The first thing vendors must do to have a successful content syndication program is to create a strategic roadmap of where they stand today versus where they would like to be in the near future. Too often, vendors jump in to a content syndication program without a proper situation analysis.

The four phases of a good content syndication program are:

1. Control Brand Messaging and Integrity
2. Organize Content and Distribute Promotions
3. Create Demand and Generate Leads
4. Improve Partner Enablement

For example, before starting a content syndication program, one of SharedVue’s clients hired a research agency to measure the effectiveness of content on partner websites. They found partners were not representing the vendor message or portfolio in line with the corporate website. Thus, the vendor needed to start with Phase I: controlling brand messaging and integrity. We then helped roadmap a strategy that quickly took them from an overall lack of branding on partners’ websites to completely controlling a cohesive set of content that enabled partners with promotional opportunities, generated demand, and captured leads. They are now in Phase IV and are working on implementing a partner enablement program that gives their partners controlled email campaign templates complete with landing pages inside the syndicated content.

While vendors don’t necessarily need to do that same type of research to implement a good syndication program, there are a few questions to ask before getting started.

How often do I want to update content on my partner websites?

How often you create new product or marketing content will largely determine how often you want to update your syndicated content. If your product development teams try to come out with new marketing content every quarter and you want that content to go live on partner websites at the same time (or even before) it’s live on the vendor corporate site, it might be a good idea to set up your syndication program with slightly more frequent updates than that — perhaps monthly. This will give you plenty of time to know what content is coming down the pipeline so that you can prepare your syndication provider for updates. The key is not to overload your syndicating partners with tons of new pages every time you update. Instead, try changing content that already exists, retiring old content or moving it to a less prominent place in the content roadmap.

Sometimes, though, it can be difficult to be aware of what content updates are coming untill they are already in the last stages of creation. That leads to the next question;

Who will be responsible for content updates and quality control?

You need a content point-person. This is someone dedicated to keeping track of what different teams within your vendor organization are doing. This will allow that person to know what content is being created months in advance of the live date. Ideally, this is not the same person managing your syndication program. This is a separate person that focuses solely on content and has an intimate knowledge of your offerings, understands the ways in which content is consumer via the web, and can rewrite content to keep the partner joint-value proposition in the forefront. This person should work closely with all the content creators within your vendor organization and only be responsible for rewriting that content for syndication.

Keeping your syndication program manager and channel content specialist in separate roles will decrease the time it takes to update content because you will have someone intricately involved throughout the whole content creation process.

What metrics can I capture to help show ROI for the program?

All marketing initiatiaves should have a way to measure ROI, but a syndication program in and of itself is not necessarily set up to measure this kind of information. There is no way to capture historical data previous to the implementation of your program. What you can do, though, is choose to measure metrics that enable you to measure ROI. If you are using your content syndication program to generate more leads for partners, compare your past sales data to what you have post-launch for your syndication program. Or, if your program is meant to reduce the time and efforts spent on updating and controlling your message on partner sites, finding the difference between your previous investments versus what you are investing in your syndication program will give you a firm grasp on your net gain.

There are also other ways to show ROI for your content syndication program. Look at the adoption rates of the marketing materials you produce for partners. Since content syndication automates the process of pushing these live for partners, you can safely assume that your marketing dollars are going to better use.

The Takeaway

Overall, you want to achieve both your and your partners’ goals. A successful content syndication program takes proper planning to streamline content updates, internal collaboration through a sole content specialist and an plan to evaluate success with relevant metrics.

Vendors have a big job when it comes to budgeting for sales and marketing activities. Compared to channel partner enablement, it is simpler and more cost-effective to empower internal teams by helping them communicate a marketing message, providing them with sales tools and tracking success metrics. This is because vendors have to run a complete communications campaign just to get channel partners to use all of the tools available to them. It’s easier to get a direct sales team on board.

