Best Practices

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]

Your digital footprint is huge. Okay, well, truthfully, I don’t know what size it is. But here’s what I do know: your digital footprint has a huge effect on your online marketing. When it comes to factors you can control to improve your website traffic, it’s Mr. Big. You do want to improve your website traffic, correct? Let’s have a look at how it’s done.[read more]

Every day, I hear about how social media strategists and managers are frustrated with the lack of executive support. Yet, many aren’t doing themselves any favors. Executives don’t speak the language of social media. They speak the language of the C-Suite and their audience are shareholders and stakeholders.[read more]

A customer shares an insight within your company’s online community. He somehow found the time in between meetings, phone calls and lunch to share a suggestion, idea or complaint in a discussion thread. “It would be great if the XYZ product would … ,” he writes. What does your company do with that customer input?[read more]

Social relationships

In a noisy, distracting world, we are bombarded. We start each day feeling as if we are behind. Data noise is everywhere. Over 100 million bits of information come in through your visual system—every second! In the midst of this chaos, you need to build, manage, and nurture your relationships.[read more]

It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by numbers. It almost feels like the new binary; we used to speak to computers in 1s and 0s, and now we have thousands of numbers with which to communicate our social media successes or failures. So how do you know which measures to pay attention to, and which ones are more vanity stats?[read more]

Did you know that visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text? Content with images attracts 94% more total views on average than content without images, and videos are clicked on 12 times more often than links and text posts combined. So here are five ways to help you incorporate visuals into your social media.[read more]

The study made clear that the UK (32%) is most open to choose a smartphone over a wallet when going out if they could only bring one item. Canadians might be struggle the most in the old world: 75% of them don’t carry cash around.[read more]

This is your only stop on the internet where you will find such a large, detailed guide to increase traffic to your website! I have not yet seen a guide where it lists so many effective traffic generation techniques, never mind a detailed explanation of each one.[read more]

All those emails, petitions, fansites, and even banana baskets played a role in bringing back the show by helping Netflix quantify the size of Arrested Development fandom. Netflix has wowed with its marketing campaign, a flurry of tricks (sorry, Gob: illusions) that blur the line between reality and the show.[read more]

IBM plans to launch the Watson Engagement Advisor, aimed at helping organizations provide better customer service and product recommendations in real time at scale. The same technology that once outsmarted humans to win Jeopardy and has recently been used to diagnose cancer will now be used to help organizations sense and respond in real time.[read more]

For most small B2C establishments, particularly brick-and-mortar retail and dining, social media presents a challenge in terms of authenticity, timeliness and scale. Casey at the pizza place is able to capture pure moments as they happen and deliver them to his online audience, such as a toddler enjoying a slice while wearing a Superman cape.[read more]

As more sites have now added share buttons and integrated social media it has become easier to share content socially than ever before. In February 2010, people preferred to share content via email but now sharing content via email has decreased from 93.3% in 2010 to 53.3% in February 2013.[read more]

Consumers, aided by social, mobile and internet technologies, are expecting more from the brands with whom they choose to do business. They are beginning to define a brand mostly, if not solely, by its online presence. To offer value and increase website conversion, make sure you fix these any or all of these five elements if they are broken.[read more]

Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications

I had a chance to sit down with Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications to discuss some of the topics that you will see at the Social Shake-Up Conference where Adam will be speaking. The following is a transcript of that conversation.[read more]