It was just last month we blogged about a company with a need for someone with Marketo skills.  Now we caught wind of a Washington, DC based company, HireStrategy, that has issued a blanket call for Marketing Automation professionals.  This add appeared in a local tech daily newsletter, Potomac TechWire and has been running for several days:

Sales Automation and Marketing Automation Experts

HireStrategy is currently working with numerous high-level software product companies that are looking for Sales Automation and Marketing Automation experts. Qualified candidates will have extensive knowledge and use within SalesForce.com and Marketo/Eloqua (or comparable) tools using each to help with demand and lead generation programs and implementations. Strong understanding of technical environments and the ability to help shape automation strategy and best practices are critical. These positions are extremely lucrative for qualified candidates. If interested please submit resumes to ____@hirestrategy.com.   (Name removed to protect the innocent)

By just soliciting resumes without listing a specific open position, it clearly shows that HireStrategy sees the demand swelling for this type of professional and is building a pool of candidates.  The skillset for a Marketing Automation professional is still relatively rare.  Some platform providers are creating certifications, and that will up the ante on salary and demand.

Are you trying to fill an MA position?  Don’t forget that Allinio can help you with this, either by managing your platform for you or helping you find the right person via our nationwide network of Marketing Automation veterans.

ps. – The rascal on the wanted poster is purportedly still alive and running one of the first Marketing Automation service provider companies there is.

We are delighted to be a member of the American Marketing Association and receive the benefits of membership.  One of those benefits is a subscription to Marketing Insights, which has a tag line of “Driving Informed Decisions and Business Value Through Analtyics.”  Well, all we can say is Bravissimo!  What tickled our fancy this month was not an article, but an advertisement.
ReadyTalk, an up and coming challenger in the webinar space, has been making great advances against competitors like GoToMeeting and WebEx; we’ve experienced a few webinars with their platform and like it – however, we’re not here to talk about that.

We love the fact that their advertisement in Marketing Insights, a not-so-inexpensive spread near the beginning of the magazine, states a bulleted feature/benefit that we could not ignore:

“Seamless integration with Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot and others.”

Folks, this is fantastic.  A vendor is publicly telling us that they sync with the leading CRM and three leading Marketing Automation platforms.  And my publicly, they are implying that Marketing Automation is significant enough to mention.  Yes indeed, it is.  The data you can measure from registration and attendance is worthwhile to track; they obviously indicate an interest in your product or service.

Our wish list however, for any of the the webinar platforms, is that they can track participation and answers in polls, as well as use of the chat tool when asking questions.  To us, these are indicators of more active participation in a webinar and deeper interest in your product or service.  What do you think.  Platforms, how about it?  In the meantime, we must say again about ReadyTalk:  Bravissimo!

Pardot does it again: A great infographic that speaks for itself (we know, that’s what they’re supposed to do)… But personalization is easier said than done – it’s another painful but necessary phase of an organization’s transformation into a truly network-centric, data driven company.  The challenge to personalization is knowing what to personalize in your content and how to gather that granular data.  Progressive profiling on forms on your landing pages can facilitate that but it may take a while to fill enough fields in your records to make it worth while.  Start with things you can easily measure like gender, region of the country, industry, and even language.  From there you also have to create the content that will be served dynamically, so be ready to amass a lot of components, including images.

Nevertheless, Pardot gives you a good place to start understanding the importance of personalization better.  Enjoy!

Creative Commons by AMagill

Almost a year ago we blogged about the lack of Marketing Automation skills, which fit into a broader category of Marketing Operations.  Since then we’ve been helping companies go through the painful but necessary transformation to become network-centric organizations that capture “data-driven revenue™.”  The main challenge is that we have not come far enough in getting people with the right skills in positions where they can make a positive impact on the top line.Fortunately, Marketo recognizing the skills gap, has come out with its own certification program that facilitates proof of mastery of its complex platform; Without this knowledge, to really understand such a platform, you may have to rely on their extensive but non-linear online resources or go through a grueling trial by failure routine.

But someone has done that, how do you find them?  What is their value to your organization?  We recently caught wind of yet another company’s attempt to find a Marketo knowledgeable person and they presented this job description:

Marketing Operations Manager

The marketing operations manager will support the success of this Company’s sales and marketing programs by providing the information needed to make management decisions and the technology infrastructure needed to execute these programs. The marketing operations manager will work closely with sales and marketing leads to maximize the effectiveness of marketing and sales automation to drive leads through the marketing and sales processes.

