David Raab

I’m spending more time on airplanes these days, which means more time browsing airport bookshops. Since spy stories and soft core porn are neither to my taste, the pickings are pretty slim. But I did recently stumble across Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, one of several recent books that explain the latest scientific research into human decision-making.

Lehrer’s book shuttles between commonly-known irrationalities in human behavior – things like assigning a higher value to avoiding loss than achieving gain – and the less known (to me, at least) brain mechanisms that drive them. He makes a few key points, including the importance of non-conscious learning to drive everyday decisions (it turns out that people who can only make conscious, rational decisions are pretty much incapable of functioning), the powerful influence of irrelevant facts (for example, being exposed to a random number influences the price you’re willing to pay for an unrelated object), and the need to...

With its usual fanfare, Marketo today announced the acquisition of social marketing campaign company Crowd Factory.

Crowd Factory is a certified cool product, which is probably reason enough for Marketo to buy them.  But what I find intriguing is how little the two businesses overlap.  Marketo is primarily focused on business marketing, and in particular lead generation, nurturing and analytics. Crowd Factory has some B2B clients but is clearly aimed at large-scale consumer marketing. Campaign types listed on its Web site include refer a friend, social sweepstakes, polls and voting, flash deals, group offers, and intelligent share buttons. Few would be considered relevant for most B2B campaigns.

Indeed, Marketo already had a reasonable set of...

Infusionsoft introduced its latest release earlier this month. This included a full revamp of its customer interface, a new campaign builder and shopping cart, and new capabilities for Web analytics, lead scoring, and lead source reporting.

Stated so plainly, this doesn’t sound like much. But Infusionsoft says it’s the biggest release in company history and I've no reason to doubt.  A new interface and campaign builder are big projects.

Both represent significant improvements over previous Infusionsoft editions. The interface is cleaner, organized around tasks rather than data objects, and lets users customize their menu of top-level functions. The campaign builder now supports branching flows, timers, and multi-step sequences with a smooth drag-and-drop interface. The shopping cart is also significantly more powerful. Lead scoring (nicely executed), Web analytics, and lead source reporting all fill major gaps in the product...

I first bumped into Kwanzoo about a year ago at a conference trade show and was frankly puzzled at what they offered. The mechanics were clear: a tool to generate HTML-based forms, surveys, banner ads, and social sharing links that could be used on Web sites or embedded in emails. What puzzled me was the advantage of this over anyone else’s HTML content, including the content that could be generated using standard tools within most marketing automation systems.

Since this particular mystery ranked somewhere between the fate of Amelia Earhardt  and Nacza Lines  in my personal priorities, I didn’t investigate further. But the company reached out to me recently and provided a clearer explanation. Here’s the story.

What makes Kwanzoo special is it creates a sequence of Web pages that can be deployed as a single unit. A...