Grant Gross’ excellent story in CIO.com goes into more detail about why you can’t pin the exit polling failures of last week’s general election on big data. Paul and I use these failures as a starting point to discuss the lack of quality in survey research, particularly in the B2B tech marketing space. Both of us have been the recipients of lousy survey “results,” or more accurately, wishful thinking on the part of marketing and PR people. So save everyone’s energies: don’t produce these 200-person SurveyMonkey polls that have no real meaning. Better yet, when a reporter wants to see the survey instrument and the underlying methodology, send it. You’ll gain plenty of street cred and may even get some ink too.

Our recommendations are to pay careful attention to survey size, understand the sampling methodology, make use of a professional pollster or research analyst or statistician and learn from the experts.

Listen to our podcast here:

In this week’s podcast with Paul Gillin on B2B marketing, I talk about my 21 years of writing a weekly Web Informant email newsletter. Last year I summarized my efforts in this piece with lots of links back to the early days.

Also in our podcast, we pay tribute to Bill Machrone, editor of PC Magazine and an all-around fine human being, for his recent passing after battling brain cancer for two years. And we address a listener’s questions about the importance of images and about C-suite demands that PR pros support the brand’s lead generation efforts.

Listen to the 15-minute podcast here:

We talk today with Andy Hoar, the Vice President and Principal Analyst for Forrester Research for many years. Andy wrote a seminar work 18 months ago called The Death Of A (B2B) Salesman. In that piece, he stated that a million US B2B salespeople will lose their jobs to self-service eCommerce websites by the year 2020.

“If I know what I want, I should be able to buy it immediately,” Hoar says. “When it comes to cross selling and qualifying buyers, all of this can be done better in a digital environment. There are a lot of impatientB2B buyers these days.”

Listen to our 22 min. podcast with Hoar below:

In this episode, Paul and I talk to Shelley Harrison, owner of LaunchPad. She has helped start more than 200 tech companies over the years, including cc:Mail (acquired by Lotus), Socialtext (acquired by PeopleFluent), Postini (acquired by Google), Vermeer (acquired by Microsoft) and others. She often follows a serial entrepreneur from startup and startup, and spoke to us about what makes for great partnership between founder and director of marketing. She offers plenty of advice, including what attributes the serial entrepreneurs she has worked for over the year have in common that make for compelling marketing of their businesses: she presents a very long list, which happens only a fifth of the companies that she has worked for. And she talks about what happens when a marketer’s advice conflicts with the founder’s vision, and the people whom she has been able to persuade, or at least listen to her point of view. you can listen to the 20-minute podcast here:

Frank Cutitta has been around the tech industry for decades and both one of his plum assignments was managing the international expansion of IDG properties during the company’s glory days. As a result, he has been to more than 100 countries and understands how to adjust your marketing plans and messages accordingly. In this 27 minute podcast, we spoke to him about what marketers need to know to work with non-American audiences and product teams, and how they should become more sensitive to local customs and ways of doing business. Listen to the recording here:

This week Paul Gillin and I look at six recent stories and how they affect marketing decisions, including the end of Gawker, how Google is changing its algorithms to penalize pop-up mobile ads, a survey out of the Duke business school about expectations on social media marketing, and why many marketers aren’t doing enough to take advantage of LinkedIn’s deeper engagement features. You can listen to the podcast here:

This week Paul Gillin and I discuss three B2B marketing-related articles from TechCrunch, some commentary about content marketing and how one firm excels at it, and a piece on Twitter’s waning influence in the WSJ. The context is our regular For Immediate Release podcast, and you can play it below.

In this week’s episode, Paul Gillin and I pay homage to Lois Paul, who is retiring. The cofounder of Lois Paul and Partners and a respected technology journalist before that, she has been an inspiration to many people, including our co-hosts. Her work ethic, integrity and judgment are legendary in the New England PR industry and elsewhere. We expect that in retirement, Lois might cut her work week back to 35 hours. Whatever she does with her time, she will do it well.

A long post on the Curata blog asserts that “Content Marketers Desperately Need More Journalists.” It cites recent Curata research that shows that companies continue to invest heavily in content marketing but struggle to find quality content. At a time when the challenge of rising above the noise is greater than ever, why would you not want to hire people who already know how to do it? (We can offer a few suggestions, too!)

China is cracking down on news sites that use social media as sources, saying that tweets aren’t a substitute for good old-fashioned fact-checking. We wish more U.S. news organizations would take a cue from Beijing and be more responsible.

Finally, new research by Forrester finds that CMOs are feeling their oats. More than eight in 10 report that their performance is now lined with business targets and nearly 1/3 have P&L responsibility, which is way up from last year. Click below to listen to our podcast.