This important position will report directly to the Chief Strategy & Marketing officer and will have significant exposure to executive management. Success in this role requires Salesforce.com and Marketo administration experience, excellent analytical abilities, and discipline and diligence to do things right.

Principal Responsibilities

• Document lead conversion and sales cycle processes and identify inconsistencies, gaps and areas of improvement.
• Implement lead-to-revenue process improvements in Marketo and Salesforce.com including creation of fields, workflows, assignment rules, reports and views for daily use by sales and marketing.
• Assist in training sales and marketing users and enforce correct use of Salesforce.com.
• Continuously monitor and manage data quality and information accuracy of contacts, leads and opportunities data in Marketo and Salesforce.com.
• Upload marketing lists and leads with appropriate data controls and cleansing.
• Support campaign setup and list pulls in Marketo and Salesforce.com.
• Setup email, campaign and program templates in Marketo for use by marketing team.
• Lead the integration of marketing infrastructure – Marketo, Salesforce.com, Web properties, WebEx – to support integrated marketing programs and proper lead flow.
• Setup and manage lead scoring and lead nurturing programs in Marketo.
• Provide weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly lead-to-revenue metrics to sales management, marketing management and the executive team.
• Analyze customer data, marketing data and sales data to support key decisions.
• Lead the marketing budget development process working with the Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer and marketing directors.
• Track budget on a weekly basis and support the procurement process.

Requirements

• 2+ years of Salesforce.com administration experience
• 2+ years of Marketo administration experience.
• Clear understanding of the lead-to-revenue process in an enterprise software company
• Experience integrating salesforce.com with other marketing tools such as Marketo and websites.
• Fluent in using Microsoft Excel for creating sales and marketing analysis and charts for executive management.
• Experience creating and tracking marketing plans and budgets with Microsoft Excel.
• Extremely detail oriented, meticulous and analytical.
• Strong interpersonal skills; ability to work well with sales management and other teams.
• Good PowerPoint skills.
• BA/BS in Marketing or Business preferred

Not bad, so what do YOU think?  How much should a person who can fulfill those tasks and meets the minimum requirements earn? $50K?  $60K?  $70K?    More?  How are your going to “create the demand” for people with those skills to work for you? We’d love to hear what you think.

(By the way, if this job decription describes YOU, we also want to talk to you because we have projects which require your skills…)

Allinio was at Marketo‘s 2013 User Summit last week.  Yes, it was fantastic.  Yes, Marketo is clearly doing some innovative things for its customers.  Yes, their platform is poised to proliferate more Marketer’s devices in light of its fortchoming IPO.  However, we’re not talking going to comment on Marketo directly today.  Rather, we are going to share with you the efforts of a company that is part of their “LaunchPoint” ecosystem of companies that add value to the Marketo platform…

Those big bashes at conferences do make for good networking.  While savoring mini-carnitas tacos, we had the pleasure to meet Josh Krasengor, CMO of Red Funnel Consulting, the developers of FatStax.  FatStax is a mobile app that basically records a salesperson’s use of a touch screen when presenting customers in a face-to-face scenario.  We had some questions for Josh to explain this useful too.

Allinio: How does your product/service allow Marketers to better gather, analyze, share, and act upon data?

Krasengor: Corporate marketers don’t have visibility into real-time sales activity in the field.  Additionally, field marketers and salespeople are often too busy to enter leads in a timely manner or document the details about face-to-face interactions with prospects. They also sometimes lack the appropriate tools. Consequently, organizations miss out on the opportunity to coordinate their sales and marketing efforts to earn optimal returns on their marketing automation investments.

FatStax Marketo Mobile Marketing Automation Integration allows organizations to eliminate the disconnect between sales and marketing operations when it comes to capturing leads and documenting sales engagement. With just a few taps on an iPad, field personnel can document leads and interesting moments, and send them to marketing automation, like Marketo in real time. At the same time, reps can send product information to a lead or respond to a lead inquiry via email.

Allinio: What is the value proposition of your product/service to Marketers?

