As our president Josh Cline wrote, strategy is the most important component of any marketing endeavor. This is truer in the digital marketing arena. Inbound marketing and social media marketing are  strategic marketing tools. In order to succeed in your marketing efforts, marketing strategy is necessary.  Read more...

Google’s UK, Ireland, and Benelux Marketing Director Dan Cobley lectures at TED about the intersection between physics and marketing. Didn’t know they had something in common? Think again.

Here are Dan’s principles:

a) Newton’s Law: The more massive a brand, the more baggage it has and the more force it takes to change its position. The bigger a brand, the more difficult it is to reposition it.

b) Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: Observing consumers changes their behavior. For example, people aren’t honest in focus groups and surveys. However, with digital marketing, it’s much easier – we can measure what consumers actually do rather than what they say they do. This is why user testing is so important — we can measure actual behavior with digital marketing.  Read more...

What attracts Google’s crawler (also Yahoo’s and Bing’s, but let’s focus on Google right now) is commotion. Fresh, interesting and catchy articles and conversations that shake up the web.

Here’s the equation:

On the one hand you have “Social Media,” which is where the discussions and conversations take place. What people talk about matters. On the other hand, you have quality links to pages. Good links from various sources attract search crawlers. If you combine social media attention with the right link-building layout, your page gets to the top of the search engine results page (SERPs) quickly.  Read more...

Privacy online is such an important component of our everyday life today. Anything posted online (and these days, that’s just about EVERYTHING) is public. That’s why any company needs online policies. Social media and computer use policies, incorporating social media use – both personal and professional – are so important. Charlotte Li recently wrote about it in her book Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead about how companies can maintain some level of control.

But, in this video below, comedian Stephen Colbert has another suggestion — use common sense.  Read more...

Watch this video to learn about the business benefits of social media and some of the things that need to be done in order to do it.