New Amazon F1 Instance Reduces Capital-Intensive and Time-Consuming Steps in App Development

Amazon's is making news about lots of interesting things at its AWS re:Invent 2016 conference currently underway in Las Vegas, and their just announced AWS F1 Instance is no exception.

"Today we are launching a developer preview of the new F1 instance," said Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services. "In addition to building applications and services for your own use, you will be able to package them up for sale and reuse in AWS Marketplace. Putting it all together, you will be able to avoid all of the capital-intensive and time-consuming steps that were once a prerequisite to the use of FPGA-powered applications, using a business model that is more akin to that used for every other type of software. We are giving you the ability to design your own logic, simulate and verify it using cloud-based tools, and then get it to market in a matter of days."

Here are the specs on the FPGA (there are up to eight of these in a single F1 instance):

- Xilinx UltraScale+ VU9P fabricated using a 16 nm process.
- 64 GiB of ECC-protected memory on a 288-bit wide bus (four DDR4 channels).
- Dedicated PCIe x16 interface to the CPU.
- Approximately 2.5 million logic elements.
- Approximately 6,800 Digital Signal Processing (DSP) engines.
- Virtual JTAG interface for debugging.

The F1 instance will significantly speed up applications that are built for a specific purpose. "The general purpose tools can be used to solve many different problems, but may not be the best choice for any particular one," says Barr. "Purpose-built tools excel at one task, but you may need to do that particular task infrequently."

Typically says Barr this requires another balancing act: trading off the potential for incredible performance vs. a development life cycle often measured in quarters or years.

"One of the more interesting routes to a custom, hardware-based solution is known as a Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA," said Barr. "
This highly parallelized model is ideal for building custom accelerators to process compute-intensive problems. Properly programmed, an FPGA has the potential to provide a 30x speedup to many types of genomics, seismic analysis, financial risk analysis, big data search, and encryption algorithms and applications."

"I hope that this sounds awesome and that you are chomping at the bit to use FPGAs to speed up your own applications," said Barr. "There are a few interesting challenges along the way. First, FPGAs have traditionally been a component of a larger, purpose-built system. You cannot simply buy one and plug it in to your desktop. Instead, the route to FPGA-powered solutions has included hardware prototyping, construction of a hardware appliance, mass production, and a lengthy sales & deployment cycle. The lead time can limit the applicability of FPGAs, and also means that Moore’s Law has time to make CPU-based solutions more cost-effective."

Amazon believes that they can do better, and that's where the F1 instance comes in.

"The bottom line here is that the combination of the F1 instances, the cloud-based development tools, and the ability to sell FPGA-powered applications is unique and powerful," says Barr. "The power and flexibility of the FPGA model is now accessible all AWS users; I am sure that this will inspire entirely new types of applications and businesses."

Developers can sign up now for the Amazon EC2 F1 Instances (Preview).

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5 Easy Videos Every Small Business Can Make ASAP (With Awesome Examples)

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Google Asked to Delete a Billion Links... and For the Most Part Complies

Google's Transparency Report shows that Google was asked to remove over a billion links over the past 12 months and has complied with copyright holder requests 90% of the time. TorrentFreak crunched the numbers and found that Google was asked to remove 1,007,741,143 total links from 945,000 different domains. TorrentFreak says that a total of 908,237,861 links were deleted.

The music industry dominated the take down requests, with over a quarter billion over the last 2 years by BPI, which represents the UK’s recorded music industry. Nearly 98% of url's reported by this organization were removed.

The contention is that music "doesn't just happen," it's an investment. A recent report by IFPI, Investing In Music, details the significant investment of the music industry (particularly record labels) make in creating hit songs and popular artists. The report says that music companies invest US$4.5 billion annually in discovering, nurturing and promoting artists. It's no wonder they are actively fighting illegal sharing of their product.

File sharing sites were the biggest targets of the removal requests:

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How to Navigate the Social Ad Spend Solar System [Infographic]

Author: Mike Tomita

Social media is a popular channel of choice, with 2.31 billion active social media users and 1.97 billion active mobile social media users worldwide, according to data from We Are Social—and it’s getting better by the minute.

Recent updates to many social networks’ algorithms give users a better experience—one with less promotional content and more relevant content that they want to see. However, this means that, as a marketer, you need to supplement your organic posts with paid promotion to get your posts seen by your audience.

