Social Media Marketing

Social media has become a part of everyday life. The number of worldwide users is expected to reach 3.02 billion by 2021. Apart from the growth in the number of profiles, consumers have been devoting more of their time to engaging with social media sites. One-seventh of the average user's waking lif...

Influencer marketing continues to build steam, and more companies, large and small are getting involved. As powerful and as helpful as influencers can be, it's important to realize that not every influencer is right for every company. Selection of the right influencers to work with your company and ...

In a recent E-Commerce Times poll, only 4.32 percent of respondents said there was always enough information on the first page of search results to meet their needs. By comparison, 14.05 percent said they found the first-page search results were rigged and limited by algorithmic highlights.

A little over 10 years ago, we were toasting social media as the great innovation that would enable CRM to traverse the mythical last mile between vendors and customers. Every analyst had something positive to say about social and its future role in CRM. I wrote a paper in 2004 forecasting that soci...

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing ways to get a message out there. It uses the popularity of people who have many followers and a wide reach, to market products and sway opinions. It's very much a marketing strategy for the social media age. "Influencer marketing is one of the faste...

Instagram has introduced Checkout on Instagram -- an in-app purchasing tool -- as a closed beta for consumers in the United States. Among the 20 participating brands are Adidas, Nike, Burberry, Dior, Huda Beauty, Prada and Michael Kors. "Users in the U.S. can buy from a majority of these brands star...

Storytelling is a central part of e-commerce marketing, and it's vital that brands both know their own stories and understand how to tell them. Everything from brand loyalty to purchasing decisions relies on a company having an engaging and well-told story. "Facts tell, but stories sell," remarked S...

From fountain pens and high-end pencils to unique paper notebooks, analog writing tools have legions of fans, even though we're living in a primarily digital world. It's precisely the physicality of analog tools that makes them appealing to many people immersed in a digital reality. They're groundin...

Musing about Facebook's first 15 years, CEO Mark Zuckerberg positioned it as a David confronting a Goliath composed of hierarchical institutions. Facebook gives the masses a voice, he wrote. It brings communities together and provides businesses with low-cost outreach. Progress has been made in addr...

Over the past 10 years, I've been a part of at least that many startups. The tools of the trade have changed rapidly, but the core elements of successful entrepreneurship remain relatively unchanged. When I first started out, "social media marketing" was a brand new concept and existed almost entire...

Among the myriad of tactics that e-commerce businesses can use to pump up sales, preorders might be the most overlooked strategy. Yet preorder sales are a highly effective way to generate early buzz to gin up demand for new products. A "preorder" is the sale of a product that is not immediately ava...

Telling an engaging and effective story is vitally important for the success of a business. A good story draws people in, fosters loyalty, and brings your brand alive.

Social is nearing the end of its "hypecycle." During that early phase, an innovation is seen as everything from a cancer cure to free lunch. Most of the claims prove baseless, but then something curious happens. Users take another look and discover some things that the innovation is a perfect fit fo...