Shel Israel writes The Social Beat blog column at Forbes.com and has authored four books about digital media's impact on business. He's now working on his fifth book, The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Work and Life with Robert Scoble, due to be published in October. 

I got a chance to catch up with Israel to talk about the latest trends in marketing: context, personalization, and the debate over tracking cookies. Here's what he said.

The top of your fundraising pyramid is just that -- a small, concentrated piece of your whole universe, made up of older, rich donors who, though important, won't be able to add to the strong foundation of your future fundraising efforts. While they’re reliable for contributing large sums of money to help you reach your yearly goal, they are high risk, high reward from an investment of time and resources perspective.

If you're drinking the inbound marketing Kool-Aid and regularly publishing content online, there's a good chance you may have experienced content theft at one point or another. Many of us are all too familiar with the feelings that follow the discovery of content thievery: your stomach drops, quickly followed by thoughts of "Why me?" Then the anger sets in.

As head of HubSpot’s creative and design team, I spend nearly every day acting as the translator between my designers and the rest of the company, particularly executives, marketers, and salespeople, (i.e. those folks whose jobs are often held to more formal or quantitative metrics). Obviously, it should come as no surprise that there is always at least

My first reaction when I read about Yahoo buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion was utterly cynical: Here’s Marissa Mayer overpaying for something yet again. You may recall that two months ago Mayer paid $30 million for a startup called Summly and the only reason seemed to be that Summly’s founder was a high-school kid and photogenic.