Zdnet has a great transcript posted from a recent AlwaysOn panel on blogging, including some concise and practical advice on how to build a compelling blog from Buzzmachine’s Jeff Jarvis, Peter Rojas of Engadget, and Elizabeth Spiers, publisher of Dealbreaker.com. If you write a blog, either personally or commercially, it’s worth the quick read.

Thunk, Inc., a design and development studio in San Francisco, is launching a new application at Demo 07 that mashes up proposal automation, CRM and business productivity tools. The solution, called [tag]Honeypitch[/tag], enables the creation, collaboration and negotiation of proposals, estimates and contracts online.

The goal is to enable teams to create the perfect pitch of ideas, services, and products that generates immediate feedback and results. Each customized pitch has version-controlled sections and topic-based message boards that allows both parties to agree to terms with confidence.

Details won’t be available until after the Demo launch, but you can sign up for the beta invitation at Honeypitch.com.

[tag]SugarCRM[/tag] just keeps bringing on more reasons for companies to consider OpenSource CRM. Although Yankee Group estimates Sugar’s market share at only 1%, eclipsed by up-market proprietary software providers like [tag]SalesForce.com[/tag] and [tag]SAP[/tag], SugarCRM continues adding to an array of enterprise class features priced cheaper than the competition–potentially vastly cheaper if you have a savvy engineering team.

SugarCRM bills itself as a “commercial open source” provider, which means they have built a platform and development community around an open source product that anyone can download, use and hopefully enhance, all for free. They also provide commercial products with Professional and Enterprise editions, including on-demand versions. They’ve built a reputation for highly customizable and powerful software, backed not only by the company, but by a large community of thousands of passionate developers. They say their typical clients are small businesses who don’t want to pay the high cost of other CRM solutions, and large enterprise businesses with significant customization requirements. They haven’t been much of a threat to Salesforce, Siebel or even Microsoft, with whom they now partner, but their success in building strong products and buzz may change that.

The latest additions to Sugar 4.5 include Multi-Channel Marketing and Business Analytics modules. The Multi-Channel Marketing module offers campaing creation and tracking across channels, a web form for capturing leads, and ROI reporting. The Business Analytics Module, which is only available in the commercial additions Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise, provides advanced data filtering and customizable reports. It’s unclear if or when this module will filter down to the Open Source product. 

You can play around with the on-demand SugarCRM product directly online at demo.sugarondemand.com .

[tag]PowerReviews[/tag] is getting a lot of buzz for a company that won’t officially launch until sometime late this year. But the company’s potential to aggregate a significant swath of consumer product reviews, and a host of user-friendly features to help customers filter through those reviews seem pretty compelling. Based on the concept of taking Amazon’s review system to the wider Web, PowerReviews will offer it’s review platform for free to online retailers, while centrally aggregating and disseminating reviews across their network. That means consumers can research a potential purchase at their favorite online store, while tapping into a much wider network of customers who have reviewed the same product at other stores. The product will be free to retailers; the company says it will earn revenue from its own shopping portal, leveraging the reviews to drive optional Pay-Per-Click traffic back to retailers.

There are a number of interesting features designed to enhance usability for posting and researching reviews, from a social tagging system to a review summary that filters up the topline takeaways from consumer reviews. One of the more interesting features is Verified Purchaser, which spotlights reviews written by consumers who have actually purchased the product in question, as validated by the retailer.

What makes this product interesting is the opportunity to consolidate a large portion of consumer review data. This would provide huge opportunities not only for advertising, but also for direct market access and research for merchants. Imagine as a merchant having a dashboard highlighting review trends and individual alerts so you can stay more closely in touch with consumers commenting on your products. Instead of having to monitor a huge number of sites, you’d have them consolidated in one place. The site already mentions the opportunity for merchants to “respond to reviews”, but the terse wording of this feature, and the otherwise narrowly defined revenue model suggest this might be a bigger part of the upcoming release than they want to announce. But now I’m just speculating.

What’s useful for marketers to consider is how to keep your ear close to the ground where consumers are commenting on your products. That’s a daunting task in a world full of vastly distributed social sites offering their own forums for product reviews. To the extent that a company like PowerReviews might draw some of those disparate threads together, marketers should pay attention.

Chris Saad, Co-Founder and CEO of [tag]Faraday Media[/tag] , the company behind the Touchstone Attention Management Engine, launched the Media 2.0 Working Group today. The group includes a growing spectrum of influential developers, marketers, media representatives and commentators, organized to discuss, debate–and ultimately to help shape–the accelerating transformation of the media industry and the growth of social media.

“The Media 2.0 Workgroup is a group of industry commentators, agitators and innovators who believe that the phenomena of democratic participation will change the face of Media Creation, Distribution and Consumption. Join the conversation…”

Currently, the working group’s web site provides an aggregated feed of articles and postings from more than a dozen industry vocies–a list that is apparently growing rapidly after the buzz from its launch today. Given the growing excitement around social media and its impact on marketing, this promises to be an important listening post for emerging trends.

I’m excited to announce the launch of MarketingRev, the first news blog dedicated exclusively to the marketing technology industry. [tag] MarketingRev[/tag] is a technology news source for tech-savvy marketers. Our coverage focuses on the products and companies that provide applications and technology services to enterprise and SMB marketing organizations.

As the content on this site grows, you’ll notice a few tools to help you drill down into the topics that interest you most. Of course, there’s the standard search box you can use to search posts by keywords, and we’ll be building out categories to group major product areas, like CRM, Enterprise Marketing Management, Content Management, etc. But there’s also a robust tagging system that we’ll use to create an index of companies covered here. The most popular tags will appear under the search bar, and a full index will grow on the “index” page listed on the top navigation bar. Additionally, we’ve created a Swicki through [tag]Eurekster[/tag], providing a filtered search on marketing technology products, that you can help refine by flagging content you find useful. Try it!

If you’re a marketing technology provider, please submit your company profile and news by using the submission form on our Contact page. We respect any embargoes on announcements, just let us know What and When you’re ready to announce.

Finally, although we’re starting out with a focus on news, we do want to develop commentary by opening the discussion on companies and products to you. So please comment on our posts, let us know what you think, and describe any experiences or impressions you’ve had with the products and companies covered. And if there’s something you think we could be doing better, either in our coverage, or in the resources we’re providing on MarketingRev, please drop us a note at editor@marketingrev.com
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