Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

CMOs have been grappling with the emergence of new technologies such as social, mobile and other digital channels over the past five years. The challenge — and perhaps opportunity — is about to go into overdrive over the next five years. Now, CMOs will have to grapple with the added complication and explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies — technologies that will dramatically transform how buyers engage with brands.

If you lose their interest, buyers can switch brands or cut the cord with a keystroke. Marketers need to be listening and responding, not just in every channel, but in every place and every moment.

But what does this mean in practice?

The path to 2020: Marketers seize the customer experience

Marketo turned to the EIU to help with the answer. EIU surveyed nearly 500 CMOs and senior marketing executives around the world to learn what these experts thought about the technologies and customer trends that are most likely to change marketing over the next five years....

We all love lists, especially “best of lists” related to our own profession. It is even better, of course, when people we know actually make the list—and when we make the list ourselves. A number of “best PR blogs” lists recently surfaced. InkyBee, Cision and CyberAlert all weighed in, tackling the ranking in different ways using a variety of criteria....

Confusion over social and mobile reigns among the ranks of marketers according to the latest edition of The CMO survey by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

Much like last year’s survey, CMOs said they plan to invest in social, mobile and digital. However, this year, there’s a catch: Much has been made of the disparity between marketing investment in social media and mobile technology and the return on investment (ROI).Here are three examples...

Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.

We received over 600 nominations for our fifth-annual Top 10 Social Media Blogs contest (the blogosphere’s biggest contest for social media blogs). The list of 22 finalists is pretty impressive! See for yourself below....

I believe in the premise of amazing, interesting, human, wacky, irreverent, or timely so much that I co-wrote a book in 2010 that is partially devoted to it—especially the human and timely components. But here’s the truth: I’ve worked with more than seven hundred companies as a marketing consultant, and I’ve come to realize that while “be amazing” can work, it’s also extraordinarily difficult.

Telling someone to be amazing is like telling someone to make a viral video. There’s no such thing as a “viral video.” There are videos that become viral, but they are few and far between. The marketing of “be amazing” is the marketing of the swing-for-the-fences home run hitter. There are two by-products of that approach: an occasional home run, and many strikeouts.

You can do better. You can break through the noise and the clutter and grab the attention of your customers by employing a different approach that is reliable, scalable, functional, and effective. It’s simply this: stop trying to be amazing and start being useful....