Jude Fischer's blog

Will 2010 be the year that social media lands at the head table for B2B marketers?  Perhaps.  To listen to some, if you aren’t a fully engaged social media butterfly at this point, you’re already running the risk of becoming a dinosaur.  And for marketing folks, this might be true.  Ignoring shifts in customer behavior is never wise, but neither is assuming a shift has occurred when it hasn’t.

Sometimes us agency folks get so used to doing what we do that we lose perspective on what others are (or are not) doing.  I was recently presenting some ideas to a prospective client and included a Google AdWords program to help them expand their reach beyond their traditional customers into competing technologies.  As I went further, it became apparent they weren’t at all familiar with how a pay-per-click (PPC) program works.  So, for their benefit and perhaps yours, here are six quick steps to integrating PPC into your marcom mix.  

If you don’t know me, I’m a bit of a music junkie. On occasion, I’ve even been accused of being a snob about it. If you’ve ever seen the movie High Fidelity, my wife says I fall somewhere between the characters played by John Cusack and Jack Black. ( I like to think I’m more like the quiet, geeky guy played by Todd Louiso.)

Everywhere you look today there are articles and bloggers talking about applying metrics to marketing activities, and as a long-time media guy and a former market research analyst, I’m all about having good numbers when it comes to making marcom decisions, but are we tracking the right metrics or just the easiest ones?

Any individual or organization that has made the decision to begin a blog has soon thereafter asked the question, “What in God’s name am I going to write about day after day?” Naturally, if you’re blogging, you want your posts to impart some sort of meaningful content or revolutionary insight. Unfortunately, the simple truth is that isn’t going to happen every time. But that’s okay. The idea isn’t always to break new ground. In fact, more often than not, the idea is simply to extend the dialogue.

For too long now, Adventive Marketing has been guilty of not practicing what it preaches. While we’ve been working hard to develop and implement integrated branding and lead generation programs for our clients, we’ve ignored our own marcom needs. We let our Web site sit stagnant for too long. Our marketing materials grew dated and ineffective, and our “database” became little more than a holiday card mailing list. Cardinal sins we preach against to our clients every day.