Tag Archives: MotiveLab

On Being a Blogging Fool

I’m at an overlap for a couple of weeks where I’m writing for four blogs. It’s a little insane, but it’s keeping me very well engaged. I’ve decided that after I finish my gig guest-blogging for Unica, I’m going to continue the same focus with my MotiveLab blog, and turn Marketonomy into more of a dedicated look at the broader issues of marketing–in essence just distilling out from Marketonomy the social media content and leaving the rest.

I’m working on an editorial plan that will turn each blog into a dedicated area of focus. So my expanding media empire of one will consist of MotiveLab (social media), MarketingRev (marketing tech) and Marketonomy (the marketing profession). I’ll eventually put a small meta-navigation bar at the top of each blog to link them together. I should have this all in place by the first week of April.

In the meantime, I’ve been writing today about a new blogging platform for businesses at MarketingRev, called HubSpot, which looks promising. I’ve been writing about some funny social media trends at Unica, including speculation over how American Idol Sanjay has survived despite really bad singing, and Expedia’s Wiki Whitewashing (hat tip: Mike Moore). And finally, I wrote a short entry about the market penetration of the Social Media meme at MotiveLab.

The Power of Social Media

Big day today.

First, today marks the launch of MarketingRev.com, a news blog covering technology for marketers. This is an evolutionary step in the development of the Value Added Marketing Association, whose mission is to accelerate the development of marketing technologies, and the advancement of a marketing technology community. MarketingRev assists that goal by providing news and insight into marketing technology and the industry at large, drawing together and informing marketers who understand the critical role technology plays in the evolution of marketing as a corporate function. If you’re a technology provider, please submit your company profile and news directly to MarketingRev for coverage.

Second, today is my first day as a guest blogger for Unica’s Marketing Consortium. I’ll be blogging for the month of February on the topic "The Power of Social Media", exploring the meaning, the origins, the hype, and of course, the relevance of Social Marketing to marketing practitioners. I’m opening today with an invitation to weigh in on the meaning of Social Media, and how you experience it as a marketer and as a consumer. There’s a lot of good dialog that’s been happening on the Unica blog, so please join the fray.

Finally, I’ve finally made the decision to relaunch MotiveLab as an agency focusing on Social Marketing. I’ve pulled down the MotiveLab site for a couple of weeks to reshape the content and position the company. I’ll be announcing some exciting partnerships after the relaunch in a few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll be digging deeper into the social media trend, both in concept at the Unica blog and in practice with MarketingRev.

Party Like it’s 1997

I’ve just dropped into one of the busiest stretches of business I’ve had in a long time, and a lot of changes are looming on the horizon that may affect Marketonomy. It feels like 1997 all over again. For starters, I’ve been invited to guest blog for Unica for the month of February–which will actually start next week. Given the roster of previous guest bloggers, I’m taking this as a big honor and I’m quite excited to get started. I’ll be focusing on The Power of Social Media, and drawing together insights and opinions from across the marketing and media landscape. I’m not sure yet how I’m going to resolve my posts there with Marketonomy, but it’ll work itself out.

Additionally, I’m launching a new blog tied into the Value Added Marketing Association. I’m not going to say much about it before it launches, except to say that it’s brought me the opportunity to work with a lot of exceptional marketing veterans and newcomers, and I have a strange uncanny feeling that this will prove to be a much bigger step than it has seemed in constructing it.

I’m also in the middle of a major decision about MotiveLab. I didn’t set out to start another agency–I’ve been far down that road before with a lot of great successes and failures, the kind that make you pause before you do it all over again. But the work I’m being asked to do is leading more and more in that direction, and I’ve arrived at the point where I need to make a clear decision about whether to keep it a loosely defined consulting banner, where I can do whatever kind of work I want in marketing and tech, or whether to put a stake in the ground and launch an agency. The truth is, I’ve already made the decision–I just haven’t been honest with myself yet that I’ve made it. Isn’t life fun?

Finally, I’m doing some interesting and challenging work in podcasting and videocasting that I’ll be able to show soon. You don’t realize how much of a shift this medium is–it’s just audio and video over the web, right?–until you get down in the trenches and try to make a program that works. I’ve been working with a team at Informatica developing a series of vidcasts spotlighting some of their c-level executives, and we just wrapped the shoot yesterday, in preparation for syndication beginning the first week of February. I’m working on an analysis of videocasting and its impact on the evolution of social media, which I’ll be able to post when the series goes live.

So, here’s to being busy. And here’s to life on the near side of the next bubble.