Marketo announced its new social marketing application that features a tight integration between social, email, mobile and web channels. This new application transforms social marketing into a fully integrated marketing process that can be combined with email, web marketing, online events, and other customer communication strategies, according to company officials.

With this new social marketing application, dedicated social engagement campaigns such as social sweepstakes can use and feed into a unified customer profile database, and social marketing tactics can be added to amplify marketing campaigns in traditional digital channels.

Demand Gen Report recently caught up with Michael Brenner, VP of Global Marketing and Content Strategy for SAP, to discuss the process of creating a successful content hub for your brand. Brenner developed an award-winning inbound marketing content destination site for SAP called Business Innovation and will speak on the topic of content management at the upcoming B2B Content2Conversion Conference, to be held April 22-23 at the TimesCenter in New York.

Demand Gen Report: What does it take for a vendor to become a trusted source for content?

Michael Brenner: Stop acting like a vendor for starters. The biggest challenge for content marketers in any size organization is convincing everyone else that to become a trusted source of content you have to act like a trusted source of content. The content has to be something that people actually want, are looking for, or that they will find valuable or entertaining. In short, you have to act like a publisher who (mostly) makes an effort to appear like their content is not swayed by their need to make money.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth an inbox full of email, E-books and white papers. B2B marketers have been increasingly adding video to their content playbook as vendors roll out tools that enable them to gather more precise information about not only who downloaded their video, but how long they viewed it, what sections they played back and other unique metrics that marketers can’t track with other types of content.

As executives become more engaged with video, it is becoming a more powerful way for B2B marketers to communicate. The Echo Effect Study 2012 by IDG found that 58% of B2B tech buyers watched videos to find information on products they wish to buy, and 54% watched videos for product reviews. After watching a video, 66% researched a product; 46% visited a vendor web site or contacted a vendor for more information; 42% purchased a product; and 25% added the vendor to the short list for consideration.

With the latest version of the Chatter collaboration tool from Salesforce.com, users will be able to access, create and act on customer information in the Chatter feed, from any mobile device.

With the new Chatter, mobile will be able to:

• Access all customer information stored inside Salesforce including customer accounts, campaigns, cases, leads, opportunities and custom apps built on top of the Salesforce Platform. Users can get real-time updates such as a quote approval, service inquiry or social conversation;
• Create and edit information and notifications from the new publisher that lets users seamlessly scroll through a variety of actions including files, photos, polls, and tasks; and
• Act on updates around contacts, accounts, opportunities, campaigns and custom records directly from the feed.

Pinterest has rolled out Pinterest Web Analytics to offer marketersinsights into how visitors are interacting with pins that originate from their web sites. This analytics tool is currently available to verified web sites.

Key features of Pinterest Web Analytics include:

• Capturing information on the amount of visitors pinned content from your site;
• Number of Pinterest users that have viewed these pins;
• Number of visitors that have accessed your site via Pinterest; and
• Analytics on the most repinned, clicked and recent pins.

Overall email volume increased 5% in Q4 2012 compared to the same period the previous year, according to a recent Experian Marketing Services benchmark report. In addition, the Experian study found that unique open rates increased 12% year over year in Q4 2012.

Additional key findings from the report include:

• The revenue per email increased 8% in Q4 2012 compared to the same time last year, an increase from 13 cents to 14 cents per email year over year;
• The email volume among different industries shows that travel emails reported the largest increase with 21.4%; and
• The revenue per email in Q4 2012 was 30% higher than in Q3 2012, an increase from 11 cents per email to 14 cents.

Firefox, the open source Internet browser claiming 11% of global market share, has announced it will no longer allow third-party tracking cookies. Other companies have discouraged tracking cookies, but now Firefox has developed a complete block.

For the demand generation and lead generation business this is either a) a disaster of nuclear proportions, b) the start of a legitimate targeting issue, or c) an inconsequential decision by a flagging technology company.

B2B data services firm NetProspex announced the availability of Workbench, an online platform for marketing data management. Workbench puts tools directly into the hands of B2B marketers to help them improve the data used in their marketing and sales outreach, according to company officials.

“What we learned in doing our B2B Marketing Data Benchmark Report is that this issue of managing data is huge and there are not a lot of tools available to help marketers ensure data integrity,” Maribeth Ross, NetProspex’s VP of Marketing, told Demand Gen Report. “Data integrity falls by the wayside and becomes secondary to getting the actual work done.”