As diversity chair for the Greater Fort Worth Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America, I was recently tasked with bringing in a guest speaker to discuss communicating with a diverse audience. (The luncheon was focused specifically on diversity.) I invited L. Michelle Smith, AT&T’s head of corporate diversity, and was pleasantly surprised — and excited — when she discussed the company’s use of the Net Promoter Score, or NPS, to measure audience engagement with its brand.

NPS is a real-time measure of how your customers feel about you. Ms. Smith spoke about how AT&T had tailored a segmented messaging strategy to its LGBT audience and used the NPS system to measure the strategy’s effect.

We live our mantra of Changing B2B Marketing Forever. It’s our commitment to embrace processes and methodologies that really set us apart in our space. So, when we see bad practices out there in the world in which we live, we need to speak up. That’s the case here, where we delve into junk research — a practice condoned by some marketing folks to peddle so-called research just to make a buck. In this white paper, we’ll outline what to look for to avoid junk research and how to develop sound practices that yield actionable and insightful data from sound research.

I won't bury the lede: Through the middle of 2014, more money has been invested in human capital technology than in all of 2013 (at that point, an all time high for investment). 

That's according to a report released this month from CB Insights. Again, remember that 2014's numbers only stretch through the end of June: