Latest Social Media News

Future of Content Marketing For Online Merchants
Online merchants are learning hard lessons about content marketing. Mainly that it takes a lot of time, effort and money. What if you could increase your customers engagement, support and loyalty without spending an arm and a leg? Interested?

This Curagami post shares tips on how to think like a magazine editor - at least an online magazine content editor. It shares five tips including:

• Find 3 – 5 content groups that interest your visitors.
• Decide your schedule (we recommend monthly updates at first because that is a big commitment that must be kept to gain trust).
• Curate content from trusted sources such as brands, manufacturers and even competitors.
• Automate at least one of your content groups with feeds.
• Find and nurture free visual media sources such as Haiku Deck.

 
Read more about evergreen content and why thinking like a magazine editor can help your online store create TRIBE and MONEY on Curagami:

http://www.curagami.com/ecommerce/magazine-ing-content-5-tips/?v=7516fd43adaa  

Becoming A Social Business - 5 Quick Tess
If your answer is NO to any 2 of these questions your company is failing to become a "social business". Good news is fix is easy, just be able to say YES to all five:

Twitter - Do you FOLLOW at least 50% Of Your Followers (and do so with some presence and reasoning)?

Twitter - Do you respond to @YOU comments in hours or less?

GPlus - Are YOU and YOUR COMPANY on GPlus?

Pinterest - Are you anticipating the visual marketing revolution by PINNING?

Facebook - Have you held at least one Facebook contest and/or responded to and allowed customers to post on your Facebook wall?

YouTube - Do you have a YouTube Channel and are you posting there at least weekly?

We are past the time when merely having a Twitter button meant anything. Your business must USE and be PRESENT on these tools or your social buttons create powerful "Don't Get It" dissonance.

What other "social tests" can you think of? Marty

5 Internet Marketing Secrets
Some of these 2014 "secrets" such as ecommerce and social media may not feel very secret, but there is still plenty of "blue ocean" in them still. Ecommerce creates great content marketing support for less and less effort (to create the story) so every website should have a store now even if all they sell is their logo merchandise.

Social media is ubiquitous but not embraced. Our recent Ecommies Study of social media for top online retailers (http://bit.ly/1gATp9p ) proved many have social media accounts but few are "social businesses".

5 Secrets Blog Post on ScentTrail Marketing
http://bit.ly/IYZIo8

5 Secrets Haiku Deck
http://bit.ly/1k6uJFu

Can a soda machine teach important Intenret markeitng lessons? Yep, the brilliant Coke Feestyle machine is a stduy in Lego-like building simple, adding touch so even complex things feel easy and the "appification" of everything.

We share ideas for how to move Coke Freestyle machines into an Internet of things by using a mobile app to create community and gamify their very cool soda machine: :

Amazon's New Social Relevance
Amazon was late to social media and they paid a price for being tardy. Almost 90% of Amazon's pages have been eliminated from Google's index post Panda and Penguin.

Granted we would all like to be left so "high and dry" since Amazon still has 127M pages in Google, but, as this linked post describes, Amazon is embracing social media marketing now with new tools such as Amazon collections and a social share widget that is approaching ubiquity.

If Amazon can learn new social shopping tricks so too can your website. The key idea is even a website that was slouching toward having a billion pages in Google must play for social relevance now as so should we all.  

Related

Amazon's Collections on Scoopit
http://sco.lt/7eE6Tp ;

Amazon's Social Rebirth on ScentTrail Marketing
http://scenttrail.blogspot.com/2013/08/amazons-social-rebirth.html  ;

Today, around the world more people have mobile phone subscriptions than have access to electricity and safe drinkable water. Today, almost a third of the world's population uses the internet (a 528.1% growth since 2000!

So what are we doing with all the time we spend online, and how do we know all that time is being spent in useful ways?

For many of us, the internet is among the first things we experience after we wake; in fact, 75% of users are online before 9 a.m. Over 75% of people in the US own a laptop, 53% a smart phone, and 31% a tablet. Email is the most common action performed by people on their laptops, while search is the top action for mobile phone and tablet users. 72% of people like to play games on their tablets while 70% use their mobile phones for social media. Where do we use these devices? 72% of people use their mobile phones while traveling, and 64% use them in restaurants and coffee shops. As for tablets, 88% of people use their devices in the living room, 79% in the bedroom.

