Mark Polly

Online marketing is a challenge.  When you think about having a conversation with your customer or potential customer, where you communicate can have a dramatic impact on whether your message gets through. Many people can identify Facebook and Twitter as two common social media outlets. The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and JESS3, shown here, does a […]

Here in the U.S. we take privacy seriously and often go to great lengths to avoid asking customers for personal information. It appears that global consumers are more open to sharing personal information about themselves than maybe what everyone assumes. Sandy Carter recently posted on her blog Social Media to Social Business about an interesting study  IBM recently […]

I peeked in my U.S. Mail mailbox this morning and found a nice ad from Walt Disney World in there with all my other mail. Normally that piece of mail would have been thrown out with all the other junk, but something caught my eye.  The item is a colorful, three-fold, heavier stock flyer with […]

On September 12, 2013 Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant report for horizontal portals.  Overall, the Magic Quadrant hasn’t changed much from last year with the vendors staying in the same quadrant as they were in 2012 (yawn…).  You can see my blog post from 2012: Gartner Magic Quadrant: Horizontal Portals 2012. In the leader quadrant, […]

Marketing automation is a hot topic today, but can be very confusing.  There have been a lot of entrants to the market in the last few years, with lots of features coming online daily.  In addition, marketing tools rarely stand alone and need to be integrated into your website, your portal, your social communities and […]

Multichannel delivery is a hot topic these days.  Just when you thought developing for multiple browsers was tedious, not we have to account for multiple device types, responsive sites, native mobile apps, etc, etc. To help with this IBM has updated the Multichannel Feature Pack to their rapid development environment Web Experience Factory.  With Web […]

Claire Marshall  recently posted on IBM’s Smarter Conference blog an article titled “5 ways to personalize your site content via IBM Marketing Center“. In the post, she talks about the following ways to personalize your site: Greeting – if you know the person’s first/last name then display it on the page Referring Site – if […]

Last week, Microsoft announced that Perficient was awarded U.S. Partner of the Year at their Worldwide Partner Conference.  At the same time, Perficient also won three additional regional awards from Microsoft, including National System Integrator of the Year East Region Northeast Area Cloud Partner of the Year Enterprise Cloud Partner of the Year, Central Region […]

In May of this year, I blogged about IBM’s then up-coming Digital Asset Management integration with MediaBeacon.  IBM  started shipping that product on June 18, 2013 via electronic distribution and July 12 via CD.  You can see the official announcement letter for details. Here is a demo of MediaBeacon working directly with IBM Web Content […]

Larry Bowden kicked off IBM’s webcast today about their new focus on Exceptional Digital Experiences.  In the past couple of years, IBM has introduced the Exceptional Customer Experience suite of products and the Exceptional Employee Experience suite.  These suites combine various IBM products such as WebSphere Portal, Connections, Sametime, etc into pre-configured suites focusing on […]

IDC has released a new report that shows IBM holds 14% and Jive has 10% market share in Enterprise Social Software. David Rowe at CMSWire.com provides some details contained in the IDC report via this article: IDC: IBM, Jive Lead Shifting Enterprise Social Software Market. I found interesting the growth rates of the various vendors. […]

In working with our IBM Connections clients, we usually recommend not changing the standard Connections theme much.  The theme controls the color scheme, fonts, headers, footers, page layout, etc.   Making significant changes can impact features on the system as they can be somewhat connected to each other. IBM has recently introduced a new theme […]