Amid the Noise and Haste

Are You Engaged?

Forrester has released the results of a new survey on engagement (this is a product).  Not the kind that leads to marriage, but the kind that keeps you in touch with your clients.  As they defined it, engagement is the level of involvement, interaction, intimacy, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.

As they see it, these four components of engagement - involvement, interaction, intimacy and influence - can help you learn how to make better marketing decisions.  Their argument is the following:

...that companies need to start tying these metrics together to make sense of how engaged their customers actually are—and then make product and marketing decisions based on that knowledge.

Now, there's no clean and beautiful equation like e = mc². But as we continue this research on the topic and gather feedback (we've already seen some extremely polarizing reviews of the report), we'd love to get your take on the matter.

Sifting through the noise and haste, can you see how to better engage your customers?  If you don't have definitive metrics, I suggest open conversation with your customers.  Talk to them, or better yet listen.

 

Keep track of yourself

Ever wonder how you spend your time on the web?  Google can tell you with Google Search History.  For instance, I do a lot of searching on Mondays, apparently, and also more searching at night...this part makes sense since I am working on my MBA and spend my evening working on my projects.

More about Reusing Content

Continuing the discussion from ABM's Business Information: Capitalizing on New Business Information in Revenue Streams...

Chuck Richard from Outsell, Inc. opened his session Outsell Analysis of B2B Growth Imperatives with the big threat facing businesses in the publishing and data worlds: "If you don't have a repository or database your competitors will...it is a must in today's business world."  Chuck then led us through his "Top 10" list of the repository trends in business today:

10.    Ride the growth stream
9.      Supply more of the minimum daily requirements
8.     Know the roles of the buyers in each product category
7.      Build it, share it, buy it, sell it
6.      Know the rich data competition
5.      Cash in on the "snoop" money
4.      Watch the trend in User Generated Content**
3.      Get rich data recovery bounce
2.      Capture rich data rewards
1.      Drop the damn skepticism

**  Chuck also gave us a few interesting sites to ponder over in the context of UGC (user generated content).  Here are the sites worth looking at:

www.swivel.com:  The "YouTube" for data"
www.zoominfo.com:  A "business information search engine, with profiles on more than 35 million people and 3.8 million companies"
www.zilla.com:  A yet-to-launch search site...the page is just a place holder at this point.

As Chuck pointed out, the jury is still out about user generated content people are still skeptical about validity, but with the advent of wikis, community sites, blogs and more UGC is here to stay.