Social Media Software

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing guest articles from experts in the realm of content marketing. This week, Josh Miles writes.

Josh Miles is principal and founder of Miles Design, a branding firm specializing in branding and website design for professional services and software firms. Josh is the author of the new Content Marketing Institute book Bold Brand: The New Rules for Differentiating, Branding, and Marketing Your Professional Services Firm.

“It will look like you guys are on everywhere, even if you’re not.”

Our media buyer always had a way of helping our clients make the...

October 2012 was an exciting time for ExactTarget’s partner ecosystem. Not only was the Orange Partner Network program launched at Connections, but also in front of the 4,000+ attendees, ExactTarget was excited to present the Power of ONE Reseller Partner of the Year award to our Platinum partner, C.TRAC.

C.TRAC has taken ExactTarget’s passion and unwavering commitment to client success and worked it into their own daily business practices by truly embodying ExactTarget's core values. Combined with their innovative strategy, design, integration, database management, reporting services, and...

I’m not a big fan of country music.

I don’t mean to alienate anyone due to personal preferences, and I’m sure we can find common interests even if country is the only genre on your iPod, but country tunes are just not my favorite tunes to hear.

That being said, one of my closest friends loves country music. We were recently at a restaurant that was playing a country song called “Where I Come From.” I was poking fun at the whole situation because I’d recently heard a completely different country song also called “Where I Come From.”

Lo and behold, there are two country songs with the exact...

Traditional media just isn't cutting it anymore, folks. Digital is the way. Then why aren't more brands embracing new technologies like they should?

According to a poll of US marketing professionals conducted by the American Marketing Association (AMA), brands plan to shift dollars from traditional media to mobile and social in 2013 and beyond. Why? Traditional media is fragmented and audiences are dwindling. According to the report, traditional mass media once offered marketers the benefit of reach, but now it's too fragmented and the metrics aren't great. 

eMarketer says, "Print media has...

Everything was going fine. You had set up your email marketing campaigns properly, all of your subscribers were double opt-in, you were sending emails on the right frequency, and your content was exactly what you had promised.

As far as you knew, people loved this stuff.....

But then, out of the blue, Gmail and the other ISPs started blocking your emails! But why? Why? Because those subscribers aren't interacting with your email anymore. They've become disinterested. They've become what are now known as 'the un-engaged.'

Just sending email to your subscribers isn't good enough

Just sending email...

The 20^th annual SXSW interactive festival in downtown Austin, TX, brought in tens of thousands of people competing to maximize their brand’s visibility. From swag to branded pedi cabs to exclusive parties, people are doing whatever they can to create brand awareness and build lead generation. Who will break out of the mainstream and leave an impression on this year’s SXSW?

Here are a few noteworthy announcements:

1. Bre Pettis, CEO of MakerBot Industries (known for their 3-D printers) revealed the MakerBot Digitizer. This device uses lasers to scan the contours of physical objects. These...

How many times have gotten stuck purchasing concert tickets for everyone in a large group because there's no other way to get seats next to each other? And what's worse, this creates a situation where each of your friends owes you money--which typically adds up to a considerable amount of cash.

That frustrating and painful ticketing experience may be a thing of the past by the next time your favorite act comes to town.

Interactive marketing software and social networking platforms have now made it possible for brands (like AEG's AXS.com) to vastly improve the ticket buying experience. Whether...

Today, Anonymous hacked into Burger King’s Twitter account and changed all the logos and messaging to McDonald’s. The buzz was tremendous and drove a massive amount of new followers for Burger King.

So, while it was no doubt embarrassing for the brand, many folks are pretty impressed by the increase in followers, brand mentions, and other nice side benefits the brand enjoyed. Unfortunately, Twitter quickly shut down their account as news began to spread.

So what can we learn?

1. Make sure you are adequately staffed to respond in real-time to customers. This will also ensure that you don’t miss...

At Connections this year we recognized over 30 companies as finalists for our Power of One Awards. The marketing team from Blinds.com, a leading retailer in the window blinds and shade business, was recognized as a finalist for their "Entice and Engage" campaign that generated 175% growth to their email list. Featured below is a summary of how Blinds.com went about achieving these phenomenal business results.

THE BLINDS.COM STORY

The Blinds.com team wanted to grow their email list with engaged prospects that could be reached across a number of platforms—not just email. The team knew that...

We had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Schoenfeld, CEO of  Simply Measured, at Connections this year. Today we're sharing his thoughts about the future of social media as part of our focus on Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013.

In Adam's words:

"Our goal is to put the tools to understand business data in the hands of business users. We think reporting should be simple, beautiful, and accessible for everyone – not just data scientists. Our software streamlines the process from data to deliverables and eliminates the countless hours spent on everyday reporting tasks. We do this by putting...

