Mark Polly

Rob Will, Chief Architect at IBM, presented the future vision for Portal and WCM today.   He started out talking about how the concept of customer experience has been evolving over the past few years.  A core shift has been to enable non-technical users to do more and more with less reliance on IT. A slight […]

Kudos is best known for providing add-ons to IBM Connections that help with and encourage adoption of the social media platform. Kudos Badges is a gamification system that includes missions, rewards, ranking and leaderboards. Just ahead of IBM Connect 2014, Kudos has announced a new product called Kudos Boards. Boards is targeted at the Activities […]

Almost one year ago at IBM Connect 2013, IBM showed some advanced marketing integration with IBM WebSphere Portal.  The demos showed marketers easily customizing portal pages with targeted content based on market segmentation.  Some of the features demo’d last year have slowly crept into the product. Today, though, IBM announced a much better integration between […]

Today Oracle announced they are acquiring Responsys, a leading B2C cloud-based marketing system. This acquisition is part of Oracle’s strategy in becoming an end-to-end player in the rapidly expanding customer experience space. Earlier this year Oracle purchased Eloqua, a B2B marketing platform. By combining Responsys and Eloqua, Oracle says, “for the first time CMOs across […]

We’ve been reading and commenting about CMOs and CIOs lately (for example, see Is There a Blurring Line Between CIO and CMO?).  With the maturing of Customer Experience Platforms (CXP or CXM) and Marketing Automation, the interplay between marketing and technology is rapidly growing. Virginia Backaitis published today at CMSWire an article titled Hey CMO! Hey […]

One of the challenges with managing social media is getting your message out to the many, many social platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, etc.  I wrote recently how I use IFTTT to send blog post announcements to various sites from our WordPress blog.   Companies like HootSuite have created platforms that solve this […]

Well Dreamforce 13 was a whirlwind and I’m glad to be home.  The final session I attended was delivered by Sungard’s VP of Marketing, Christine Nurnberger.  While the title of the session  said something about Marketing Metrics and ROI, it really was about how Ms Nurnberger transformed Sungard’s marketing efforts over the last 18 months. […]

Patrick Stokes, VP for Product Management at Salesforce provided highlights of the social roadmap for their Marketing Cloud.  The following are the four areas that are the focus of the roadmap: Publsih Engage Listen Advertise The social tools in the Marketing Cloud include Radian 6, Buddy Media and Social.com.  These tools are integrated with ExactTarget […]

Brian Andersen (LUMA Partners) and Robin Bordoli (Marketo) gave a great presentation on the Marketing Technology Landscape.  This area is to broad to get into details in one hour, so they presented an overview of the market and then suggested the following three tactics to cope with the vast amount of change going on: Accept […]

Barbara Meskin from Jim Beam presented how that brand learned how to engage customers through social media on a global scale.  The journey that she decribed included the following steps over two years, although these things were not done linearly all the time: Social Audit – here they had to figure out what they had […]

I mentioned Salesforce 1 in a previous post, a new platform to run Salesforce on mobile devices.  Service Cloud is also being enabled for Salesforce 1, so you can run Service Cloud applications on mobile devices.  Salesforce demonstrated how Philips embedded Service Cloud into an ultrasound machine.  When a technician has trouble with the ultrasound machine, […]

Marc Benioff’s keynote is the first session today at Dreamforce13.  Marc and Co-Founder Parker Harris spent time this morning highlighting features and applications that are going to be available on the Salesforce platform in the “future”.  Parker made a dramatic entrance dressed in a “Back to the Future” professor costume, so he showed a bunch […]