File Sharing is very binary – either you share a file online or you don’t.

Well not anymore! – enter Drop.io.

Drop.io allows consumers to create their own private online spaces where they can easily and privately share photos, videos, documents, and other types of media with others. By default, drops are “private” – consumers control how and with whom drops are shared. Drop.io never requires any type of account registration, and all drops can be password-protected and set to expire after a period of time. Drop.io provides multiple methods of sharing content – by uploading through the Web site, sending email or MMS messages to the drop email address, faxing assets in and out, or by calling the drop voicemail number to leave a voice notes.

Hear what Chad Stoller has to say about how marketers’ should be using Drop.io externally as well as internally.

Drop.io – a podcast with Chad Stoller

About Chad

Prior to joining drop.io, Stoller was Executive Director of Emerging Platforms at Organic, a marketing and communications company, where he led Organic’s strategy for new communication platforms, including social networking, mobile, gaming, meta-verse, geo-data applications and location-based services. In addition to developing strategies for Organic, Chad worked directly on emerging platform programs for leading brands like Chrysler Corporation, Bank of America, Fox Entertainment, NBC and Sprint.

Stoller began his career as a media planner and developer for fashion experience at Arnell Group, where he worked on such brands as Ray-Ban, Banana Republic, Donna Karen and Samsung. Subsequently, he co-founded Surge Interactive, the interactive division of Arnell Group, where he led interactive brand strategies for Universal Music Group, Tommy Hilfiger, Clear Channel, among others. Stoller returned to Arnell Group five years later in the newly created role of Director, Communications Solutions and was responsible for such brands as McDonalds, Siemens, Reebok, DaimlerChrysler and others.

Twing.com, a property of Accoona Corp., is a free service that aims to help users search for opinions, information, and conversations that match their particular interest—however obscure that particular interest may be. The site encourages users to get in on the conversation by enabling them to find communities relevant to their interests.

While blogs and social media have become increasingly common – discussions occurring on message boards and within forums aren’t usually surfaced by traditional search engines. This kind of web content is multiplying rapidly and you are going to need something dedicated to getting to the content underneath.

So I interviewed Scott Germaise the director of product management for Twing to find out how we should be using this great new tool for your reputation monitoring efforts.

Searching Communities and Forums – a podcast with Twing

About Scott

Scott is currently the Director of Product Management at Twing.com, a vertical search engine for searching and discovering communities. I’ve been in the online biz since the early days at Prodigy, was a co-founder and VP, Information Architecture at About.com, worked for or on other community sites such as ClubMom.com.

Does Sales really care about leads? Maybe not.

If you ask Bill Binch, VP of Sales from demand generation software provider Marketo, he prefers pipeline and bookings to leads. Ironically, as much as lead nurturing and lead scoring can help generate pipeline and revenue, by framing the discussion around leads too many marketers ignore the equally valid perspective of their sales counterparts. This can lead to diminished success for many marketing-led efforts around lead management.

This is just one of the many disconnects between sales and marketing that we’ve been exploring in the series Sales is from Mars, Marketing is from Venus. This is my 3rd such podcast with Marketo in this area. First we started with a CEO’s perspective then we did a VP of Marketing perspective and now we have the VP of Sales perspective. Getting the Sales viewpoint is critical for marketers since lead management initiatives always require buy-in and support from Sales to be successful.

Special thanks to my friends at Marketo for allowing me to interview their VP of sales for this podcast. They use what they sell to create opportunities for themselves, so there is no better place to look for ideas on how to optimize your own demand generation efforts than by talking with the guys who sell and deliver that for a living. I always learn something I can incorporate into my lead nurturing platform every time I talk with them! I hope you learn something too…

What Sales Really Thinks About Marketing?

About Bill

Bill brings 16 years of best practice sales, leadership, and operations experience to his role leading all of Marketo’s sales and customer success activities. Prior to joining Marketo, Binch was VP and General Manager, Distribution, at AVOLENT, where he managed the team focused on the distribution market, small & medium businesses, and install base customers. Prior to AVOLENT, Binch developed his sales and operational experience at Oracle, PeopleSoft, and BEA Systems, where he built and managed direct, inside, and channel organizations and ran business units ranging from mid-market business customers to strategic accounts. Bill graduated from Arizona State University with a BS in Marketing.

Rather than storing data and software applications down the hall in your office or in a big data center – there is a shift towards storing them on the web. And that’s the shift that Nick Carr has built his book upon.

We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift to reduce costs in this post Sarbanes Oxley and difficult economic environment if we want to gain competitive advantage for ourselves and for our country. No longer is running enterprise CRM or ERP a competitive advantage – its table stakes.

What does this mean for IT departments? What does this mean for your data security? And most importantly – what does the impact of distributed computing have on marketers? Check out what Nick has to say about all this …

The Big Switch – a podcast with Nicholas Carr

About Nick

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?. published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise of “cloud computing” and its implications for business, media and society.

Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.

In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.

Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.