In this #InspiredMarketing blog series, we are sharing predictions on the future of marketing from 25 industry thought leaders. These predictions have been compiled in our new whitepaper, Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013. In today’s post, Phil Szomszor of Firefly Communications shares his thoughts.

B2B Social Media Comes of Age

A recent eConsultancy survey found that 67% of marketing decision makers agreed that social media is integral to their marketing mix (and only 11% disagreed). But when I speak to B2B marketing and PR leaders, the received opinion is that social media is a “consumer...

Over the next several weeks, we will be sharing predictions on the future of marketing from 25 industry thought leaders. These predictions have been compiled in our new whitepaper, Inspired Marketing Predictions for 2013. Today, Ashraf Montaser of AdInfinity shares his thoughts.

True Cross-Channel Marketing Arrives

How many times have you heard the term “cross-channel” bandied about? As a marketer, the answer is probably more times than your average political candidate has been pictured kissing babies—constantly.

What is usually meant is that you can do web and social and email and offline and...

Racing is all about speed, but every now and then it helps to slow down and understand what drives the speed. I'm not talking about the cars, but rather the companies and the sponsors behind each team. Last week, as a sponsor of Andretti Autosport, ExactTarget had the opportunity to attend the Andretti Autosport Sponsor Summit.

The summit was what you would expect from a team known for winning championships. Day 1 started with a look back at Andretti Autosports's championship season and a look forward to the future of INDYCAR. On Day 2, we heard from the team's sponsors. Topics covered...

If you are interested in our social media marketing products or improving your social media strategy, we want to meet you!

The leadership team from the social media lab in San Francisco will be at Connections presenting on panels, demoing software and meeting with customers, analysts and the media. If you are interested in meeting with any one of our social media product experts, use the following Twitter handles and send us a message!

We’ll make sure we hunt you down and point you to the right sessions, meetings and late night parties. Here are just a few folks you can reach out to while at #ET1...

Moments ago we announced the completion of two incredibly strategic acquisitions - marketing automation provider Pardot and Web personalization provider iGoDigital. These transformational additions to the ExactTarget family broaden our suite of digital marketing products with B-to-B Marketing Automation and expanded Web capabilities that include predictive analytics.

Let me share a little more on each of these great new additions.

Pardot - In talking with clients around the world, it became clear that the marketers are hungry for a lead nurturing solution that integrates with their broader...

I had the chance to sit down with Ben Pickering, CEO of Strutta to discuss Facebook Marketing Best Practices and Strutta!

SM: So what exactly is Strutta? 
BP: Strutta is software that helps marketers create, build and launch promotions on Facebook. Our tools are self-service and allow brands to build and engage their audience through social media, identify top influencers and measure campaign effectiveness.

SM: That sounds impressive! Does your platform work with ExactTarget?
BP: We have partnered with ExactTarget and SocialPages to make it easy for customers to develop fully-branded contests and...

How do you better operationalize your social media efforts to be truly effective? According to Valeria Maltoni - Brand Strategist and Author of the Conversation Agent, its critical that you integrate people and technology effectively to succeed in social medial

1. People: to give your best to customers and partners, you need the best from your teams. Social media enables you to achieve a broader strategy and purpose by activating all employees on behalf of your brand. When everyone is involved, it’s not about who anymore, it’s about how.

Few assets are more valuable than a company’s customer base.  

Yet, most companies are more systematic about managing their office supplies than their customers.  Research continues to show the majority of companies don’t know enough about their customer’s preferences and needs, what products or services they use, if they are satisfied, or if they are thinking about defecting to the competition, and why.

The problem is NOT the lack of customer data. Rather, pockets of customer data exist throughout the company. The problem is that none of it is integrates to create “one version of the truth”...

Mashable reported last week that Facebook tab engagement has dropped substantially (53%) since the introduction of timeline as the new format for Facebook fan pages. 

However, I think there is a crucial nomenclature oversight in the article – touting traffic statistics as engagement.  The two are most certainly correlated, but engagement (i.e. interacting with content on a tab – clicking play on a video, entering a sweepstakes, liking an image gallery) is much more important and pivotal to brand success than traffic (i.e. registering an impression (page view) on a tab).

Engagement – much more...

I'm at the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) annual forum in New York and couldn't be more excited to share that our new mobile software ExactTarget MobileConnect is here. Talking to mobile industry veterans, top brands and agencies about our newproduct is simply amazing.

ExactTarget MobileConnect is a mobile messaging solution that helps marketers to create, target, send and track SMS campaigns. What really sets MobileConnect apart from other mobile marketing solutions out there is that it seamlessly integrates with our cross-channel messaging platform, the Interactive Marketing Hub, to...