Solid content strategy (what you’re going to post on your page)Promotion strategy (how you’re going to continually increase your fan base)Engagement strategy (how you’ll respond to fans and build community)Conversion strategy (how you’ll turn your fans into customers)

It’s perfectly within Facebook’s Terms of Use to do a giveaway on your fan page. The rule of thumb is does everyone get one? If the answer is yes, you’re good to go—that’s a giveaway. If the answer is no because you’re drawing select winners, then that’s a promotion where you must adhere to Facebook’s Promotions guidelines and use an app to administer the contest/sweepstakes.

the average ER for most brands and businesses is a mere 2%!

mobile market, which brings in a quarter of YouTube's daily 1 billion hits

After watching two sales snatched from the jaws of well-known (and more expensive) national brands, the consultant couldn’t resist asking the clerk what this smaller company’s secret was. Was there a special sales incentive? Did the store have too many of these shoes in inventory? But the clerk just pointed to the crowds of shoppers needing attention and then explained, under his breath, that this particular brand saves him a lot of time on busy Saturdays, because they ship their shoes to the store with the laces already laced up.

what every marketer should worry about most, what should keep you up at night, is whether you have done all you can to minimize the obstacles your customers encounter during the buying process

Today I searched for “search engine” on Google. The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy

52 percent of boomers will like brands in exchange for offers, compared with 42 percent of millennials. Both groups had trouble remembering all of the brands they had liked — 63 percent of millennials and 60 percent of boomers. Like doesn’t necessarily lead to love, as just 16 percent of millennials and 36 percent of boomers said they truly “liked” brands they have liked on the social network. The opinions of friends remain important, as 68 percent of millennials and 52 percent of boomers said they turn to information about brands from friends.

While there’s no disputing the fact that Facebook provides a valuable channel for brands to engage with their fans, the value of a like is diluted if the people liking them won’t remember who they are tomorrow. That’s why it’s vital for marketers to understand the driving factors behind online behaviors so that they can convert fans into loyal, interested, and paying customers.

thousands of so-called virtual assistants - essentially freelance social marketers - who typically offer clients 1,000 likes for about $25. 

"One thing all of these virtual assistants have in common is a large number of fake profiles that they use,” he said. “The average virtual assistant I've seen who does Facebook marketing has at least five Facebook accounts.”

Such deals have proven irresistible to marketers. “Business owners jump on the chance" to get hundreds of likes, said Jayme Pretzloff, online marketing director for Minneapolis-based Wixon Jewelers, "but they don't realize the repercussions of doing this. Facebook has already cracked down on this by changing its Newsfeed rankings based on engagement." Companies' strong engagement with their fans will appear more often in their fans' feeds, he adds.

“PR is about pitching the brand to the media.  You help shape the story, but you don’t craft the story.  Brand journalism is about creating the actual content, finding the best ways to share it, and telling the stories of your people, customers, and brand.” You’re skipping the middleman, essentially. You’re no longer hoping for a third party to tell your brand’s story, you’re doing it yourself.

“Brand journalism is the use of a journalistic approach to storytelling on behalf of a brand.  It is the mindset of assembling and delivering a compelling story, but it is not impartial.  It presents the brand’s messages and perspectives.”

A brand that is creating and sharing terrific stories and entertaining content, however, will get noticed and those sales leads will come as you establish yourself as not only a source of information regarding your particular industry but a place to regularly stop by for good reading material in general.

Sixty-nine percent of the heads of households in the U.S. play computer and video games. And 97% of young people — your emerging talent pool — play them

Endless sameness. People come to work and, without climactic events, do essentially the same thing every day forever — like a mountain climber who never sees a peak ahead.

Little sense of personal achievement. Most people lack sharply measured goals. They can work diligently every day but never have a significant success — or failure.

social media is becoming a skill, not a job. Companies like Intel and Dell and IBM are leading the way in broadly distributed social participation, giving thousands of employees the opportunity to win hearts and mind in social and with smart content.

This decentralization of social communication has widespread ramifications for social media management software vendors, as it puts additional emphasis on triage and workflow tools.

The days of one social media manager handling Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and the rest is coming to a close (as is the era of the one or two person content marketing team) and the same way all of us have a corporate email address and phone number, we’ll all (or nearly all) have a role to play on behalf of the company in social and content marketing, eventually.

The Attention Economy paradigm was, in many ways, the fundamental building block for understanding the rise of social media and social networking. This paradigm rested on a simple, but amazingly robust, observation – that the scarce resource in our information overload world was attention.

in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

attention is no longer the scarce resource in the world of the mobile Internet - it's location

Having a thousand quality fans that do something is better than having a million followers that do nothing.

Instead of spending all your efforts on selling your product, develop and foster relationships with your community by providing relevant and useful content available to them at their point of need. Understand what your customers want and give it to them.

To Schmidt, today’s smartphones are pocket-size supercomputers. And their core is Android.

1.3 million Android devices come online every day. Nearly 70,000 of them are tablets, an area that Schmidt admitted Android fell behind in relation to the competition (Apple’s iPad, which he did not mention by name). The installed base of Android devices is pushing 500 million, with 480 million active Androids in circulation. It is an ecosystem, Schmidt said, that went beyond anything Google had ever imagined. 

Digital advertisers and publishers may also want to consider using a responsive design strategy to ensure that their sites deliver consistent, high quality digital experiences across desktop and mobile channels

As the number of Internet-enabled consumer devices continues to grow, so does the propensity of consumers to sequentially use multiple devices to complete a single online task. In fact, according to a new study from Google, 90 percent of people move among devices to accomplish a goal.

Examples of how consumers sequentially use multiple devices for a single task include opening an email on a smartphone and then finishing reading it on a home PC and looking up product specs on a laptop after seeing a TV commercial

The other primary way of using multiple devices is simultaneous use, meaning using more than one device at the same time. This includes both multitasking — performing different tasks on different devices — and complementary usage such as looking up a product online while watching a TV commercial.