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Big data isn’t just a function of better data-tracking technology; it simply wouldn’t exist without the ever-expanding catalyst that is big content.

marketing content refers to any artifact with which a consumer interacts that relates to a brand. Content gets “big” via its amplification, iteration and dissemination across multiple channels, devices and platforms. When content “jumps the tracks” and is no longer controlled solely by the brand, but can be summoned and even manipulated on demand by consumers themselves, then it’s “big."

Based on a 2012 survey by Content Wise, marketers increased their total spending on content development by 45% from 2005 to 2012, when the percentage of marketers’ budgets allocated to content creation increased from 31% to 39%

The major takeaways from Google Panda and update (in no particular order) are as follows: Focus on original content – you will get hammered for “stealing” or repurposing on too high a scale (for example, lifting content from Wikipedia) Over-optimization kills – Google can sniff out sites that are designed solely to exploit certain key words (for example, repeating the same keyword, or variations thereof to drive traffic) Link to high quality/authoritative sites – while Panda focused more on a more systematic sweep of SEO, Penguin is focused on the processes around linking. Don’t over-link, and when you do create links, link to high quality sources Excessive Ads are Bad – If it looks like you are running too many ads against your content, you will face the consequences SEO is a “Bad Word” – The rise of the term “content marketing” effectively means that high quality content trumps low quality link bait.

Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative SitesContent marketing does not just refer to content you write for your own site, but content you write for other sites.

content marketing also improves SEO rankings and traffic.  Link building is a common SEO strategy that is always difficult to grow through a paid channel.  The best way to get organic and quality links is by creating interesting content that drives people to link and share your content.  Whether or not it’s directly related to your line of business, driving free traffic is always a victory.

One of the most common mistakes made when designing social applications is focusing immediately on rich, heavyweight interactions rather than lightweight ones. All the best social experiences online map closely to how offline social experiences work: offline, people build relationships slowly, one lightweight interaction at a time.

Every now and again we have more heavyweight interactions, such as family dinners, big nights out with friends, birthdays, anniversaries, family vacations and so on. But if we hadn’t built the relationship through many lightweight interactions over time, we’d have no interest in the heavyweight ones. The aggregation of many lightweight interactions is very powerful. It builds deep relationships, and helps people curate parts of their identity.

It takes months and years to build relationships with people, and they all are built on many lightweight interactions over time. And people build relationships with brands in the same way as they build relationships with people: slowly, one interaction at a time. Just as we don’t suddenly become best friends with someone, we don’t suddenly fall in love with a brand – so build products that support lightweight ways for people to interact and show the aggregations of those interactions over time.

Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device

Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.

Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern

According to Ron Faris, Head of Brand Marketing at Virgin Mobile, “scaling our content efforts isn’t just about expanding the size of our social reach across new platforms. It’s also about deepening the level of engagement we have with our fans in the social communities they hang out in

Twitter users follow at least one brand, and that more than half of users follow six or more brands.

Twitter also studied the reasons why someone follows a brand, and as you might expect, freebies and discounts are definitely a factor. But according to Lunenfeld, people also said they were interested in getting access to exclusive or promotional content.

The big message of Lunenfeld’s talk was to encourage advertisers to understand that advertising on Twitter isn’t separate from regular content. Brands should think of conversations on Twitter as a canvas where “you can paint some amazing stories,” he said.

“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

what is native advertising? A quick, simple definition: It's an ad whose form and delivery is identical to the content environment in which it is served. The opposite, in other words, of interruptive advertising: billboards, takeovers, and big banners that take up space on the page but don't otherwise relate.

Native advertising is not without its controversies. A big one is the learning curve: Marketers must master each potential advertising environment and learn its intricacies, from Tumblr users' love for animated GIFs and the phrase "fuck yeah," to Twitter's peculiar language of retweets and replies to Facebook's maddening algorithms.

Care about consumers’ experiences; don’t aim to disrupt what they’re trying to do. To that point, don’t expect an exchange of value in order to get a consumer to disclose personal information to the brand. If you are getting information from a consumer, use it to improve his or her experience. Don’t cannibalize the relationship being established.

innovation is often triggered by those too naïve to be aware of why something can’t be done

Innovations happen when you take beta concepts live, sometimes by necessity, sometimes by opportunity.

A new survey by Initiative questioned some 8,000 web users age 16-54 in Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the Netherlands, U.S., and U.K. to find out how they were influenced in purchase decisions by social media interactions. The results are kind of amazing: A huge 99% of the "top 10%" of influencers reported that their friends quiz them before making a big purchase. This top 10% has a disproportionate influence on the opinions of others--because 72% of them access content in print, online and mobile form more than once a day, compared to just 18% of the bottom 10% of influencers. 