Luckily, advertising on social media platforms is also improving—for both marketers and our audience. As marketers, we have an abundance of ad types, targeting, metrics, and available social platforms at our fingertips. This bonanza of improvements also benefits the end-users since they’re seeing ads that are more relevant to them and their interests, rather than a bunch of noise.

Given this expanding universe of continually evolving options, you may feel a bit overwhelmed as you’re evaluating if, when, and how to jump into social advertising. Fear not, other marketers have already planted footprints across the solar system of social advertising and we can all benefits from their brave efforts. Here are a couple of points to keep in mind as you start your odyssey.

Social Media Advertising is Pay-to-Play

While brands can, and do, have interesting things to say, their content is typically not what users are looking for when they first log into their network of choice. Posts from friends, family, and beloved celebrities are usually at the top of this list and network algorithms are designed to deliver this desired content. Therefore, most brands need to put some dollars behind their posts to get any real traction. In fact, social advertising spend is expected to increase to $11 billion by next year, according to BIA/Kelsey, so make sure you budget accordingly.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

While people may be active on several social networks, they are most likely after different content with a different mindset on each. It will take some testing to determine the right platform to reach your target audience as well as the right messaging and content to engage them. Testing ad types such as images, videos, animations, and especially mobile-optimized ads will also be critical to your social media marketing.

Check out our infographic, Navigating the Social Ad Spend Solar System, to learn how social advertising can benefit your marketing campaigns.

View the infographic in a new window here.

Please use the HTML code below to embed this graphic

<a href="how-to-navigate-the-social-ad-spend-solar-system-infographic"><img alt="How to Navigate the Social Ad Spend Solar System [Infographic]" src="http://blog.marketo.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Navigating-the-Social-Ad-Spend-Solar-System-Marketo.png" width="100%" /></a><br><p><small>Brought to you by <a href="http://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation">Engagement Marketing Software by Marketo</a></small>

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How to Navigate the Social Ad Spend Solar System [Infographic] was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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3 Marketing Operations Mistakes That Will Break Your Sales and Marketing Alignment

Author: Tanya Chu

What do the marketing leads look like? Where are all our leads going?

On the marketing operations team, we get asked these questions often by the demand generation and sales teams. Lead management is a critical piece to effective sales and marketing alignment, and without proper planning and execution, leads cannot move smoothly through the funnel. Marketing operations is responsible for this on both a tactical and strategic level, and we need input and feedback from demand generation and sales.

However, things do not always go as planned. We get asked all the time about the validity of a lead or why a lead was routed to a certain person or team. In this blog, I’ll share some common marketing operations mistakes I’ve come across. If you’re interested in learning about more, you can register for my upcoming webinar (tomorrow), 8 Biggest Mistakes Marketing Operations Makes and How to Avoid Them.

Let’s take a look at three big marketing operations mistakes and how you can avoid them:

Myopic Lead Scoring

One of the biggest mistakes in marketing operations happens when leads are not properly qualified, or prioritized, as they enter the funnel. This is often the result of faulty lead scoring. For one, scoring can be done on an ad hoc, as needed basis, but it will lead to inconsistent results. Another pitfall is that lead scoring may be designed through the lens of marketing without critical input from sales.

To combat these issues, follow the recommendations below:

1. Centralize global scoring. Regional demand gen marketers may feel that scoring should be localized because of their unique understanding of their markets. However, regional scoring may lead to fluctuating lead scores and confusion about lead performance globally.

At Marketo, we work with our global demand generation teams to determine how we want to score based on demographics and behavior. For example, we normalize how leads are scored based on their job title. We set up a rule that recognizes a job title containing “gerente” for the European Spanish version of “manager and then scores the lead accordingly. On the behavior side, we have matrices that dictate scoring by program channel type, investment level, and lead response action. This centralized approach has greatly helped us evaluate the quality of top-of-funnel leads coming in and understand our program performance.

2. Align scoring with sales efficiency and incentives. While systematized lead scoring provides invaluable metrics to the demand generation team about which programs to drive more of, the lead score should also resonate with the sales team as well. Too often, we hear that sales distrusts the lead score, which leads to them not utilizing the scores at all. To curb this, it’s important to ensure that the scoring is valid and works to support sales.

