Matthew T Grant

Had He willed they would not have been idolators. –  Sura 6, “The Cattle”

The existence of evil, or, more banally, base disobedience of God’s word by the vast multitude of human beings, must in some ways be explained by monotheism. If God is all-powerful, in fact, singular in His omnipotence, how do you explain the existence of evil without admitting that it too, like all else above and below, was created by God?

Similarly, since God has sent down his Word and therewith his Law via sundry emissaries, how is it that so many, indeed the majority of humanity, either fail to heed it or denounce it as false (adhering instead to their own regional or familial creeds)?

The idea that God created evil (the Devil, drives, temptation) and then bestowed Free Will upon Man in order to test his fidelity seems far-fetched. Why would an all-powerful Being operate in such a neurotic (or, really, passive aggressive) fashion?

The alternative (if you are not going to jettison monotheism altogether and retreat into a polytheism that does not suffer this conundrum) is to state forthrightly that God created Evil and, moreover, that God determines who will obey and who will not.

Hence the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination, for example, or, a thousand years before it, the words of the Holy Quran where we find in Sura 7, “The Wall Between Heaven and Hell,” Aya 178: He alone is guided whom God shows the way; and whom He leads astray is surely lost. (This is echoed later, in Aya 186, “Whosoever God allows to go astray has none to show him the way, for He leaves them to wander perplexed in their wickedness.” and indeed repeated throughout the Quran.)

“Whom He leads astray….” How many can get to that and appreciate and worship a God who willfully leads some astray? Of course, Islam aside, how else are we to understand the monotheism espoused my Judaism or Christianity (or Zoroastrianism, if you want to get technical)?

And have many considered that, when we look out over the vast sweep of history, broadly speaking, or burrow into the unique experiences of every individual who has ever lived, we would not be able, following the model of monotheism offered in the verses cited above, to distinguish a reality created by God from a reality which has unfolded in His absence?

In other words, truly consistent monotheism and atheism, from the standpoint of observable reality, are indistinguishable.

Which brings us to the preeminent secular commandment: “Be Yourself” – a notion emanating from Emerson and Nietzsche, sacralized in the Sixties (not to mention countless movies, sitcoms, and television dramas), and now central to the concept of authenticity that the social media gurus of today wield like an iron hammer.

You are as God wills you to be. Thus, when you are “yourself,” you are submitting to the will of God, as is proper. However, when you are not yourself, then you are also obeying the will of God, since you could only not be yourself if He willed it to be so.

We can no more escape ourselves than we can act against the will of God. You are always already yourself, even when you are not. If God wills you to not be yourself, than “not being yourself” is how you are.

And therefore, I believe, the insistence on “being yourself” is really driven by the frustration and disappointment associated with the fact that this is, in fact, impossible.

Image source: mrmystery.

“Can’t you see that I’m the one who understands you?”

When my oldest son was 3 or maybe 4, he picked up a copy of Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, opened it and, looking intently at the pages (he could not read at the time), started shouting, “I knew it! I knew it!” This perfectly illustrates my own relationship to the work of this seductively abstruse thinker.

One thesis of the aforementioned well-worn paperback is that the gaze is an object of desire. We want to be seen. This yearning is rooted in us at an existential level and finds expression throughout our culture. Why else, I ask you, would  spiritual union, intimacy, and intense personal commitment be expressed simply as, “I see you,” in the film Avatar?

Of course, the idea that people seek out “the gaze of the other” doesn’t really sound that profound considering that everywhere we look advertisements abound promising methods to improve our appearance in order to make ourselves more attractive. For his part, Lacan makes his idea stranger than obvious by insisting that the gaze is an actual object (captured, for example, in Holbein’s anamorphotic skull), and not just the fact that someone casts a longing glance our way.

