In between a mountain of work I’ve been popping in and out of the Marketo User Conference in San Francisco. One of the words that keeps being used is “moments”. It seems that it is the “moment for moments”.

Adam Bain (the Twitter Adam) was the first person I heard speak about the importance of moments to marketers. It struck me as really important in the context of Twitter – that is what we do on Twitter, express the moments that matter around us.

Marketo is clearly building on this idea (maybe without knowing of Adam and Twitter’s use of the phrase – which is OK). How do we use marketing automation platforms – and marketing in total to drive customer engagement – to create moments in which customers experience our products and new kinds of value are created. And, how do we manage the moments that aren’t going to plan.

Couple of other big thought-starters so far:

• Most large marketing teams are really struggling to build marketing operations capability that reflect their scale. For businesses like Xero, we nail this early and fast. Without a strong marketing operations capability, you can’t win in a marketing technology centric world.
• SMB as a phrase should be entirely eliminated. There are small businesses and then there are medium businesses. They are no more similar than MLB – medium large businesses. Lets stop characterizing them as the same when they aren’t.
• Marketers should never assume that the role of marketing is understood – or that it is a cookie-cutter of what the exec team did somewhere else. Great brands are building amazing customer momentum with no marketing. MyfitnessPal got to 45 million users with no marketing – but now marketing plays a vital role in driving engagement.
• Engagement will be a key marketing activity, if it isn’t already. For the past decade marketing automation has driven focus to acquisition – how many funnel diagrams have you seen that stop at win/loss. Those same platforms are now being turned to focus on engagement and how won customer become addicts and advocates. 
• Employees are a squandered marketing resource. How do we build amazing employee referral systems that turn every employee into not just an advocate but an active acquirer of customers.
• Engaged leaders are vulnerable. Read Charlene Li’s book and check out Brene Brown. Had a great conversation with Charlene Li on why I think authenticity isn’t a great thing to ask for (people can often be authentically awful) when the central cultural barrier in organisations is a lack of vulnerability.

More to come…. your thoughts?