Marketing Smarts from MarketingProfs

Author Amy Howell talks about how professional women can use their personal networks to build their career, and the importance of cultivating genuine connections online and offline.

Michael Stoner shares insights he gained from compiling 25 case studies in higher education marketing, and how marketers can build integrated marketing plans that maximize audience reach using traditional channels, social media, and emerging platforms.

Online conflicts can cost businesses thousands of dollars (and hours) to resolve. Attorney Andrea Weckerle, author of Civility in the Digital Age, explains how you can protect yourself when a situation turns ugly.

Jason Falls of CafePress talks about cause marketing, Autism Awareness Month, and how businesses of any size can give back to the community.

Dorie Clark talks about the concept of personal branding, the importance of producing your own content as part of a reinvention effort, and how one goes about finding and benefiting from work with a mentor.

Michael Weiss, managing director at figure18 and a veteran speaker, consultant, client advocate, and sales executive, has an interesting perspective on marketing and advertising, not to mention the role of the agency, in today's always-on, always-open business environment.

This week's guest on Marketing Smarts is Tim Suther, chief marketing and strategy officer for Acxiom, a firm that Tim referred to as "the original Big Data company"; FRONTLINE called it "one of the biggest companies you've never heard of."

Though living in a new era of participatory media, our notions of what constitutes an audience and what audiences actually do has not changed much since the broadcast era--and that's a problem, argues Sam Ford.

Steve Bushong's background in systems engineering, and his experience with sourcing, procurement, and operations, gave him a unique perspective on how marketing can and should work in today's complex media environment.

Testing your online campaigns, landing pages, forms, website, and so on can't be an every-now-and-again thing. Testing must be iterative and ongoing if it is to produce results. Which means, among other things, that your organization must institute a culture of testing.

Demonstrating value is certainly a fine reason to measure our actions and their results. But discussing marketing measurement with Jim Lenskold during this week's Marketing Smarts podcast got me thinking that we may be thinking about the purpose of measurement exactly backwards.

"Buyer personas don't work if you make stuff up," Adele Revella told me during this week's episode of Marketing Smarts. "They work if you listen to customers first." But to gather real, actionable customer intelligence, you need to talk to actual customers. That can be challenging for two reasons.

David B. Thomas, senior director of content and community for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and author of The Executive's Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy, discusses social media policies.

Dan Pink argues that selling (especially in the form of persuading or convincing someone to do this or that) is deeply embedded in our nature. "We need to move away from thinking of selling something as a kind of unnatural, scurrilous act," he insists.

The Atlantic magazine has made a highly successful transition to the digital world. To understand what has led to its digital success and uncover what content marketers might learn from its example, I invited Bob Cohn, the magazine's digital editor, to Marketing Smarts.