All buyers want and need to be educated. One of the best ways to do that is making it easy for them to get the information they need to make decisions. Blogs provide an excellent mechanism to do this, especially when paired with other social media tools.

It’s been quite the year, hasn’t it? As we started 2009 it was hard to know what to expect. We were in the depths of our fears about the global financial crisis we had just entered. Every day seemingly brought more bad news and no one knew what would happen next.

Somehow we made it through the year and things are looking up—on some days—and not as up on others. But looking back we’ve learned many things as we’ve weathered the storm. What have we learned you may ask? Here are a few things from my marketing perspective:

One of our ongoing marketing challenges here at IntraLinks (and likely for many other companies who are global in scope) is how to best balance global and local needs in messaging, content and demand generation campaigns. The quick answer to that question is of course: "Glocal" is possible! But is "Glocal" really the answer, or do you instead end up with something that meets neither the need for global consistency nor local specificity?

We're right in the middle of those hazy, lazy days of summer, when it can be challenging to stay focused on serious business issues. But one thing that I have been reading and thinking about lately is the fine line between gaining more insight into your clients and prospects and crossing that line into the gray space that feels more like invasion of privacy. I don't mean invasion in the legal or technical sense but in an ethical and moral sense. When is staying close to your customer a little too close?

I'm not the only one thinking about this issue of course. The July 31, 2009 New York Times had a cover article entitled, "Ads Follow Web Users, and Get More Personal" which addressed some of these same concerns. Technology is enabling us to learn more about our clients and prospects in their daily lives and particularly in their online lives. We can now have a front row seat observing them as they surf the web, transact online and view material on demand. It's a cornucopia of information!

I try not to dwell on it but I've been in the corporate world now for over two decades. When I started at my first job we not only didn't have the Internet, we didn't even have a PC on our floor! We took our typing downstairs to a typing pool that did our projects, returned them to us for editing so we could return them to the typing pool for another draft. Repeat. Repeat. No one had heard of email, web sites, social networking or blogging. It was a world of hard copy office memos, hard copy brochures, hard copy advertising and more or less one way communication with our customers and prospects.

Flash forward to 2009. PCs are not only on every desk but a BlackBerry is in every pocket. Or maybe an iPhone. There is no such thing as really being out of the office or away from your desk. Pretty much everything is online, virtual, soft copy, in the cloud and moving at the speed of light. So what's a marketing old timer to do??