Last week, ExactTarget held their annual Connections Event demonstrating the power of the individual and how through technology, vision and creativity companies are able to respond to customer conversations and create bespoke engagement plans. The event, aptly named ‘The Power of One' was opened by key note speaker Jimmy Wales, the Founder of Wikipedia who led the day's hot topic of the impact of social marketing and customer driven technologies.

The digital landscape is changing and developing at an ever-increasing rate. The reach of technology has touched every part of our daily lives, and marketing would be pointless if it did not incorporate this. While this is common knowledge, the optimal implementation of this digital technology does not seem to be.

At our Marketer Breakfast held in London recently, a collection of Acceleration’s top tier clients met to debate and provide feedback on tips, tools, challenges and metrics regarding how leading brands are grappling with the dynamic channel that is social media.  It was quite clear through the round table discussion that social media is a challenge for all companies, faced with a plethora of tools emerging in the marketplace and results that run a short lifespan, too recent to produce enough trend data.

Sometimes the largest challenge our Enterprise clients face is not technical, it’s organisational alignment. Within the more complex web analytic environments I've worked in I’ve noticed a common barrier is often the working relationship breakdown that occurs when IT and marketing are disconnected.  Sometimes they just need a translator to bridge their different perspectives. At other times senior management is needed to bring unity to bear on the business goal driving the initiative.

While participating at Adobe’s recent Online Marketing Symposium in San Francisco, I heard consistency across a sampling of two hundred digital marketers; with emphasis on the retail, financial services and travel industries.

There was unison across three points: 

1)  Social is ready for serious measurement in the digital marketing mix;
2)  Social dialog management belongs to Marketing; and
3)  If interns are the talented staff running social media, who is doing the heavy lifting.

The production was slick, and I’m hard pressed to re-call any other conference in London which can claim the same level of professional delivery. Massive screens and impressive graphics enhanced the content of the presentations in the main conference area, which were, engaging, enlightening and entertaining. Twitter updates came through thick and fast and were quick to add colour, context and a bit of debate around the topics in real time – they also quickly flagged anything sub-standard in a rather brutal way. This event certainly set the bar for events to come.

When I was asked to speak and moderate a panel at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, I was intrigued.  Email has been a pillar of online marketing from the start, along with Websites and Banner Ads.  (They weren’t even called Display Ads then.  And Search was in its infancy, who remembers Alta Vista).  So what’s new with Email?  Why are people congregating to focus on something that’s been a constant for over a decade?

Last Monday at MediaPost's OMMA Global Summit in San Francisco, I lead a panel discussion about the current state of email marketing and the opportunities for using customer data to do better email marketing.  The panel comprised both vendors and client-side marketers - Eric Kirby from Connection Engine, Sameer Kazi from ExactTarget, Anita John from HP and Seth Berman from BlueShield CA - so we had a nice mix of what the market is asking for and what is being offered.

Sometimes you attend exhibitions and they’re great. You feel inspired by them. Other times you walk away having expected a little more. That’s how I felt about ad:tech this year. It seemed busier than last year, but then again it was also much smaller, so it would.

Wearing my SEM hat firmly pulled down upon my head I began to test Google Instant.  There are already quite a few questions regarding how it will affect our day to day tasks and I feel that tracking the progression of each search as it occurs will have a large effect on the placement of ads at the correct time.  Simply allowing for a keyword phrase to drive traffic as it always has before will no longer work once your competitor changes strategies to get their advert displayed before the searcher has completed the phrase they’re typing.  Suddenly you find yourself in a race t