A different study, by Market Force, underscored the fact that brands are leveraging social media to promote themselves. Embedded in the study were stats on the power of the average user to spread brand-related messages: 81% of U.S. respondents said posts from their friends directly impacted their decision on purchasing something, and 80% or respondents said they'd tried new things based on suggestions of friends.

This is a big departure from the static print ads and traditional TV spots of the past. Initiative's study even included advice for brands to move well beyond the thinking of a traditional 30-second ad spot, and push out additional material like behind-the-scenes footage...all to drive discussion and lead to more online chatter that will lead to brand discovery. It also suggests that brands build a team of "relevant social influencers" to spread new ad campaigns and stimulate dialog.

Pinterest has beaten out Yahoo organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide

Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63% on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.

it could also be because Shareaholic’s data, which comes from a network of 200,000 publishers using its social sharing and content analysis tools, is more likely to reflect an engaged community where people are comfortable with using social networking sites to perform searches. In other words, it’s not a big picture study here – just a slice.

TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.”

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

Fewer people are seeing Facebook posts from brands, businesses and celebrities, the social network has acknowledged. 

It is unclear how page views have been affected, but a report from Valleywag today claims the company is slashing organic reach to just one to two percent of people who have clicked a Page’s Like button.

Each day, there are an average of 1,500 stories the company can show in someone’s news feed, and Facebook said in December that as a result of the increased competition for post views, many pages will likely see a decline in organic reach.

According to a new poll of U.S. marketers conducted by Gartner, corporate websites are ranked as the top digital activity for marketing “success” — beating marketing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media marketing, however, ranked as the next most important activity, equal in importance to online advertising.

The survey, conducted in November and December of 2012, polled a relatively small sample of 250+ marketers from U.S.-based companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue

Design, development and maintenance of the corporate website was cited by 45% of survey respondents as contributing to marketing success, with marketing on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter cited by 43%. Digital/online advertising was also cited by 43%

Each video will last a maximum of 15 seconds, suggesting Facebook has taken note of Vine’s offering – which is limited to a 6 second video format. A small number of big brands will be part of the initial trials, including Unilever, Nestlé, Ford, Diageo, American Express and Coca Cola. To create more impact (at least at the beginning) users will only see video content from one of these advertiser’s in any one day. The ads will be bought on a cost per thousand basis with rates predicted to be in the low $20s, a cost per engagement model is not currently being considered.

rapidly expanding online video advertising market - 41% growth Y.O.Y, US 2012.

social TV lab: “Our team and Bluefin Labs (which Twitter purchased earlier this year) will come together, put mutual skin in game, and create a social TV lab that we think will give our clients unprecedented real-time data on how consumers are watching, buying and the conversations that amplify brand messages."

“the idea that the digital marketplace is moving from ad exchange and targeting and re-targeting to, while still including those things, much more toward creating real-time content and experiences.”

SMV sees Twitter not as a media silo in itself but a platform that extends across paid, owned, and earned media. "If you think the future of marketing is convergence and amplification of big moments over time, as we do, then Twitter becomes one of the essential channels you have to evaluate in any marketing plan.”

Leaders at some companies have begun to include employees — not just senior executives, corporate spokespeople, and other authorized communicators — in the work of telling their company story. "Employee-generated content" is one term for this practice. Our term for it is inclusion, and it's one element of a new leadership model that we call organizational conversation.

That's a big departure from how leaders have traditionally managed the flow of ideas and information within their company. And, not surprisingly, there is a reluctance within many organizations to move in that direction. Recently, when we surveyed participants in an Executive Education program at Harvard Business School, more than half of them (51%) said that the goal of "encouraging employee voice" had "no priority" or had a "low priority" at their company.

People today are skeptical of slickly produced brand messages. They're skeptical of slick official spokespeople, too. Leaders who want to build public trust in their company brand, therefore, often recruit employees to serve as brand ambassadors. Training people who work for a company to speak for that company is a marketing practice that doubles as an engagement-building practice.

Recent changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithms have lavished online publishers with unprecedented referral traffic, creating a ripple effect throughout the news industry. In September, stately newspaper sites set a digital traffic record, seeing an 11% gain in visitors since June, while Facebook referrals from BuzzFeed’s diverse partner network of sites increased by 69% from August to October.

But traffic-bound publishers are growing anxious that yet another algorithm change could erase the big gains of the last few months — that traffic could disappear just as quickly as it came. “We’re starting to get very nervous,” one staffer at a major paper told BuzzFeed. “It’s scary that they can get everyone hooked on such high referral traffic then take it away so quickly with a quick flip of their algorithm,”

“They’re gonna keep tinkering with the algorithm, so I expect the referral surge will taper off. I’m not worried, though. Facebook has a hundred billion reasons why they need to support ‘high-quality content,’ which means they won’t abandon publishers anytime soon.”