One way we have done this at Marketo is by bumping up lead scores for those who fill out a “Contact Me” form. We also score accounts, which aligns with an account-based marketing strategy for both marketing and sales. We built in a component of our scoring that takes into account (pun intended) the lead’s account score, and sales is incentivized to go after accounts with a higher propensity to buy.

As our business has grown, there has also been a greater need to drill down on scoring granularity. Two years ago, we started scoring on product interest to give our internal sales team an idea of the products a lead was researching. This year, we did a deep dive on looking at leads in specific industries that we wanted to grow sales in.

Unorganized Lead Routing

After you properly qualify inbound leads, you’ll want to decide when they should be routed and to whom. Lead routing can vary from being quite simple to fairly complicated depending on the needs of your organization.

When I started at Marketo more than three years ago, the company was much smaller and our lead routing requirements were much simpler in both scope and magnitude. It was fairly easy to update teams and territory assignments. Fast forward three years—our sales team has more than doubled, there is a strategic shift to an account-based marketing strategy, and our international teams have expanded. Our lead routing needed to change accordingly and we had to have a solid plan in place from start to finish.

From my experience, lead routing mistakes manifest in three ways–unknown processes, the question of fairness, and lack of agility. All three issues lead to inefficiencies in delivering leads to sales.

To address this, follow these steps:

1. Communicate processes with sales. It sounds simple, but if you lift up the hood of your marketing automation engine, you may find that marketing says “Here!” and sales says “Where?” Sales teams are often unaware of the process in place for follow-up and how certain steps need to be followed in order for activities to be logged.

Organize a training with sales so they understand the processes that you have created. If there are certain views or reports that you are using to identify leads that are passed to the sales team, make sure they have access to identical views and reports. You’ll also want to explain how leads should be prioritized for follow-up. It’s a good idea to create a feedback loop and ask the sales team if they are seeing patterns in how the leads are coming into their views. There could be better ways for you to automate the flow that reduces manual work done by the reps when they see misrouted leads.

2. Drive fairer distribution of leads. The question of fairness always arises because sales teams are under pressure to deliver based on the leads that get assigned to them. A key marketing and sales exercise is to investigate the quality and quantity of lead flow in each territory. Sales coverage and performance results should reflect varying demand. In some territories, a round robin may be the easiest and most balanced way to distribute leads. However, in the example of our lead routing in Europe, language preference is used for distributing leads.

Make sure that you have the proper data to support your organization’s routing needs. One area of lead routing that we’ve been optimizing at Marketo is passing more highly qualified leads to more senior members of our sales team. This strategy gives more junior members experience with working leads and allows senior members to follow up with “hot” leads more efficiently.

3. Understand tradeoffs. When it comes to maintaining your lead routing, there are tradeoffs. The first consideration is quality vs quantity. Routing can be designed to filter out leads that do not meet stringent criteria. Are your sales teams trained to quickly sift out junk leads? If they are, are there just too many leads coming in daily to get through all of them? It’s up to marketing operations to understand the sensitivity of sending too many leads versus only delivering the most highly qualified leads to sales.

A second consideration is between volume and velocity. Even with the volume of your leads determined, there are still leads that need to be channeled very quickly to the sales team, such as a lead who fills out a “Contact Me” form. This means that leads with “less” scrubbing may move into a sales view rapidly.

The last consideration is designing an articulate lead routing engine and having enough resources to manage it versus a simpler routing engine with less maintenance overhead. Do you and your team have the time to manage complex rules, along with understanding edge case scenarios? Make sure the tradeoffs are understood between your marketing and sales teams.

Undefined Marketing and Sales Handoff

Once you have your lead routing and lead scoring in place, it’s also critical to have a workflow for handing qualified leads off to sales. Mistakes with the handoff lead to lost time and money and could even jeopardize a sale. Because there are gray areas of ownership and contention, we’ve learned to do the following:

1. Agree on definitions. Agreement on what is a marketing qualified lead is the first step in the marketing to sales handoff process. A marketing qualified lead, or MQL, must meet certain criteria in order for sales to begin follow-up. This should be aligned with lead scoring, as mentioned above. An MQL must also be easily identifiable as one and there needs to be a process in place for the sales team to follow up so marketing knows that the lead is being worked on as well.

