Successful Workplace

Does your marketing message align with your product and is it delivered in the right voice and best medium? Is your team creative and enthusiastic? All too often, great products are limited by poor choices in marketing. We walked the cliffs of Belle-île-en-Mer, France today and took in sights that had great parallels to product […]

Are you looking at your customers as an opportunity to put cash in and get cash out of the investment in marketing? Are you talking about return on investment in your loyalty program? If so, you should take a new look at what true relationship means and how the inputs and outputs can be very […]

The word is out on TechCrunch that Instagram will add video on June 20th, bringing competition to Twitter’s Vine. While it’s still possible this is a deliberate misdirection by Facebook, it seems more reality than fib. Video is hot and it is a trend that will continue to grow as marketers fine-tune what content, length […]

Believe it or not, we’re now a decade into the concept of mainstream social media. It was May 2003 when LinkedIn first hit the Web and it was only 2004 when Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg. It was only seven years ago, 2007 to be exact, when Jack Dorsey sent the first tweet from […]

I’m a father a few times over, most recently to a baby girl born in late February. While Catherine isn’t old enough to tell me yet, I’m sure she’ll soon be reminding me of the same thing my teenagers say: that I’m a victim of the thoughts and structure of an earlier time. Fair enough…while […]

I was surprised today when I discovered that a choice of reward for my credit credit card loyalty program was credit toward shopping on Amazon.com. When I made the choice, I found out I had credit on the retailer’s site, available to be used immediately. Before I made this simple discovery, I thought I had to […]

If you’ve missed it, analytics have been undergoing a shift for the last several years. Where before data was collated, cataloged and mined today it’s reacted upon in some sectors in real-time and in-stream. Technology is allowing us to harness big data and understand it in milliseconds but will this quest for speed be your […]

Spending time in London and Paris this week for TIBCO’s Transform Conference was a great reminder that there’s still an enormous swath of our world that doesn’t get Big Data. Look no further than the leak of the NSA’s PRISM data surveillance project and you’ll see that the officials charged with oversight don’t get it when […]

Everyone loves Software as a Service (SaaS) these days. It saves money, it simplifies deployment, and it does an end-around the legendary bureaucracy and obstinance of IT. As some would paint it, SaaS should be able to eat the world and leave the average IT department looking like an underfunded ghost town. The ghost town But […]

TIBCO today announced its purchase of StreamBase, a software company focused on streaming big data and very successful in capital markets and government intelligence, among other verticals, where the ability to process fast-moving data with very low latency is absolutely essential to the business. Big data is hot We know big data is all the […]

Editor’s note: Faced with declining IT budgets during the recent economic downturn, many CMO’s turned to Software as a Service (SaaS) to fill the gap left by an underfunded and overloaded IT department. This kicked off a battle for budget, strategy and control that continues to heat up in most enterprises. In this piece, Brad […]

I’m a technology guy who tries to keep up with every booming tech startup, acquisition by a major player, and new version of top-selling software. I’ve watched waves of technology crash on the shore of commerce and government. Why am I telling you this? The conversation we’re not having I’m confident I’ve been left with […]

The brouhaha over NSA’s PRISM project that involved spying on Verizon customers and asking Silicon Valley giants for access to their customer records is a bit of false indignation, if you ask me (what, you didn’t ask me?). First, there have been warnings for years about our loss of privacy. Secondly, and may more importantly, […]

Most people working in technology are in some way part of the vast conversation taking place around Big Data. That has to be hundreds of thousands if not millions of individuals. “Powerful insights” is the commonly heard phrase. It should also be completely clear to the public by now that data in large enough sets, […]

Most companies don’t understand how to manage their websites versus their social media content. And its a shame…they’re missing the great one-two punch of marketing. If you’re thinking of replacing your website with social media, stop. If you think your website can be a collection of social media pages, you’re wrong. Website advantages Your website […]

It’s starting to look like brands and retailers are finally starting to understand the mobile device. It’s about time. Since the dawn of the smartphone, the world has predicted that mobile technology would change the retail landscape. Instead, there’s been very slow progress and an unfulfilled prediction. But we’re turning a corner, and reports are […]