Krasengor: This mobile marketing automation process eliminates the communication gap between field sales teams and marketing by giving field reps the ability to quickly and easily enter leads and interesting moments into their marketing automation tool directly from their iPads. Lead data can be instantly included in marketing automation nurturing programs and your organization can make the most of each acquisition dollar spent.  What you’re actually doing is extending the reach of marketing automation campaigns into the field, thus creating an onsite marketing automation channel

Let me spell out the benefits clearly for your readership:

1. Extend the reach of marketing automation campaigns into the field creating an onsite marketing automation channel
2. Improve collaboration between sales and marketing
3. Capture a larger number of interesting moments and gauge the level of product interest for more leads
4. Generate more MQLs
5. Start the lead nurturing process sooner
6. Target leads more appropriately
7. Track the effectiveness and usage of marketing assets to identify the content that best drives conversion
8. iPads are cool and much more effective way to engage prospects and sell

Allinio: What is a common misconception that the market has about your product/service?

Krasengor: The FatStax Mobile Marketo Automation Integration is a new concept that solves the business problem and fixes the disconnect between marketing in sales. There is not much misconception, however since it is a new concept, people are just beginning to realize the potential that mobility brings to sales and marketing. Mobility, via the iPad, opens a new channel for marketing automation. Right now, we want to educate marketers that mobility can fix the disconnect with marketing and sales and make your marketing automation programs much more successful. And, sales can be more productive with the right content on their iPads.

Allinio: What is the most successful or innovative use of your product/service by a business to date?

Krasengor: We just announced the FatStax Mobile Marketo Integration partnership and we have a few customers that are also Marketo clients, and some have a strong background with marketing automation, so there is big interest in this integration. We have existing customers with global sales teams using FatStax. Think about how many interesting moments those sales teams can be capturing in the field and sending to marketing for nurturing in a marketing automation campaigns?

Allinio: What is your greatest challenge as a marketing organization?

Krasengor: If you asked me this question two years ago, I would have told you the disconnect between marketing and sales around leads and CRM was my biggest challenge to solve. But now, since we use our own products and put our money where our mouth is, we don’t have this challenge. Now the biggest challenge as a marketing organization is communicating our solution to the world. When you have a powerful new concept like mobile marketing automation and are leading a new mobile revolution, you really have to educate people about what it is first and peak their interest before you run out and sell. Being a smaller company that is growing, this process takes time and is a challenge, but once people start to understand mobile marketing automation and see results, this challenge will minimize and it will become standard.

Allinio: Josh, thanks for the demo and explanation.  This fills a need out in the field and saves a rep time.  Rather than do something and log it or vice versa, you are doing both at the same time.   Plus you can’t count on the prospect to download things on their own time so this is a good way to see that it gets done, especially when it comes to initiating them into a nurturing program.    It will really become valuable when a company has a wide range of content that the rep can send based on buying role, buying stage, and some personal attributes.  Hopefully the reps will adopt this tool when they see how easy it is to use.  Good luck in the rest of 2013!

Ahh, the 1970s…. Never mind the hindsight on how devastating a product like cigarettes are to our health…  Never mind the totally un-PC  attitude of featuring a woman with a black eye in today’s society…  Never mind that vice products (like booze and tobacco) were the among the first to be accused of using subliminal messages in their shills (com’on, nobody had their teeth bleached back then,  and there was no Photoshop; her teeth were cleaned manually by a very good graphic artist though.  So what’s the point of this?

Ahh, the 2010s…  We’ve come a long way, baby  (pun intended).  Nevermind that technology has advanced us so far that print ads are a joke in some Marketing circles.  Never mind  that smoking is on the wane, but tattooing and body piercing is on the rise.  Never mind that it is just as incredibly easy to switch cloud based services as it is cigarette brands or laundry detergent, for that matter.  The point is that customers may be just as fickle as ever.  Or maybe not.

You see, we recently read a Business2Community post by Jessica Iansmith (@jessicaiansmith) in which she described switching from using Marketo to HubSpot.  It even garnered the attention of HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan (@bhalligan), who took the time to comment on the post.  Mind you, this was also a career switch for the former senior Marketing strategist, who oversaw the implementation of the Marketo platform for her employer and is now an account manager for a Tennessee-based HubSpot partner, obviously helping sell the HubSpot solution.  We don’t mind that she is happy to write with such harmless, expected bias; rather we are ecstatic that she is smart enough to leverage her career because of her still relatively rare knowledge of Marketing Automation and has now set out to help bring this “fire of the gods” to other Marketers.  Hopefully her previous employer can find another Marketo user if the more junior Marketing strategists aren’t up to speed.   We wish her luck and welcome her into the still-evangelistic movement of which Allinio is also a part.