Yet, no direct sales strategy can compete with a partner channel that is both agile and streamlined. The trick is being able to control a cohesive message, provide sales tools and show ROI for hundreds or thousands of channel partners. That’s where content syndication and marketing automation come in to play.

When you increase the body over which you are broadcasting that message — through a partner channel — it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain and update. But a channel strategy increases the number of touch-points a vendor has with the end customer. No direct sales strategy can even come close to meeting the same volume. Thus, there is a trade-off. It is much simpler to control a marketing message about a product or other offering if it is confined within a direct sales organization. However, if a vendor’s main POS is on partner websites, a content syndication strategy is the best way to control and update content on hundreds or even thousands of partner websites. And as a complement, a marketing automation platform makes it easy for partners to drive leads to those partner websites with cobranded email campaigns and auto-generated landing pages, complete with lead capture and ROI tracking. In the end, controlling a marketing message becomes just as easy and cost-efficient as doing it through direct sales, plus you increase the number of leads.

With a direct sales strategy, it is vendor vs vendor. There is only competition for the customer’s attention. In an industry where so many vendors sell similar products, it becomes necessary to increase the number of places for customer interaction to stand out. With a partner channel, vendors can compete on two levels: the customer and the channel partner. And channel partners will showcase a vendor over its competitors if vendors make it easy enough for them. So a vendor could potentially beat the competition not because it has a better product, but because it has a better relationship with partners.

One key way to help channel partners become better marketers of vendor products is by automating processes that take additional time and resources for them to implement. With a direct sales team, a vendor must have a complete infrastructure to support any enablement efforts. With a partner channel, vendors can use a content syndication and marketing automation platform to make it easy for partners to perform marketing activities. For example, if you have email campaign templates partners can download, cobrand and send, don’t just put them in a partner portal for partners to download. That isn’t what a vendor would do with a direct sales team. It would be sent for them. Give partners the same — an automated place where they can select a campaign template, upload or purchase a list and create all the appropriate lead capture and metrics tracking in a few easy steps. Also, vendors don’t make direct sales teams update content on the corporate website, so you can’t expect your partners to have the appropriate resources to update product content on their websites. Setting up a content syndication pipeline will dramatically improve a partner’s website and your relationship with them.

Whether it’s with direct or channel sales, it is important for companies to find the most cost-effective methods of getting product information and promotions in front of the end consumer in the quickest way possible. The bottom line is that vendors need to do things that will increase partner loyalty and dependence while improving channel partner relationships without sacrificing direct sales resources. With that being said, the methods channel marketers use to make their partners better marketers will largely determine which vendor partners focus their time and resources on selling.

Many channel vendors struggle with implementing successful social media activities both internally and for partners. There are several reasons for less-than-stunning programs, but 4 of the most common across all channels organizations are:

• Difficulty in showing ROI
• No clear understanding of social media etiquette
• Unsure of who to target
• Limited resources to dedicate to the program

Below are some ideas on how to combat the problems listed above and specific examples I’ve seen being implemented in various places.

Show ROI for Your Channel Social Media Programs

In a previous post, I talked about some general ways to measure ROI through metrics. Sure, things like website visitors, leads, customer engagement, or number of people submitting employment applications sounds good, but metrics like this mean little if you can’t associate it with monetary value. You’ve got to set a baseline for comparison.

Ask yourself, “How much revenue is my company or channel bringing in? How much time do brand and product managers spend on figuring out how our products are perceived by customers?” These two things are very easily associated with a monetary value, either income or opportunity costs. Compare the metrics from before your social media programs were implemented to now. Has there been an increase in sales or a decrease in costs for marketing? If so, you can probably attribute the difference to your social media efforts.

The Bottom Line: Figure out which metrics you can easily associate with either revenues or costs and develop your social media activities around changing them. If the activities you are doing can’t be associated, you should probably change your approach.

Understand the Social Media Landscape

Often, channel vendors jump into the social media space without a firm grasp on how to act and communicate. Simply posting links or self-promotion is not going to get you anywhere. There has to be an effort around interaction and two-way conversation to be successful.