In her finely crafted hit, “You Belong With Me,” Taylor Swift emphasizes that the “gaze” as object of desire is actually a placeholder for something even more potent and abstract: knowledge. That is, rather than merely being seen, we want to be known. To put it another way, what we want the other to see in us is our understanding of them.

The protagonist of the song, well-aware of the visual allure of her high-heeled, short-skirted sexual rival, goes out of her way to convince the object of her desire (“you in your worn out jeans”) that what she has to offer is something to be more highly prized. Certainly, she says, the toned legs and prominent ass buttocks of a cheerleader are undeniably appealing, but what is more elusive and valuable, in fact, what you yourself lack, is the satisfaction that comes from clear-sighted self-knowledge, which I alone, as the one who gets your humor and knows your story, can provide.

The irony, and tragedy, I suppose, is that visual immediacy can so easily trump this intimate knowing, however desirable the latter may in the end be. I believe that this is amply illustrated by the video for “You Belong with Me.” The fact that Taylor Swift is herself physically attractive not only makes the narrative unbelievable, at least as told from her perspective, but also highlights the challenge of becoming an object of desire through primarily subjective (“I know you”) means.

At least that’s what I got out of it.

If you don’t have time to blog then don’t. Ghost blogging is inauthentic & the antithesis of everything social. #dontbeafake cc @mitchjoel – Avinash Kaushik

When I was in graduate school, there was a lot of talk about the “death of the author.” Such talk was driven primarily by French, post-structuralist thinkers like Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Lacan who had an intensely nuanced and complex notion of writing and authorship that tended to highlight the supra-personal in any putatively “personal” utterance or authorial gesture. Steeped in such thinking, I became very skeptical of attempts to say with certainty who the “who” is when we ask, “Who wrote this?”

Barthes et al. were responding to various French philosophical currents of the 20th century but especially, I believe, existentialism. Whereas existentialism had put the individual human being at the center of (an ultimately meaningless) existence, thus hoping to establish a new moral center following the death of God, the post-structuralists chose instead to show that the individual was not the center of anything but, rather, the effect of many things (language, culture, discourse, the unconscious, etc.).

The French were not the first or the only critics to suggest that the individual (sometimes called “the subject”) was epiphenomenal. Freud had certainly pointed in this direction when developing his psycho-analytic theories as had Nietzsche a decade or so before him, Marx a decade or so before that, and Hegel at the very outset of the 19th century. But even these gentlemen were not the first to insist on the essentially contingent nature of individual identity which, in one form or another, can be traced back to the teachings of Buddha and even the Vedic authors before him.

Which is all to say that when I read things like Mitch Joel’s recent blog post on “ghost blogging,” my philosophical buttons get pushed.

Conceding that there may be practical value to ghost blogging (“I get that people Ghost Blog and it works”), Mitch shows that his opposition to it is, more than anything else, a matter of faith. Like a Luther for the Twitterati, he writes, “I believe this one thought (and I will stand by it): corporate Blogs being presented as a personal space to share insights have a predisposed and inherent understanding that the person whose name is on it is the actual author.”

You see, Mitch is less concerned with the value of ghost blogging than he is with values or, as he puts it, “ideals” (“I do think that there are some commonly held ideals within Social Media”) which he also refers to as the “pillars of what makes something ‘social’.” These pillars being, “transparency, openness, honesty, human and real voices (not corporate mumbo jumbo) and a culture that embraces sharing between these real voices.”

In other words, Mitch is a moralist who even indulges in the classic rhetorical move of the moralist, the value-laden leading question: “Why is everyone who defends ghost blogging so afraid to state that ghost blogging’s first act is one of deceit and misdirection?”

The philosopher in me wishes merely to point out that expressions like “actual author,” “real voices,” “human,” “social” and so on are not unproblematic.

What, after all, is an author and how does an author, generally speaking, differ from an “actual” author? What makes a voice “real,” particularly when we are talking about written texts (blogs) where the notion of “voice” itself is metaphorical? What attributes belong to the category “human” and what happens when “humanness” is invoked as an ethical category? Since when is the “social” defined by “honesty, transparency, and openness” rather than by concepts like “convention” or “conflict”? Etc.

