Classically marketers have always been protective of their content locking them up in PDFs and then putting a registration page in front of them. This behavior is known to have a 1 in 10 (10%) download rate which isn’t bad by marketing standards but on the flip side that means there is a 90% leakage rate!

Studies have shown that a NON protected PDF will get as high as a 20X greater download rate. But then how can you capture registration information?

Peter Nieforth’s company, Vitrium Systems, has created a web-based tool called docmetrics. Their solution moves away from external registrations forms to forms that are embedded directly inside the PDF – this allows marketers to collect reader data while they are engaged in the content and share the content with their colleagues. In addition to the data on who is reading the content, docmetrics provides data on when the document was opened, how many pages were read, and how much time was spent on each page.

To hear more about this exciting new technology with my interview of Peter right on the show floor at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! WARNING: this was recorded on the show floor so it is a little loud (sorry) because there was quite a crowd in his booth!

Unlock your PDF’s and set them free! – a podcast with Peter Nieforth

About Peter

Peter Nieforth is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder at Vitrium Systems Inc. Nieforth founded Vitrium Systems together with Narayan Sainaney, Blair Adamson and Alfred Dorey bringing together a core group to crystallize and commercialize the ideas and research of Sainaney. Nieforth specializes in financing, organizing and commercializing promising start-ups, most recently acting as Director of Investment for The Loreto Bay Company (LBC), where he worked on raising a total of 18 million US dollars for the world’s largest sustainable resort community, which is currently being built by LBC in the Mexican Baja. Nieforth has also served as an investment specialist for BMO Bank of Montreal, as Financial Advisor for Yorkton Securities Inc. and as Financial Consultant with Merrill Lynch Canada Inc.

Nieforth studied Political Science at Acadia University, and graduated from Mount Saint Agnes Academy in Hamilton, Bermuda.

It should come as no surprise that the online gaming market is exploding. In fact, last year online gaming attracted 28 percent of the total worldwide online population — almost 217 million people!

For a long time gamers were thought of as young guys with glasses and zits playing for 14 hours a day but all that has changed. The market has been embraced much more by women and the age range has expanded from 7 to 107.

Opportunities for product placement as well as experiential branded games are close at hand for us as marketers. Now that games are becoming so prevalent, we’re beginning to see specialized ad networks focused on in-game advertising as an untapped channel. Microsoft and Google have already made acquisitions in the space and start-ups are chomping at the bit.

So to get a better understanding of the gaming space, I had the opportunity to interview Roman Nouzareth the President and CEO of Café.com. Roman is no stranger to online gaming, having successfully founded Boonty, Inc., a leading digital distributor of casual and hardcore games, and ushered in the try-before-you-buy downloadable business model. This time around, his business is focused on entirely new revenue streams – advertising and micro-transactions, or virtual items you buy and use in and around the games. He has a unique perspective on where the online gaming trend is heading.

Social Games: Useful for B2B Marketers?

About Roman

Roman is one of the founders of Boonty.com, the worldwide leader in the digital distribution of video games. Boonty offers Internet portals, ISPs, mobile phone operators, advertisers and PC manufacturers a complete solution that combines all areas of expertise needed for a generic video game digital distribution offering, the negotiation and selection of content from publishers, the design and management of a complete e-commerce and downloading platform, online marketing know-how, and a leading role in managing websites’ Games component. Casual and hardcore gamers can thus access a catalogue of over 1500 PC and mobile games for an optimal gaming and purchasing experience.

After successfully being in charge of sales strategy, marketing, and publisher relations in Europe and Asia, Roman is now responsible for the North American market. From Manhattan, Roman also took the Product Management lead for the company in order to design and release the new social gaming site cafe.com. Roman was also a Jury member at the famous advertising Cannes Lion Festival in 2000 and a speaker in various events like CES in Las Vegas. He holds a Law Degree from the University of Paris II Assas and is an investor in several start-ups.

Many marketing teams are being asked by senior leaders in their organizations why they aren’t using the same cutting edge tactics as some of their competitors. When is it right to use cutting edge tactics? When is it right to use traditional tactics? When and how should you integrate the two?

To answer these questions, I interviewed Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting. He runs a Web Marketing Boot Camp to help marketing teams come together, discuss these issues, and learn what Web marketing tactics link best to their corporate strategy.

Here is a taste of what Michael covers and what he thinks the future looks like for Web marketers.

New Rules of Web Marketing – a podcast with Michael Mace

About Michael

Michael is a principal at Rubicon Consulting, where they help tech companies solve tough strategy and marketing problems. Michael is a former Chief Competitive Officer and VP of Product Planning at Palm, VP of Strategic Marketing at PalmSource, and director of Mac Platform Marketing at Apple. He also has served in many other roles. For more info on him please visit his website.

What if you placed a call to GM and the CEO answered the phone?

You would think perhaps this company is too small to suit my needs. This is why the bigger a company gets the more faceless they become because they layer on infrastructure to foster a certain perception.

