Marketing execs drinking midday highballs on Madison Avenue are posh and glamorous. No wonder then that some businesses still hold traditional media marketing—glossy campaigns in print, splashy billboards, tv spots and their mindless jingles—over and at the expense of their social media marketing efforts. Just like business school is stuck in analog and antiquated ways, denigrating modern, online MBA programs in favor of prestigious institutions that have always been there. Marketing is the same way.  But the problem with this dated type of advertising push is that the information…

Merchant tools on Foursquare are free and the company claims to want to always keep them that way. It’s challenging for Foursquare to make money when they don’t charge their 750,000 businesses for their listings and they definitely won’t charge the 20,000,000 on the platform to be able to use it, so they’ve chosen to generate a bit of revenue by speeding up the process through which businesses can get verified and utilize Foursquare’s tools. It all comes at a cost. Granted, it’s not much. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Foursquare Logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)"][/caption]…

As the madness of the holiday season dies down and the New Year gains pace, retailers will renew the cycle of offering new attractions to entice shoppers into parting with their hard-earned cash in exchange for physical and digital goodies. [caption id="" align="alignright" width="169" caption="Oxfam online shop advert (Photo credit: net_efekt)"][/caption] From New Year’s Eve to Valentine’s Day, there is no lack of opportunities for shoppers to indulge in shopping mania. And now, a large number of users are moving to the online world, where they can window-shop and buy goods from within…

Since 1958, there has been an increase in the need for business intelligence. It’s nothing new, but in recent years it’s been much more important as the data is finally reaching the ability to display and track it. This graphic depicts the history as it has happened over the last 54 years. Click to enlarge. Courtesy of Las Cruces Toyota. …

In 2009, Google launched Places, an offering designed to take the place of its Local Business Center. Though it delivered dramatic improvements from day one, it focused on the same general goal of helping local companies increase their visibility. Today, the service is still going strong and arguably better than ever, yet few local marketers are using it to its full potential. Fortunately, we have compiled a few tips on how to use Google Places to spread the word about your business. SEO your page When leveraging Google Places to increase visibility, it is important to understand that the “page”…

Small kids can use them just fine. They are more portable than a laptop, more powerful than a smartphone, and perform nearly every duty that a business person needs (especially when an external keyboard is added, which sort of defeats the purpose of having a tablet, but that’s another debate). Why, then, are more corporations and large businesses not adopting tablets as their primary method of mobile productivity? Why do so many continue to push clunky laptops onto their employees? The answers are numerous. Some companies simply do not trust the cloud, yet. Some still require access to programs…

$100,000,000,000. A one followed by 11 zeroes. Has social networking truly become so lucrative that Facebook’s intention of launching their initial public offering on May 17th will yield a company that can raise $10 billion against such a lofty valuation? It’s a question that was being asked when Facebook was worth 1/3rd of where it is now. The question will be asked until it fails or clearly succeeds. What do you think? Is Facebook really worth that much?…

No, it’s not spam, but it is associated with a pork product. Search engine optimization has a bad name in many circles. It is synonymous with spamming much in the same way that racial, lifestyle, and religious stereotypes work; the few bad apples make the normal, honorable “SEOs” look bad. With that said, this isn’t about them. People are getting more involved with their websites and they often ask what they should be focused upon to get their search rankings higher. I always tell them the same thing, and it’s held true since 2007. In fact, it’s become even more important. Bacon. Bacon is the key to…

It’s hard to imagine the world without Facebook right now. Even people who aren’t users are affected by it even if only because they are constantly bombarded with commercials, billboards, and other people telling them to follow this and like that. The site has become the center piece of a company that is expanding beyond the boundaries of social media and influencing the real world. Is it possible that Facebook can fall in the next few years? Yes, Facebook is doomed The brief history of the internet has brought us many companies that were too big to fail. They held the collective attentions of the…

Most businesses are getting involved in social media in some way. Whether for marketing, customer outreach, collaboration, or any of the many ways that businesses can utilize social media, the need to have a proper strategy and plan is growing. The biggest question many ask is whether to train their current employees, hire new ones, or outsource. It’s the expert versus the advocate question. Hiring an outside firm to handle a company’s social media is an option that allows for proven, repeatable strategies and experience to run the campaigns. It means that internal people have less control…