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.

The Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive), which comes into force on 26 May 2011 has created much attention and speculation on how it will be implemented, enforced and what its ramifications might be. The issue at stake is the use and abuse of cookies.

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.

Once considered a ‘nice to have’ the strategic importance of marketing to an organization’s success is no longer open to question.  Marketers are judged on their ability to be creative and produce stunning media campaigns that support the sales effort. At the same time, they are expected to be au fait with the latest marketing technologies being introduced at an ever-rapid pace, all of which are supposed to make their lives easier.  The life of a marketer is no walk in the park that’s for sure.

I speak with marketers everyday who intuitively think that administration is a major part of their job. Filling in PO numbers, asking management for campaign financing, reporting, briefing requests to agencies, creative reviews and copying figures into and between spreadsheets.

Marketers generally don’t audit their search campaigns. But when they do it’s mostly because their campaign results don’t meet expectations or performance isn’t going well as it used to. So what people usually tend to do is put their search marketing up for tender, hoping that a new agency will get them back on track. However procurement takes time and once a vendor has been chosen, they typically take 3 months to ramp up and precious time has been lost from initial RFP to seeing actual improvements in performance, if this even happens.