Whether it is a blog, Facebook Fan Page, or Twitter profile, you’ve got to be open and altruistic. Due to the nature of social media, people will reject outright promotions if you don’t mix it with content that’s also valuable to your followers. The other day I was on a call with my marketing department, being asked as to why one of our Twitter followers was upset about a tweet. The reason was because someone had posted the same link multiple times but masked it with different intro text. It was misleading and a waste of time for anyone who had already clicked on one of the previous posts.

The Bottom Line: Be open about your company and the content you share, have meaningful and personal conversation with people, and produce valuable content for your fans and followers that they will want to share.

Pick a Specific Target Audience

Sometimes vendors aren’t even sure who to target. In one instance they may be talking to channel partners and in another customers. Just like any marketing program, your social media activities need to have a target audience. What you talk about, how you present yourself, and your overall strategy all depend on who you’re targeting. You’re not going to offer end-customer promotions on a blog that your partners subscribe to. Likewise, end-customers don’t care about new marketing materials available in your partner portal, so why tweet it to them?

If you want to sell more products through your direct sales team, create a blog that targets your leads and other end-customers and post detailed information about the best ways to use your products. If your partners are failing to engage in downloading sales materials from your partner portal, find them on Facebook, create a Fan Page, and offer them the content there. As an example, PTC does a great job of offering free and useful information (such as videos, pictures, discussions, etc.) to customers on their Pro/ENGINEER – Did You Know? Facebook Fan Page.

The Bottom Line: Don’t just create a blog or Twitter account and post all of your corporate, sales, employee and product information there. Tailor your actions to meet the needs of a specific target audience, be it partners, end-customers or qualified leads.

Dedicate a Resource to Your Social Media Programs

How many brands can you name that talk to you on a regular basis? None. A brand cannot talk, but people can. Companies rarely send a post-purchase direct mailer without the CEO or some other figurehead signing it, so why would you run your social media program differently? Lots of companies even have one or two people acting as the face of their organization at press conferences. Everyone needs a spokes person (i.e. have you ever seen the move Thank You For Smoking?).

People on social media don’t like being sold to – they like being talked to. In social media, organizations have what is called a “community manager”. These are people that act as an expert on your company and spend all day talking to people on Twitter and Facebook, getting to know your target audience. They also write blog posts that engage your audience members, encouraging interaction, content sharing, and advocating a sale or buying themselves.

For example, Everything Channel (@everythingchnl) has several people dedicated to creating content, each an expert on different subject matters. This content is created specifically for social media, and everyone who creates the content does so based on a guideline document. This creates a cohesive, clear presence and followers know where content originates.

The Bottom Line: Find someone to run your social media programs who knows how to interact with others on social media, can write well, and has a strong understanding of your products and solutions. You can still have a corporate Twitter account, but put a face behind it.

In the weeks to come, I will address each of these areas individually and further explain

Many marketers struggle to justify their social media activities for one main reason – they can’t show ROI (return on investment). While there are some obvious benefits to using social media, such as SEO, audience engagement, and product promotion, there are no dollars assigned to those metrics. ROI deals with financial impact, not benefits. From an economists’ standpoint, it is the opportunity cost (comparison of what you could be doing vs what you are doing) divided by the cost of your investment.

At the end of the day, things like website visitors, community engagement, or number of people submitting employment applications means absolutely nothing unless you can assign a monetary value to the data. However, connecting the dots can sometimes be convoluted.

Ask yourself, “So what does all this non-financial data mean?”

For any business, cost reduction and revenue growth are the focus for all short-run and long-run activities. Thus, if you can show that your social media activities directly affect one or both of those two performance indicators, you can justify using social media for your business.

How to Justify Social Media for Your Business

To justify using social media, you must establish a baseline for comparison. What are your current monthly sales? How many hours per week does your customer service department or representative spend on issues? Taking the time to gather these metrics will make showing ROI easier. Moreover, they actually give you something to show a correlation to your social media marketing activities.