2. Monitor accountability with SLAs. Enforceable SLAs (service-level agreements) should be put in place so sales can be accountable for leads that have been passed over. SLAs help ensure that sales is following up with given leads in a set amount of time. While marketing drives MQLs, sales also needs to take responsibility for giving feedback on the quality of MQLs and timeliness. SLAs help with improving lead management alignment, which includes understanding issues with lead routing and lead data and assessing if you have the right tools in place for measurement.

3. Run uniform reports. You should create official reports to run metrics on MQLs and sales performance. Even though data can be sliced a number of ways to support managing teams, the source of these reports should be the same. Oftentimes, sales will run their version of reports and marketing will run their version, and meetings will be about the data source and not about improving the business itself. Instead, public reports should be shared and vetted by both marketing and sales. Here at Marketo, we share the marketing operations-approved dashboards and the fields that we use to report on MQLs across both teams.

Marketing sales alignment is a never-ending process because it is ever-changing. However, the best way to consistently meet business demands is to make incremental improvements and constantly evaluate how you’re building processes.

If you want to learn more about the challenges that marketing operations faces, register for my webinar, 8 Biggest Mistakes Marketing Operations Makes and How to Avoid Them.

 

 

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3 Marketing Operations Mistakes That Will Break Your Sales and Marketing Alignment was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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How to Use In-Store Behavioral Data to Increase Sales

We all know that online shopping behavior is tracked in order to increase sales, but what about the behavior of brick and mortar shoppers? The Global Director of Marketing for IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT), Scott Neuman, points out that gathering data about a shoppers activity in a physical retail store is just as important as it is when the customer is shopping online.

Capturing Offline Shopper Data

"Over the past decade we have seen many advances in online retailing ranging from dynamic pricing to predictive buyer behavior, all with the goal of providing better service and driving increased revenue," notes Neuman. "All of this has been achieved through the creative use of data captured through the experience. But have in store experiences kept pace with the online experience? Is the in store data that is being captured falling into a black hole? Is the potential data being captured at all?"

Neuman suggests that just like how retailers track their online customers, knowing what products are viewed and in what order, physical stores could and should do the same in order to increase the bottom line. He says that by adding RFID tags on each item in the store, a retailer can track the movement of shoppers and know what order they put products into their carts.

Adjusting In-Store Marketing Based on In-Store Behavior

You can also know how long customers browsed in the vicinity of certain products. Neuman says that with this data retailers should ask, "What made them move on? Was there more you could have done with the display? Was the price point wrong?"

Using IoT data a retailer can "correlate the current flow of customers with check out receipts" in order to adjust in-store promotions with in-store data. "Much the same way online retails can track a customer’s digital journey of page views and their shopping cart at checkout," said Neuman. "Then you can tease out where opportunities lie to not only increase sales, but increase customer satisfaction."

How Will the Internet of Things Impact Marketing?

IBM's IoT marketing director was recently asked how will the Internet of Things impact marketing. "It really comes down to the data that's available to marketers," said Neuman. "When you think about the sensors and what they are connected to, reaching out to where customers are and where they are making decisions, that's really the nirvana for marketing!"

The IoT revolution is an "explosion of data" that is a significant opportunity for retailers, but also an extreme challenge. "How do you make sense of all of that?" asks Neuman. "That's where technology really starts to play a role."

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4 Life Lessons I Learned (So Far) From a Career in B2B Sales

Author: Alexandra Nation

I’m cursed.

Play me a tune: any tune, from any decade. If I don’t already know the song word for word, I’ll pick up the tune and the lyrics in a listen or two. Maybe there’s a parallel between my ear for music and my knack for languages. (Growing up, I spoke fluent Farsi and picked up enough French to score top marks on my high school AP exam without actually taking the AP class.) I’ve loved music my entire life, but my curse is this: I am the most terrible singer you’ve never heard.

Because of this, I also decided at a young age that I would be equally useless at playing any musical instrument and never even tried. However, I love studying the habits of professionals at the top of their game in any industry, especially because my own career has taken quite a non-traditional path. Imagine my delight when I came across piano salesperson Erica Feidner, who was named one of the top 10 greatest salespeople of all time by Inc Magazine. The piano happens to be one of my favorite instruments, and if you’ve never listened to The Piano Guys, a group that covers everything from Beethoven’s 5 Secrets (a favorite of mine) to Rolling in the Deep, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and pull up their YouTube channel.

