We want YOU to write for the MITX blog! We want to feature our rock star members, and their points of view, on the most discussed and questioned industry topics. Writing for our blog is a members only benefit and one we hope everyone takes advantage of. Who better to educate our readers than some of our very own?

This is the time of year when we reflect on the past, and look to the future. Through the end of January 2013 (2013!) we'll be sharing guest blog posts our the annual Predictions & Reflections series. We asked some of our smartest guest writers to reflect on the past year and look to the upcoming year. This post is by Seth Lieberman, CEO of SnapApp. Seth has more than 15 years of online marketing experience. When he is not immersed in social media marketing, you can find him at home in Brookline with his young family or indulging in one of his many hobbies, from gardening to photography to music to woodworking. You can reach Seth at @sethwlieberman or slieberman at snappapp.com. 

This post is part of the September blog series. With FutureM coming in October (do you have your pass yet?!), we're thinking a lot about marketers and consumers, and this series reflects that. We asked our writers to answer this question: "what is it going to take for marketers to catch up to consumers?" We'll be sharing several posts each week of the month. Stay tuned for diverse viewpoints and creative answers to this question. This post is by Harvey Simmons. Harvey is Dean of Marketing Affairs atEverTrue, a TechStars and MassChallenge startup that is dedicated to providing school fundraisers better data by connecting traditional alumni CRMS to the social graph. Harvey is a proud  Boston College Alum, and is wild about running, college basketball and everything mobile. You can reach Harvey at @HOSimmons4 or at harvey at evertrue.com. 

"Content is King" is every day more cliché. The popular saying seems to take real estate in nearly every presentation on digital marketing. Just as marketers witnessed Web 1.0, 2.0 and are currently experiencing 3.0 with the advent of mobile, it is helpful for marketers to consider where the theory behind the popular saying may be evolving too.

Buyers today are much more than victims to the once-almighty ad dollar; we are no longer gatherers, but instead we are hunters. We have tools like Yelp to help us find the best coffee shop in town and Amazon to help us decide what are the best headphones are for our next run. When we want to make a purchase we either have the tools to make us better at it or are looking for them. Although marketers cannot control all of these conversations, they can contribute by providing their own tools that extend beyond their content of thought leadership.

When your customers have provided over 60 million reviews on your site, understanding who they are and successfully engaging them is critically important to your business’s success.

This post is part of our February blog series. We asked several thought leaders to respond to this question: "What technology do you love most?" Stay tuned for more posts in this series, and for the upcoming March series on UX/design. This post is by Ali Robbins Hyatt. Ali is a manager on the growth and innovation team at Avery Dennison and a past member of the MITX Future Leaders Group. Find her on Twitter!.

I will admit it – I can be overly analytical when making a simple decision. If I am in a new city and want to maximize my dining experience for the night, I will consult not one, but countless apps and websites to make my final decision. Eater and Grub Street are professional sites that relay the newest restaurants from the trusted opinions of food writers. Chowhound’s community of foodies gives me a perspective on which of the city’s top restaurants cannot be missed. The Yelp app gives me the latest reviews so I can check if a restaurant has recently gone downhill. The Menupages app shows me the menu so I can... well, you get the point!

Here are the best blog posts & tweets from the first ever E-Commerce Summit! Scroll through and see what people were saying.

A Tale of Two (E-Commerce) Retailers - by Chris Fletcher, Research Director, Gartner
Perspectives on the E-Commerce Summit - an Event Recap - by Mina Hsiang, Associate, General Catalyst Partners

Get to know a MITX member! This month we're featuring e-Dialog.



1. How was e-Dialog founded, and what inspired its creation?

e-Dialog was founded in 1997. The original founder was Bill Herp, a serial entrepreneur, motivated by technology and new opportunities around that technology - originally focused around email. It grew quickly initially, but had to retrench during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s, going from 200 employees to 50. The company raised $20 million in venture capital and quickly grew to 400 employees and was acquired by GSI Commerce in 2008, which was acquired by eBay Inc. in 2011. Today e-Dialog is a leading provider of multichannel digital marketing solutions for some of the world’s most recognized brands, with over 400 people in 6 locations through the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific.

2. What makes e-Dialog different than other companies in your market space?

It has to be our strong core foundation in email marketing combined with backing from ecommerce power houses like GSI Commerce and eBay that is enabling us to extend beyond email and provide digital marketers with an end-to-end platform for multichannel customer engagement. As the “hub” for digital communication, our open platform allows digital marketers to quickly analyze data, make decisions, and target and refine consumer experiences seamlessly across channels.

Today, MITX hosted an event on improving success in social marketing by looking at your activity through the lens of a product launch. The panel of experts consisted of Stacey Howe, Global Digital Marketing & Brand Management at New Balance (giving the B2C viewpoint); Chip Terry, VP/GM of Product & Strategy at BzzAgent (giving the Technology/Media Perspective); Polly Pearson, President of Pearson Advisory with 9+ years experience at EMC (giving the B2B Perspective); and Tracy Stokes, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Former Senior Director of Global Brand Marketing at Timberland rounding out the panel as moderator.

Guest post by Brian Cavoli, Marketing Director at BzzAgent. Follow Brian on Twitter! This is one of several guest posts in the MITX 2011 Perspectives Blog Series. Stay tuned for more posts by Boston's most influential thought leaders.

Marketing in 2011 is about the power of the group. If there is one thing we learned in 2010, it was that the collective power of people connecting in social media can drive some serious sales. In the coming year, the social media practices of motivating consumers to get their friends, family, and followers to organize around a purchase activity will be the most effective way for companies to sell online. This won’t be driven by marketers looking for another way to push messages or hoping their viral videos take off -- it will be driven by Social Media’s ability to provide unique group experiences and shared value. The message may come from the marketer, but the marketing comes from the people.

The perfect example of this is the group buying phenomenon Groupon. Everyone’s been talking about them this year - and for good reason. Forbes referred to them as fastest growing company in history. It is always fascinating when a hot company turns down billons from Google, but what makes the Groupon story so important is how it has transformed social marketing and connected the web to massive retail store sales.  

Group buying certainly isn’t new. (Remember Mercata?) Some of the earliest and most well-funded ecommerce sites on the web were attracting like-minded shoppers to get better deals in bulk. The problem was they weren’t social. The deals didn’t get people excited, and unexcited people tend not to share things too much.

The world is different now. The Internet has become a social marketplace. Groupon has cracked the local ad market and spawned countless numbers of imitators, but the next year will bring the expansion of this concept to a wide variety of new industries. Consumers are already sharing their latest purchases with each other for everything from scented soaps to Cisco servers. The companies that can reach a targeted audience with valuable, exclusive offers can turn that buzzing into buying.

Plenty has been written about Groupon clones and high-profile sale sites like Rue La La and Gilt Groupe. But the underlying trend is spreading fast. eBay is bringing group buying to gift giving with GroupGifts, GotGroupBuy.com is offering all types of electronics, and brides can join forces for great deals on jewelry and honeymoons on a new Knot.com site. In China, Mercedes sold 205 Smart cars in 204 minutes on a group buying site. I predict this kind of innovation will crop up in whole new verticals like insurance, financial services, and even health care, to improve the customer buying process. Look for companies to break down the walls around how groups coordinate to buy these products in 2011.

Sites like these are not about advertising. They use a promotional approach to create the kind of buzz that gets a group of people talking and buying. It takes much more than just a great deal. Here are 4 keys for “we-commerce” success in 2011:

Guest post by Jeff Janer, Co-Founder & CEO of Spring Partners, and MITX board member. Follow Jeff on Twitter! This is one of several guest posts in the MITX 2011 Perspectives Blog Series. Stay tuned for many more posts by Boston's most influential thought leaders.