For example, instead of just showing an increase in the number of hits to your website since you began your social media efforts, show the correlation between an increase in sales and the number of people visiting the website. Have you had more sales inquiries? What is the total for net new customers? Assign a dollar amount to those potential sales and then you’ve got something.

The Bottom Line: Use trend analysis to make correlations with your social media activities. You must assign dollars to the data you collect.

Have you used or seen good examples of trend analysis to justify ROI for social media activities? Tell others in the comments.

Everything Channel has brought on Eric Schweitzer to help with its new SharedVue channel content syndication (Syndic8) and marketing automation (Communic8) tools. Eric will fulfill the role of Web Producer. In this position, he will help ensure all of Everything Channel’s SharedVue customers have seamless content updates on their channel partners’ existing websites.

“Eric is a great addition to both the web production and tech teams in general,” says David Ford, Web Production Manager for Everything Channel.  “His new roll as web producer will be pivotal in helping our team spin up new clients more effectively as well as assisting with ongoing and day to day content refreshes of existing clients. He is also an excellent guitarist… which is always a plus.”

Eric’s previous experience as a Web and user interface designer, multimedia developer and Flash programmer will prove invaluable as the SharedVue team creates new channel solutions for vendors and their partners.

Content syndication isn’t about putting as much content on channel partner websites as you can. It is about providing the end customer with quality, relevant content that is specifically tuned for each partner. Ideally, content should be created specifically for your channel partners syndication program, not scraped from your corporate website (unless the content there is already channel-centric). Creating content that stresses the importance of the partner makes you look better because the partner has more incentive to showcase your products and their solutions.

On average, a channel partner’s website has 15-30 pages of content, give or take a few pages. If you decide to syndicate 200 pages of product content, you really warp the partner’s site. All of a sudden, the partner has a huge website with content only about your products and solutions. The partner’s message and content get lost, eliminating the appeal of the joint-value proposition for the partner. When this happens, partners will often stop syndicating content or stop pushing customers to your pages. Thus, the content becomes moot.

Likewise, you don’t want to syndicate content that may not be relevant to the end customer. If your messaging isn’t driving the idea that your partner is the most knowledgeable resource on the subject, customers will go somewhere else — possibly a competitor!

That’s why it is really important to develop your content syndication strategy. Below are a few quick tips to help create a cohesive, strategic content syndication program for your channel partners:

1. Develop a strong content plan. Ask yourself, “What is the purpose of our syndicated content? Do we want to generate leads for partners? Increase our product page views on partner websites?” Write down a few goals your content should accomplish. If you’re using SharedVue’s Syndic8 tool, ask us to help. If you have a content update that doesn’t help achieve those core goals, perhaps it shouldn’t be pushed to syndication. Moreover, syndicating only strategically planned, well-thought out content created specifically for your channel will increase adoption rates of your syndication program and increase sales through your channel in the long run. Content is key!
2. Refresh your content often. Partners love having fresh, up-to-date content on their websites. With content syndication, you have the ability to do that for them. This doesn’t mean creating new pages every quarter. Instead, think about rewriting your existing product content to better fit the needs of your partners. If you’re using SharedVue to syndicate channel partner content, use the metrics and analytics consoles to see how your content is performing. Really make the syndicated content you already have better.
3. Create “content sets” for your channel partners. Not all of your partners specialize in the same areas. Moreover, not all of your partners sell all of your products. Spending time to create different sets of content for your syndication program can help your partners retain and focus on their specific target market. When you start pushing all of your content through to all of your partners without regard to their certification levels or specialties, the value of the content is lost because it isn’t helping the partner sell anything. Also, the end customer is on your partner’s site for a reason, looking for a specific solution. If you give them only the information that is relevant to them, they are more like to become a sale.

End users are already bombarded with hoards of product content. Creating a concise, strong message for your syndicated content with good product/solution descriptions will benefit you more than pushing out tons of product information. Think about what the partners need, then analyze, refine, and syndicate.