Back to Erica. She is a classically trained concert pianist who insists that she’s not in sales (despite selling $3.5 million worth of pianos in one year), but prefers to think of herself as a ‘piano matchmaker.’ Upon discovering Erica, I found myself reading everything I could possibly find about her. It got me thinking about how what I’ve learned as a salesperson translates to my everyday life, and also served as a great reminder of how I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of sales and industry expertise.

Whether you’re a seasoned salesperson or just starting out as a mighty business development rep, read on for four life lessons I learned in sales:

1. You’ll develop ninja-like observational and communication skills.

Have you ever told someone something she didn’t want to hear, only to hear these two deadly words?

“It’s fine.”

Not only is it most definitely NOT fine, but I bet her face and tone betrayed her actual meaning.

The point is this: every spoken communication has three components: face and body, tone and volume, and actual words said. Depending upon which study you consult, you will find these approximate ratios: 55% of a message is generated by the face and body, 38% from tone and volume, and only 7% from words said. So it’s no surprise that in a sales cycle, the ability to observe and respond to nonverbal communication separates average salespeople from top-notch ones. It is hands down the most valuable skill to hone.

Over the years, my fellow sales warriors and I have developed preternatural capabilities for observing tone, body language, and interpreting what people say versus what they mean. The most common example happens in a customer meeting when you explain a technical concept to a customer, only to hear them say “That makes sense…” with a furrowed brow. In these situations, I often gently meet their eye, smile, and say “Are there any parts of what I just explained that we should revisit?” I usually get a huge relieved grin and an “Actually, yes…could you go back a screen? I’m sorry, that was totally over my head.”

2. You will learn to say no when needed.

The best salespeople are not the ones who drive towards a yes–they’re the ones who ask the right questions and then have the courage to say, “Wait a second. Based on what you’ve told me, I don’t think this product makes sense for you.”

This is not the same thing as reverse psychology, although that can also be effective when deployed judiciously (“This is a great book, but you probably won’t like it”). Rather, saying no is a fantastic life skill. Think of every time that you’ve wanted to say no in your personal life, but didn’t–you were probably worried about offending the other person, to the point where you would consider compromising your own needs just to make them happy. This also includes saying no to people asking for a chunk of your time that you simply don’t have to give. If you know how to politely say “no,” you’ll find yourself with renewed control of your life and future.

3. Everyone’s favorite subject is themselves.

When Erica Feidner meets a new client, the relationship begins with an hour-long conversation. She patiently uncovers not just what the customer is looking for in a piano, but their musical background, favorite songs, and preferred pieces to play.

After her thorough questioning, she takes a piece of paper and writes down a series of numbers, then walks the customer into the showroom and guides them toward a couple of instruments. She invites them to play, leaving the room if they prefer not to play for an audience. Based on their gut reaction to the piano and the way it sounds compared to their musical aspirations, she adjusts her recommendation. This recommendation could encourage the customer to wait until a piano she has in mind arrives in stock–never mind if it delays the purchase or risks losing the customer to a competitor.

This masterfully executed process matches Erica’s expertise with the customer’s timeframe. I don’t know about you, but any salesperson who counsels patience over a purchase earns my loyalty for life, because there is no better way to demonstrate that you actually care about a person and understand their needs loud and clear.

4. Sales gives you a front row seat to how people make decisions.

Sales has fascinating elements of psychology and neuroscience. In the beginning of this piece, I said that I’ve never even tried to play music, because I somehow extrapolated that not being able to sing means not being able to play. However, Erica has a process that teaches people to read music in one lesson. Her incredible story and expertise make me want to contact her and learn to play music. I don’t know where I’d put a piano in my house, but given her integrity, she’d probably recommend that I wait to buy until I have space or buy the world’s tiniest piano and put it in the corner of my living room.

Just like coming across Erica’s story uncovered musical aspirations I never knew I had, a top salesperson is able to draw people out both personally and professionally. If you learn to listen to a person beyond their words and ask the right questions, you are demonstrating the two best characteristics of a top salesperson.

