Corporate blogging is building momentum, with many companies looking to balance the need to "be out there" with a fear that they will end up hyper-exposed. Take a look see at 2 whitepapers on the subject by Factiva (Free to download - registration required)
Blogging and your Corporate Reputation: Part One - Listen to the Conversation (December 2005)
This first part of a series looks at how public relations and marketing professionals use blogs to research and understand how the market perceives their company and products. (137 KB)


Blogging and your Corporate Reputation: Part Two - Contribute to the Debate (December 2005)
This second part of a series looks at the creation of blogs by organizations as a way to contribute to the worldwide online conversation. It covers how public relations and marketing professionals write blogs themselves or encourage subject-matter experts in their organziations to do so. (68 KB)

Destination CRM posts a survey by the Aberdeen group which talks about the ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) in a piece called The Art and Science of Equilibrium. The whole MRM (Marketing Resource Management) thing is hot hot hot. My company, Factiva uses it to plan, deploy, manage and measure leads coming into the business. This helps us to accurately measure our ROMI and budget and strategize for the future.

Aberdeen talks about 4 main areas of competency to get MRM working:

"Use customer profitability and lifetime value models to plan investments. Tap predictive analytics and modeling tools to turn customer and product data to improve revenue-generating opportunities. Build relevant, personalized relationships with most valuable customers via their channels of choice. Use marketing analytics to craft higher-value customer interactions through event-based, lifecycle stage or adaptive interaction marketing procedures to construct personalized relationships."

Check out a podcast on the Marketonomy Blog , an interview with my boss at Factiva, CMO Alan Scott, talking about how marketers are losing control of the message in the world of new media. Blogs, WOM and CGM are changing the way we look everything and its a new paradigm that everyone in marketing has to get used to (or step aside).

Very interesting Executive Brief from IDC (subscription only www.idc.com report# 33943) talks about how Tech marketing investment growth is at the highest rate in four years. In '05, the IT marketing spend outstripped the IT revenue growth rate, a trend that is set to continue and accelerate in 2006.

Very cool resource for technology marketers looking for ideas about what IT people are talking about right now. Techtarget, a developer and IT community. Packed with news, commentary, whitepapers and vendor lists, subdivided by discipline. Everything from SAP to Microsoft represented here.

Another worth looking at is IT Toolbox - community jammed with technology blogs.

Factiva visited Gartner ITxpo and Symposium last week, check out their blog. This is a great show, lots of hard core technology guys as you would expect. Gartner stats say that around 50% of attendees dont attend any other show, so its an annual event for many to find out whats hot in the marketplace right now.

Theme this year was Rapid Results - Faster ROI, looking at how IT can prove value and return on IT investments - present and future. There is a great deal of pressure on IT to contribute to the bottom line, not just be this huge gaping cost center.

I remember when I started in technology marketing, well over ten years ago. I worked in Marketing for a firm called Dahlgren that made and sold Linear Motion Control Systems, primarily for the engraving and control panel markets. Very unsexy. At that time NO ONE wanted to work in that field, everyone wanted to be in the consumer end of the market. All my friends were off to work for agencies, doing glamorous things with glamorous people - I had to run the gauntlet of the shop floor of the engineering division, a very male dominated world indeed. Not for the faint of heart.

How times change, the skills I learned way back when are now in demand - how to penetrate a naturally savvy and a tad cynical marketplace with your software or service. In my current role as Marketing Comms Manager for Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, I work specifically on the IT segment. We look at intergrating content into workflow for enterprises, whether that be by role or industry. Challenging stuff indeed as IT is not the buyer, but can be an influencer, and they have to be convinced that our web services based solution will work well.