Hi, I'm John Balla - I co-founded the SAS Customer Intelligence blog and served as Editor for five years. I held a number of marketing roles at SAS as Content Strategist, Industry Field Marketing and as Go-to-Marketing Lead for our Customer Intelligence Solutions. I like to find and share content and experiences that open doors, answer questions, and sometimes challenge assumptions so better questions can be asked. Outside of work I am an avid downhill snow skier, hiker and beach enthusiast. I stay busy with my family, volunteering for civic causes, keeping my garden green, striving for green living, expressing myself with puns, and making my own café con leche every morning. I’ve lived and worked on 3 contents and can communicate fluently in Spanish, Portuguese, Hungarian and get by with passable English. Prior to SAS, my experience in marketing ranges from Fortune 100 companies to co-founding two start ups. I studied economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and got an MBA from Georgetown. Follow me on Twitter. Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Brian Solis of the Altimeter Group envisions a future brimming with potential, and a key part of his vision of the future are connected customers. These people are connected thanks to amazing technologies that enable the shared experience to take center stage, and for which new measures of success highlight many big opportunities. The connected
Brian Solis of the Altimeter Group has a compelling vision of the future - one which is replete with promise made possible by great technologies. But these great technologies come with a need to keep them in the right perspective (more on that below). In addition to great technologies, his vision of the future includes
When it comes to online customer data, marketers today have to balance a fine line between consumer privacy and effective marketing. The problem is that it’s quite easy for marketing to be intrusive, annoying and even creepy, so there is a risk that the abusers in our industry may prompt legislation
Today is Father’s Day in the United States, so as I did on Mother’s Day with advice from moms, I gathered fatherly advice from my coworkers, and my friends and colleagues in other organizations to see if I could relate the words of wisdom to marketers. For some, the dads have chosen to
Are you invisible or remarkable? That's the question that Seth Godin believes that marketers should ask themselves in the new economy and there are 3 simple reasons why: All media is now optional - no one is going to look at your tweet or open your junk mail unless they
Integrated marketing is a very broad view of marketing as a circular ecosystem that integrates people, processes and technologies in a process from concept/idea, through planning and resource allocation to execution, evaluation and analysis that feed back into ideas and planning. That definition comes from Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" report on Integrated Marketing Management.
Pharmaceutical companies (“Pharma”) operate in a very complex environment – to begin with, their customer is usually referred to as “the patient” and it gets more complicated from there. The relationship between Pharma and the patient is not always a direct one, and whether or not the customer is “delighted” often
Let me begin by saying that I am a huge fan of Linkedin. To folks who do not know LinkedIn, I always describe it as a "serious social network." When you are on LinkedIn, you post the equivalent of your résumé, add other details, join groups that are usually professionally-oriented and connect with
We're pleased to have Scott Brinker, a thought leader and entrepreneur at the intersection of marketing and technology, as the newest contributor to our sister blog from our friends Down Under called "Left of the Date Line." In his first post for that blog, he explores the idea that everyone in marketing
Today is the day we celebrate Mother’s Day in the United States. So, in honor of Mother’s Day, I decided to crowdsource as much motherly advice as possible to provide useful inspiration for marketers. The inspiration hit me late on Friday afternoon and I'm so pleased to have a big