I’m not sure that Mitch Joel is interested in the history of philosophy, let alone the history of the “ideals” that he invokes. Indeed, I’m fairly certain that he would dismiss my argument—that, in essence, concepts like authorship, or authenticity for that matter, are over-determined, social constructs which in no way represent uncontested, universal values—as equivocation. I am, after all, a ghost blogger whose work goes undisclosed by my clients. Thus, in the eyes of Mitch Joel, Avinash Kaushik, and others, I’m an aider and abettor of unreconstructed frauds and deceivers.

In my “defense,” and in answer to Mitch’s inherently unanswerable question (shades of “How frequently do you beat your wife?”), I would say that, if I am afraid to state that my first act every morning is one of deceit and misdirection, it is because I fear saying something that I do not consider to be true. Rightly or wrongly, I actually believe that the people whose bloggings I facilitate are the “actual” authors of the posts that I produce. The ideas are theirs, the “voice” is theirs, the blog is theirs, etc.

That being said, on a “human” level I resent the jargon of authenticity which pervades social media. When someone says, in the imperative voice, “Don’t be a fake,” I bristle. Why? Because I find the division of human actions into “real” and “fake” itself dehumanizing. Where does the notion of “authenticity” come from anyway? It is a term of trade driven by the desire to differentiate the genuine from the counterfeit so that an item can be assigned a monetary value. “Authentically human” is just another way of saying “Genuine leather.”

When we demand that humans be “authentic,” or criticize them for being fake, it’s because we have reduced them to the status of commodities. In fact, I believe that the social media, rather than humanizing marketing, as Mitch Joel and others have long hoped, have in fact completed the total colonization of human thought and affect by market forces.

Given the absolute assimilation of our lives by the new media, down to the most trivial whims (“I just ate a donut covered in bacon!” “I hate Justin Bieber”), isn’t it possible that the only way to hang on to our humanity is through masks, personae, and “ghosts”?

Or, in the immortal words of Robert Plant, “When you fake it, baby, please, fake it right.”

Image Source: Nick Wheeler.

In America, and apparently some parts of the developing world, it can be very shocking when you tell people that you do not believe in God. Indeed, even among America’s educated classes, you’ll rarely hear an expression of outright atheism (though you will encounter a fair amount of agnosticism).

I asked a friend once why this was and he replied, in effect, that people claim to be agnostic mainly because they are cowards. At first I thought he meant that they, like Pascal, were basically hedging their bets. I mean, what if they’re wrong? Better not to commit either way.

Now I believe that he was pointing instead to their fear of communal opprobrium. Agnostics don’t fear God, after all (if they did, they wouldn’t be agnostics). The only thing they have to fear is Believers.

For my part, I’ve tended to be fairly forthright about my atheism. I do not believe that God exists. At the same time, being of a rather philosophical bent, I’m not entirely comfortable with that manner of expressing things. Why? Well, it all depends on what your definition of “is” is.

You see, we humans tend to have a pretty strong physical bias when it comes to “existence.” When we say that something exists in the course of daily conversation, one can safely assume that we mean “physically” exists. And to the extent that we are particular in questions of fact, we have some fairly rigorous and straightforward standards regarding proof of physical existence.

For example, one should be able to supply fairly precise coordinates of an existing entity’s location in space if one wants to definitively claim that it does indeed exist. One should also be able to specify it’s mass, its physical dimensions, and so on. (In the case of those “objects”—electrons, black holes, photons, etc.—for which precise location or exact mass, among other things, may be difficult to establish, we have mathematical models and experimental procedures that provide a great deal of circumstantial evidence from which existence can be reasonably inferred, if not postively demonstrated.)

