What is the hottest thing in technology marketing right now?

David, Joe, Chris and Doug have made great points.

Most of my clients are tech companies. What I'm seeing is that tech company marketers are acknowledging the need to involve business buyers in their conversations and dialogues. Technology is finally making the transition to becoming a business conversation first, a tech conversation second. The challenge for many tech cos is that they don't know or truly understand the business buyers they must now engage. This makes it harder to move beyond features and discuss benefits from a business objectives perspective.

I'd also like to applaud the API comment made by Doug. As marketers invoke more technology into their processes, the need to ensure it all works together is an imperative. No more silos should become a mantra from here forward. This means marketers need to think beyond the app to how it fits into the overall big picture view of their marketing process development. As more channels come into play, the better tools and cross-platform technology marketers have to integrate marketing programs, the more they'll be able to evidence the impact from their marketing programs. Time to get beyond last-touch attribution.

Great comments David. Really excellent stuff. I also think that we're seeing demand gen and social inching more closely together. It's almost like each side has waved a white flag and said, begrudgingly, to the other, "Ok ok, I guess you have a point. I need to incorporate more of your thinking into what I do." The nexus of those two worlds is a very hot sector right now -- I imagine because companies feel like they can fill two hard-to-fill roles with one headcount. -Joe / @jchernov / Eloqua

Content marketing will continue to be extremely important but with a shift toward quality over quantity - many marketing organizations today are focused on the latter to the detriment of the former. There's a great conversation on this topic going on here - http://www.focus.com/questions/are-marketers-emphasizing-content-quantity-ove...

I'm (of course) a very big believer in social as a marketing channel - regardless of industry it's becoming THE place where customers engage and spend their time. Marketers need to continue to work hard to identify and engage with influencers and relevant conversation. It's becoming so core that I suspect we will soon drop the reference to 'social' and just accept participation as part of marketing in general, but those marketers who have not yet made it part of their mix (which includes the majority of B2B marketers) need to get going.

I also believe that APIs and 'Marketplace' marketing will become even more important in 2012. Salesforce.com has obviously had a great deal of success establishing themselves as a (the?) platform with their AppExchange marketplace. Other companies such as Google, Intuit, HubSpot, Hootsuite and Constant Contact are rolling out similar initiatives for their customer bases in an effort to establish themselves as platform rather than point solution companies.

Last but not least I agree with David on infographics - a picture says 1000 words and the more marketers can do to illustrate rather than tell the more successful they will be.

All excellent insights.

Content Marketing has taken off across B2B -- but that will raise the bar, so only top-quality content will achieve the returns that even so-so stuff did last year.

Next year, innovative ways to get that content discovered may be the main challenge. And some of those ways (not all) may start to look like old-fashioned, outbound, broadcast marketing!

The value of data seems to be rising as well, partly in response to the trend Joe noted: demand gen meeting social (the new data firehose). If we're going to persist with silo applications across the B2B marketing mix (I hope we're not but I see no Unified Field Theory emerging, much less a platform to manage it all) then sharing data across these apps will become increasingly important.

So before you buy an app (whether a webinar platform, email tool, automation suite, CRM or CMS), ask about its API. Does it play nicely with others? If not, that elusive 'single view of the customer' will remain a distant hope.

The infographic fad may settle down a bit as marketers realise that cramming a powerpoint into a pretty picture is not necessarily the best way to sell that story. Great infographics will still earn their backlinks.

Finally, the year of mobile for B2B?
Not sure. I do think we'll have to make sure our websites & emails are mobile friendly in 2012. And some killer B2B apps will emerge in some markets (like mobile alerting apps for time-sensitive markets). But I'm not seeing the mobile tsunami yet -- which means I'll probably get soaked.

Consumerization of IT. That, and cloud computing, create a future where technology marketing needs to appeal to a broader audience than the 40-50,000 CIOs grazing in the market.

Technology marketers should be thinking about marketing across, within, around and inside of big buying organizations. The shape of the marketing challenge is changing from one of big elephant hunting to tribal organizing.

I expanded on that core idea here: http://www.velocitypartners.co.uk/2011/12/28/for-2012-never-a-better-time-to-...

Enjoyed the insights from everyone who has posted here. We have tried to capture our learnings from B2B clients in a series of posts on our blog (3 done, 2 more to go). What we have heard as 2012 trends are:

1. Maximize the RPM Investment: See http://bit.ly/kz-blg
2. Campaign & Funnel Automation: See http://bit.ly/trnds-2
3. Go Social, Go Cloud, without IT: See http://bit.ly/trnds-3
4. Connectors, Connectors, Connectors
5. Marketing Mobile to Business

David talks about "Advocate management". We are seeing that as one of the areas of interest for demand gen, i.e. tap into customer advocates to drive word of mouth, demand, leads and sales.

Ardath and Doug talk about APIs, and how different marketing systems and tools need to "play nice" in the larger enterprise marketing ecosystem. Could n't agree more! That's the theme of what we mean by "Connectors, Connectors, Connectors". All marketing tools and systems need to decide what are their core competency areas, and then open up to others, so the marketer (customer) wins!

Joe talks about demand gen and social. We see that as well. In fact the larger opportunity (which we explore in "Go Social, Go Cloud, without IT") is for enterprise marketers to work in a connect into social at every point of engagement with a prospect, whether it's an email, website, Facebook page, affiliate / partner, display, re-targeting or even mobile. Essentially make it real easy for a prospect or customer to advocate the brand or business, at the point of engagement.

The other opportunity we explore is leveraging "Social Real Identity" in other B2B channels (e.g. a company website) making for a much richer experience for users. Imagine customer testimonials enhanced with social identity, increasing the relevance, trust and authenticity of those testimonials, even as they stay "current" as the testimonial provider switches roles or companies...

The overriding need, we see, is for campaign approaches, or tools that tackle multi-channel campaign execution, while making life easier for the marketer. Enable quick and easy re-use of campaign components across channels. Take an "improve what we already do" approach, as opposed to forcing marketers to completely re-invent an existing methodology, approach or process that they know works. They just want it to work better!