Do you remember when you first joined LinkedIn? If it was near the start, there were a bunch of people who invited you to be on the platform. The person who invited me was influential and someone I respected, so I started to fill in the form. I didn't write too much and didn't think too much about it afterwards. Afterall, I wasn't their target market - or was I?

In business, to be successful you need revenue, and to fuel revenue you need LEADS. Put simply, lead generation encompasses all activities relating to the identification and cultivation of potential customers.

In the middle of the night, I woke up. I had arrived in Atlanta late yesterday and made the fatal mistake of going to sleep early. Mostly because I felt the need to be fresh today.

As you know I write. Sometimes on this blog, in magazines, in newspapers, books - you name it. I do it because it is my passion. So it will come as no surprise that as a writer I decided to do a #callout on LinkedIn to other marketers asking them simple questions like why they got into marketing, why they like marketing and what's next.

When I first joined LinkedIn many years ago, I was reluctant. The only reason I joined was because the person requesting me to join was a guy in YPO organisation that I respected, and I thought I should say yes. It was long before everyone else got on board, and I didn't see the relevance as I was a business owner - but something said to me that it would play a big role in the future of marketing.

We are about to embark on our last quarter of the financial year, and like most companies, we are seeking to accelerate our sales performance and leverage our current marketing structure and assets.

Marketing Eye is one of Australia's most recognisable marketing consulting firms due to our online performance. We were early adopters of everything from websites through to social media use. We know that every single month search engine optimisation must be a priority, and blogging keeps our prospects coming back time and time again.

What was once a hobby can now be a lucrative career, as social media becomes a unique branch within a company’s communications department.

If you don’t believe me check out all the ads for social media experts that now pervade seek.com.au. They are many and varied and companies will pay six figures for the right person.

While a sex tape is a good way to get media exposure for some; Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton and alike - it's not the right way to get the type of media exposure to escalate your business's chance of being written about.

When I first started doing PR, I used to write a media release and fax it to a media outlet - all with varying results. The headline, like it is today, is worth it's weight in gold, and if you have a strong first paragraph, you may get that call back you have been waiting for.

That was soon followed up with 'pitching' on the telephone and depending on what mood the journalist was in or your ability to 'sell' a story to them, you either walked away with a published article or your press release was thrown in the trash can.

In 1998, the faxing part changed to emailing which was fantastic because it was a much faster and less tedious way of getting a media release out to journalists. It also was a much more environmentally friendly way to operate and allowed for changes to be made to ensure that each email sent out to a journalist was a one-to-one marketing piece rather than an everything to everyone, hit and miss style approach.

The lines blurred sometime in the last 10 years, but I don't know exactly when it happened.

Having started my first business at 25 years of age, specializing in technology marketing, I thought I had it all. A marketer who understood technology marketing and who could talk the talk which at that time seemed to be, the height of the dot com boom, the most lucrative marketing position one could hold.

Then of course, someone came along and started talking about company culture, and marketers took a turn to start embellishing the on-boarding process of new recruits, with a mixture of "people marketing" with "technology marketing" - and for a time, that was all the rage. It seemed to be the only thing people were talking about and marketers started to play a role in human resources, giving recruiters and in-house HR managers the tools to "sell their brands" like they were a front line sales executive needing to close the deal in order to reach their quotas.