Talk to your your Facilit8 Account Manager for more information »

Every channel vendor wants to do more with less, particularly in this economy. One way of achieving that is by being more efficient: cutting out waste, running lean, and employing talented, versatile individuals who can self-motivate and multi-task. When it comes to the channel, self-motivation takes on a whole new meaning in terms of getting channel partners to act and share sales strategies. There has to be a benefit for the partner. That’s why incentive programs are key in pushing partners to act.

It was only fitting that Eaton Corporation, known worldwide for their power management solutions, asked Strategic Insights to develop a contest website to promote the concept of “Efficient Uptime” to its channel partners. Efficient Uptime has been a theme of Eaton’s for a while now—this was the next step in engaging the partners to become part of the message.

“The goal is two-fold,” says Eaton Global IT Manager Brooke Lang. “The Efficient Uptime contest not only reinforces our campaign message, it also encourages partners to share best practices with one another by documenting their success stories for everyone to see. We’re extremely excited about it.”

To enter the contest, a channel partner must describe what Efficient Uptime means to them and how they have delivered it for a customer, including the environmental and cost savings achieved. Bonus points are given for stories that include Eaton Solutions. Stories may consist of documents, presentations, pictures and videos. Eaton will choose two winners who will receive $2500 each.

“It’s really more of a microsite,” explains Associate Creative Director Chris Griffin, “which is not to diminish its importance, but better describes its focus: it’s a website with one purpose. Over the course of three tabs, which serve as sub-pages, visitors can get an overview of the contest, its rules and can upload their materials right then and there.” Partners can then choose to direct judges to a URL or upload content, or a combination of both.

Eaton plans on promoting the contest through email blasts, through its distributors, an online campaign conducted by Everything Channel and through its partner portal, also created by Strategic Insights.

Of the portal, Lang comments, “We’ve seen great results so far. Since its launch, we’ve grabbed an additional share and a half, and have outgrown the rest of the market pretty significantly.”

The important take away from the mini cast study is that just because you create a marketing initiative or incentive for your partners, that doesn’t mean they are going to act on it. You must make partner recruitment just as important as the program iteself.

Framingham, Ma – June 22, 2010 – Everything Channel, a UBM company, announced the release of a new eBook featuring best practices for efficient channel marketing. Developed by cloud marketing experts from Everything Channel’s newly acquired asset SharedVue, the eBook and accompanying webinar entitled, Channel Partner Content Syndication & Marketing Automation: Maintain Consistent Messaging Channel-Wide for More Effective Marketing, seeks to answer a common question, “What could your channel accomplish if you could make it easier for your partners to market and sell your product or service?”

Join the June 29^th webinar and receive a free copy of the eBook »

Webinar Details

Enabling partners is difficult especially with varying channel sizes, partner capabilities and partner adoption rates. By understanding why channel partners struggle to implement new marketing initiatives, vendors and service providers can learn how to enable them with multi-touch marketing campaigns, syndication capabilities and marketing automation tools to be successful.

The eBook and webinar will also address:

• How to help partners succeed in marketing your products
• What methods to use for content syndication across all partner websites
• How to leverage traditional and new media tools to launch campaigns
• How to easily track marketing metrics across the whole channel

“Many companies recognize the need to improve marketing and sales functions, but in today’s dynamic marketplace how to go about doing so is not always an obvious answer,” said Robert Faletra, CEO of Everything Channel. “By focusing on content syndication, technology vendors and solution providers will be able to lay the foundation for more successful marketing initiatives today that will lead to channel revenue tomorrow.”

Webinar details:
Date: Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Time: 9:00 am PT/ 12:00 noon ET
Duration: 60 minutes
Register Here »

About Everything Channel & UBM

Everything Channel

Everything Channel is the premier provider of IT channel-focused events, media, research, consulting, and sales and marketing services. With over 30 years of experience and engagement, Everything Channel has the unmatched channel expertise to execute integrated solutions for technology executives managing partner recruitment, enablement and go-to-market strategy in order to accelerate technology sales. Everything Channel is a UBM company. To learn more about Everything Channel, visit us at http://www.everythingchannel.com.

