Netimperative | News | Today’s top stories. Kiosked, a global platform for visual and social commerce, has launched its Smart Content Trend Report 2013, a trends analysis which addresses the changing digital marketing landscape and introduces the concept of Smart Content, a non-intrusive service for consumers that is interactive, targeted, personalised and measurable. The report, developed using insights from leading industry experts, highlights the need for Smart Content as a response to the underlying trends and shifts in marketing, retail, and content that are changing and shaping the ways in which brands interact with consumers.
Kiosked’s report explores new approaches required to meet the needs of brands, publishers and consumers alike in a streamlined, new approach to modern-day marketing. “In recent years, media has become decentralised and increasingly intertwined with ecommerce. Highlights from the Smart Content Trend Report include: 1. 2. Blurring the boundaries: every device is a portal Every surface becomes actionable. 6 Ways Social Media Marketing Is Changing (For the Better) We’ve been at this social game for a while now, you and me. We saw it grow up from a minor phenomenon to a mainstream communication channel. And we were there for the emergence of “pinning” (no longer just a wrestling term), the broad use of Twitter in crisis reporting, and seemingly countless redesigns of the Facebook Wall, err ...
Timeline . In such a rapidly changing space, it’s hard not to get pulled into an ongoing analysis of where we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re headed next. In this most recent round of reassessment, a handful of trends have caught my attention. And, unlike the loss of LinkedIn Answers , I’m feeling pretty good about them. 1) Social Media Is Gaining Weight as a Sales Tool Social media has always enjoyed firm footing as a marketing and communications tool. “Sales should help with content and build a reputation for thought leadership,” Belzer advises. Another example of social being used well for sales came to us via the Matchist blog . Why I Fired My Marketing Agency. About a year ago, before I became a HubSpotter, I stopped wasting my company's precious money and fired our marketing agency.
It wasn't that difficult of a decision to make, but it was an extremely expensive lesson to learn -- to the tune of about $70,000. In a previous life, I was a small business owner. When I joined the company in September 2011 (we'll call it the Acme Startup Company), my business partners had just spent two years in research and development. They managed to round up enough money to get them through the early days and come out on the other end with a prototype for the Acme software product. When they asked me to work with them, they were nearing a product launch. And part of their strategy to support that launch was hiring a marketing agency. We Needed Leads, They Gave Us Twitter Followers The Customers Started Coming, But … No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service Three months later and a grand total of $70,000 poorer, it was time to say goodbye. Advice for Small Business Owners. The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty. The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched.
They reveal trends in adoption and they are one of the few public metrics available to analysts trying to assign value to companies preparing an initial public offering. But how accurate are these numbers? In some anecdotal cases, the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles. No user profiles means very little usable data for marketing or advertising campaigns. It means corporate marketers and advertisers will not be able to reach and engage with the numbers they expect, resulting in increased costs and a discouraging ROI. If corporations aren't able to use social media to reach large numbers of consumers, the value of platforms such as Facebook will be severely diminished. How large is this problem of fake and empty user profiles?
Where did these half million people come from? How the Third Wave of Media Is Transforming Marketing Content. As a society, how we watch, read, and consume information is fundamentally changing. News, information, and entertainment will never go back to "the way it was," and this change will have a powerful impact on all aspects of inbound and outbound marketing. In 2012, marketing is publishing, so let's learn how to be a great publisher in an industry under constant disruption. This week, some of the most intense shots yet were fired in the battle for the eyes and mind of the world.
Stop. Listen for a second. Do you hear the cries and confusion? As a marketer, you should be cheering. Amazon's Unwavering Assault on the Publishing Industry Brick and mortar bookseller Barnes and Noble announced this week that it would no longer stock books published by the digital book juggernaut, Amazon.com. In the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon said it sold millions of Kindle electronic reading devices, but the business still came in a billion dollars in revenue below Wall Street expectations. Niche AND Quality.