Unfortunately, the existence of God doesn’t lend itself to such procedures and demonstrations. If it is argued that the reason for this is that God does not exist “physically,” then I must respond, “Well, then, in what sense of the word ‘exist’ does God exist if not in the physical sense?”

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I spend more time tending my Twitter garden than I do planting bulbs here in my own backyard.

To remedy this, I’m attempting a little cross-pollination and invite you, dear reader, to drink deep from my Twitter well. Just look at the precious coins I’ve tossed therein:

• “How to Train Your Girl with a Dragon Tattoo” #ijustsaw Sat May 1 22:38:34 2010
• I just realized: Plaid is the new paisley 10:35 PM Feb 4th
• i think i crashed Google. #sorry! Wed Feb 10 23:25:44 2010
• It started with a shout-out, and ended in a shoot-out Mon Feb 22 14:24:43 2010
• um, because you’re psychotic? RT @warrenellis: I do not understand why I have not been approached to run the UK Space Agency. Tue Mar 23 12:55:30 2010
• @tallbonez I like wearing hash browns too but they leave grease and ketchup stains everywhere I sit Wed Mar 24 08:42:07 2010
• Are humans the only species with the proven ability and willingness to hunt other species to extinction? #justcurious Sat Apr 10 09:57:35 2010
• Don’t hate the player, hate the instrument Sat Apr 10 19:34:31 2010
• “divine” is just another way of saying “inhuman” Tue Apr 20 08:37:22 2010
• I wanna be part of a global teeny-bopper trend I don’t understand! “Older Girl, You’re So Pretty” – #happy700thdayshinee Sat Apr 24 10:10:06 2010
• Somebody asked me for a “realistic estimate” of when I could do something. I told him, “Realism isn’t exactly my bag.” Fri Apr 30 11:31:33 2010
• If you’re trying to figure out if something is a good sign or not, it’s probably a bad sign. Sat May 1 22:39:47 2010
• I knew the focus on ROI was just a fad: http://adage.com/agencynews/article?article_id=143644 Mon May 3 09:12:22 2010
• Maybe global warming is just God’s way of boiling the ocean. Tue May 4 06:42:41 2010
• As anyone ever actually said, “Here, let me Bing that for you?” I thought not. Tue May 4 07:15:36 2010
• People always say “re-invent” yourself. Is this tacit acknowledgment that we are inventions to begin with? Tue May 18 09:52:32 2010
• I have nothing to add to the “conversation.” Pls RT Fri May 28 16:07:18 2010
• The remarkable power and portability of some euphemisms: People say “I have to go to the bathroom” even when they’re out in the woods. Tue Jun 1 17:14:01 2010
• Some complain about our growing inability to read anything of length online. What do they expect from people using “browsers”? Thu Jun 10 23:55:07 2010
• Hemingway called the blank page “The Great White Bull” – Does that make Twitter’s “What’s happening?” box “The Little White Bull”? Thu Jun 17 22:44:12 2010
• The hint of androgyny that suggests a kind of decadent villainy in American popular culture. Tue Jun 22 14:43:53 2010
• The lump on his neck pulsated as though it were full of bees. Tue Jun 22 15:32:16 2010
• Sea-foam on beach-breaking waves always seems to be galloping to boil and feather on the shore. Thu Jun 24 12:58:42 2010
• Every life is a word and every horoscope it’s false etymology. Fri Jun 25 09:30:58 2010
• Backlit leaves, sunlit ghosts Fri Jun 25 14:11:21 2010
• The real question is, “Wozu Twitter in dürftiger Zeit?” Fri Jun 25 14:49:30 2010
• The truth will set you free, but first it will make you throw up. Tue Jun 29 10:02:20 2010
• “The only thing our society rewards is potential. Accomplishment actually counts against you” Mon Jul 12 09:34:56 2010
• One sip of Pilsener Urquell and I’m back in Mittteleuropa. This beer is my Proustian madeleine. Mon Jul 12 23:46:09 2010
• “403 Forbidden: The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it.” – Servers are basically like teenagers Wed Jul 14 11:09:07 2010
• Me: Listening to Jimi Hendrix makes me want to get a Stratocaster. My friend: It makes me want to get a hooker. Thu Jul 15 20:41:03 2010
• I wish I got “Frenemy” requests on Facebook. Sat Jul 24 15:18:02 2010
• We need WikiDepends to prevent WikiLeaks Mon Jul 26 13:18:35 2010
• I’ve never counted my chickens before they hatched, but I have counted them right before they got gobbled up by the fox 4:32 PM Feb 1st
• I think I may have just violated the Prime Directive. 11:18 PM Jan 21st
• When I grow up, I want to be an unindicted co-conspirator. Mon Jan 11 12:27:05 2010
• OMG! LOL! WTF? 10:07 AM Jan 5th
• EYE OF THE TIGER!!!!! 2:27 PM Dec 17th, 2009

