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]

To be effective on Twitter you need to setup a good workflow and learn how to schedule your Tweets to get the best impact with your audience. Scheduling your Tweets will save you time and help you be more productive with your social media. It is all too easy on social media to get distracted, lose valuable time and not achieve your objectives.[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]

Semantic search is changing everything. From the way traditional marketing is done to the way social media connections are now forged, the web is forcing us to create more transparent, honest connections than ever before.[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]

Certain individuals have always wielded outsize influence on the decision-making of others in their social groups, but not until the age of the social web have there been systems to easily quantify and measure social influence - rather, it was subject to perceptions about credibility and personal brand. But now gut feelings are being...[read more]

Flickr’s redesign propelled it in the direction of looking exactly like Facebook would look if images were the only content. I am not denying that Marissa Mayer has brought an incredible amount of fresh ideas and new strategies to reinvigorate Yahoo, but the Flickr property, ignored since its 2005 acquisition, seems to be rebounding in the direction of other platforms.[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]

penguin/shutterstock

As expected and announced by Matt Cutts for upcoming penguin updates on Twitter, this is the first major update which is being called as Penguin 2.0 (officially) rolled out yesterday on May 22, 2013 has impacted 2.3% of queries that a regular user might notice.[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]