Now as a platform-agnostic services provider, Allinio has seen multitudes of Marketo and HubSpot customers, in addition to users of vendors like Pardot, Act-On, Silverpop, Net-Results, and many others.  Most of these customers are “brand new” and just getting over the learning curve or starting to come to grips with the incredible transforming tool that Marketing Automation is.  We’ve seen some go from HubSpot to Marketo and some go from Marketo to Hubspot.  The other platform vendors have lost and gained their competitors’ customers, although there are still a lot more “newbie” customers to win over.  We’ve also witnessed companies that have switched Marketing Automation platforms a mind-boggling three to four times in just as many years.  We won’t say who, but it wasn’t the Marketing Automation platforms’ fault and we were happy to see one of those companies’ Marketing VP get shown the door after such adoption incompetance.

So our point is, why switch?  We’ve heard many reasons, among which these are the most frequent:

- The salesperson for Vendor A outright lied to us about Vendor B, which  was a better fit.

- The integration with our non-Salesforce CRM is not as robust as we thought it would be.

- The demo the salesperson gave us for Vendor C was smooth, but once we dived into the UI and jargon we realized it was a lot harder to understand, and the vendor’s customer support organization either ignored us pushed us towards their consulting partners.

- We don’t need all the bells and whistles that came with particular platform.

- It doesn’t do what we thought it would do. (little did Marketers in this bucket have any idea of the content creation challenge that lay ahead of them)

If you decide to switch, contact us first.  We may save you the trouble by showing you how to use your existing Marketing Automation platform properly.  Or we can set you on the path for a better fit, but the former usually happens, not the latter.  And if you don’t have a platform yet, call us before you talk to a vendor that pushes only one solution.  One size does not fit all.

So have you switched?  Thinking about it?  Why?  Feel free to start a discussion here.  We don’t necessarily want you to “fight” to stay with a vendor, but we don’t want you to assume the fetal position and give up easily either.  Tell the Marketing Automation community just what is going on…

We’ve previously said we admire Scott Brinker (@chiefmartec) and his Chief Marketing Technologist blog.  One of his watershed blogposts and presentations is “Rise of the Marketing Technologist.”  In it, Scott clearly admonishes that Marketing “must control its technological destiny.”  And his evangelism has been increasingly validated.  For example, Laura McLellan (@lauramclellan),  a thought leader at one of the biggest analyst firms, Gartner Group, last year predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIO/CTOs.

While Computerworld Luddites (Ha! Ain’t that funny to say) still imply that IT is not an internal customer-serving entity, the fact remains that while Marketing may not control IT’s budget, it certainly will drive an increasing share of it.  Even pro-CIO blog CIO Update is on the bandwagon, conceding “Inevitably, the CMO will have more influence than the CIO on the technology decisions made when purchasing mobile solutions for marketing and defining the mobile strategy to work with new channels like social networks.”

But recently there was another bellweather pointing to not just a “rise,” but a surge.  Allinio, being proudly headquartered in Charm City (that’s Baltimore, Maryland for you uninitiated folks) subscribes to the Baltimore Business Journal (yes, the old fashioned hard copy version).  BBJ is one of approximately forty weekly B2B newspapers of the American City Business Journals, and like the other publications each week posts a “Top 25″ list focusing on a certain topic or B2B vertical.  These lists are useful for learning about some of the leading companies right under your nose.

The list of note was the “Largest Software Development Firms in the Baltimore Area.”  Unfortunately, unless you have a hardcopy, you can’t see it.  The magazine is unenlightened and keeps lists behind a paywall and this list in particular will not be featured until the 2014 book comes out because basically all these annual book of lists are are aggregated content of every weekly list that is published.  They are free to annual subscribers but cost extra and it appears that cities construct different lists partially based on their ecosystem (for example, only Baltimore lists the top crab houses in the city).  Anyway, we digress.