If you’re a fellow student of sales, I’d love to know what resources you use to try and improve your craft– tweet me @AlexandraNation or leave a note in the comments below!

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4 Life Lessons I Learned (So Far) From a Career in B2B Sales was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Mad Marketing 106: Positive People, Content Cultures, and More

It’s podcast time my friends, and in this episode of Mad Marketing, I’ll be addressing the following subjects: Why I’ve elected to surround myself with positive people, and how watching the recent election was difficult based on the fact that so many generally happy and positive people changed their tune, even to friends. The interesting…

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Lead Assign: Cost, Competitors, Community, & More [VIDEO & PODCAST] One Last Tool

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Internet of Things to Drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Industrie 4.0 -- Companies Endorse New Interoperable IIoT Standard

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will be the primary driver of the fourth Industrial Revolution and Cisco and other companies are at the forefront. It's commonly referred to as Industrie 4.0.

"Industrie 4.0 is not digitization or digitalization of mechanical industry, because this is already there," said Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Gutzmer, Deputy CEO and CTO of Schaeffler AG. "Industrie 4.0 is getting the data real-time information structure in this supply and manufacturing chain."

"If we use IoT data in a different way we can be more flexible so we can adapt faster and make decisions if something unforeseen happens, even in the cloud and even with cognitive systems," says Gutzmer.

From the 2013 Siemens video below:
"In intelligent factories machines and products will communicate with each other, cooperatively driving production. Raw materials and machines are interconnected, within an internet of things. The objective, highly flexible individualized and resource friendly mass production. That is the vision for the fourth industrial revolution."

"The excitement surrounding the fourth industrial revolution or Industrie 4.0 is largely due to the limitless possibilities that come with connecting everything, everywhere, with everyone," said Martin Dube, Global Manufacturing Leader in the Digital Transformation Group at Cisco, in a blog post today. "The opportunities to improve processes, reduce downtime and increase efficiency through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is easy to see in manufacturing, an industry heavily reliant on automation and control, core examples of operational technology."

Connectivity between machines is vital for the success of Industrie 4.0, but it is far from simple. "The manufacturing environment is full of connectivity and communication protocols that are not interconnected and often not interoperable," notes Dube. "That’s why convergence and interoperability are critical if this revolution is to live up to (huge) expectations."

Dube explains that convergence is the concept of connecting machines so that communication is possible and interoperability is the use of a standard technology enabling that communcation.

Cisco Announces Interoperable IIoT Standard

Cisco announced today that a number of key tech companies have agreed on an Interoperable IIoT Standard. The group, which includes ABB, BoschRexroth, B&R, Cisco, General Electric, National Instruments, Parker Hannifin, Schneider Electric, SEW Eurodrive and TTTech, is aiming for an open, unified, standards-based and interoperable IIoT solution for communication between industrial controllers and to the cloud, according to Cisco:

ABB, Bosch Rexroth, B&R, CISCO, General Electric, KUKA, National Instruments (NI), Parker Hannifin, Schneider Electric, SEW-EURODRIVE and TTTech are jointly promoting OPC UA over Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) as the unified communication solution between industrial controllers and to the cloud.

Based on open standards, this solution enables industry to use devices from different vendors that are fully interoperable. The participating companies intend to support OPC UA TSN in their future generations of products.

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3 Things Marketers Can Be Thankful For

Author: Marissa Lyman

The moment November 1st rolled around, I immediately began thinking of turkey, cranberry relish, and food comas.

For our international readers, November is the time of the year when Americans justify devoting an entire day to eating. I know what you’re thinking–what about the other 364 days of the year when the United States treats the McDonald’s breakfast menu like an all-you-can-eat buffet? Touché, my international marketers, touché.

However, beyond food and American football, Thanksgiving is actually about giving thanks. This time of year is rough for marketers. Many of us are already chin-deep in 2017 planning and can barely think about the rest of this calendar year. Or, perhaps you’re like my local supermarket, completely fixated on December. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some candy canes, mistletoe, and fat, festive animals, but let’s take a brief moment to think about what we’re thankful for.

What was that? Did I just hear you say vodka?! No! I meant in marketing. What are you thankful for in marketing?

