Infographic, Full Results and Paul Writer Take here 

For many B2B software companies, customers are now buyers, many of whom want to drive the relationship and buying cycle, moving sharply away from the former sales-team-focused cycles. The customer experience with the company has gained importance; many company-centric processes must give over to processes with a strong customer focus. Both Marketing and IT have important roles in customer engagement, with marketing technology growing in sophistication and variety. 

An Accenture-sponsored study involving over 300 CMO's and 300 CIO's presented its view of Marketing + IT. The CMO Council believes there is a global imperative for marketing and IT organizations, which too often have been polarized and adversarial, to find common ground around the business of innovating more efficient, effective and measurable ways to target, acquire and stay intimately connected to customers. The need for greater synchronization, partnership and collaboration between these two groups has never been more critical to their mutual success. 

The answer lies in enablement and empowerment of IT and Marketing working as true collaborative partners, where the leadership fully supports the elimination of silos and frees up IT to work on strategic initiatives. Click here to read more. 

Success Story: Driving Client Loyalty through Dimension Data's Client Advocacy Program

By definition, technology-based solutions require the integration of products, services, and unique IP to address and resolve the complex business problems large corporations face today. While most solution implementations are ultimately successful, they are rarely easy for all of the typical reasons-the requirement to integrate with legacy IT systems, the reluctance to change management processes, the challenges surrounding collaboration and internal communications, to name just a few. Maintaining high client satisfaction and driving loyalty has always been a challenge.

In this post, Steve Hurley shares a success story of Dimension Data, a global company specializing in IT and networking infrastructure solutions. Dimension Data established its Client Advocacy Program to make sure that it always provide its most strategic, operationally-oriented accounts with the best possible client experience. 

Click here to read on.

Jessie Paul, CEO of marketing advisory firm Paul Writer, classifies data leaks through social networks into two pithy categories: malicious and foolish. "Most of the data breaches fall in the foolish category. It's often the case of companies not enforcing its confidentiality policy. Worse, the policy is a 30-page document that nobody reads or takes seriously," says Paul, adding that companies must constantly keep educating employees about what employees can post on social media and what they cannot.

Click here to read the entire story. 

A content marketer has to contend with constant, lightening-fast competing messages. No matter what field you serve, your audience has thousands of other messages competing for their attention and action. This may feel overwhelming, lead to fatigue, and exhaust you to the point of not trying.

But there's no reason to fret. There are five simple rules you can follow to ensure your messages will be the ones that do get through. Most of them concern something so imperceptible that we don't even think about it: information design. Information design, in this case, is about how the human eyes perceive the written word. 

Click here to read about  how you can make sure your messages survive in the whirlwind of marketing that swirls around us all.