Pretty good, right?

Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Epistemology pays no bills,” Martin remarked drily. – Charles Stross, “The Singularity Sky”

When I wrote about the “database of intentions” and linked that concept to my own longstanding view of the web as the “database of human consciousness,” and thus the fulfillment or actualization of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, I was not trying to make a business point; I was trying to make a philosophical point.

By making a distinction between the two, however, I do not mean to elevate the latter (philosophy) above the former (business). In fact, I was mildly chagrined that my arcane references to a long-dead philosopher and the equally deliquescent tradition of German Idealism with which he is associated bore so few immediately practical fruits. A few kindly souls actually took the time to read the post, so where was the pay off?

While I would like to say that “philosophy is it’s own pay off,” I actually believe that philosophy’s pay off is always and necessarily extra-philosophical. As the  the epigram to this post suggests, by “putting things before us” philosophy’s product amounts to “a perspective on things,” rather than any “thing” in particular. Wittgenstein put it this way: “One might also give the name ‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.”

Heidegger too insisted on the “no-thing-ness” of philosophical thought. To him, thinking was unique as an human activity because it did not truck with beings, but solely with Being (Sein), which he called “essentially the same as Nothingness” (wesenslgeich mit dem Nichts, or something like that).

But the case of Heidegger reminds us that philosophy’s product – a perspective on things – while not belonging properly to the order of things  can nevertheless have a tangible impact. A philosophical perspective not only shows what is there, but what is possible and, in some cases, what is necessary. When these things, possibilities, and necessities get organized into practices, philosophy has its pay off and that pay off could take the form of a religion, a political system, a life-style, or even a business.

Of course, in all these just-mentioned cases the work of organizing is what produces the real value, not the work’s philosophical underpinnings. The value of philosophy is always mediated. In the absence of this mediation, philosophy is as bereft as the coin of a vanished realm or lyric poetry in a dead and forgotten language.

Image Source: danbri.

John Battelle recently pointed out that Google is compiling a Database of Intention (strictly speaking, he pointed this out back in 2003).

Said database is comprised of every search ever entered, every list of results every tendered, and every click-path thereafter taken. Referring to AdWords, AdSense, and Omniture, he additionally pointed out that an ecosystem had blossomed around this pure, though recently attenuated, signal.

One implication/assumption of his insight: Wherever we feel that humans are expressing intent, business(es) will grow.

To put it another way: When I know what you want to do, I can make money by facilitating the accomplishment of that need.

Although there were some who disagreed with Battelle, the many comments on the post demonstrated the concept’s potential primarily by playing with it. For example, some said the Web also constitutes a database of “What I’m listening to” or “What I’m eating” or “What I just saw.” Furthermore, someone also pointed out that all the commercial information on the web – “What I actually bought” – significantly completes the intention picture by capturing which intentions actually led to thing businesses care about most: realized revenue.

