Join Suzanne Martin, past BMA/Chicago President and CMO of Revenew, and Tribby Warfield, President, North America Commercial, Gates Corporation, as they lead an early-morning walk/run/bike ride along Lake Michigan. No need to sign up—just assemble in the hotel lobby at 5:30 am. Suzanne and Tribby will get you back to the hotel by 7:00 am.

In this digital, environmentally conscious age, paper too often gets a bad rap. As North America’s leading copier and printer paper maker, Domtar knew it had to do something about the problem, but a broad consumer ad campaign wasn’t in the cards. So Domtar opted to target opinion leaders and purchasers of large volumes of paper. The resulting campaign uses digital, social, viral, video, PR—and, of course, print—to tell the Paper: Because story, which is helping change opinions about paper and create preference for the Domtar brand.

In the "old" days, marketers would create annual plans and pretty much stick to them with little or no deviation. Then came quarterly plans, spurred by faster-changing business conditions and easier-to-change-and-optimize tools. Now, we’re in the era of real-time marketing, where marketing campaigns sometimes resemble political campaigns, inspired by current events and the news and created on the fly. Learn bow some b2b marketers are tapping and borrowing from the consumer marketing and political worlds to do effective real-time b2b marketing.

In the mid-2000s, online b2b communities were red hot. Everyone wanted one. Success stories included ITToolbox, Oracle Technology Network and GlobalSpec’s nrand new CR4. But a funny thing happened along the way: many efforts failed, due largely to lack of customer enthusiasm and adoption. But those that have survived and prospered have figured it out how to make these things work. At least one has become such a strong umbilical cord to customers that its parent is considering taking the child’s name!

In this hour, you will hear five consecutive "firebrands" take 10-12 minutes each to raise the roof on a narrower but key b2b marketing issue or trend.

Twitter brings us closer to the things we care about. With over 400 million Tweets a day, conversations unfold around topics from breaking news to cultural events to marketing trends. Learn how you can tap into these conversations to get closer to customers.

Clichés are everywhere in b2b marketing. Every trade magazine and most PowerPoint decks and websites are jammed with cringe-worthy specimens. We’re so overrun you may be forgiven for thinking it’s hopeless. Learn how to fight this plague and what the antidote might be.

In a slower-growth economy, already-long sales cycles become even more extended. Marketers need to light fires, setting aside ordinary conventions of proper form and process to accelerate decision-making, indeed to create decisions others aren't even yet contemplating.

Nine of 10 b2b marketers are actively creating 'valuable' content for marketing purposes, yet only one in three is seeing results. Plus, the content being created in different silos is causing havoc to the customer experience. What does Joe suggest?