Our Blog
From Mad Men Advertising to Rabbit Hole Marketing – A Recap
We came, we ate breakfast, we learned – all before the blizzard hit. Pretty good timing on the Business Marketing Association’s part. Any marketer knows, the way to an audience’s heart is great information presented in a fun engaging way. As the panelists discussed their journey through the world of digital, I had to keep looking around to remind myself that I wasn’t in fact at Acme Comedy Club. If they are marketers by day, they had to secretly grace the stages of comedy joints at night – they were hilarious. The panelists included: Patrick Dunn – Director of Sales & Marketing at GetWireless Mike Bernard – VP of Services at Relationship One Jason McConnell – Director of Marketing Communications at Sport Ngin Bob Peterson – Research Director for SiriusDecisions The best part about this panel, besides their comedic flair, was that they provided a range of point of views, from consulting to corporate to startups, from B2B to B2C. The panel was moderated by our own Rebecca Ramsden, Director of Interactive Marketing. Bye Bye, Mad Men The days of Don Draper and telling consumers what/how to buy are over. They’ve taken over the selling process, leaving organizations in […]
Harness the Power of Hadoop for Marketing Automation.
We’re excited to announce that we’ve launched a new product, the Hadoop-Silverpop API Connector. SmartBase was the first to develop this kind of application between these popular tools – We’re really proud of it! So, what is it? Glad you asked! The Hadoop-Silverpop API Connector is an application that connects our Hadoop platform, also known as HURON, to your Silverpop marketing automation platform through API calls. HURON contains a proprietary processing engine inside the Hadoop structure that makes your data useful. As a marketer, being able to easily access to all of the data in your organization and actually use it is a dream scenario. This connector makes that dream possible! Typically, as seen above, Hadoop pushes the data to a relational store and that relational store feeds the Marketing automation platform. This doesn’t allow full use of the data you’ve collected and makes it complicated to bring in another data variable. Essentially, you’re restricted by the fields of the relational store. Our application connects to the platform itself to be able to access all of the data in Hadoop directly, cracking open the treasure chest of marketing campaign possibilities. What does it do? Our application manages your databases and relational […]
SBS Featured in 50 Most Powerful Big Data Vendors
SmartBase was pleased to be featured as one of the top 50 Most Powerful Big Data Vendors in CIO Story’s ‘Big Data Technology of 2015’ issue. As we’ve focused our organization back to our roots of data, we’ve found that this is where our clients can find the most growth in their organizations. Once your data is clean, accessible and analyzed, you can streamline operations, improve R&D and predict trends for the future. This is true of almost all industries and, as data grows exponentially, it won’t be something organizations can ignore for much longer. This is why we’ve created HURON, our Data Analytics Platform that is supported by Hadoop. HURON is a data lake that houses, processes and analyzes your data in a way that makes your data useful. Our proprietary data processing engine within HURON is the muscle that makes this analytics platform unique and effective. Here’s a little bit more about the platform from the CIO Story article: “The SBS Anlaytics Platform is a data lake that comes with pre-built functions for data acquisition and ingest, profiling and cleansing, data append and integration. It also boasts of industry leading discover and visualization tools for exploring data using various analytic […]
10 Big Data Analytics Conferences You Need to Know About in 2016
Because technology changes almost daily, keeping your data science skills polished will keep you a step ahead of the rest. Here are 10 data analytics conferences / summits / forums that we think will be helpful to you as you and your organization dive into 2016. We’ve included the hashtags of these conferences so even if you can’t make it, you’ll be able to follow along on social media for those golden nuggets of data wisdom. Enjoy! As we’re headed toward 2017, check out our list of data analytics conferences for the remainder of 2016. January Chief Analytics Officer Forum When: January 26-27th 2016 Where: New York, NY Speakers: 40+ Speakers – Charles Schwab, Affinity Health Plan, State Farm Insurance, Sharp Healthcare, McGraw-Hill Education Hashtag: #CAOForum Big Data Innovation Summit – ‘Making Your Data Actionable’ When: January 28-29th 2016 Where: Las Vegas, NV Speakers: eBay, Boeing, US Dept of Commerce, Groupon and GE Hashtag: #DataVegas16 February Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit – ‘Advancing Insight Through Data Science’ When: February 18-19th 2016 Where: San Diego, CA Speakers: TE Connectivity, Washington Post, LiveNation, XBOX, and LinkedIn Hashtag: #PASanDiego April Enterprise Data World – ‘The Transformation to Data-Driven Business Starts Here’ When: April 17-22nd […]
B2B Marketing Success Stories: Breaking Through the Clutter
As B2B marketers, we hear a lot about the problems, challenges and hardships we face. Do you ever wonder ‘where are the success stories?’ Us too. Along with the BMAMN, we’re excited to help share what’s working in the B2B marketing space right here in our backyard. Our own Director of Interactive Marketing, Rebecca Ramsden, will be facilitating a panel discussion with other Minnesota marketing leaders from Deluxe, Alignex, Salo and Turck. The panelists will share their successes and reveal how they did it – and how you can too. Are you on Twitter? You can follow them here: Cameron Potts – VP Public Relations, Deluxe – @campotts Nicole Yager – Director of Marketing, Alignex – @nicoleyager Maureen Sullivan – Director of Marketing, Salo – @mesullivan9 Chris Vitale – Director of Marketing, TURCK – @chris_vitale SmartBase Solutions – @SmartBaseMN (Shameless plug) Who is this event for? Marketing professionals in B2B companies who are looking for creative and effective content marketing techniques that will help their message to stand above the rest. Details: Success Stories: Breaking Through the Clutter August 4, 2015 – 7:30 to 9:30 am Breakfast | Presentation | Q&A | Networking Metropolitan Ballroom & Clubroom Register today to learn what successful Minnesota businesses are doing with video, storytelling, […]
Apple, Taylor Swift and Customer Loyalty
I won’t give you the entire backstory between Apple and Taylor Swift. You can read that here. I’ll just refer to the bones of the story. Taylor Swift didn’t agree with a decision made by Apple and she did what a lot of people do: She shared her thoughts about it with her followers on social media. On Sunday morning she wrote a letter to Apple on Tumblr, a popular blogging social network, and it was ‘hearted’ by 70k+ of her extremely loyal fans. It was also picked up by several news sites you may have heard of, like the NY Times, Forbes, and Fortune. As an influencer with millions of fans all over the world that are waiting intently to hear/see what she is saying and doing next, it’s obviously advisable to listen when Taylor has a gripe. Especially because Taylor is known for using her influencer power to speak for those whose voices aren’t often heard. Not everyone has Taylor’s status, but companies should treat each of their customers as if they were Taylor-sized influencers. And I’m going to tell you why. Are you listening? Now a disheartening statistic brought to you by Sprout Social: 5 out of every 6 attempts to interact with a brand on […]
SmartBase Office Relocation: We’re Moving to North Loop!
