Providing the best product won't be enough to carry your business into the future: You need to create experiences your customers want to share. Author Brian Solis discusses the need for innovative leadership, the new generation of consumerism, and his recent book, What's the Future of Business? more

"Be nice" isn't just advice for kindergartners: Nice businesses earn more money. Author Peter Shankman talks about the value of creating a "nice" corporate culture in his latest book, Nice Companies Finish First: Why Cutthroat Management Is Over—and Collaboration Is In. more

National Geographic has dominated print media for 125 years, and now the organization is staking its claim on social networks and photo-sharing sites. EVP and CMO Amy Maniatis discusses brand management, the power of content, and the importance of emerging platforms like Instagram and Google+ for increasing your brand's reach. more

B2B Marketing Forum Keynote Jill Foster gives us a sneak peek of her presentation "Stuck in Elevators and Other Unsavory Networking Disasters," and provides valuable networking advice for marketing professionals. more

Digital marketing expert and author Mitch Joel shares insights from his new book "Control Alt Delete" and discusses such topics as social media and content strategy, and how marketers can prepare for upcoming technological changes. more

Author Amy Howell talks about how professional women can use their personal networks to build their career, and the importance of cultivating genuine connections online and offline. more

Michael Stoner shares insights he gained from compiling 25 case studies in higher education marketing, and how marketers can build integrated marketing plans that maximize audience reach using traditional channels, social media, and emerging platforms. more

Online conflicts can cost businesses thousands of dollars (and hours) to resolve. Attorney Andrea Weckerle, author of Civility in the Digital Age, explains how you can protect yourself when a situation turns ugly. more

Jason Falls of CafePress talks about cause marketing, Autism Awareness Month, and how businesses of any size can give back to the community. more

Dorie Clark talks about the concept of personal branding, the importance of producing your own content as part of a reinvention effort, and how one goes about finding and benefiting from work with a mentor. more

Michael Weiss, managing director at figure18 and a veteran speaker, consultant, client advocate, and sales executive, has an interesting perspective on marketing and advertising, not to mention the role of the agency, in today's always-on, always-open business environment. more

This week's guest on Marketing Smarts is Tim Suther, chief marketing and strategy officer for Acxiom, a firm that Tim referred to as "the original Big Data company"; FRONTLINE called it "one of the biggest companies you've never heard of." more

Though living in a new era of participatory media, our notions of what constitutes an audience and what audiences actually do has not changed much since the broadcast era—and that's a problem, argues Sam Ford. more

Steve Bushong's background in systems engineering, and his experience with sourcing, procurement, and operations, gave him a unique perspective on how marketing can and should work in today's complex media environment. more

Testing your online campaigns, landing pages, forms, website, and so on can't be an every-now-and-again thing. Testing must be iterative and ongoing if it is to produce results. Which means, among other things, that your organization must institute a culture of testing. more

Demonstrating value is certainly a fine reason to measure our actions and their results. But discussing marketing measurement with Jim Lenskold during this week's Marketing Smarts podcast got me thinking that we may be thinking about the purpose of measurement exactly backwards. more

"Buyer personas don't work if you make stuff up," Adele Revella told me during this week's episode of Marketing Smarts. "They work if you listen to customers first." But to gather real, actionable customer intelligence, you need to talk to actual customers. That can be challenging for two reasons. more

David B. Thomas, senior director of content and community for Salesforce Marketing Cloud and author of The Executive's Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy, discusses social media policies. more

Dan Pink argues that selling (especially in the form of persuading or convincing someone to do this or that) is deeply embedded in our nature. "We need to move away from thinking of selling something as a kind of unnatural, scurrilous act," he insists. more

The Atlantic magazine has made a highly successful transition to the digital world. To understand what has led to its digital success and uncover what content marketers might learn from its example, I invited Bob Cohn, the magazine's digital editor, to Marketing Smarts. more

"Search engine robots—the last time I checked—do not have credit cards to buy your product," says Sonia Simone of Copyblogger Media. Which is why, she adds, "It makes more sense for us to look at SEO as a function of content, rather than content as a function of SEO." more

"All of us want to belong, and all of us really want to make an impact, and some of us... we invent Facebook," Ekaterina Walter, social media strategist at Intel and author of Think Like Zuck told me during this week's episode of Marketing Smarts. more

We covered a range of topics on the Marketing Smarts podcast in 2012. In this episode we share some highlights on creating compelling content, allowing social media to humanize your organization, building community, and navigating the sometimes tricky relationship between marketing and sales. more

Beth Kanter and Katie Delahaye (KD) Paine, authors of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit: Using Data to Change the World, discuss performance metrics and nonprofits. more

C.C. Chapman, co-author of Content Rules, has a new book out, Amazing Things Will Happen, which is a collection of short pieces, lessons, and observations intended for "anybody out there," C.C. says, "who may be stuck in a rut or maybe just not doing exactly what they wanted with their ... more