Jeff Zabin
More Companies Seek to Implement a Single Technology to Support Multichannel Campaign Management
Consumers expect to be able to interact and transact with companies however they please, based on their own channel preferences. For marketers, this expectation can be both a blessing and a curse, depending on the degree to which they’re able to succeed with their...
Why Sentiment Analysis Isn’t Like a Game of Roulette
In the game of roulette, there are black rows and there are red rows. Gamblers can place their bets anywhere they choose. On so-called even-money bets (red/black, high/low, and even/odd), the odds of winning would seem to be exactly that: 50:50. Yet given enough...
Social Integration is the Name of the Game
Large companies are making big strides in shoring up their capabilities around the social channel. A lot of the credit goes to advances in integrated social platforms. Adopting these technologies, companies are now listening, publishing, analyzing and engaging across social in a more systematic...
The Text Analytics Space Heats Up With a Big Funding Round for Clarabridge
Most people didn't use to pay much attention to text analytics. Maybe natural language processing and computational linguistics didn't strike them as terribly exciting. Or maybe the potential business application of the capability wasn't so glaringly obvious. In any case, with the announcement last...
Why Acxiom is Opening the Kimono on Consumer Data
Having written extensively in the past about the need for companies to grant data autonomy to their customers, giving them the ability to access, alter, and suppress their consumer profile data, I'm keenly interested in Acxiom's upcoming launch of AbouttheData.com. The fact that Acxiom,...
Using Benchmark Research to Get a Reality Check
Welcome to Lake Wobegon," exalts Garrison Keillor on his long-running NPR radio show A Prairie Home Companion, "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average." "Above average" is how a disproportionately large percentage of companies...
Nonprofits Embrace CRM, as in Constituent Relationship Management
According to the just-released Giving USA 2013: The Annual Report on Philanthropy, total charitable giving in the United States last year was $316.23 billion (about 2% of GDP), most of it from individuals. This represents an increase of 3.5% from 2011. The fact that...
Telligent, Zimbra and the Online Community Software Space
Last week, Telligent announced that it has acquired the assets of Zimbra from VMware. This is relatively big news in the realm of online community software, where investment and acquisition activity has slowed considerably in recent years. Six or seven years ago, this competitive...
Buzzword Du Jour: Omni-Channel Marketing
It used be that marketers talked in terms of multi-channel marketing. Then, to some extent, it was cross-channel marketing. Now, it seems, omni-channel marketing may be assuming the mantle of CMO Buzzwords That Matter. The evolution in terminology makes sense, to some extent. Multi-channel marketing...
A Serious Look at Technology Solutions for Social Listening
I've been covering social listening – sometimes referred to as social media monitoring and social intelligence (although both these terms have slightly different nuances) – as an industry analyst for more than six years, first at Aberdeen Group and for the past three years...
A Fifteenth Century Monk and the Intangible Value of a Facebook Fan
Luca Pacioli, a Fifteen Century Venetian monk, is widely credited as the first person to document the principles of double-entry bookkeeping and is even thought by some historians to have actually invented it. If true, Pacioli can hardly be faulted for thinking only about...
Analyst Day at HubSpot: Sunshine and Daydreams
As an industry analyst, I'm frequently invited to attend "analyst day" events hosted by technology solution providers. I typically decline. I find that spending a full day listening to a management team boast of how they're solving the marketing, business intelligence or customer service...
Infographic: Inbound Marketing for Small Businesses
Gleanster recently published an infographic that tells a compelling story about the value of inbound marketing, particularly in the context of small businesses. It incorporates both Gleanster research and third-party stats from a number of different sources. For those not paying attention to the evolution...
Adjusting the Noise-to-Signal Radio for Better Social Listening
As a child, I could sometimes be found crawling around the unfinished attic of our house. It didn't even have floorboards. What was I doing up there? I was adjusting the TV antenna. My father would be stationed in the basement, in the family...
Agile Business Intelligence: Because Information is Power and Timing is Everything
Businesses of all sizes are turning to self-service business intelligence (BI) tools to gain faster and better access to information and insights. This is partly a response to stretched IT staffs that cannot keep up with the constant demand for new reports and analysis....
Putting Mobile Marketers in the Driver’s Seat
Anyone who attended or paid any attention to last week's Consumer Electronics Show knows that the theme of the event was mobile. In fact, new buzzwords were coined just for the occasion. Young people are now "Generation M." They are also "born mobile." I'm not...
New Adventures in Precision Marketing: Peeping Toms and the Consensual Customer
The same battle has been raging for years. On one side are marketers whose success lies in presenting consumers with highly relevant messages and offers. That means mining consumer data for behavioral, psychographic, transactional and other information and/or purchasing multi-dimensional portraits of consumers from...
Visualizing Marketing Dashboards
New Gleanster research on business intelligence reveals something that we marketers already knew: Marketing organizations are spending a lot of time and effort creating dashboards that tell them everything they need to know – and also what the folks in the executive suite want...
A Big Week for Business Intelligence
Is the Business Intelligence space heating up or what? The same week we publish our new benchmark report Agile Business Intelligence, two (really, three) leading BI solution providers (both of them included in the vendor ranking charts) had big news to announce. First, Actuate announced...
Netflix Takes Some Heat on Social Media – But to What End?
This week doesn't mark the first time that Netflix subscribers have been up in arms. It also happened five years ago. That's when the company disclosed that some customers had to wait for popular DVD titles longer than other customers.The problem was that in...