But new media changes that paradigm and enables every brand to have a voice. From the smallest of firms to the largest and from the most obscure products to the most complex services. This is something every brand manager in every company should be working on right now – opening up your brand to be more conversational!

Which is exactly why Rohit Bhargava wrote his new book entitled Personality not Included. It’s not just another book about social media – it’s a book about how to regain a brand personality.

I had a chance to catch up with Rohit and discuss questions I had after reading the book. I hope you enjoy my interview with him as much as I did.

Personality Not Included – a podcast with Rohit Bhargava

About Rohit

Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team at Ogilvy, a leading agency, in helping clients navigate the social media universe. He publishes the Influential Marketing blog, ranked among the top 50 marketing blogs in the world, and is often featured as an expert in media including The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, and Fast Company.

Rohit is also the author of the newly released book, Personality Not Included, published internationally by McGraw-Hill. A guide for companies on how authenticity is the new standard that brands need live up to in the social media era, the book has received significant early praise and features a forward by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Guy Kawasaki.

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and reediting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works.

Most companies see the groundswell as a threat. But you can see it as an opportunity!

That’s the reason that Charlene Li and her Forrester Research colleague Josh Bernoff wrote their new, appropriately named book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

In the book, they describe the strategies and stages every company needs to go through to listen to, talk to, energize and embrace the groundswell. I had a chance to catch up with Charlene to get some answers to questions that came to me as I read the book and compared my social strategy with their recommendations. So I hope you enjoy this podcast …

Riding the Groundswell of Social Media – a podcast with Charlene Li

About Charlene

Charlene is one of the leading voices in the area of Social Computing and Web 2.0 through her work over the past nine years with the respected technology and market research company Forrester Research. She is one of Forrester’s most quoted analysts. An accomplished and frequently requested public speaker, she often appears at industry events and delivered the keynote speech at Forrester’s Consumer Forum in 2007.

Charlene analyzes how companies can use technologies — like blogs, social networks, RSS, tagging, and widgets — to meet business objectives. She started her own analyst blog in 2004 and is regularly cited as America’s most influential analyst blogger. She shares her blog with Josh Bernoff.

Previously, Charlene led the marketing and media research team at Forrester and ran its San Francisco office. She has also been publisher of interactive media for Community Newspaper Company, a group of newspapers in Massachusetts, and served on the board of directors for the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation. Charlene has managed new-product development for the San Jose Mercury News and has also been a strategy consultant for Monitor Company. She holds an M.B.A from Harvard Business School.

Charlene lives in San Mateo, Calif., with her husband and two children, all of whom are happy, engaged members of the groundswell.

When marketers design a marketing campaign – we typically design them for “rational” buyers. But do buyers ever act rational?

And what about us?

When we make decisions we think we’re in control and making rational choices. But are we?

Dan Ariely a faculty member at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and member of the Media Lab has launched a book called Predictably Irrational and the blog by the same name dedicated the study of behaviors. His work is fascinating and enlightening for all marketers.

Dan is going to be one of the Keynote speakers at MarketingProfs B2B Forum on June 9-10 in Boston (along with David Meerman Scott) which sounds like a fantastic line up to me – I know I will be there as well conducting a panel on: Is Social Media Harder for B2B vs. B2C? So don’t forget to join us for that.

This is a direct link to the event use promo code ESPK08 to save $200 on the $1,295 registration fee (save $350 if you sign up before May 19th).

Oh Behave! – Hidden Forces that Shape Irrational Behavior

About Dan

Dan’s immersive introduction to irrationality took place many years ago while he was overcoming injuries sustained in an explosion (here is a description of his experiences in the hospital). The range of treatments in the burn department, and particularly the daily “bath” made him face a variety of irrational behaviors that were immensely painful and persistent. Upon leaving the hospital, he wanted to understand how to better deliver painful and unavoidable treatments to patients so he began conducting research in this area. After completing this initial research project, he became engrossed with the idea that we repeatedly and predictably make the wrong decisions in many aspects of our lives and that research could help change some of these patterns. A few years later, decision making and behavioral economics dramatically influenced his personal life when he found himself using all of the knowledge he’d accumulated in order to convince Sumi to marry him (a decision that was in his best interest but not necessarily in hers). After managing to convince her, he realized that if understanding decision-making could help him achieve this goal, it could help anyone in their daily life.

Predictably Irrational, is his attempt to take research findings in behavioral economics and describe them in non academic terms so that more people will learn about this type of research, discover the excitement of this field, and possibly use some of the insights to enrich their own lives. In terms of official positions, he is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and at the Media Laboratory, a founding member of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and a visiting professor at Duke University.

Over the past few years marketers have been working on tracking conversations about their brands on the Web (you are tracking and listening, aren’t you?). But once you have that in place, then what?

Strategies for understanding and dealing with the flow of all these conversations are the natural next step. As more and more conversations are coming online, you need to respond quickly. So knowing things like “sentiment,” who in your organization is on point to respond, and whether they have been doing so are becoming more important. It’s like being at a party and having several conversations going on that you want to participate in.

