The San Francisco Giants at long last won the World Series last week and ShoreTel found a way to make significant hay with the achievement.

ShoreTel provides voice-over-IP equipment and counts the Giants as one of its customers. In 2009, the company created a series of content relative to its Giants installation, including a video with Giants’ CIO, Bill Schlough, a press release and an advertorial produced with Network World. After the World Series win, the company jumped on the opportunity to once again put its Giants relationship front and center.

IDG Enterprise’s forthcoming LeadAccel online reporting service is the latest example of a tool that should be a boon for marketers looking to improve their lead nurturing capabilities.
I’m probably biased here, since I worked for IDG’s Network World publication for 11 years and still do a fair amount of work for IDG, but LeadAccel makes [...]

This has to be good news: magazine ad pages rose in the second quarter, albeit by just 0.8%, vs. the same quarter last year – the first increase since 2007, according to B2B Media Business.
Also encouraging is the list of magazines leading the charge in terms of ad increases, including titles such as Fast Company [...]

In my last post I mentioned how it’s possible to parlay a single customer interview into numerous marketing materials, from case studies to videos.  In doing a bit of prep for an interview with the CEO of KACE, I found the systems management appliance vendor to be a perfect example of my point.
Case studies – [...]

Unless you are completely ecstatic with the white papers your firm produces and the results they deliver, you’ll want to check out “Reengineering the White Paper,” a 3-part series published by The Bloom Group consultancy that offers a prescription for how to produce more compelling white papers and ensure they get in the right hands.
Part [...]

I’m pretty sure that, at one time or another, every blog has to include a story about customer service hell.  It’s probably more therapeutic for the blogger more than anything, especially in a blog that’s supposed to offer marketing tips. But I’ll justify this on the idea that bad customer service is one more thing [...]

Everyone loves a good survey – and a survey can certainly be an effective marketing tool, especially when the numbers say what you want them to say.
But if your survey is to have any credibility, you need to tell people how many qualified respondents it is based upon.
This came up today because I was poring [...]

AdMedia Partners earlier this week released the results of its 16th annual survey of media and marketing services executives.  This appears to be a fairly significant undertaking, as the survey goes to some 7,400 executives in the advertising, marketing services and related industries, according to AdMedia Partners. (I say “appears to be” because, oddly, AdMedia [...]

The folks at Vertical Systems Group are predicting that Ethernet business services will hit $40.2 billion in revenue by 2014, the result of double-digit growth over the next few years.  I believe it for a couple of reasons.
One, these folks have been following the carrier market for more than two decades and they know what [...]

I’ve been helping Network World line up speakers to present end user case studies at its IT Roadmap events for more than four years now.  IT Roadmap is a one-day event held in 10 U.S. cities that covers multiple technologies in separate breakout sessions and workshops. (Learn more here.)
In the course of finding folks who [...]