The real point of this blog is to underscore several companies that made this list.  Now, when you think of software development firms, you think of companies that design and create billing systems, trouble ticket systems, human resource systems, etc.  And you don’t put “web firms” on this list because they’re well, web firms.  But in Baltimore this year several Marketing firms made the list of “software developers” and it makes sense.  R2integrated, G1440 Inc., and SmartLogic Solutions all create marketing and mobile applications for both B2B and B2C customers.  They don’t deal in SAP or other platforms most of us think as “Enterprise” software – their customers are mainly Marketing organizations.  And the tools they use did not exist a few years ago.

So fundamentally, some Marketing departments will not necessarily grow bigger that IT departments within the same company, but rest assured they will be outsourcing to companies like R2i and SmartLogic Solutions to get their digital Marketing initiatives implemented; once again, that doesn’t mean websites and actually implies a myriad of other things that Marketers need to gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon revenue related data.  So the surge of the Marketing Technologist is indeed happening (Scott, do you agree?). We wish that American City Business Journals was not so draconian in how they list and share data; we were unable to find other cities in their publishing empire that have put together a similar list this year.  We remain curious as to whether those cities follow a similar trend in which what Marketing entities which effectively are agencies are making these “software developer” lists.  We do know that the lists can be self-selective, but the bottom line is agencies are now solidly software developers and need to be reckoned with.

Post note:  The vessel on the cover of this year’s Baltimore Business Journal Book of Lists illustrated above is Pride of Baltimore II, a topsail schooner home ported not far from our office and an ambassador of Baltimore, Maryland, and United State maritime history.  It was ships like her run by privateers that confounded British merchants, resulting in an unwelcome attempt by said navy to destroy the shipyards tucked deeply in Baltimore Harbor from which she and others were built and fitted.  Fortunately there was a small outpost in the way by the name of Fort McHenry that showed the greatest naval power on earth that we Marylanders are fiesty SOBs and don’t take kindly to bullying.  You hopefully know the rest of the story.  (See, besides being thought leaders and experts on Marketing Automation, we know a lot of cools stuff too!)  We are always thrilled to see her sailing by our window and always wish her fair seas and following winds…

Sometimes we need to toot our horn – Yes, that’s an avatar of Allinio’s President, Joe Zuccaro (@joezuc) in a recent Marketo infographic about Marketing Automation.   Joe was approached by Marketo to contribute to this infographic and their latest publication, The Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation.  So we had to ask him:  How did a nice guy like you get such notoriety?

Joe responded, “I’ve been a Marketer – as a minion and as a manager.  I’ve been in Sales – carrying a bag, a smiler and dialer, a channel manager, and I’ve managed salespeople.  So I’ve seen the revenue side of the enterprise from many angles.  And if there’s one thing I’m passionate about, it’s measurement and accountability.  When I saw Marketing Automation in its fledgling state, I knew this was the thing that businesses desperately needed.  And so I have made it my passion to share these important tools with businesses.  Marketing Automation can give businesses information superiority over their competitors if executed correctly.  Or it can be a large timesink and money pit.  It’s my passion that has guided me into speaking out about Marketing Automation and networking with some of the leading platform vendors and the best of the Marketing Automation experts.”

Marketers need help in making the transformation into a network centric, data-driven organization and I want to help as many as I can possibly help.  I’ve known the folks at Marketo for years – they are trailblazers in the Marketing Automation space and I’m humbled to be included in this content with such great Marketing Automation thought leaders as Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo) and Mac MacIntosh (@B2B_Sales_Leads).  I guess my passion got me in the group.”

We also asked what he thought of the Wizard of Oz theme of the infographic.

With a grin, Joe chimed in, “What fun! That’s got to be one of the most endearing movies of all time, and thanks to Marketo I have a closer connection to it.  And I’m glad they portrayed me realistically, even with my Jimmy Durante schnozzola, and didn’t make me look like a Flying Monkey.”

OK, Joe, you’re still a barrel of monkeys (pun intended), but let our readers review the infographic and see it’s actually useful:

Well, for those of you who never got a St. Valentine’s Day card this month, neither did we!  So print out the one above and consider you our sweetheart and close you eyes and pretend we’re hugging you!

Today’s topic is an interesting one, although it should be about maintaining your editorial calendar because we’re obviously two weeks late on this one!  But we digress…. the real topic is what we said at top -  does Marketing Automation help you “love” customers?
Allinio thinks so; let us count the ways:

1.    It helps you communicate clearly and consistently, which is a form of love.

2.   It delays the siccing of rabid salespeople on an unwitting client before it’s necessary – if you ask us, that’s definitely love and compassion.

