As marketers, we are being pushed to know more about more things in more ways than ever before.

Today — we are literally stacking our education, experience in the business, acquired knowledge, personal experiences, interactions, observations and musings up like building blocks to create our portfolio of skills and abilities, in terms of marketing and branding.

The good news is that the information has never been more readily available.  Books, podcasts, white papers, blogs, e-newsletters, webinars and the list just keeps going.

One of my goals for this blog is to be well, a resource for helping you find those resources.  So from time to time, I’m going to give a nod to some good sources that I’ve stumbled upon.

Here are the offerings for this go around:

Resource #1:

Thanks to a post on the accenture blog about their new book CRM Transformation: Transforming Marketing, Sales and Service, I discovered Montgomery Research and their host of thought leadership white papers.  Correlating to the accenture book — they have a section called The CRM Project. 

There you can find white papers with titles like: Smart Enough Customer Decisions,  Continuous  Customer Dialogues (strategies for growth and loyalty) and Transform Customer Data into Profit.  (Note: You do have to sign up to access these white papers, but it’s pretty painless.)

Resource #2:

Joseph Jaffe launches his new book, Join the Conversation, this week.  Jaffe, best known for launching the conversational marketing company, crayon.

It makes sense that a man whose company specializes in community, dialogue and partnership would pen a book that spotlights how companies must adapt to the brave new world of the Internet, social media and networking, consumer-generated content, blogs, and podcasts by joining the rich, deep, and meaningful customer conversations already in progress.

I just got my copy today and can’t wait to dig into it.