This all took me back to 1995 when I was teaching Hegel to Middelbury students and told them that the world wide web was the true realization of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Mind” because, in the totality of the web, Spirit (“Geist” or “Mind”) represented itself to itself in an unprecedented manner. (In his characteristically grandiose fashion, Hegel had implied that this self-representation was happening in his book.)

The web is the medium of our lives and increasingly a medium where fusion overcomes immersion. As such, the Web doesn’t just archive what we’re looking for; it archives much of what we actually do. Not just, “This is what I said,” but, “This is what I’m saying.” Not just, “This is what I saw,” but, “This is what I’m seeing.” Not just, “This is what I thought,” but, “This is what I’m thinking.” Etc.

Many years ago, I saw some German dudes talking about how private videotapes constituted the greatest recorded catalog of everyday life ever assembled. The web has absolutely superseded that by creating “not just” a database of intention (in addition to a database of videotaped qoutidiana), but a database of consciousness itself.

Any idears how we could make money off that? Wait, somebody already has!

Image Source: quapan.

Caught Pat Martino’s first set at Scullers last night. He was playing with organist Tony Monaco and drummer Jason Brown and confirmed note-by-sinewy-note  his well-deserved status as a living master still very much in possession of his prodigious gifts.

Martino’s patented “horn-like” lines were in full display, as was his aptly groovy and well nigh gut-bucket comping, while his dynamic phrasing added a sublimely meta-rhythmic layer to all the serpentine spideriness of his “concept.”

One thing that separates Martino from the be-boppers and modernists who preceded him (the Jimmy Raneys and Jim Halls of the world) and the post-modern post-fusionists of today (from Scofield to Rosenwinkel) is that he’s got a healthy dose of the Sixties on him. This shines through in his come-by-it-honestly nativist approach to the funky organ trio setting as well as in his trance-inducing, raga-esque vorticism (which reminded me, at times, of my longtime idol, Gabor Szabo).

In other words, Martino was great.

Nevertheless, for me, the true star of the evening was Tony Monaco. A highly animated and expressive guy (his protean facial expressions were themselves worth the price of admission), he played astoundingly well, moving fluidly from vintage Jimmy Smithery to an ELP-like psychedelia. The neck-deep in the reverb, quasi-soap-opera tone he chose during “Alone Together,” which he rode deep into an obscure, supersonic well, was emblematic of his adventurous, effervescent, and endlessly captivating style. We haven’t heard the last from Mr. Monaco.

The evening’s one moment of strangeness was when Pat temporarily dismissed the band and invited his wife, Ayako, to play a couple numbers with him. I couldn’t get my head around that move until I thought, “This guy has basically been on the road for 45 years and, at this point, the stage is more or less his living room. Why shouldn’t he just sit down with his wife and play a couple tunes for friends?”

Except, of course, the stage is not a living room and we are not his friends, which made this portion of the show either eccentric, endearing, or irritating, depending on where you were at mentally.

Image Credit: tom.beetz

Bob Knorpp of the Cool Beans Group kicked things off with “pay attention to the keywords you are using in social status updates.” If you are looking for additional SEO power and buzz, focusing on these status updates can have an impact based on the way these things are indexed (with an emphasis on the first six words).

Dave Thomas of SAS focused on the power of content and especially the importance of re-purposing the content you produce. He referred to Kirsten Watson’s (Kinaxis) practice of producing a white paper, first, then using that to produce blog posts, then creating a deck from that for Slideshare, and finally, interviewing the author to create a podcast. An audience member then told people not to forget about images which are, of course, indexed as well.

Stephanie Miller of Return Path recalled the advice that you should never test just to test, but always to use testing to prove out particular points.

Bob Knorpp shared the lesson that you should listen to your sales force to find out what kinds of content bring the best leads, then optimize for that content. It might sound obvious, he said, but it bears repeating because it gives you something very concrete to work with. (I found “improving the relationship between sales and marketing” one of the sub-themes of the entire forum.)

