Marketing Communication

Keeping tabs in Online Marketing Communication.

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As social networks have evolved, so have the ways in which people share, consume, and discover information. The consumer has now become a brand's most influential stakeholder, wielding the ability to influence friends and peers significantly more than advertisers. This shift in power has caused a corresponding transformation in social networks and how brands use them to engage with and market to consumers. Facebook's Open Graph, for example, is a formidable force that is changing the way brands and consumers interact.

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Nearly two years after its initial launch, Pinterest still has its share of skeptics within the media industry. They have resisted invites to check out the site and snickered at the idea of a virtual bulletin board built using simply visuals. Yet, in recent months, the female population has enthusiastically welcomed the social media platform with open arms. Whether they are pinning what they are having for dinner tonight or where they would like to go on vacation someday, Pinterest has made quite an impression thus far.

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When Pinterest came onto the scene it instantly became more than a playground for scrapbooking fans. Business owners quickly learned the benefits of adding a visual component to their social media strategies. As a result, Pinterest has experienced astoundingly rapid growth, already passing Tumblr and Flickr.

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U.S. retail sales will increase 3.3 percent during the upcoming holiday shopping season compared with last year, according to a recent forecast from Chicago research company ShopperTrak. It’s likely a good chunk of that increase will come in online retail: Internet holiday sales were at a record $37.2 billion last year, up 15 percent from 2010, according to comScore (SCOR).

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The test period for Facebook’s Offers product is drawing to a close: Facebook announced Thursday that all Pages with more than 400 fans can now seed discounts and promotions through the network — except those operated in Japan, which will be eligible next week.

Merchants are also now required to pay at least $5 to run Offers. They will remain free for users to claim.

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In the last few months, Facebook has made significant changes to the way advertising works on its site. As some predicted, Facebook’s going public and needing to drum up more revenue has resulted in the company dipping its hands deeper into users’ data to monetize it. More than that, those hands are starting to pull in data from outside of the Facebook kingdom. Privacy engineer Joey Tyson lays out the three big “innovations” in Facebook advertising from the last few months in a Facebook blog post, and argues that the company “carefully designed our versions of the features with your privacy in mind.”

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When thinking about social media strategy creation, where should a marketer start? One important component to be included should be a social media audit, where you survey the social landscape to find your customers, industry thought leaders and competitors on social spaces. 

Through some analysis, a marketer is able to glean what works and what doesn’t based on the performance of competitor’s pages. By understanding how the audience responds to different types of content and calls-to-action, you can set your own channels up for success at the outsight.

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LinkedIn is rolling out new brand pages to boost engagement between job hunters and companies on the social network, according to an announcement Thursday on LinkedIn’s website.

The revamped company pages are more visual and less flooded with widgets. There is a large cover photo at the top of the page, similar to Facebook, and company updates about product announcements and job opportunities are displayed more prominently.

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With Facebook making their timeline feature permanent for business pages, and Pinterest and Instagram gaining traction in popularity and social influence, now is a good time to explore the ways in which social media is shifting toward a more visual experience and what businesses can – and should – do to take advantage of these new platforms and emerging trends. In fact, the news of Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion only puts an exclamation point on that statement. So what kind of strategy should businesses take to target and engage with consumers in this environment?

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Have you noticed the changes to LinkedIn recently?

Although changes to LinkedIn are less frequent than on Facebook, they can have significant marketing implications.

Read further to find out how the recent changes to LinkedIn impact your social media marketing.

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Facebook frequently updates its platform with new tools, apps, and features. The constant flux can make it difficult for social media managers to keep up. 

During last week’s PR Daily Twitter chat—dubbed #RaganSocial—we asked participants which features they think people should know about. Here are some of the responses:

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The world's biggest companies absolutely understand how important social is. Their CEOs now articulate their social media strategy. They track how they're doing against their rivals. But by the time they come to someone like me, whose job is to actually put their plans into action, they have no idea how to get what they want.

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President Barack Obama managed to steal an impressive amount of Gov. Mitt Romney’s press coverage with a few, cheap social media tricks, including the most retweeted post of the convention. In comparison to the Republican National Convention’s all-out multi-million dollar conservative carnival, Obama made front page Google News with dramatically less effort and at no cost with three clever social media projects: answering questions from Reddit users for 30 minutes, tweeting “This seat’s taken” in response to Clint Eastwood’s silly stand-up routine (51K retweets), and releasing the White House beer recipe. Sure, Obama has the spotlight advantage because he’s the President, but it goes to show that all the money and staging in the world can’t compete with cleverness.

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Facebook is by far the largest social network on the web. While Mark Zuckerberg has made plenty of great calls in its design, the site — and the way people use it — isn’t as streamlined as it could be.

These 20 tips, tricks and tools will give help take your Facebook experience to the next level. From simple settings options you may have overlooked, to browser plug-ins dedicated to making the social network even better, you’re sure to find something on this list that will make your Facebook time even more addicting than it already is.

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TechCrunch first reported earlier today that enterprise social media platform HootSuite is buying another social media platform, Seesmic. That fact has now been confirmed by HootSuite itself. Ryan Holmes, the CEO, has given us some more color on the deal, and we’ve found out some other details as well along the way.

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On June 6, Larry Ellison--CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world--tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn’t tweeted since.

As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. Within the C-suite, perceptions remain that social media is at best a soft PR tool and at worst a time sink for already distracted employees. Without a push from the top, many of the biggest companies have been slow to take the social media plunge.

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Allen Weiner, Research VP at Gartner, has given f-commerce (Facebook commerce) a failing grade. “Of all the pre-fixed commerce trends, none has hit the ground with a thud more than Facebook’s ‘F-Commerce,’” said Weiner. His judgment is based on a survey by youth marketing agency The Beans Group, which found that 91 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds say they are not interested in buying products or services directly through Facebook.