Nick Martin’s Marketing Pages.

Marketers should have their heads in the cloud.

If you haven’t readThe Big Switch by Nicholas Carr yet, you need to add it to your list. Cloud computing — that is, computing infrastructure that is based somewhere out on the Internet, rather than installed on hardware locked in your company’s IT center — is becoming real. Fast.

Combined with the maturity of web-based software-as-a-service offerings, the strong gravitational pull of social media sites where marketers now work beyond the borders of their company’s sandbox, and the widespread proliferation of web services and mash-up APIs, the cloud has become marketing’s new IT platform.

For marketers, this is a terrific opportunity(a) to re-calibrate the relationship between marketing and technology and(b) to expand your capabilities in the “new marketing” environment, where the pace of innovation in online marketing channels and methods continues to accelerate.

I think of “computing in the cloud” for marketing in fairly broad terms — more broadly than thetechnical definition of cloud computing — and divide it into four buckets:

Continues @http://marketingpages.typepad.com

Related articles by Zemanta

• 5 Basic Things to Consider Before Moving Your Startup to the Cloud (readwriteweb.com)
• Rackspace Expanding Cloud Services to the UK; Building on Cloud Growth (eon.businesswire.com)
• Cloud computing benefits start-up companies (slideshare.net)