Top 5 Social Media Questions Marketers Want Answered + MORE

  

Everyone is talking about mobile. Some e-commerce websites are venturing into it. Mobile commerce (also known as “m-commerce”) has immense potential, exhibiting a 86% growth rate and hitting $25 billion in 2012 (set to reach $86 billion by 2016, according to eMarketer)…

Most businesses upload videos to YouTube but don’t take advantage of optimizing their video nor adding annotations. With annotations you can layer text, links, and hotspots over your video. Annotations allow you to add information, interactivity and engagement. For businesses, this means you can overlay calls-to-action directly in the video – adding a link back to a demo, download or registration…

In the new Pew Internet & American Life Project teens and social media report, Facebook is shown to be by far the dominant social network — in some ways surprisingly so. I say surprising because the Pew data seem to be partly contradicted by anecdotal evidence that many teens are ignoring…

When it comes to writing for the web, competition is steadily growing fierce.  We’ve had it drilled into our heads that “content is king” but great content is what gets results.
The thing nobody ever tells you, though, is how you are supposed to create all this great content.
If you dread staring at a blank screen and fret about coming up with something ground-breakingly awesome, don’t worry…

What if you could tap into the minds of 3,000 marketers to find out where they stand when it comes to social media marketing? How valuable would it be to know how your peers are handing the time commitments, social media platforms and measurement?
Lucky you and lucky me, the answers to those questions are found in today’s 2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report from Michael Stelzner and Social Media Examiner…

People seem fascinated with routines – how other people get things done and the like. While you do need to develop your own way of getting it all done, it can be inspiring and reassuring to hear how others are doing it. (Yesterday I wrote – 7 Things I Did Not Know About Writing Before I Started)
How I decide what to write about
photo credit: Sven Van Echelpoel via photopin cc
I have a pretty solid editorial calendar that runs out about a year in terms of monthly focus themes so my blog posts, podcasts and guest content is lined up to match my annual plan…

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Happy Wednesday! It’s landing page examples time. Today, as a special treat for CCD week, I’ve compiled a list of 36 landing page designs to critique, most of them are awesome, some need a bit more work, and I’ve also included a few that are down right awful (as a lesson of what not to do)…

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…

Yesterday, Frank posted the news that Yahoo bought Tumblr. The big takeaway was this quote from Yahoo’s announcement:
We promise not to screw it up.  Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going.  We will operate Tumblr independently.  David Karp will remain CEO.  The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same as will their mission to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve…

This is a great summary of many of the trends that we’ve been hammering away on with our clients – authorship, content, mobile and social media are key trends. I might add video as a fifth, it’s becoming commonplace on virtually every site and it’s an incredible way to take a difficult topic and visualize it for your audience…