Trends

Microsoft has topped the Reputation Institute's Global CSR RepTrak 100 Study for the second year in a row. The institute surveyed 55,000 consumers worldwide about their attitudes toward the reputations of companies in terms of corporate social responsibility. Google, which was No. 2 last year, fell ...

The ghost of Anthony Lye presided over Oracle OpenWorld's third-day customer experience, or CX, keynote. For CRM and related things, it was the moment I'd been waiting for. Lye is in robust health as far as I know, but he has been gone from Oracle for about a year. He was the architect of Oracle's C...

There are many reasons marketers today are gearing up their mobile strategies for the holiday season, and not all of them are as obvious as one might think. Yes, revenue and competition are of course key factors, but in this Internet era, so is a third: Namely, a proactive, aggressive mobile CRM and...

Talk to any sales or marketing consultant, and you'll probably get an earful about "sales-marketing misalignment." This chronic conflict between sales and marketing is the single dumbest reason that otherwise worthy businesses struggle. The classic symptoms: Sales spends a lot of time prospecting be...

Like any major trade show, OpenWorld has been in planning for a long time. However, this OpenWorld might be the most planned show of its kind ever, because in addition to the extravaganza taking place in the Moscone Center, many of the hotels in the area and even in closed-off streets, an important ...

The holiday season is upon us; even those uninitiated in the ways and means of retail can see it in the Halloween decorations and candy that are now so plentiful on store shelves. For the initiated -- that is, anyone who expects to make a buck off of the holiday shoppers this year -- not only is the...

There's always been a dichotomy between the promise of CRM and the reality of CRM. The promise is something like this: CRM can become the nucleus of your business, unifying sales, marketing and support around a shared set of data about your customers. Not only will it make your relationships with yo...

There were a few representative tweets in the article I read on the accounts of Twitter's S-1 announcement last week. My favorite was, "This is Peak Twitter," implying it was time to sell -- but that overlooks the inconvenient idea that except for the secondary markets, there isn't anything to sell ...

It's easy to be blinded by the obvious. It happens in business all the time. Something is right in front of you, but you attribute its effect to a different cause. I see this most typically when observing a paradigm shift -- the reason for the shift is not always the obvious causative agent. For exa...

Real-time bidding holds numerous benefits for mobile marketers, but there are downsides to the ad technology as well. In particular, the dominant theme to that downside is that RTB -- at least for mobile ad formats and mobile platforms -- is still in its early days. More specifically, while the tech...

Marine liability insurer The Shipowners' Club has signed up to get IT service management from Axios Systems on a SaaS basis. It wanted to remove the cost and complexity of security, backups, implementation and upgrades while retaining full ownership of its data. That, in a nutshell, is why companies...

Why buy when you can lease? That's a question businesses are asking both externally, as they offer products ranging from software to food, and internally, as they look at billing, ERP and other operations. The upshot is that corporations are moving toward a subscription-based business model both ins...

It is an old truism of economics that supply drives its own demand. While this is true, it leaves a lot unsaid. For example, a boatload of hula hoops could conceivably inspire a new generation of kids to pick up the toy, and nostalgic adults of a certain age might be compelled to see if they could s...

With its ability to match ad-inventory supply and demand in real time against the attributes of any given viewer, real-time bidding is starting to make its way into the delivery of mobile ads. For marketers, it can be a very good thing. When it works as it is supposed to, it makes mobile marketing m...

In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence...