Jesse Noyes

Twitter announced a new look on Thursday. And the facelift came with an early holiday present for marketers – brand pages!

Twitter’s Chief Revenue Officer, Adam Bain, told Advertising Age that brand pages on Twitter were a frequent request of CMOs.

So what’s beneath the wrapping paper?

Twitter brand pages hinge mainly on two elements:

1. A branded header marketers can use to more prominently promote their logos and taglines;
2. The ability to promote a particular tweet at the top of a brand’s timeline, which can contain an embedded video or photo.

The open question is whether the long awaited brand pages will provide the firepower Twitter needs to compete with Facebook, LinkedIn and even Google+ for businesses’ attention.

Just last month, Google+...

If you’ve worked in b2b marketing or sales over the years it may have felt somewhat akin to alchemy: add a dash of this and a little of that, and – voilà! – a lead becomes a closed deal.

That’s because in the past there were a few things you could measure in a given revenue cycle, all the aspects you wished you could measure, and all the stuff you didn’t know you should measure.

But advancements in technology and methodologies have made it possible to get a unified view of the entire sales and marketing funnel, make adjustments in real-time and understand how buyer behavior predicts what leads will result in closed deals. In the process, marketing is moving from alchemy to revenue rocket science.

Several companies are transforming the traditionally separated sales and marketing functions by incorporating the principles of...

There are more than 150 million blogs. Last year, over 100 trillion emails were sent out. The number of websites in the world is well over 250 million. 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

In a world drowning in content, the secret to success is not more content marketing – it’s better content marketing.

That’s what Wendy Clark, VP of Integrated Marketing and Communications at Coca-Cola, told a crowd of digital marketing enthusiasts at ad:tech 2011. “The world is not lacking content,” she said. “You better be great storytellers.”

The internet was once a great anonymous playhouse. That’s changing as the social media drives the web towards a greater degree of personalization.

And that’s great news for marketers.

That’s what David Fischer, Facebook’s Vice President of Advertising and Global Operations, told the audience at ad:tech, the yearly conference for digital marketers.

Personalization, Fischer noted, is the reason why Facebook is growing so rapidly – 800 million registered users and counting. In fact, recently, the social networking company counted half a billion users coming to Facebook in a single day.