Eloqua Chief Privacy Officer Dennis Dayman said there is considerable activity in governments as far as regulating privacy, but not around security and protecting customer data. Dayman said he thinks self-regulation can work, but there's still a need for legislation on security. There is nothing overarching around marketing data, he said.

One suggestion for increasing security around email addresses is whether a person should be prompted to change a password more frequently in order to log-in. Yet, a show of hands vote in the room conducted by Turner Broadcasting's David Bronson indicated that the business is doing a good job there. Eloqua's Dennis Dayman said 8 characters and punctuation should be used as a minimum for a password, but he is not an advocate of "single sign-on."

Eloqua Chief Privacy Officer Dennis Dayman said that marketers trying to prevent hacking into a system with email addresses may need to ramp up a focus on security. "We as marketers don't put the right protections on things like email addresses," he said. Social security numbers are protected heavily, but less so email addresses.

Content Marketing Institute's Joe Pulizzi said email marketers need to focus more on content quality, partly by designating a "Chief Content Officer," or de facto editor-in-chief, internally. The title doesn't have to be known exactly as a "Chief Content Officer," but the role is crucial. Here are some titles in other companies: Cisco – Content Evangelist Incept – Content Engineer Quality Logo Products – Content Marketing Manager Radian6 – Content Community Manager Johns Hopkins – Web Content Coordinator National Instruments – Content Manager Who is best to fill the role? Pulizzi …

Content Marketing Institute's Joe Pulizzi, the keynote speaker Wednesday, said he'll ask a marketer to lay out all its collateral on a table -- brochures, magazines, email newsletters -- and they can't believe the tone. They find: "It's always about us, how can they stand us? How can they want to do business with us, we're sending them all this crap." Make it more about the consumer. Use a pull, not push publishing tactic. A Custom Content Council survey shows 73% of consumers would prefer to get information from a company "in the form of a collection …

Meeting some resistance among executives about using "custom publishing," Content Marketing Institute's Joe Pulizzi said he re-branded it "content marketing" and interest level jumped. He tells email marketers, they are in the content business. “You have to create the most interesting, the most need-to-have content,” whatever the channel, whether print, staging events or email. “You are content marketers, you are in this business,” Pulizzi said. If a TV marketer produces its own content, it has to buy airtime, but with email: "We own our own media channels, we're not renting.”

First example of custom publishing: late 1800s magazine "The Furrow," from John Deere, to inform farmers who had little source of information about new tools. The magazine exists today, with a Web site. Info courtesy of Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute

A new Forrester report "The Interactive Brand Ecosystem" says "more than 80% of American adults are online and on average those users spend as much time on the Internet as they spend watching TV." Same is true for Europeans under 55. Also, on "most days, the MSN home page reaches more people" than a prime-time TV show. The Internet offers a chance for more comprehensive messaging and consumers say the Internet is "their most important source of product information."

Noted author Arthur Middleton Hughes, a vice president at the Database Marketing Institute, said a larger share of a company's marketing budget can go to email, if email marketers demonstrate to C-suite executives how email can produce a high "lifetime value" for a particular customer. "In almost any organization, email is at the bottom of the power structure," he said. Instead, TV leads the pack. "Lifetime value" for a customer varies widely from company to company of course, but he defines the metric as profit per customer over a three-year period. Hughes, a 33-year veteran of …

A panel with music marketers expresses how tough it can be to stick with a campaign strategy -- email or otherwise -- when an artist may alter plans. "We're trying to control leaks in the music industry, but it makes hard when the artist actually releases it," said Universal Music Group's Anna Lee, referring to a song ahead of time, without a label's approval. Also, after their fans are buzzing about something on Twitter, they may be inspired to oblige requests, affecting a marketing plan. Then, some artists are loathe to do any promotion, and others may …