And it's another good morning on another good day, welcome to Radio CBM 98.6, all the news you can use, all Don Byron all the time:
The National Geographic Society claims a return on investment [1] of "200 to 300 percent," with some customer segments realizing "50 percent overall campaign performance improvement" from adopting SAS products.
The Geographians say they're "hunting and gathering customer information into one central marketing database."
David Harkness, National Geographic's Marketing Analysis Manager, said they can "better identify underperforming customer segments with SAS." He said preliminary reports show that wildebeests are "definitely underperfoming. They may have to go." Photo essays of primitive African tribes "always perform well in junior high schools."
Automation Centre has released TrackerSuite.Net 3.0 [2], an update of its Web-based project management and virtual office platform with new modules and "personal customization features, Business Intelligence pivot table capability and more," such as "monogrammed initials and your choice of teal, beige or chartreuse."
TrackerSuite.Net 3.0 lets project managers, IT administrators, purchasing managers and others "collaborate from a unified enterprise database integrated with other core systems in real time." There's a new synchronization module so you only have to make adds/removes and name changes once in Active Directory. Users can also pivot and drill down into the TrackerSuite.Net database to view the BI information most relevant to them. "Financial people can analyze cost data in multiple currencies, account management personnel can review site prep statistics and CEOs can count how many times their name appears in print."
In politics, the highly respected Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll finds [3] that 38 percent of voters now "Strongly Disapprove" of President Barack Obama's job performance, while only 30 percent "Strongly Approve," for a net negative rating of -8. Exactly one month ago he was +9, with the Strongly Approve/Disapprove ratio at 38/29. With unemployment hovering around 10 percent White House officials attributed the freefall in America's opinion of Obama to "people with the wrong set of priorities, such as whether they have a job or not, instead of the truly important things such as the President getting a lot of cool photo ops around the world and sucking up to Qaddafi."
Responsys has released Responsys Interact Connect [4], an integration tool letting marketers "define, schedule, and automate data transfers between external systems" and the Responsys Interact campaign management platform. It uses a Web-based UI to "eliminate the need for scripting and reliance on IT resources," giving marketers more control over customer data and "getting rid of a few more smelly IT geeks."
According to a February 2009 Forrester Research report titled "What's Your Web Data Integration Strategy?" the term "data integration" conjures feelings of "animosity" and "dread" for marketers, since it might force them to "talk to somebody in IT."
John Berkley, Vice President of Product Marketing and Product Management at Responsys, said the product "allows for easier sharing of data, providing marketers with a complete and uninterrupted view of their customers at every interaction point." He noted that lessening a company's reliance on IT is "all to the good," as it reduces civilians' contact with "guys who can recite Star Wars dialogue."
In sports former Tennessee Titans quarterback Steve McNair and his girlfriend, Sahel Kazemi, were found shot in her apartment in an apparent murder-suicide. Police believe Kazemi shot McNair, a married father of four, while he was asleep then turned the gun on herself because—true story—she was afraid McNair was "seeing somebody else." [5]
The TAS Group has announced the latest Dealmaker platform [6], Version 6.3, which includes "MarketView capability," letting you both see total addressable market and assess the long-term health of accounts "in one view."
It can be integrated with CRM systems from Salesforce.com, Oracle and Microsoft, company officials say.
Donal Daly, chief executive officer of The TAS Group, says being able to see where the gaps are for certain products "will enable companies to target valuable additional revenues, and give them a real sense of what the future holds and what they need to do now to change it. Or at least give them time to work up a plausible CYA excuse."
The TAS Group is headquartered in Seattle, with international headquarters in Dublin and Reading, England because "we really like rain. We're thinking of moving our operation to northern New Zealand, they get a ton of rain there."
That's the show for today, we're off to buy the wife a knockoff of Michelle Obama's $6,000 VBH alligator manila clutch purse [7] to accessorize her knockoff of Michelle Obama's $540 sneakers [8], then take her to the pub as a knockoff of Michelle Obama's taxpayer-funded London vacation [9].