In their new book, The Age of Context, Shel Israel and Robert Scoble have updated the sweeping and ambitious look at marketing and media they co-wrote in 2005, Naked Conversations. Every business you have or can imagine will be shaped by what the authors are calling The Age of Context. When did corporate videos start giving movies like Titanic a run for their money? Traditionally, corporate videos had a reputation for being rather boring. Marketing departments went for the safe option – it worked, it was easy, not too risky, and therefore their jobs were safe. However, over time this view has changed. If you’re running a promotion for your business on social media – or anywhere really – you should take care to ensure your prizing structure is strategically relevant. Your prizing structure should work toward proving your brand’s promise. It’s pretty exciting to learn that IBM are giving internal crowdfunding a trial. The company is well known for its use of idea jams to solicit opinion from it’s 100,000+ employees on all sorts of issues, but now they’re trying something a wee bit different. One of the biggest challenges that have faced marketers for the last few years is the idea of measuring digital results. Marketers around the globe have thrown up the white flag claiming that you cannot measure the ROI of social media, but I’m here to call those marketers' bluff. Content is playing a key role in Ford's strategy. As Scott Monty told me, "our marketing is moving away from a campaign mentality, to an 'always-on' mentality. That requires a lot of content." Their experiments are providing us with case studies and templates for successful approaches to what is at the heart of the social media revolution. Whether or not your site has “valid HTML” is often something you will see listed in an SEO report. While it is important for a number of reasons, finding out if you validate or not should not be a key focus of your SEO work. But see what Google web guru Matt Cutts has to say about it. Encrypted search was introduced in 2010 to keep the information of logged in users secure. Now that security has been expanded to everyone who searches using Google, at least in the US. Here’s the breakdown on Google Encrypted search and what it will mean for businesses online. There are now more Facebook Contest options since Facebook loosened up the promotion policy and allows contests on both the Timeline via a post, and via apps on tabs. So how can you decide which to use? The key is understanding how the contest fits into your larger marketing strategy. According to a report from 24/7 Wall St., the estimated number of advertising and promotions managers fell by almost two-thirds from 2002 to 2012. Now before you go drinking away your sorrows, take Dan Lyons’ nuggets of wisdom over on the HubSpot blog. His perspective on this otherwise terrifying figure is vital for you to understand. Although branding plays an integral part in every business, B2B leaders continue to face numerous challenges. The following are statistics you need to know to understand the obstacles of B2B leaders. This, in turn, will help you reflect on what you need to improve. In a knowledge economy, getting the most out of every employee is paramount, and with the baby boomer generation beginning to retire this has taken on critical importance for companies, whatever their sector. What role can gamification play in this? As much as I enjoy watching the two uber-generations I am sandwiched in between indulge themselves by slinging verbal mud pies at each other, to me, the whole argument entirely misses one very stark and inexorable reality: as Americans, we’re all entitled, and we have bigger fish to fry. With its recent launch of the Groupon Partner Network, a new affiliate marketing platform, Groupon has begun its journey to become the most widely used network for local e-commerce. Groupon is clearly poised for a massive level of growth in the near future. So Tim Cook, the famously private person who has the thankless (but well-paying) job of trying to replace the most famous and iconic company leader of all time, has taken to Twitter. The "tweet heard round the world" happened, gentle readers, at 3:02 PM on September 20, 2013. Hashtags are the key to discovering, communicating and sharing on social media. Let’s have a conversation about hashtags and demystify what they're all about and how to use them once and for all. Your business activity and personal activity will become far more efficient as a result. Best practices for measuring social media marketing are still evolving, and even though brands are committing an increasing percentage of their budgets to social channels, many are still skeptical about its value and return on investment (ROI). What’s a marketer to do? I attended kindergarten at Zena Elementary School in Kingston, New York, where my teacher was Ms. Silvernail. Back then, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) didn’t yet exist. Search engines didn’t exist because the web was not yet invented. 15% of people still don’t use the Internet, but at least the majority of them see some sort of value in it. What do you think: how difficult it is to survive without Internet and will it be easier in the future to plug-in those last 15%? Responsible Tourism is tourism ‘that creates better places for people to live in, and better places to visit’. Responsible Tourism is about industry role-players in the tourism sector, including destinations, taking responsibility for achieving sustainable development through tourism. There are literally hundreds of things you can do – on page – to add more value to your listing than the competitor’s listing. Get creative! If you are only pulling in an Amazon/Ebay/Clickbank listing for an item, it’s likely your site will be penalized, unless you add extra value. In honor of Walter White and the terrible habits he picked up while building his meth empire, I invite you to focus on something we can control: our own bad habits. And since this is a blog dedicated to content marketing, here are 6 habits we marketers need to break ... badly. Adobe research indicates marketers don’t know what they’re doing. Or possibly, they know what they’re doing, but don’t know if they should be doing it. In this article, we'll examine what's turning marketers into insomniacs as digital marketing continues to completely change the landscape. Smart content marketers pay significant attention to search and social. Search is the leading way that people actively discover new information. We search for content more than 21 billion times each month in the United States, and more than 115 billion times around the world. Media relations is the backbone of a strong communications program.Journalists and bloggers know we have a business reason to be contacting them and they know, when pitching an editorial or a story, we’re doing so on behalf of a client.