Finally, there's a video excerpt of my keynote speech for Forrester's Marketing Forum in Los Angeles (April 8-9, 2008). The theme of the entire conference was based on my report, Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement. I was the opening keynote on the first day of the conference. The title of my speech was Engagement: A New Approach To Understanding Your Customers. It was pretty exciting once I got on stage, but it certainly was stressful...

Marketing is too short term. People demand more control over their interactions (with each other, with brands, and with media), and for the most part they get what they ask for. But to effectively engage people, especially in an environment socially charged by technology, the only way companies can realistically communicate with individuals is to do so over a longer time frame. But that significantly changes how agencies and marketers use their staff and keep the creative...

Measure engagement—the real engagement. It’s funny, marketers dump 92% of their budget into traditional channels that are extremely difficult to measure, the other 8% go to interactive channels where they basically use the same metrics they’ve used for the past five decades. Then they complain that they can’t determine the value of social media. Yawn. My sympathy is wearing thin. Social media is trackable. Every time someone comments, rates a product, reviews a product, connects to...

I recently published a Forrester report titled Marketing's New Key Metric: Engagement (more detail here on the Forrester Marketing blog). One interesting aspect of this research was presenting the idea that the marketing funnel is more complex than we may think. I initially presented to my fellow marketing analysts an idea that suggest the funnel was dead. That didn't go over so well, which demonstrates how sacrosanct the funnel is to marketers. However, they also...