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"Marketing to women" has become the new buzz phrase for many companies. Corporations are creating high-level positions with the title of director or VP of the Women's Marketing Initiative; forming Women's Advisory Boards; hiring consultants to help them; and employing and promoting more women. While these moves may be seen by some as politically correct, there should be a sound business basis for recognizing this influential market segment and trying to capture its loyalty and dollars. How would capturing just 1% more market share impact your bottom line? 3%? 5%? 50%?

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Marketers have a choice: You can continue using the same marketing methods you have always used to reach your customers, or you can try something revolutionary. You can join them. You can stop trying to guess what your customers are talking about, and instead join their communities and talk to them directly. Here are some of the tools -- like blogs, MySpace, and other consumer-generated media -- that your customers are already using to communicate online, and how you can incorporate them into your marketing plan.

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One of the enduring myths of negotiation is that it is a back-and-forth struggle with your customer that occurs in the final stage of the sale, the "close." Here's how to survive (and maybe avoid) it.

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Google recently launched Google Trends, a tool that allows you to view keyword search trends by year and month. You can also view trends by news mentions and by region/country of searchers performing searches. Here are some real-world ways marketers can use the data in this truly useful tool to help get a jump on competitors and assess their search penetration.

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The month-long 2006 World Cup Soccer tournament will begin on June 9, and already commercials have been launched referencing the event. The heavy hitters behind those ads include 15 global brands, such as McDonalds, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Nike, and Adidas. The US focuses on advertising globally since the World Cup typically evokes little excitement domestically. Only one market segment in the United States veers drastically from that trend—the Hispanic community.

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At a recent marketing association event about landing big company clients, one of the participants asked the speaker, "How do we find the watering holes where the decision makers meet?" The room burst into discussion. Some people said golf courses. Some said nonprofit boards. But I couldn't help thinking of a better alternative: Build your own watering hole. Load your Web site with so much fresh, valuable, and compelling information that it becomes the center of your industry's discussions. Here's how.

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Why can't sales and marketing see eye to eye, and how does an organization deal with oftentimes opposing views?

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The Web analytics space is hot, customers are engaged, consultants busy, vendors optimistic. There's no question this is a healthy "industry." But intense competition among the top vendors has somewhat killed product innovation. Unfortunately, that's happening at a time when the next generation of the Internet—what some call Web 2.0—needs a totally different kind of Web analytics.

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Are you confident that the tactics you, your web designer, and your SEO all employ won't get you slapped by the search engines? If you can't say with absolutely certainty that you're squeaky clean, then you'd better study the following list of black hat tactics to avoid.

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The role of the Chief Marketing Officer, a title almost unheard of 10 years ago, will continue to expand in the next decade. Marketing is evolving from an art into a science—and it's about time. As CMOs begin to embrace their new-found stature, are they tuned into what really makes them effective?

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Over the last 50 years, marketers have been working overtime to legitimize our craft; we have even gone so far as to refer to marketing as a science. Without question we have made great strides. But at the same time, we have lost some of the magic. And a little magic can make a good marketing plan quantifiably better, and in many cases great!

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Many organizations have had customer reference programs in place for years, but not until recently have those programs begun to capture the executive attention they deserve.

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RSS may not ever replace email as a delivery tool. But nonetheless, it will move Web site traffic, because people can use RSS readers to receive content without having to visit a site. Here's part two of a primer on RSS, and why marketers should care about it.

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Imagine a California wine club modeled after the movie "Sideways"? Sure, it sounds cool. But there are many inherent challenges -- the decay curve on the "Sideways" recall, for example, and the fact that marketing a sensory product online is always a challenge. Read the details in this case study.