I made a trip to Austin last week to get the ball rolling with my new co-founder and partner in MotiveLab, Joel Granoff. Joel is opening a MotiveLab office in Austin, and he took me on the grand tour of businesses, including a number of potential partners and clients. If you want to hear about a few cool businesses in Austin, I posted about the trip on the MotiveLab blog.

During the trip, we launched a big lead gen campaign for MotiveLab with Bulldog Solutions, an Austin-based lead generation specialist. We wrote an article for the Bulldog Solutions newsletter (registration required, but worth it) about social media as a lead generation channel, and offered a link to a Marketing Brief titled “12 Essential Tips for Success in Social Media”. Wow, what a response. We’re about to hit 350 registered downloads for the Marketing Brief, even though it requires qualified registration.

Our partner Netline, experts in content syndication, have handled the registration and syndication, and really hit the ball out of the park. They encouraged us to add a couple of survey-type questions to our registration form, and the high number of quality registrations has turned that into a nice piece of insight about the market that we’ll be analyzing and sharing in the near future. Our questions were about attitudes toward social media, its relevance to marketers, and who they expect to deliver social media services. Just looking through the responses has been surprising, but we won’t have a full analysis until next week.

If you’d like to download the MarketingBrief, which was sponsored by our friends at BuzzLogic, you can find it courtesy of Netline on their TradePub Web site.

While I’ve been away, Victor Cook has been stirring the waters with his ongoing analysis of a battle over the acquisition of the Chicago Board of Trade. His latest post sizes up the battle as a "Mexican Standoff", and continues to show the value of the Enterprise Marketing Framework for analyzing competitive advantage and market opportunity. What’s particularly interesting, for those of you who have been following our discussion of The Enterprise Marketing Framework, is a new and simple description of the EMF’s top-down approach to stock valuation. It’s well worth a read, both for the description of the battle over the Chicago Board of Trade, and for the new insight into the Enterprise Marketing Framework. By the way, Victor is now a certified poster for Seeking Alpha, a media site for professional stock analysis. Congratulations, Victor.