United Business Media

UBM (UBM.L) focuses on two principal activities: worldwide information distribution, targeting and monitoring; and, the development and monetization of B2B communities and markets. UBM’s businesses inform markets and serve professional commercial communities – from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists – with integrated events, online, print and business information products. Our 6,500 staff in more than 30 countries are organized into specialist teams that serve these communities, bringing buyers and sellers together, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently.

Everything Channel has hired Jessica Lee to take on the role of Account Manager for the SharedVue content syndication and marketing automation division. As part of the cloud marketing team, Jessica will provide day-to-day support and serve as the primary point of contact for new customers. In addition, Jessica will provide customer and technical support for vendor resellers and partners.

“Jessica has extensive experience in planning and directing campaigns that help clients understand and reach their target audiences. Her experience with brand building and corporate events also fits nicely into SharedVue’s core solutions – Syndic8 and Communic8,” says Sara Bryson, Director of Facilit8 and Projects.

“I want to focus on building relationships and offering support to SharedVue’s current clients,” says Jessica. “I’ve always enjoyed developing communications plans and hope to apply my experience to help innovate my accounts’ syndication programs.”

SharedVue is the marketing technology division of Everything Channel, providing cloud marketing and lead generation tools that help companies maximize sales through channel partners and direct sales.  SharedVue clients include:  Cisco, HP, Salesforce.com and VMware.

Cloud marketing enables channel partners to become better marketers of enterprise companies’ products by using Web content syndication and automated marketing campaigns.  It combines traditional marketing techniques with the technology of software-as-a-service.  SharedVue combines marketing and technology expertise to develop cutting-edge Web marketing products that enhance companies’ relationships with their customers and generate leads.

Everything Channel today announced that it has acquired SharedVue Inc., a leading cloud marketing solutions provider, to better serve its customers and prospects by integrating Web content syndication and automated marketing campaigns into the “Complete Technology Channel Solution”.  The new integration addresses the current market need for a comprehensive solution to effectively execute and manage end-to-end marketing campaigns, and underscores the significance of content syndication and marketing automation to achieve measurable and significant results. Technology vendors and solution providers alike will greatly benefit from the union of these organizations to drive sales and increase brand awareness.

“We are excited about the new capabilities SharedVue brings us,” said Robert Faletra, Everything Channel CEO. “By adding this technology to our solutions we can offer our vendor customers the ability to syndicate content across thousands of partner websites in multiple languages instantly. If a vendor changes product information on their website, SharedVue’s product Syndic8 immediately populates those changes on every one of its solution provider partner websites so that all sites have the most current marketing message to the end user,” Faletra noted. “In addition, we can provide incredible reporting capabilities with SharedVue’s product set. This will allow us to tie syndication and marketing automation together with demand generation capabilities to accelerate sales for vendors that work with us and drive more revenue through the channel.”

Reid Overcash, CEO of SharedVue said “We are thrilled to combine our products and technology with the resources of Everything Channel. We believe we have a best of breed solution here that solves a real set of problems faced by manufacturers as well as their solution provider partners.  Everything Channel can help customers deploy this rapidly and in such a way that it drives sales for partners and suppliers alike.”

“HP’s partnership with SharedVue has enabled us to help hundreds of our partners strengthen their messaging alignment with HP through the HP Solutions Showcase.  Together we have made it easier and faster for channel partners to leverage the critical HP content and transform their websites into more successful demand generation engines. ” Says Katie Spence, US Partner Marketing, Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking, Hewlett-Packard.