Here, let me share a few things in marketing that I am grateful for to get you started:

1. Technology That Makes Life Easier

Remember when the only way to reach your buyers was through direct mail, magazine ads, television commercials, and out-of-home advertising? Back in those days, it wasn’t even possible to have a one-to-one relationship with your customers, not to mention prospects.

Today, however, not only can we use technology to drive real interactions with customers, we can do it in a way that’s effective and efficient. Need to find and reach out to your top 100 customers in one go? Done! Want to clone a drip campaign…and still be able to track conversions for each one? Mission accomplished! No need to start from scratch every time; technology is here to help! Technology cuts out the tedious, time-consuming tasks and allows marketers to focus on what we do best–build relationships.

2. The Opportunity to Continually Learn and Grow

Marketing is many things, but it’s certainly not boring. Who would have thought that something like Snapchat would become a MAJOR marketing channel? Any platform that has voice-changers and stickers and can still be seen as valuable to a business has my vote.

There will always be new channels, technologies, and trends, and more so now than ever before. As much as hopping on the latest internet sensation can feel like a rat race, the industry’s evolution always keeps things interesting. And it puts marketers at the cutting edge of nearly every new trend. It makes you the most in-the-know person at the party when you can start talking about VR and AR and IoT and AI and USA and VAT and–wait a moment…

Sometimes, I wish the industry would stop changing for a moment so we could all catch up, but it’s all for good reason! It’s evolving in a way that allows us to better serve the people we need to put first–our customers.

3. You Can See the Impact of Your Marketing

As a marketer you’re in a very unique day and age. Unlike any of the marketers that have come before you, you can actually quantify the impact of what you do. No more spending money in a vacuum or randomly putting messages out in the universe and crossing your fingers that they did what you intended them to do. By measuring the impact of your campaigns, from early-stage to late-stage, you can identify your most valuable programs and channels as well as which ones you need to optimize.

Today, you have the tools to show yourself, your manager, your CMO, and your CEO how what you’re doing actually impacts your business. Take Marketo customer Panasonic, for example, which was able to show how brand awareness–merely seeing an ad on Google or Facebook–could be tied back to revenue. That’s unreal! Or at least it was unreal…until now.

Give Thanks!

So take a moment, pause, and be thankful for what you’ve got. And if you’re still saying vodka, I get it.

What are you thankful for? Share in the comments below!

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3 Things Marketers Can Be Thankful For was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Hubcast 118: Thanksgiving Trivia, Artificial Intelligence, & Certifications

Welcome back to The Hubcast, folks: A weekly podcast all about HubSpot news, tips, and tricks. Please also note the extensive show notes below, including some new HubSpot video tutorials ...

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Stanford Study: Teens Clueless On Distinguishing Sponsored Content

A Stanford Study of 7,804 students from middle school through college illustrated that young people are clueless in knowing what is actual news versus sponsored content. This study comes on the heels of fake news hysteria that Facebook and other social media sites possibly impacted the presidential election. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that this is crazy considering that there was so-called fake news about both candidates.

According to the Wall Street Journal, who first reported on the study, 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website. The study indicates that most students didn't look at the source of a news story, but were more motivated based on the actual content of the headline link or the associated image.

The study noted that after showing high school students images of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site, 40% of them believed that was strong evidence of contamination from the Japan Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster, even though no source or location was provided.

This is exactly why "native content" and "sponsored content" is so insidious. https://t.co/fUlCSOH4Gl

— Cyrus Farivar (@cfarivar) November 22, 2016

I see that the Wall Street Journal and others reporting on this study link it directly to the "fake news" controversy, which literally has nothing to do with this research. They were looking at sponsored content and sponsored news links from automated ad serving firms like Taboola and Adblade, not individuals posting misleading news on social media.

To avoid another election disaster, all kids must
be taught to think critically: ask questions and weigh evidence https://t.co/DC2K3wLnaz

— Tony Wagner (@DrTonyWagner) November 22, 2016

Some people, even Harvard professors, can't remove their own political biases when interpreting research.

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Sample Videographer Job Description and Posting for Marketing Departments

If you’ve been paying any attention to our content on The Sales Lion over the past year, you’re quite aware of our focus on helping companies become “media” companies– a shift that is needed as we all roll forward into the digital age. This being said, more and more companies are hiring in-house videographers in…

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