3.  It allows you to dynamically serve personalized content, so you can send Ashley a picture of a dozen roses and Peter a picture of a six-pack – That’s love.

4.  By working off triggers, it allows you to send content at the right time when the customer can use it – much unlike our negligent blogger who did not post this blog in time for Valentines Day.  We don’t love him anymore but are glad that our Marketing Automation is configured to be dummy-proof.

5.  You can build landing pages and email templates without depending on grumpy IT personnel, so you can quickly run campaigns.  Keeping grumpy IT personnel out from between you and your customers is definitely a sign of love.

6.  It allows you to pay attention to real prospects who have the proclivity to buy from you, so you can ignore the dud leads.  Paying more attention to real prospects sounds a lot like love to us!

7.  By designing your processes around the personas you have created for your content strategy, you are catering to the persona – their pain points, their drivers, their validators, their essence.  And if you’ve gone as far as to name your personas – Whoopie!  That’s got everything to do with love.

8.  By automatically complying to their desire to unsubscribe, it shows your humbleness and devotion – a very high form of love.

9.  By being patient with a slow prospect who gradually goes down your sales funnel, you’re showing almost parent-like love.

10.  Let’s knock salespeople again – if some salesperson is to lazy to follow up on a Marketing Qualified Lead, then you can always gently place them back in your nurturing program – showing you love the customer more than the salesperson.

See, Marketing Automation helps you love your customers.  And for the record, we do love our clients, with or without Marketing Automation, but we also love Marketing Automation!  And we love our blog readers, regardless whether they are customers, so we promise not to be late again with any holiday related cutesy blogposts.  

(But don’ t expect a blogpost entitled “Does Marketing Automation help you be Irish?” either.  We’re not touching that one.)

Here and there have been articles about military applications of social media, but recently we read a very good piece from the folks at C4ISR Journal, a B2B publication for the defense industry that focuses on the technologies that foster intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.  In the last issue of this periodical, “Human Sensors,” (November/December 2012, pp. 16-18) Aram Roston (@AramRoston), the newly hired editor, wrote about the US military’s sophisticated monitoring and analysis of social media, particularly Twitter.  You would be surprised what Twitter actually does to help DoD and its contractors….

A Twitter offering known as the “Firehose” is, essentially, all the tweets ever tweeted, excluding private messages.  Now that tweets are created in excess of 400 million per day, that’s quite a cache of data treasure.  We were surprised to see that the exact phrase “Twitter Firehose” only produced in 37,500 results on Google, which is nothing when you’re talking about technology with such a potential for controversy.  Why controversy?  Because while our tweets are public, many still expect a level of privacy, especially from government observation.  But we’re not here to facilitate a privacy debate.

So what exactly is the military doing with tweets?  Whereas in the past, the military has had sonar to understand the marine environment and radar to understand the aerospace environment, “social radar” can be used to understand the human environment.  Contractors like Attensity, which this blog has covered in both 2009 and 2010, are taking the data from the Firehose and selling it to the intelligence community.

The DoD is studying how messages spread through various populations, much like an epidemiologist studies the spread of disease.  Whether they are friendly messages in friendly populations, or threatening messages in non-so-friendly populations, the military is trying to understand where messages spread, how fast they spread, how intense they spread, and what it may mean for “boots on the ground.”  They learned a tragic and valuable lesson from Somalia in the 1990s, when enemy messages were being sent through the streets of Mogadishu by beating 55-gallon steel drums and the most advanced technology was absolutely clueless as how to predict it, detect it, understand it, or stop it.

Luckily, the efforts of marketers do not require exposure to such peril, but there is much to learn from the military’s efforts to monitor social media.  There may be trends in a particular area that while seemingly innocuous, eventually make an impact on your brand and sales.  You may be able to find a need in a segment you never noticed before.  You may actually be able to intercept an opportunity for a quick sale also.

While the ability to filter through all the noise out there in the Twittersphere may be daunting, with time it will be easier even for an SMB to manage this – there are already affordable tools out there to do help you monitor keywords and phrases, but what will be more valuable will be tools that economically analyze the “big data” and provide you with a real-time window as to the sentiment and how people with similar needs are related and how they communicate.  We are getting there, but there is still much work on the part of marketers on just how to gather, store, analyze, share, and act upon this data.

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