Marketing automation has been around for some time now, but it’s becoming increasingly popular as many of the marketing and campaign management tools available to both agencies and technology savvy marketers now provide the ability for end-users, such as marketing managers, to create their own complex automated programs. Marketing automation is the initiation of marketing programs based on a pre-defined set of rules or a trigger resulting from a customer action and it’s a great hands-off way to reach a consumer at a potentially critical purchasing decision time...

My young children love hearing stories about magical fairies, honest politicians, and other mythical creatures, like Phantom Applicants of the College Sea, and Social ROInicorns. I have to admit, the stories can be pretty outlandish at times. You can make up almost anything around Social ROInicorn these days and get your children (and others) to listen...

Politics get in the way again and the USPS suffers!

Not being able to get phone reception in the Chicago metropolis on a recent trip reminded me of one simple fact: not enough foresight and planning went in to the development of the current mobile phone data networks to be able to handle the onslaught of data requests originating from all the smartphones that have saturated the market in recent years...