Category Archives: speeches and podcasts

FIR B2B Podcast #47: Hank Weghorst and account-based marketing

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Paul Gillin and I talk today on our FIR B2B podcast with Hank Weghorst about account-based marketing (ABM) and why it is catching on now, along with some of the mistakes that potential users of ABM can first make. Weghorst gave this TED Talk about the process where he describes how his company has assembled a huge database of more than 50 million companies worldwide, and makes this information available to his customers via various desktop programs. Paul and I find out what ABM is all about and why it’s time has come. Listen to our podcast below.

FIR B2B podcast: LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Chief Tells What Works

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If you use LinkedIn for marketing, you must listen to this interview. LinkedIn consistently ranks as the most effective social network for B2B marketers. What do the best of the best do well? David Karel shares the lessons he’s learned from nearly two years of working with hundreds of B2B marketers as well as using the LinkedIn platform to reach his own customers.

Listen and learn from Dave Karel on our latest For Immediate Release: B2B podcast from Paul Gillin and I. We have a 20-minute flash tour of what you need to know to succeed on LinkedIn.

FIR B2B Podcast: Why words matter, with search marketing guru James Mathewson

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James Mathewson is a prolific author, digital marketing expert, search engine aficionado and editor-in-chief of IBM.com. Paul Gillin and I recently spent some time with him talking about using data to understand how customers think so that you can align messages to explicitly and implicitly stated needs.

For example, using the wrong terms — such as notebook instead of laptop — can sabotage your marketing efforts. Marketers need to use the language of customers and prospects to define their brands. Listen to our podcast here.

For Immediate Release: a podcast for B2B Marketers

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I return to doing a regular series of podcasts with my long-time former partner Paul Gillin, called For Immediate Release: B2B. Paul and I co-hosted almost 100 episodes of MediaBlather back several years ago, and many of those shows have held up well talking about how technical PR and marketing communications professionals can leverage new media and other strategies.

In this week’s show, we talk about the upcoming merger between Microsoft and LinkedIn (Paul and I are split on whether it is a good thing), and interview Radius.com CEO Darian Shirazi about predictive analytics and its utility for marketing and customer retention.

Redmond Magazine: Using OpenStack to Control VM Chaos

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I join Dell Virtualization Evangelist Hassan Fahimi to provide a complete overview of OpenStack and Foglight for OpenStack, including:

  • Understanding OpenStack deployment strategies and issues
  • Gaining complete visibility into your OpenStack topology
  • Monitoring the performance of specific OpenStack modules and components
  • Leveraging alerts to proactively identify issues
  • Taking advantage of built-in “FAQs” and reports to immediately get the answers you need

You can download my slides here, and watch the webinar here.

TechTarget seminar: How to make the move to hybrid cloud computing

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The benefits of cloud computing have been hammered into IT – streamlined processes, improved accessibility, greater flexibility, and so on – but latent concerns around security, performance, and access have kept many organizations from realizing the true value of the cloud.

You need to objectively compare the capabilities and costs of cloud services against those of traditional on-premises infrastructure – even if you’re already doing some mix of the two (in fact, especially if you’re doing a mix of the two).

This five-city event provides that objective perspective by focusing on building a data center infrastructure that realizes the true value of cloud computing across your IT infrastructure – including automation, high availability, appropriate utilization rates – and not just limited, low-impact use cases. Sign up for one of the cities that I will be speaking here.

Webinar for Citrix: Listen to Your Customers, How IT Can Provide Better Support

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IT needs to provide the best possible support to its end users. Indeed, treating them as your customers is critical. I cover some of the lessons learned from the best and worst customer-facing organizations (including developing profiles such as Mailchimp did for figuring out customer personnas) to see how IT can make improvements in this area.

Here is a video recording of my portion of the webinar (16m).

Gigaom webinar: Customer-Driven Infrastructure: Building Future-Ready Consumer Applications

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Based on a white paper that I wrote earlier in the year for them, I am holding a webinar next week with the above focus. In this webinar David S. Linthicum SVP, Cloud Technology Partners and Brandon Elliott the Chief Technologist for Rackspace and I will examine the infrastructure needs of customer-facing applications by examining the challenges faced by businesses in the most demanding industries. It will provide a framework for evaluating technology decisions from the perspective of customer experience quality and suggest metrics that can help businesses justify and benchmark the success of their investments.

You can register here for the event, to be held on August 28th.

 

Webinar: Best Practices for Protecting Sensitive Data from Insider Threats

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Join me and Tina Stewart, the VP of Marketing for Vormetric, in an interesting webinar on 7/22 at 11 am PT. Insider threats have shifted to include both traditional insiders – individuals with access to critical data as part of their work, and privileged users — and the compromise of legitimate users’ credentials by sophisticated malware and advanced persistent threats (APTs). According to the latest Insider Threat Report from Vormetric, organizations are still wrestling with this growing problem, and struggling to find an appropriate security response.

We will talk about these issues and some of the ways that IT managers can mitigate these threats. Here is the link to view the webinar recording from Virtualization Review.