Dave Thomas echoed several speakers saying that it’s ok to take a hybrid approach and integrate your “traditional” marketing techniques with all the emerging tactics now available.

Stephanie Miller, finally, recalled an exercise used in one session where the speaker took the marketing messages of several competitors and showed that you could not tell the companies apart solely based on these messages, which were essentially the same. Compare your messaging to that of your competitors and prepare to have your eyes opened!

As part of a discussion about getting more people in your organization involved in social media, Bob Knorpp cautioned first that it may not be the case that everyone is actually going to be good at it (blogging, for example). So you should take people’s strengths into considerations before asking them to do something. He wanted people to remember that, frankly, if your organization is listening, then that is already a win.

There followed a discussion about the loss of control brought about my social media. It was acknowledged that this loss of control can certainly make some people nervous, and that this is a natural response in some cases, but that our role needs to be one of educating people on how to use these tools. In fact, we can create whole plans around it so that we have a framework within which to judge and evaluate our efforts.

The conversation then returned to the publishing metaphor especially in the context of Kipp Bodnar’s suggestion that your goal should be to produce the best-read magazine in your industry. Bob Knorpp took issue with the publishing metaphor and suggested that we use, instead, the “theme park” metaphor. “When people go to Disneyland, they don’t rave about the brochure, they rave about the experience,” as he put it.

Finally, I said that my big takeaway was that all this isn’t about the technology; it’s about the “soft stuff.” Marketing automation, lead management, social media engagement all boil down to human interactions. It’s these interactions that produce the processes that you automate, build trust between marketing and sales, and, ultimately, determine the role you play in the lives of your customers.

The question central to this session was, “How can marketing automation help produce higher quality leads and foster a better relationship with sales?”

The format involved Laura Ramos asking each panel member, all of whom represented marketing automation vendors, to respond to a specific scenario that she had cooked up. As the panelists responded to the challenges, here’s some general insights and thoughts that surfaced.

• Lead automation tends to be primarily about new customer acquisition but good marketers use these systems to manage the entire customer life-cycle and look for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. (Jon Miller, Marketo)
• It’s not about automation per se. It’s about automating good process. (Kristen Hambelton, Neolane)
• Along the same lines, creating a lead scoring system is an iterative process. Additionally, the automation system itself has to be easy to use. (Parker Terwin, Genius.com)
• Testing and optimization (of subject lines, landing pages, etc.) is key to effective marketing and your automation system should help you do that. (Jon)
• On the ROI front, the emergence of the SaaS model has really changed how marketers need to think about the investment (cap ex vs. op ex), but it is also changing the conversation from one focused on ROI and one focused on TCO. (Jon and Kristen).
• This led to a broader discussion of ROI in which Brian Kardon of Eloqua pointed out that, for a marketing automation implementation to work, a lot of marketing processes have to change and, therefore, the conversation shouldn’t necessarily focus on the investment. Instead, you really need to uncover whether or not the organizational will is there to see this process through.
• It’s not hard to accumulate a lot of data, the question is, what do you do with it? Ideally your systems will talk to each other so that you can see the data and act on it all from one place. (Kristen)
• On that point, Jon talked about the power of integrating the insights from your analytics and automation tools actually show up where your sales people are looking.
• When integrating the various tools with salesforce.com, you need to make sure that changes to your implementation don’t break the connection with the marketing tool and that you aren’t asking your sales people to learn how to use a new tool.

An audience member (from Daxko) asked each panel member to say something positive about the other panelists’ products. Kristen said that Marketo has helped increase adoption of automation. Jon said that Genius.com has pioneered automated response. Parker said that Eloqua is the Cadillac of solutions. Brian said that Neolane is a good product with a lot of happy customers.

Of all the things I heard in this session, the one that really stuck with me was this one made by Brian Kardon: It’s not the technology that’s the problem, it’s the soft things.