Here's another interesting session from the South by Southwest Interactive conference a few weeks ago... Dharmesh Shah, co-author of the Inbound Marketing book, gave a concise, high-speed presentation on some of the best practices in social media marketing.  Here are a couple of video clips from his session:

A lot of the startups I work with, both open source companies and SaaS, are now taking Inbound Marketing more seriously as a way to grow their business, whether it's an open source business, cloud, SaaS or some combination.  The reality is it's just not good enough to have a killer product.  You need to have a dialog with prospects and make sure …

Around a year ago, I took on a new role at Sun as vice president of lifecycle marketing. While the title was an odd one, the charter was pretty straightforward: Bring the best practices of open source, Web 2.0, and modern online marketing to Sun's portfolio of servers, storage, software, and services in order to drive up revenues and drive down customer acquisition costs.

Open source was an incredible calling card that we could use to determine what customers were interested in. Now we just needed to figure out how to harvest that interest.  It worked for …