Lovely Links

We've been struggling with how to incorporate mobile marketing into our mix, and this post from Jonathan Staret's Text Message Marketing Blog brings the channel into better focus. He talks about Walmart's use of text messaging, both the good (10% of the customers offered, opted in) and the bad (they regularly send 3-4 texts at a time). Interesting read.

And, Jim Berkowitz's CRM Mastery Blog had this excellent entry about the importance of communication between sales and marketing. Interesting, sales folks have a better perception of the relationship than do marketing types. Hmmm. For those of us marketers responsible for lead generation for a salesforce, we may be under-valuing their efforts, and we should probably stop that...

Just in case you've ever wondered if you're more of a revolutionary than a "wait-and-see", you need to read this Experience Curve post. Titled Social Media Biggest Shift in Marketing Strategy Since Television, it provides some excellent stats and commentary on how companies are using and how they're planning to use social media in their marketing mix. And, yes, it's big and getting bigger!

This post from Chris Brown's Branding and Marketing Blog hit home for me today. It's all about re-branding vs. updating and has some good thoughts about change. Nancy and I have spent the last few months focusing on how our business is evolving. We're trying to strategically be one step ahead, while maintaining our current consulting business. Change is hard. Change is stimulating. And, in the end, it's necessary.

Along those lines, we'd love to hear your thoughts about our brand new website: Analyze Your Customers. We've recently invested in some new analytics technology and in the training to use it. With that, we've beefed up our analytical capabilities and have some exciting new products available to marketers of all sizes. We think that this is a service much needed in the direct marketing industry and we'd love to hear if you agree.