Over the last 6 months, we’ve been focused on what we want the future to look like for SmartBase. We created a ‘Big Data’ offering that we’re calling Analytic Platform Solutions (APS). Adding this expertise to the SmartBase portfolio will be crucial for our customers in the next few years. The amount of data being created by your customers and your company is growing exponentially – We want you to be able to actually USE it! With more great offerings came the need for additional talented people to execute these services for clients like you. So we hired the best and now we are feeling a little bit squished in our current office space. The new space Our new office search started in St. Louis Park, Northeast Minneapolis and the North Loop. We narrowed it down to several options and then let every employee vote on where they’d like to work. In the end, the majority chose North Loop and we’re very excited to be moving! The new office is located in the Internet Exchange Building at 411 Washington Ave N. It was built in 1913 and the first tenant was the Studebaker Brothers manufacturing company. They used this building to assemble horse-drawn buggies and used the railroad behind the building to ship them […]
The Woman’s Club of Minneapolis Welcomes a New President
“Individual commitment to a group effort–that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi I love that quote. In leading my businesses over the last 10 years, I’ve found that living and breathing this concept is effective for success. I believe that the whole is only as good as the sum of its parts and when the individual is committed to the group, the end result is stronger. After the last year serving as President Elect, May 1st marked the official start of my Presidency at the Woman’s Club of Minneapolis. I’m both excited and anxious to be at the helm of the club because I know that inspiring member commitments, as I mentioned above, will create a stronger organization. Thinking about how far the club has come in the last 10 years has helped me determine a clear vision for its future. My main priority will be building the Woman’s Club into the epicenter of intellectual, social, and business stimulation in the Twin Cities area for women of all ages. My goal is to create a rich, invigorating environment; one where women can gather together, improve the community, network, […]
Give It Back: Putting Our Bodies to Use After Death
I’m a gardener. For nearly 40 years I’ve had my own garden and before that I helped my mother with hers. I’ve taken from and enriched the gardens I’ve worked with. It makes sense to me to give the last, best thing I have to the earth as I leave it; my body. Now, I’m in no hurry to leave, but I do understand that there’s an opportunity that comes from death. We make room for new life and can repurpose one of our most valuable assets – our bodies. Today’s traditional burial, in a casket surrounded by cement or in a 2000 degree fire, is a waste of our last gift to the world. The Business of Bodies: How did we get here? The World Health Organization estimates that by the year 2050, there will be two billion people who are over the age of 60. They also estimate that people over the age of 80 will have quadrupled by then. There’s going to be a lot of bodies. Numerous businesses have arisen over the past 100 years to attend to the needs of the dead and their loved ones. And experience that was once kept within the […]
8 Things We’re Looking Forward to at the Healthcare Marketing and Physicians Strategies Summit (#HMPS15)
We’re gearing up for the Healthcare Marketing & Physicians Strategies Summit next week. It’s almost here! This three day conference is packed with so much information they needed 3 separate tracks to get through it all! We’ll be attending sessions from Strategic Marketing to Customer Communication and Engagement to [our favorite] Analytics, Data and Measurement. We wanted to share all of the things we’re really looking forward to at HMPS15 but our list was way too long. For the sake of your precious time, we cut it down to these 8: 1. Yoga. It’s happening every morning before the sessions start. Calming your mind and focusing in is the perfect way to get your conference day started. Plus, there’ll be some free goodies for attendees! 2. Ann Handley. As the First Chief Content Officer, she knows that without great content, campaign efforts go to waste and high engagement is near impossible. We can’t wait to hear her strategies and best practices for attracting, engaging and retaining customers and patients with content. 3. The New Science of Marketing. This preconference session on Monday April 13th highlights everything we’re passionate about; using data to drive strategic decision making. What every org wants, […]