In order to help your content spread, you have to reduce the friction of sharing. In other words, make it very easy to share via Facebook, LinkedIn Twitter, Pinterest and via email. And no, don’t hide it at the bottom as a tiny button that needs to be expanded to show the real sharing buttons.[read more]

One of the most under-leveraged resources for many brands, within social media, comes from within: their employees. Research has continuously shown that people trust word of mouth or recommendations anonymously or via personal networks. So then this raises the question – why don’t more companies leverage the support of their employees?[read more]

The number of “likes” on your Facebook page and the amount of followers on your Twitter account are not the only determiners of the efficacy of your social media marketing campaign. In fact, it may not be a true marker of the success of your strategies.[read more]

lanier67, Flickr

This isn’t hard to respond to comments on some platforms like Facebook where most comments can be visibly seen on the post itself. However, mentions of your brand can be harder to track on forums you’re not a part of or on social networks like Twitter where you get a steady stream of content on your feed. To help you monitor mentions of your brand, you can use a tool like Mentions to track your name and get real-time alerts.[read more]

It seems that Target may have finally found its way into the next frontier of digital retail. Within the last week, Target has launched Cartwheel, a responsive website which will eventually become an application that allows users to earn and redeem in-store savings via Facebook and their smartphones.[read more]

A brand is essentially the sum of what people say about it. We’re connected and social now. And that’s not all. We’re hypercritical, hyperactive and so hyper-online, we’re barely offline when we sleep. Scheduling our content to publish while we’re snoring is easy. There are apps for that.[read more]

You can go “off grid.” You can turn off your email. In unplugging yourself from your social media networks and the online world, I posit what you’re really doing is unplugging your robot friends till you want to deal with them again. Friends have become objects of convenience.[read more]

Google+ is following its competition with a design change that has everyone up in arms. As usual, some like the changes made while more disapprove. The new design is going to take some getting used to, but the worlds biggest search engine had the best intentions in mind for both businesses and individuals when it came to the very photo-friendly redesign.[read more]

After weeks and months at the same desk, it’s easy to feel out of ideas. In a job that requires fresh-thinking, creativity and inspiration, a new setting can spark productivity better than any program or time-management technique. Work outside, work in the lobby, (or if you’re lucky) work from home. A new environment can reinvigorate your work life and tap into unreached potential.[read more]

I don’t think I’m being too controversial to say that women drive the majority of e-commerce and social sharing. Yet this infographic asserts that men are driving eCommerce and social sharing, and that a Google Plus share is worth five times what a Facebook share is and nine times what a Pinterest share is worth.[read more]

Eighty percent of companies plan to use social media for customer service and brands must respond quickly to customer queries on social channels. There is also an opportunity to use social customer service to increase brand loyalty.[read more]

In a welcome move, Twitter offers advertisers the ability to target users based on key words used in their previous tweets. This holds the promise of getting news of your accounting firm and its services directly to the people who have expressed an interest in them through their own tweets.[read more]

Your company may not even be taken seriously without a presence on the big four social networks: Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. However, simply maintaining social media accounts for your business is not sufficient.[read more]

Intrigued by the viral video phenomenon? YouTube has released a new Trends Map that highlights the most popular videos at a moment in time across the United States.[read more]

On Tuesday AOL hosted a Social Media Salon for Internet Week New York where the differences between social media and community management were discussed.[read more]

There are three things on the Tumblr/Yahoo to-do list for 2013: 1. Push the edges on intelligent recommendation technology (just think of the dataset they must have!) 2. Innovate on engagement-based ad format design. 3. Bypass agencies: try to build partnerships directly with brands to help bring scale and meaning to a revenue model that is based on adding value rather than the very comfortable “interrupt and repeat.”[read more]

allison.hare via Compfight cc

Sara Rosso was a bona fide Nutella superfan: a consumer so passionate about Nutella that she had dedicated her precious time to furthering the brand’s cause. She was the type of fan that brand managers dream of. Then Nutella shut her down.[read more]

AHMAD FAIZAL YAHYA / Shutterstock.com

Looking at Google’s social media history, one could speculate that the company just doesn’t have a knack for that particular sector. But Google+ is poised to succeed. Why? Google hasn’t made its newest social network better than any other. They’ve simply made it count for more.[read more]

Questions about Google's Penguin update? / shutterstock

Last week Google’s Matt Cutts announced that Penguin 2.0 is a couple of weeks away, so if you’ve been partaking in black hat SEO tactics, it’s time to stop. Listen up and follow these steps to make certain that your site is safe and your ranking doesn’t get slammed.[read more]

The phenomenon of big data certainly comes with big promise. After all, having terabytes of data on customer history and behavior is certainly better than trying to extrapolate from just a few data points. The good news is, there are technologies and tools that make it much easier to find the gold hidden in the data—and use it to refine your online marketing with laser precision.[read more]