By Jesse Noyes, Corporate Reporter, Eloqua

This year’s South By Southwest Interactive festival didn’t deliver much breaking news. That’s surprising because SXSWi has become an annual pilgrimage for tech geeks looking to discover the next Twitter or Foursquare.

This time around mostly incremental improvements were rolled out, like CNN’s “Open Stories” initiative. In case you missed it – and you probably did – Open Stories is basically a platform where users can contribute content to individual stories with photos, location-mapping and text. Yeah, it’s a lot like Wikipedia.

By Jesse Noyes, Corporate Reporter, Eloqua

This year’s South By Southwest Interactive festival didn’t deliver much breaking news. That’s surprising because SXSWi has become an annual pilgrimage for tech geeks looking to discover the next Twitter or Foursquare.

This time around mostly incremental improvements were rolled out, like CNN’s “Open Stories” initiative. In case you missed it – and you probably did – Open Stories is basically a platform where users can contribute content to individual stories with photos, location-mapping and text. Yeah, it’s a lot like Wikipedia.

Responsys, Inc., a provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions, announced enhancements to its existing integration with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture. Unveiled at the recent Adobe Omniture Summit 2011, the enhancements are aimed at accelerating time-to-market and reducing complexity of cross-channel marketing campaigns.

The update to the Responsys integration is designed to empower marketers by automatically summarizing web analytics data that is captured by Adobe SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture, into pre-defined audience segments within the Responsys Interact user interface. The integration leverages Adobe Genesis, Adobe’s technology for automating integrations between partner technologies and the Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

Responsys, Inc., a provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions, announced enhancements to its existing integration with the Adobe Online Marketing Suite, powered by Omniture. Unveiled at the recent Adobe Omniture Summit 2011, the enhancements are aimed at accelerating time-to-market and reducing complexity of cross-channel marketing campaigns.

The update to the Responsys integration is designed to empower marketers by automatically summarizing web analytics data that is captured by Adobe SiteCatalyst, powered by Omniture, into pre-defined audience segments within the Responsys Interact user interface. The integration leverages Adobe Genesis, Adobe’s technology for automating integrations between partner technologies and the Adobe Online Marketing Suite.

Genius.com today announced that it has closed a new round of funding, led by Emergence Capital, one of the company’s original backers and a leading VC in the SaaS space. Existing investors Mohr Davidow Ventures, Accel Partners and Deep Fork Capital also participated.

Genius plans to use the additional funding to increase investments in marketing and engineering, particularly around its freemium option, which is targeted at the SMB market.

eTrigue Corporation, a provider of marketing automation and sales acceleration Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, today unveiled DemandCenter, a new marketing automation platform designed to allow organizations of all sizes and expertise levels to develop and execute demand generation programs.

Focused on providing “marketing automation for the rest of us,” eTrigue DemandCenter boasts “a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface and simultaneous campaign view that allows anyone to run successful marketing campaigns in less time with limited training.”

There has been a flood of research and analysis popping up over the last few years pointing to the emergence of content marketing. However, few resources have provided prescriptive insights into how to create a content strategy specific to individual business and market dynamics.

There has been a flood of research and analysis popping up over the last few years pointing to the emergence of content marketing. However, few resources have provided prescriptive insights into how to create a content strategy specific to individual business and market dynamics.

There has been a flood of research and analysis popping up over the last few years pointing to the emergence of content marketing. However, few resources have provided prescriptive insights into how to create a content strategy specific to individual business and market dynamics.

Conversion rates of commercial email campaigns increased an average of 16.1% in the fourth quarter of 2010, compared with the same period a year earlier, for the strongest conversion rate (2.9%) in two years, according to a new study from the Direct Marketing Association and email marketing company Epsilon Data Management.

According to the companies' “Q4 2010 Email Trends and Benchmarks” report, open rates (22.1%) and click rates (5.1%) saw little change. Service messages had the highest open rates (38.2%) and click rates (8.0%).