While most consumers may treat social media sites, such as Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook as avenues to interact with friends and post musings, brands like Samuel Adams and Wal-Mart are turning them into logical extensions of market research divisions. And many companies are just starting to figure out how to utilize the huge amount of information and insight available. Read the rest of this entry »

Facebook’s new list of changes just announced is likely to put additional pressure on advertisers to throw up compelling content in order to ‘integrate themselves’ into consumers’ lives to a greater degree. Which is the prime loser? It’s the ‘Like’, which will now have a lesser role to play in marketing. Read the rest of this entry »

Right since its beginning, your Facebook profile has been the avenue for you to tell your story to the people who matter. Users treat the social site as a place to share almost everything from the seemingly small stuff, like their instant thoughts on a just read article, to some of the most crucial events of their personal lives, such as the photographs of their family functions, the wedding or birth in their family. Read the rest of this entry »

Social Media has clearly turned one of the most critical marketing tools for advertisers world over. Tech-savvy companies irrespective of their size and domain are growingly keen to leverage different networking channels to create awareness of their core business and brand. In effect, they are curtailing the budgets allocated to traditional advertising channels for more dynamic and more focused new media avenues. Read the rest of this entry »

Social media is considered an undisputed powerful tool when it comes to influencing major purchasing decisions across the Web. Many businesses still are apprehensive to employ social media channels largely owing to some myths that they tend carry about these avenues. I already have tried to clear some of these myths. Here are a few more of them that must be removed once and for all. Read the rest of this entry »

You cannot afford to ignore the basics of online reputation management because the speed and extent at which one’s reputation can get impaired is often mindboggling. Even a malicious campaign or untrue information can spread like wildfire. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several instances thus far of Google having tried to make its mark in the social realm. But unlike search, the foray hasn’t yielded success. To straight the record straight, Google has unveiled a new social networking service. It is termed the Google+ project. Read the rest of this entry »

Conversion Optimization is a handy technique that enables site owners to enhance conversion rates cutting across their marketing investments and investments, including core business sites, email, PPC, social media and other E-Commerce platforms. It is important to align analytics to online marketing investments. This principally involves measuring your digital interactions/ conversions as well as understanding target audience behavior and competitor strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

In their quest to generate a large target audience base, full-fledged and competent platforms question and answer format based online platforms are coming up in niche segments. What they essentially try to do is acting as a cache for the research that people conduct on the Web. The platforms try to incorporate all the information on one single link. Over time, the knowledge database grows to cover almost everything one would want to know by asking and replying to others. Read the rest of this entry »

Surveys in the past have established that most top brands benefit from social media as their prospects engage with them on sites, such as Twitter and Facebook – more actively and more favorably. However, many corporate entities – especially the smaller one – still hesitate to use it largely because of certain misconceptions and apprehensions about it. Read the rest of this entry »