Marketing in the Cloud Blog

"A business rules what?"  We enterprise data geeks have long relied on business rules and business rules engines to define the who, what, where, when and why of data integration. As the marketing cloud has grown, there's an ever growing need (and opportunity) for marketers to leverage business rules engines for fun and profit. BREs: Business rules engines are software services trained with your company policies that help you automate the answers to questions like: Is your email subscriber eligible

Search engines like content.  Marketing directors like traffic.  CFO's like free traffic.  CEO's *really* like gaining market share, while simultaneously decreasing the PPC budget.  Recently, we were tasked with building a workflow system to create and manage enterprise content.  Simple goal: increase traffic while decreasing PPC spend. Background: In every industry we've worked there are always ways to increase web traffic with a systematic content creation strategy.

Short URLs are the lifeblood of social apps.  The new breed of short-url apps enable you to tag and track your visitors post-click and store mucho metrics -- e.g. the ad campaign visitors clicked, facebook page they liked, or tweet they clicked  etc.  And services like Bit.ly, Tinyurl, and Ow.ly make shortening URLs supremely easy. But what if you want a bit more control over the branding of your URLs?    How 'bout your own

Many gray hairs ago I was IT Director for a small, fast-growth company.  With no outside funding, we had to pinch every IT penny.  And like every other IT department we had to make conscious decisions about the makeup of our infrastructure or 'app stack.'  For each decision, we made ROI calcs for the cost of desktop hardware, operating systems, within the local network ops center and