commbasics

This will be the first of several posts on the value and application of third-party marketing automation software. We will cover several aspects of this to simplify your understanding including: The difference between CRM and marketing automation software (surprisingly, most people are wrong) How it helps your sales team (more than they might realize) How does it affect content (a LOT!) Where to find the ROI and prove it to the boss (easier than you might think) But in this first part, we are going to address the two biggest questions: Who should you use? Can you afford it? Who you should use There are dozens of providers of this software and over the past two years, Footwasher Media has been checking out about 20 of the top rated. There are as many lists rating them as there are providers being rated so they don’t offer much help. Most of the rating is based on the number of customers using the service and their revenue. We decided on a different set of criteria: what customers say a...

Salesforce announced yesterday at the Dreamforce Conference in San Francisco that a free version of their Chatter social collaboration tool would be available in April 2010 and it comes close to being a game-changer in the effort to monitor, control and use multiple social media platforms.  But the concept of “free” is loosely defined.   You don’t have to be a Salesforce license holder to use Chatter, but the company you work for does.  And you can only invite people within that social community to participate.  That means you can’t include any external business or personal contacts.  You still have to maintain your own method for managing that.   There are lots of free and commercial tools for that task.  Too many, in fact, and one is as good/bad as any other.  My hope for Chatter, when I started hearing about potential free management tools, was that it would be a way for common folk to get ahold of all that information without having...