A proven market leader for more than 30 years with customers spanning all industries, Everything Channel offers the tools necessary to build an effective channel strategy, recruit and enable partners, and accelerate technology sales.  With this announcement, SharedVue customers will now have access to Everything Channel’s global brands and market intelligence to better execute effective marketing campaigns.  Current SharedVue customers who struggle to maximize the value of the tools due to lack of resources, will benefit from direct access to Everything Channel’s dedicated team of field sales & marketing and demand generation experts to alleviate the drain on time and resources.

“A lot of people confuse content distribution with syndication, but most don’t really understand what true content syndication is,” said Faletra. “Some publishers and media companies talk about distributing content like whitepapers through their various web and email platforms and call that content syndication. That’s just content distribution. Content syndication is the ability for companies to engage their channel partners to create a direct pipeline for their valuable web content to those partners’ websites and, as a result, their partners’ ultimate customers. And then when those marketers change or alter that content through the SharedVue administration console, it automatically changes on their partners’ sites dynamically, as well. That’s Content Syndication.”

Overcash adds, “The value of content syndication and marketing automation to the channel is illustrated by the exponential adoption our manufacturer clients are seeing from their solution providers.  Many of our clients see a 200-400% increase in solution providers using syndication and marketing automation.”

In today’s economy, most organizations are forced to do more with less without compromising on quality.  By integrating syndication and automation solutions with innovative field sales & marketing resources for managing and accelerating technology sales, Everything Channel and SharedVue will enable manufacturers and solution providers alike to better connect with and service their end-users.   Highlights of the new integration include:

• Everything Channel’s veteran Field Sales & Marketing (FSM) Team engages with partners to enable them to fully benefit from SharedVue’s Syndic8, to seamlessly and automatically update product content regularly to channel partner websites to ensure accuracy and timeliness.
• Everything Channel’s experienced Demand Generation team can assist in creation of marketing campaigns to populate SharedVue’s Communic8, a web-based partner console to promote products and services through the channel while the FSM team provides ongoing tele-support for campaigns to ensure proper execution and alleviate drain on time and resources.
• Manufacturers and solution providers can then measure campaign success and manage their syndication output through a SharedVue Facilit8 program, to assist with organizing and managing the solutions on an ongoing basis.

With the addition of SharedVue products, Everything Channel customers will benefit from a cloud-based infrastructure to become better marketers of enterprise companies’ products, help build greater market awareness and forge lasting and meaningful relationships.

Learn More About Everything Channel (www.everythingchannel.com, www.channelweb.com)

Everything Channel, headquartered in Framingham, MA, is a technology marketing and sales solutions company. Through its “Complete Technology Channel Solution,” Everything Channel offers the right business tools to accelerate technology sales. From branding and recruiting to marketing and sales, Everything Channel offers technology marketers the unmatched breadth and depth of global brands and market intelligence combined with unparalleled audience loyalty and credibility serving all technology sales channels through an extensive database. Everything Channel provides innovative field sales and marketing solutions to the sellers of technology to achieve measurable and significant results.

About United Business Media Limited

UBM (UBM.L) focuses on two principal activities: worldwide information distribution, targeting and monitoring; and, the development and monetisation of B2B communities and markets. UBM’s businesses inform markets and serve professional commercial communities — from doctors to game developers, from journalists to jewelry traders, from farmers to pharmacists — with integrated events, online, print and business information products. Our 6,500 staff in more than 30 countries are organised into specialist teams that serve these communities, bringing buyers and sellers together, helping them to do business and their markets to work effectively and efficiently. For more information, go to www.ubm.com.

About SharedVue

SharedVue is a marketing technology company that provides cloud marketing and lead generation tools that help companies maximize sales through channel partners and direct sales.  SharedVue clients include:  Cisco, HP, Salesforce.com and VMware.

Cloud marketing enables channel partners to become better marketers of enterprise companies’ products by using Web content syndication and automated marketing campaigns.  It combines traditional marketing techniques with the technology of software-as-a-service.  SharedVue combines marketing and technology expertise to develop cutting-edge Web marketing products that enhance companies’ relationships with their customers and generate leads.