I met Michael Spataro a few weeks back as I was researching tools to help me with this exact problem. I think what I found out was important for you to hear as well. I hope you agree.

Monitor, Track and Participate in Social Media – a podcast with Michael Spataro

About Mike

Mike is vice president with Visible Technologies, a leading provider of social media analytics and online reputation management services. An early pioneer of interactive marketing and PR, Mike has been devising and implementing digital communications and social media strategies for global brands for more than 10 years, including The Walt Disney Co., General Motors, Panasonic, Hewlett-Packard, MasterCard, Eastman Kodak, Verizon, Hanes, and the renowned “Got Milk?” campaign.

Prior to joining Visible, Mike led the interactive and new media divisions for Interpublic’s two largest PR agencies, Weber Shandwick and GolinHarris. He was the strategic force that established both agencies as leaders in digital communications and consumer-generated media services. During his nearly 10 years at Interpublic, Mike created and executed a variety of award-winning campaigns that blended traditional and new media ideas that produced outstanding business results for his clients.

A growing trend in B2B marketing today is in the realms of “lead nurturing” and “lead scoring.”

I have often found the best way to impress the sales team is to feed them a stream of high-quality leads. Events, webinars, account-based marketing, trade events and speaking engagements all offer opportunities to find and feed some leads (usually the hottest ones) to the sales team. But what happens to those that are not so hot? Typically they hit the cutting room floor or are left to die on the vine in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

As part of my ongoing series discussing sales-marketing alignment with our friends at Marketo, a B2B marketing software provider, in this interview Jon Miller and I look at why B2B marketers should care about lead scoring and how they can get started qualifying and prioritizing leads. Check it out …

Sales is from Mars and Marketing is from Venus – Vol. II – Lead Scoring

About Jon Miller
VP Marketing, Marketo

Jon has the unique challenge of leading Marketing for Marketo, a company whose mission is helping other B2B marketers drive revenue and improve accountability. Jon explores best practices in demand generation, lead management, and online marketing in his popular blog, Modern B2B Marketing, and is a frequent columnist and speaker at industry events. Before co-founding Marketo, Jon was a vice president at Epiphany, a CRM strategist at Exchange Partners, and a strategic consultant for Gemini Consulting. Jon graduated Magna Cum Laude in Physics from Harvard College and has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Is the press release dead?

Well not really. But there certainly is a new wave out there – the social media press release, or SMPR, spawned by Todd Defern and the folks at SHIFT communications.

What does this mean for you? Well, when newspapers, magazines and other media go online, they are trying to create a conversation around a given article or topic they have written about. Why shouldn’t that be the case for press releases?

So I decided to get a podcast together with Todd so he could shed some light on success stories using the SMPR. Enjoy …

The Power of Social Media meets the Press Release

About Todd

Todd Defren leads client services and business development efforts for SHIFT Communications, a $10 million agency with offices in Boston and San Francisco.

Working in high-tech public relations for approximately 15 years, Defren currently specializes in social media strategies and is widely noted for creating the first template for social media news releases in 2006. He followed up with a template for social media-optimized online newsrooms in early 2007.

Prior to SHIFT, Defren was at Sterling Hager, joining in 1994 as an account manager and reaching the level of managing director of the San Francisco office in August 2000. His earlier experience included managing the strategic and tactical corporate communications at ENTEX Information Services, a $2 billion New York-based systems integrator, now part of Siemens AG.

Defren has served as a visiting professor at Emerson College in Boston, lecturing on marketing and public relations on the Internet. In 2006, Defren was named a Research Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Society for New Communications Research.

Full Disclosure: I have hired SHIFT Communications to help BearingPoint with our Social Media PR

Brand building and reputation management are two sides of a coin. What brand managers do to build their company’s reputation can come crashing down overnight with the keystroke of an angry blogger.

Managing a company’s reputation used to be a back-channel activity, known only to a few. Today, company reputation is available to everyone. It is radically transparent.

Fellow blogger Andy Beal of MarketingPilgrim just released a book with Dr. Judy Strauss titled Radically Transparent. It’s a how-to guide for anyone needing to manage a reputation, whether B2B, B2C or even C2C. To complement the book, Andy has launched a service called Trackur that can help you monitor and manage a reputation.

I managed to grab Andy on his way to SXSW to discuss what’s changing in reputation management. Enjoy …

Radically Transparent Reputation Management – a podcast with Andy Beal

About Andy

Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant specializing in search engine marketing, online reputation management, and business blogging. Considered one of the world’s most respected online marketing experts, Andy has worked with many top companies such as Motorola, GlaxoSmithKline, SAS, Lowes, Quicken Loans, and NBC.

Highly respected as a source of internet marketing advice, Andy Beal has had articles published around the world, including BusinessWeek Online, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Guide, and Web Pro News. He is the co-author of an online reputation management book called Radically Transparent which can be found on Amazon.com.