in-box for whatever reason, the recipients don’t reap the benefits of those communications. And what do they do with all of those messages? They sort by “from name,” highlight and delete.

And depending on the volume, they may potentially be annoyed with the organization that sent the e-mail, which could be detrimental to future interaction. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

The focus of IT decision-makers next year will gradually shift to software rollouts and virtualization, among other areas, from the current challenges of security, business continuity and compliance, according to a new study by technology publisher CMP.

The study, “Media Engagement & Activation,” is based on Web interviews conducted during August and September with 800 business technology executives. It was designed to provide a deeper understanding of which emerging media are being used by decision-makers and what they are doing as a result of engaging with the various media sources. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline. For more information on this research, email Scott Vaughan.

Many companies aren’t coordinating their various departments’ e-mail marketing efforts, according to a Jupiter Research report released last month, “Maturation of E-mail: Controlling Messaging Chaos Through Centralization.”

Some 24% of executives surveyed said six or more departments manage their e-mail messaging activities separately. Almost half the executives questioned (44%) said they believed their e-mail would be more effective if it were managed from a central platform. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

When designing your holiday greetings, a well-planned e-card can effectively enhance your public image and may even result in added business in the new year.

Here are some tips to keep in mind when developing your holiday e-card.

1. Tie in your product or service with a holiday theme.
2. Take advantage of what the e-card format has to offer.
3. Make your message viral.

Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

With audience engagement and activation essential topics for B2B technology marketers, CMP presents the study "Media Engagement & Activation." This in-depth study of nearly 1000 Business Technology decision makers (CIOs, IT Managers and Corporate and LOB Management) will help senior marketing, marketing program and media professionals:

• Gain a deeper understanding of where, when, and why IT and corporate professionals engage with various types of content and media sources
• Build an "engagement blueprint" that maps your message and marketing plan by Corp and IT pros' consumption of specific technology information -- Security, Infrastructure & Networking Hardware, Software Infrastructure, Business Applications Software, Mobile & Wireless, and Business & IT Services
• Understand usage and the roles Websites, magazines, events, search, virtual learning tools, and user controlled platforms such as blogs, wikis and RSS, and the path business technology decision makers take as they move through their personal information journey.

View this webcast featuring Scott Vaughan, VP of Marketing for InformationWeek & the TechWeb Network; Dan Yetso, Director, Global Branding & Advertising, VeriSign; and Scott Anderson, Vice President, Customer Communications Technology Solutions Group, Hewlett Packard for an engaging and insightful look behind the numbers. Moderated by Ellis Booker, Editor, BtoB Magazine and Media Business. View the webcast archive....

This webcast presents only a summary of the available research. For complete details, email Scott Vaughan.

Doing your homework can help event planning for international attendees go more smoothly

As globalization makes the world smaller, more U.S. companies find themselves creating b-to-b events for an international audience. Whether marketing at home or abroad, building an event for a crowd from abroad requires special attention to detail.

Taking an event abroad can be expensive and it is nearly impossible to plan for all the eventual pitfalls. However, doing some legwork in advance can curtail unexpected costs and issues.

"Anytime you're going overseas you have to be aware that things are going to be different," said Carol Krugman, director-client services at experience marketing company George P. Johnson. "You would be amazed at people who believe everywhere in the world everything is the way it is at home. Those are the people that run into tremendous trouble. You have different languages, customs, business practices, different hours of operation, electrical currencies, video standards, even dial tones on telephones. Be aware that everywhere you are going to be working, you must educate yourself." Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: Most businesses—anywhere from 50% to 80%—use Outlook as their e-mail client. What’s more, a recent survey suggests that nearly 40% of these companies will migrate to Office 2007. If the majority of your marketing e-mail list is business domains, you may need to rethink the design of those marketing e-mails. Otherwise, your potential customers may quite literally not get your message. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

In 2006, a decision was made to consolidate under the “Sunstone” brand and align all search marketing under that name. After the brand consolidation took place, the company also wanted to boost its conversions, and Bob Schnyder, Internet products manager at Sunstone, knew that would mean refining the landing page strategy.

All of that would require a search agency partner, as Sunstone’s search marketing program had grown to such a degree that it was no longer manageable in-house.

“I’m a [certified] Google AdWords Pro myself, so I know what I’m talking about when it comes to paid search,” said Schnyder, who set the bar high when he started looking for an agency. “I needed to find someone who could do it better than I could and a company that not only understood search but b-to-b search.” Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

Answer: As a b-to-b sender, there are a number of things you can do to help increase your delivery rates. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

While marketing metrics has become a hot topic in the last several years, the most recent ANA survey indicated a number of worrisome declines. For example, in the 2006 survey, 28% of respondents said they could forecast the impact of a 10% reduction in marketing budget on sales, only 18% said this in this year's survey. Likewise, the percentage saying they used cross-functional teams from such departments as sales and finance declined from 45.3% in 2006 to 20.1% in 2007. And only 22% said they had "full cooperation and an open dialogue with finance" to establish metrics and methodologies for marketing ROI.

While there may be many causes, Nardone and See suggested the lack of a financial commitment to measurement was one factor. The most recent survey found that 57% of marketers invested less than 1% of their working marketing budget into accountability and that only about half (49%) even had a dedicated budget for accountability. Read the complete article on BtoBOnline.

he importance of a highly responsive mailing list in determining the success of a direct mail campaign cannot be overestimated. Before choosing a list for your campaign, it is important to understand industry basics as well as the distinct roles of list managers and brokers.

List managers represent the actual owner of a mailing list that you might consider renting. List brokers are consultants who can help you find lists of mail responders (people who have responded to some type of mailing and have asked to receive information) who match your target profile. List selects cost more, but they enable you to target demographic, geographic and psychographic information to create a mailing list that will garner an even higher response rate.

Remember that lists are rented—normally for one-time use only. Each time you wish to send out a mailing, you must rent those names anew. Discounts for multiple uses are standard industry practice.

As e-mail marketing has taken hold in recent years, list selection has become even more critical. Permission-based e-mail marketing—communications sent only to those who have specifically requested to receive marketing messages for products and services like yours—is critical, as even one misstep can result in e