Find more statistics and data at the infographic or article link.

A showcase of the best infographics from around the web (Internet Users By Region – How Much Of The World Is Online?

A look at the current statistics of worldwide internet usage.

After creating the Story of Cancer Store (https://storyofcancer.gostorego.com/ ;) in a matter of days I learned 5 valuable "New Ecommerce" lessons including:

1. Everyone Should Have A Store.

2. Stores Are Easy.

3. Stores Are Visual.

4. Stores Tell Stories.

5. Stores Are Fun.

Your brand and Internet marketing is STRONGER with a store and creating a store is becoming one of the most profitable and underutilized ideas in Internet marketing (especially for B2B relationship based sellers).  

101 Amazing PC / Internet Tricks no one told you before

This post shares a story, a story of a piece of content written for @ janlgordon curatti.com. How did Startup Trends 2014 II go from being a laggard at social shares to outshining its brother post (Startup Trends 2014 I)?

Ongoing curation and GPlus provide the answers and proving why we are all content curators now. The piece also shares some "down the SEO rabbit hole" content curation and creation perspective.

Promise to write more "down the SEO rabbit hole" content soon.

What is content curation and how can it help SEO? This post shares how content curation creates more reach faster and protects your Internet marketing.

Note
This post is a response to Your Guide To Conent Curation for SEO by @jaysondemers (Jayson DeMers) for Search Engine Journal. Jayson's post is dissonat to my content curation experience in several important ways.

Your Guide To Content Curation For SEO is brilliant, includes orginal thinking and cagegorization I haven't thought of or about and gets more right than wrong.

That said, it felt important to sit on the ground and discuss where my content curation experience over the last three years differs from Jayson's declarations.

I linked his post and be sure to read mine and his, comment and share your thoughts since understanding what content curation IS and how it relates to SEO feels important :). M

Here are 5 Internet marketing tactics some genius friends are using to have a happy holidays (with names and website identieis kept secret as promised):

1. Mobile Games.

2. Disruptions.

3. Asking for help.

4. Listening.

5. Crowdfunding

What are you doing that is cool, unique and different this holidays? Tell me if you can, if not hope you will in January :). M  

Discovered the strange secret of Internet marketing last week. We lucky few Internet marketers must do some things BECAUSE everyone is doing them. We violate these "conventions" at our risk, but we can't stop there.

We can't stop with mere emulation of current convention because there is no money to be made there. Our Internet marketing must win hearts, minds, love and advocacy to become increasingly valuable. We can't win brand advocates by copying others.

We must take the risk of passionate disruption. Disruption in Internet marketing is a tricky business. Too little disruption and your Internet marketing is conventional and boring. Too much disruption and your Internet marketing is speaking to itself about itself.

Testing is the best way to find the thin and ever-changing line between conventional boring and just the right amount of loyalty creating disruption. This @HaikuDeck is about how and why your Internet marketing must "think" asynchronously. Why you must disrupt to win.

Early last year we learned that one hour of YouTube is uploaded every second. It was a bracing reminder of just how many people are spending their time online simultaneously.

Created by rewards site Qmee, the infographic "Online In 60 Seconds" is a pie chart that shows off the sheer amount of online activity that takes place every single minute. The amount of YouTube videos uploaded has already increased from January 2012's 60 hours per minute to 72. Additionally, over 1.8 million things are liked on Facebook, and 278 thousand bon mots tweeted. Not depicted in the chart: the amount of work that is going undone while all of these items are being viewed.

Myths Cost Internet Marketers Money
I'm not a big myth believer. As a former Director of Ecommerce and now Marketing Director for Raleigh's leading software and web development company Atlantic BT I tend to believe in metrics and experience.

When I left e-commerce to become a B2B marketer I heard a persistent myth - that B2B marketing was dramatically different than B2C. After two years this post argues there is NO DIFFERENCE between the core of B2B and B2C marketing.

Just FEELS different :).

Internet Marketing's Triptych is Cause, Crowds and Cash. Learn how to use those three ideas in concert with one another and your online marketing wins.