Engagement

Why Consumer Intent Drives The Value Of Social Networks. The Rise Of The Mobile-Social-Vertical Marketplace. Editor’s note: Navin Chaddha is a Managing Director at Mayfield Fund, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $3 billion under management, whose portfolio companies leverage the drivers of cloud/SaaS, mobile, social, energytech and big data.

Some current Mayfield Fund investments include Appcelerator, Fab, Marketo, Poshmark, Solarcity, and Zimride. The U.S. e-commerce market is estimated at $200 billion and is still projected to account for only 9 percent of total retail by 2016 (source: Forrester Research Feb. 2012 U.S. Online Retail forecast). We believe there is ample room for growth, and much of it will come from marketplaces. The metaphor of online marketplaces, established by Amazon and eBay starting in 1995, has endured and is flourishing once again – but in a different way than in the past.

Global? Platform Disruption: New platforms such as mobile are proving to be disruptive for incumbents and require a different approach. The Higgs Boson: Why You Should Care About the God Particle. And, Sadly, Why You Don't. Rocket Scientists Aren't Exactly Marketers. It’s been a long time since the world has been interested in anything traveling into space.

But NASA finally grabbed our attention this week when the Mars rover Curiosity successfully landed on the Red Planet, giving us earthlings some crystal-clear, high-resolution photos of the surface. NASA had a lot riding on Curiosity’s success, and not just the $2.5 billion to fund it. This mission needed to make NASA relevant again to the American public. As famed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson pointed out, for anyone born after Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, multiple generations have never witnessed the “moment,” the moment where something so positively grand happens that it “elevates society rather than diminishes it.”

When Curiosity successfully touched down without a hitch, when “we” landed on Mars, generations finally had their moment. NASA and the scientific community have in recent history been poor marketers (just ask the Higgs boson geniuses). How To Go Viral On YouTube: The Untold Truth Behind Getting Views. How To Get People To Click On Your Links. An Engaged Audience [INFOGRAPHIC] Every web publisher — and especially content marketer — yearns for an engaged and loyal audience.

But with the sheer volume of noise, clutter and — well, content — online it can be hard to figure out how to reach people and keep them coming back for more. The content marketing agency BlueGlass knows a lot about how to do this well. They've run successful campaigns for clients including eBay, Conde Nast and Greatist. Now BlueGlass is ready to share some of its secrets with Mashable readers. The company produced this exclusive infographic to run down some of the ways you too can build an engaged audience online. Here are a few quick tips: Make sure you have a gripping headline, keep your copy to the point, make sure to provide value and promote, promote, promote. Why are these approaches so important? Check out the infographic below for the fuller picture.