Marketing

Tech vendors put way, way too much effort into keeping product plans secret until they can maximize hype and sales with carefully timed announcements. So why do they suck all the interest out of cool announcements by acting offended that anyone wanted to know?

Corporate executives see the need to use social media to connect with their customers, but many acknowledge that they're still figuring out how best to do it.

Fixing your CRM system and the sales and marketing organization will take some real time, and should be done in stages. Further, in both CRM and sales there's a serious talent shortage. Sure, there are people on the street -- but just try to find a truly great salesperson or SFDC wizard in New York or San Francisco. So you should grab the employees and consultants whenever you can find them, and expect to fix the software and organizational issues in parallel.

Those who make personal choices, like browsers, different from ours obviously do so because they're damaged in some way. That doesn't mean even IE users are too stupid to see that this study is shallow and inaccurate. Not what you look for in a quantitative analysis company.

Combining social media with location services and mobile phones represents the next generation of online marketing, according to speakers at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle on Tuesday.

The same week it tried to supplant Microsoft with an alternative to Windows, Google suffered PR attacks, security scares and impending financial punishment for choosing bad ad partners.

Apple comes to the rescue of a guy whose wife made him return his iPad 2.

CEO wants people to think WebOS and HP are cooler than Apple, especially given the soap opera that has been his first few months in charge.

Forbes blogger Elizabeth Woyke found herself in some deep kimchee this week. Her crime?

Open source or open source-sympathetic companies seem to have this notion that communities are a tool to get something done. Whether it's building an app, improving some software, or just trying to establish product loyalty, communities can be seen as just a means to an end.

A lack of analysis and business intelligence is causing marketing departments to confuse and anger their prospective customers, wasting money invested in both the campaigns themselves and the business intelligence and analytics tools that support them, according to new research.

As the differences between Linux distributions reduce, the question must be asked of each: how is this distribution best used? What is its sense of identity?