The social media marketing backlash has begun. Blame the unlikely team of The Onion and IBM. The former dropped a pitch-perfect takedown of socmedia “experts” right before Thanksgiving. Then Big Blue released data that showed Facebook had almost zero effect on Black Friday sales, and Twitter actually had zero.
The one-two punch confirmed my deep suspicion that a lot of the buzzword-laden blather around social media marketing the past few years was itself a form of marketing for self-conferred experts looking to make a buck off scared blue-chip companies. That’s not to say there aren’t bright, honest people plying their trade. It’s just that I keep waiting for one of them to have a Jerry Maguire moment.
Source: Let's Face it: Most Social Media Marketing Is a Waste of Time
Back in 2004, Gmail rewrote the rules for Web-based email. It had a fast, clean interface, and a jaw-dropping 1GB of free storage. Today, it comes with ten times the amount of space, and boasts many millions of users across the globe.
But even if you use it every day, you're probably not making the most of the features it has to offer. With these seven tips, you can take your Gmail life beyond "power user." You can be an off-the-deep-end Gmail megalomaniac.
Source: Ten Tricks To Make Yourself a Gmail Master
Mobile computing isn’t that “mobile.” About 70% of tablets aren’t linked to a cellular data plan, and a recent study by AOL found that 68% of time spent on smartphones occurred in people’s homes. If you think about it, the mobile revolution arguably started in 2008, when laptops outsold desktop PCs in the U.S. for the first time.
For marketers, though, there’s a big difference between mobile advertising and the desktop kind. The term refers to an ecosystem created by Apple for the iPhone in 2007 that has since evolved to include tablets and may in time creep onto the desktop as well. This is an environment in which marketers are deprived of most of their favorite tools from desktop computing. Moreover, mobile isn’t one thing, but a bunch of potential screens and situations within a category that right now comprises just 5% of all digital ad spending, by revenues.
Add it all up and mobile advertising is a big headache for marketers. Among the issues:
Source: Why Mobile Advertising Is Such a Headache for Marketers
Becky McCray (small-town entrepreneur, speaker, and author of Small Town Rules), when asked about how small-town entrepreneurs go about building community and she responded with the following:
"A lot of what gets labeled as community building online is a lot more like audience building. If you are thinking of it in terms of getting more people to listen to you, rounding up more followers, getting more “likes,” you’re thinking “audience.”
She then went on to characterize community building, as opposed to audience building:
"If you are thinking about connecting them, learning about them, hearing from them individually, and you’re thinking of people, then you are getting a lot closer to community building."
Source: What's the Difference Between Building a Community and Building an Audience? | MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
