Blowback: when online reputation management goes wrong
April 26, 2016: UC Davis got itself into hot water this month when it became known that it had contracted with two ORM (Online Reputation Management) agencies to repair some brand damage it suffered several years ago. The original damage occurred in November, 2011 after two of its campus policemen pepper-sprayed a group of peaceful demonstrators […]
Using Google Consumer Surveys to learn about your audience
April 25, 2016: Targeted marketing — whether online or offline — works best when you completely understand your targeted audience. Audience research — both quantitative and qualitative — has existed for decades but the internet has revolutionized the practice with the advent of powerful new analytics tools. Google’s ability to track and analyze massive amounts […]
How much should Facebook pay users for their posts?
April 21, 2016: Facebook is reportedly suffering from a decline in original content sharing — a dire situation called “context collapse” that threatens to put a ceiling on its global ambitions unless corrected. One curative step we recommended Facebook consider taking was to pay creators for their posts, and so it was interesting to read […]
Teens choose Snapchat as video takes over the marketing world
April 20, 2016: According to a new survey by investment bank Piper Jaffray, Snapchat has replaced Instagram as the app of choice for the teen demographic. 28 percent of the 6,350 U.S. teenagers asked to name “the most important social network” selected Snapchat. This is a jump from the 19% who voted for Snapchat in […]
Information-hungry shoppers want rich product content
April 18, 2016: New research from Salsify – a content management firm – attempts to quantify the relative importance of price, product descriptions, and reviews in a shopper’s decision to buy. The survey – conducted via SurveyMonkey in February 2016, asked more than a thousand online shoppers about the most important factors impacting their purchasing decisions. […]
Tumblr vs. Pinterest: Which is best for your brand?
April 16, 2016: Tumblr and Pinterest are two of the fastest-growing social platforms. Tumblr, the web’s premier microblogging platform, was acquired by Yahoo in May of 2013 for $1.1 billion. It’s noted for its dashboard interface and extensive customizability (users can directly edit their page’s HTML code). Tumblr skews towards a demographic that is young, creative […]
What’s behind the decline in corporate blogging?
April 13, 2016: The percentage of Inc. 500 companies with an outward-facing business blog has declined for the second year in a row, according to a study conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts. In 2015, only 37 percent of Inc. 500 companies fielded blogs – down from 46 percent […]
Google follows through on warning to product bloggers
April 12, 2016: Google — after warning product bloggers to do-follow their links and disclose any compensation-based posting arrangements several weeks ago — lowered the boom this past weekend, issuing manual penalties en masse, according to SEORoundtable.com. The wording of the penalty issued, code-named WNC-636200, was as follows: Google has detected a pattern of links […]
Turn Up the (traffic) volume on your retargeting
April 11, 2016: There’s been a lot of talk about retargeting lately. Back in mid-2014, Twitter announced that it would implement new ad retargeting options. Facebook provides retargeting — on and off the Facebook service. Especially when used with Custom Audiences, retargeting can be tremendously successful in terms of moving the awareness needle. Of course, Google’s had retargeting as […]
Why are people sharing less on Facebook?
April 11, 2016: What Facebook calls “original broadcast sharing” — the sharing of data about personal events such as birthdays, graduations, anecdotes, and food consumption — is in steep decline, according to reports at the paywalled website “The Information” and via Bloomberg News. From mid-2014 to mid-2015, the volume of this data declined by 21 […]