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ore than half of consumers want to interact with brands to solve service issues and 37% want brands to respond to their comments and feedback, whether positive or negative.

it’s a social media cul-de-sac since there are no outbound links. Content goes in, nothing come out. And of course the content isn’t searchable, so even if you have a snappy success, you can’t build on that win and amplify it into the future.

Early research also shows that Snapchat ads are ineffective. A study by Digiday showed that more than 90 percent of Snaphchat users abandons a 10-second ad in the first second

nappers love this app for self-expression and connecting with friends — not for following company accounts (less than 1 percent “sometimes” watch branded Snapchat stories). If Snapchat makes its platform more business-friendly, it risks losing its appeal.

Some brands are creating buzz by adding “Easter eggs” to the platform. An Easter egg is an inside joke or hidden feature. Here are some interesting Easter egg case studies in a post by Ryan Hoover.

If your core demographic is under 30, you probably have to figure it out and maintain a presence even if the business benefits are unclear right now.

What Google Authorship also does is help rank that author in search for original content all over the Interwebz. Can you say guest posting anyone? How about blogging communities? (Just so you know, The SMB Collective is accepting new bloggers; it’s a blogging community I established in 2010 that is ebbing out of dormancy.)

If you're an advertiser, there's a lot to think about here, especially the integrations that companies like Netflix are quietly selling to defray the cost of producing jaw-droppingly expensive fare like House of Cards. With reality on the rocks and scripted shows in a constant battle for the best teleplay, it's worth hitching your wagon to the right star.

I said a while back that linear cable would never sell premium inventory programmatically; I'm sticking with that. What's changed is linear cable likely will be unrecognizable in 10 years—even HBO is decoupling its highly prized service from a traditional cable sub

TV subscriptions are getting sold differently as consumers express their displeasure with the ever-pricier cable subscription model. That means more and more inventory is delivered in apps and through browsers. And that means programmatic sales, for sure.

consensus seems to be that it leaves advertisers scrambling to move money from linear cable to digital. That gets characterized without fail as a vote of no confidence in network programming, but it's really not; it's a vote of no confidence in the cable industry.

Marketing will no longer be just about acquisition: Loyalty and customer acquisition will still be the top two strategic programs for marketing organizations, but by 2020 they are separated from pioneering new and emerging technologies to engage audiences by only 1.6 percent.

Innovation will focus on small screens and no screens: Mobile devices and networks (59%), personalization technologies (45%), and IoT (39%) are the three technology-specific trends that will have the biggest impact on marketing organizations by 2020.

Raising customer loyalty and better brand perception are the two top benefits (both 53%) marketers aim to realize through a more positive customer experience.

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads