Marketing Smarts from MarketingProfs

Thought leadership doesn't depend on what you think about your ideas and your perspective; it depends on whether other people are in fact following your lead. You don't choose to be a thought leader, in other words; you become a thought leader. How? By inspiring people to act. And to do that, you need "a signature idea."

In the early '90s, more than a quarter million Glocks (a semiautomatic pistol) had been sold in the US. Marketers can learn a lot from the runaway success of this handgun, as Bloomberg Businessweek's Paul Barrett told us in this week's episode of Marketing Smarts.

"Popular is the last thing smart business people should want to be." At least that's the firmly held belief of Erika Napoletano, author of the forthcoming book The Power of Unpopular, and this week's guest on Marketing Smarts. But whatever could she mean? And why would any smart businessperson set out to be unpopular?

Senior-level marketers don't seem to believe their digital partners are adequately extending their service capabilities in the digital age. So how does an agency demonstrate that it "gets" digital? Glenn Engler, CEO of Digital Influence Group, answers that question in this episode of Marketing Smarts.

"Mobile is a behavior. It's not a technology." That's what Tim Hayden, CMO of 44Doors, told me when we discussed the "mobile moment" in this episode of our Marketing Smarts podcast.

What if you opened a coffee shop and needed to stand out from a slew of competitors? You'd need to create a fascinating aura around your product. One way to do that, according to Sally Hogshead, this week's guest on Marketing Smarts, would be to offer a $500 cup of coffee.

Why is it that so many books, supposedly about marketing and business, seem more focused on self-actualization and personal empowerment? Author Julien Smith answers that question in this week's Marketing Smarts podcast.

We all know that our marketing materials solve our problems. But do they solve other people's problems? I invited Laura Fitton, founder of oneforty, to explore the idea of useful marketing in our latest Marketing Smarts podcast.

Whenever we present content on mobile marketing, we get the question: What are the B2B applications? I've often wondered if B2B marketers could be thinking about mobile--specifically, mobile apps--in other ways.

It's not always clear that the organizations that call for innovation actually want it. In this episode of Marketing Smarts, professor and author Dave Owens discusses the constraints that hamper creative thinking-and kill innovation.

In this week's Marketing Smart's podcast, writer and social media manager Shannon Paul discusses the elements of a social strategy, the keys to effective content marketing, and the art of "being human."

How can you convince the C-suite of the value of your social media efforts? The key is to translate social media metrics into "core metrics your company is already measuring," Marketing Smarts guest Nichole Kelly says.

"Marketers understand what rhetoric's all about," says Jay Heinrichs, this week's guest on Marketing Smarts. Rhetoric is about changing people's behavior. And yet, to many, rhetoric is a medieval oddity, an ancient artifact

People running nonprofits are under attack by zombies! Idea zombies, that is. That was the topic of John Haydon's session at the recent BlogWorld Expo, and the starting point of our conversation in this episode of Marketing Smarts

In this episode of Marketing Smarts, we talk with Scott Brinker of ion interactive about why marketing departments need marketing technologists and why software is the key to creating a memorable customer experience.