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In the telecommunications industry, interest is growing around the concept of Customer Life Cycle Management (CLM). This concept goes beyond traditional time-views of CRM and embodies the customer history as a real-time predictor, and also aims towards the long-neglected aspect of customer retention.

Therefore, I’m pleased that the Custom Publishing Council announces the first-ever but very timely conference in this emerging field, to be held in New Orleans March 9-11. The conference targets practitioners and solution providers alike and covers both strategic and practical aspects.

As Doc Searls once said, “There is no market for messages.”  This is a hub between the company and its customers. It’s the new customer service, fusing marcom, PR and customer relations, all in one department.

Direct response marketing is when you engage in some type of advertising or marketing effort which targets a market with an offer.  The offer is such that response can be measured.  Direct contact is made from the prospective customer to the marketer.  Many B2B lead generation activities fall into the direct response category. Direct marketing is when you target a named company, title, or individual with an offer.  Contact is made from the marketer directly to the prospective customer.  As with direct response, the offer can be a variety of things including attendance, discussion, communication, inquiry, etc.  And response can be measured.  In complex sales environments, direct marketing is closest aligned to sales and sales activities.

If you aren’t delivering a regular eNewsletter to build your business, you should ask yourself why.  You are probably missing the biggest and best opportunity to communicate in a consistent and meaningful way with your customers.   Of course, you need to generate regular content that brings value to your customers. But, with that basic proviso, an eNewsletter should become an integral part of your content marketing arsenal.  Here’s why:

That’s according to Ed Moran, a Deloitte consultant who just completed a study of more than 100 businesses with online communities. Not surprisingly, these sites failed to gain traction with customers. Thirty-five percent of the online communities studied have less than 100 members; less than 25% have more than 1,000 members – despite the fact that close to 60% of these businesses have spent over $1 million on their community projects. “A disturbingly high number of these sites fail,” Moran tells us.

Preparing to broadcast an eMail campaign is like getting ready to launch a satellite; it's a nightmare to run a mistake-ridden programme. However, working with a list of detailed quality control checks will identify problems before they have a detrimental effect on customers, prospects, deliverability, the brand and ultimately your profits.

While so many people recognize the power of Digg when it comes to getting people to “vote” on what articles are the ones that you can’t miss. If only it were so easy to have customers, employees, stockholders or just about anyone vote on innovation ideas.

Ryan doesn’t believe in them. He thinks bloggers should do series posts instead. In fact, he doubts ebooks have much of a future.

For the customer, with a member site you get not just words and pictures but video, audio, discussion, web conferencing, chat, and maybe tools and utilities also. An ebook is capable of more than words and pictures but rarely is.

You’ll find everything from great newsletters to bad websites… great custom magazines for reluctant buyers… the 7 deadliest content marketing sins… 6 lessons to learn from a shopping mall…using content marketing to speed sales growth curve.

Every senior executive knows that business decisions are seldom better than the information behind them. Yet although it is usually lower-level employees who interact directly with the customer, decision makers rarely ask them how, for example, new products will fare. Leaders therefore deprive themselves of information that could enrich their analysis and reduce the risk of ivory tower decision making. Some executives understand that valuable information lies scattered around the organization but don’t know how to retrieve it. Others don’t even try, perhaps for hierarchical reasons or because they suspect they might get answers colored by the desire to second their real or assumed viewpoint.

Take a new approach to list growth. Ask!There are a surprising number of companies that, for whatever reason, fail to prominently position opt-in requests on their Web site. With the prominence of search driving customers deeper into Web sites and bypassing the home page, companies need to request email addresses more often and in more locations.

Content marketing is the technique of sourcing, creating and distributing relevant and valued content to attract, acquire, engage and enthuse a clearly defined and understood target audience with the objective of driving profitable customer behaviour.

One of the most valuable questions I ask sales and marketing teams is, “What kinds of things clearly add no value to your sales and marketing operations?” People react strongly. They give me examples like:  • Time spent nursing product quality problems  • Time spent on administration, reporting, and menial tasks (leaving little time for customers)  • Trade shows that generate boxes of “leads” not worth calling on  • Marketing literature that no one reads  • Wasting time with the wrong prospects

Keep it short. The survey should take only a couple of minutes to complete

Paul Dunay, director of global field marketing for Bearing Point, gives some superb insight into what you can do to make your podcasts truly valuable to your potential customers. Here are some standouts from my interview

This is her explanation of the top nine types of stories that people like to talk about. If you’re pitching your company to investors, customers, partners, journalists, vendors, or employees and you don’t use at least one of these story lines, you probably have a problem. And most likely you’re too close to what you’re doing,

This is about to change, with a California  startup, Expo3D which develops virtual environments to communicate and interact with customers. The 3D system offers 3 desirable features: