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The conference for managers and executives who run customer reference programs. Now in our 5th year. Early registration is open. Presenters include Deborah Eastman, CMO of Satmetrix , who will keynote, plus case studies from Hewlett-Packard, Adobe Systems, Red Hat and other leading reference programs. Lots of new information on references and social networks, where... read more →

Forrester is showing increasing interest in B2B customer engagement efforts. Laura attended and presented last week at the Summit. One of her points is that customer engagement efforts lend themselves to persuasive ROI analysis: they can have important impacts on business performance, which can be measured. Here Also, she provides an... read more →

The 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement was the most intense 2 days I’ve seen yet at one of our events. There’s no way to provide a list of takeaways and do the content flowing from the Summit justice. So over the next few weeks I’ll post a series of takeaways... read more →

Rhett Livengood is presenting on how Intel is integrating its customer reference and customer advisory board programs into its social medial program. Btw, he's a musician who cut his first album when he was 17 years old - back when an album was a "record." A few takeaways: CUSTOMER REFERENCES... read more →

At the 2009 Summit: National instruments' John Pasquarette, Vice President, Product Marketing – Software, showed us how National Instruments (NI) achieved a pretty remarkable strategic success by marshalling its customer communities in a successful, high-profile cause marketing effort. NI's long-term goal was to increase visibility and usage of its programming language,... read more →

Day 2 at the Summit on Customer Engagement.  What are health care services providers doing to cultivate customer references and other customer engagement opportunities?  VP of Market Development Vicki Cooney is telling us what AmerisourceBergen - a $70 billion pharmaceutical services provider - is doing. Vicki took a relatively new... read more →

Greetings from the first day of the 2009 Summit on Customer Engagement. Right now Forrester's Laura Ramos is talking about engaging B2B customers, in order to build brand and grow business. Some takeaways: - Most of the things B2B firms do to build brands don't work, and we know they... read more →

There is growing interest in, and evidence of, the value of developing strong emotional bonds with customers. Gone is the notion that customers - even B2B customers - buy primarily for rational reasons. Much more important than giving them logical reasons to buy is engaging with them on an emotional... read more →

It's an impressive list, including Microsoft, EMC, Intel, SAS Institute, Wells Fargo, IBM, Harris Broadcast Corporation, National Instruments, Hitachi Data Systems, AmerisourceBergen, Citrix Systems, NetApp, and others.  Recent registrants include Cisco Systems, NICE Systems, DataFlux, Diebold, Open Text Corp,, and VitalSmarts, And we'll have the strongest list of presenters on engaging... read more →

Asim is VP, Worldwide Product & Competitive Marketing at Hitachi Data Systems, and one of the most thoughtful B2B marketing executives I know. A great executive-eye's view of how to think about customer engagement, including customer reference programs. Interview with Asim