Welcome to the GMG Blog! We are super-excited to finally have our new site live, complete with a tech industry marketing blog. Our site was a tad delayed. The reason? We are growing like crazy, and we have been so busy getting our clients in the press, their products launched and their web sites up and running, we suffered the whole “the cobbler’s kids ain’t got no shoes” thing. But, as of today, that is remedied. So, think of this blog spot and the revamped GMG website as a place to visit (subscribe to our RSS feed, please) to read what our team members–some of the best marketing pros in the tech industry–think about the latest trends and goings on in the tech world and beyond.

The first thing I’d like address is the recent fiasco with Ann Taylor’s LOFT, because I think it says a lot about the changing communications landscape. If you haven’t heard, LOFT sent out a variety of promotional emails along with a push on its highly active Facebook page advertising a one-night only sale.

“EXTRA! EXTRA! Every Item 40 percent off!”

“Only until 8am tomorrow morning!”

“BUY NOW! COME…SPEND MONEY, LOFT fans!!!”

It was all very exciting (for me, anyway, since I’m a big fan of LOFT and new clothes, in general.)

So, I clicked.

And, the site was down with a message conveying the site was being revamped and maintenance.

“That’s weird, I thought.” So, I checked and rechecked my email.

“Nope. The time was right,” I thought.

So, having cool clients like Parature, a provider of customer engagement software that offers a plug-in to Facebook, I went to the LOFT corporate page on the world’s largest social network. Guess what? The negative response was overwhelming. Thousands of clients with comments that I don’t want to publish on our blog (read: not for the kids). And, radio silence from the marketing team at LOFT.

The point? In today’s day and age, the customer is empowered to tell anyone, anything at any time. There is no such thing as a low-value customer. All of those angry women had hundreds, if not a thousand, Facebook friends. And, they were mad. It was a great proof point for the need for real-time response to customer inquiries and comments in social channels as well as a need for brand marketers to tap social media monitoring and analysis tools to keep abreast of what is going on and figure out how to respond as quickly as possible.

We’re lucky to be in the business of helping really cool tech companies that are addressing the hottest and most in-demand business technologies today. Parature is one example. Another is Infegy, provider of the industry’s most intelligent web analytics tool for monitoring and analyzing sentiment shifts and used by brand marketers to see how well a campaign is working or how bad a crisis altered consumer confidence.

It’s just neat to be in the game with tech vendors that are shifting the way people do business and communicate with one another. We love it.