Social Media Training for Marketers

using marketing analytics remains a distinct challenge for companies—beyond the production of these sophisticated data."

Mobile advertising currently takes up 3.2 percent of marketing budgets but will almost triple to 9 percent in the next three years.

Social media now accounts for 9.9 percent of spending, though it should grow to 22.4 percent of budgets in the next five years.

A study by Weber Shandwick backs up this observation: About two-thirds of customers say their perception of a CEO directly impacts their perception of the company.

Another way to get shared by influencers in your field is to research which sites they visit frequently. Then either guest post for one of the sites or pitch an article about your company to people who already write for it.

Involve influencers in the creation of a piece of content, and they have a vested interest to help promote it. Do an interview with a targeted expert, request a guest post for your blog or get a quote for an article you’re already writing.

Take time to research, write, edit and fact-check articles. Shift your thinking away from quick fixes and ideas that have probably already been done. Instead, come up with unique concepts and strive for more ambitious projects.

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.

Nicheworks with more than 6,300 social media influencers ranging from comedic personalities to photographers to foodies to fashion bloggers. Among the more than 100 brands and agencies it has worked with are Hewlett-Packard Co., Coca-Cola Co. and the National Football League. Hewlett-Packard’s HP Home & Home Office Store is No. 35 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide while the National Football League is No. 151.

As a part of Twitter, Niche aims to build more tools, platforms and ways to help influencers link up with brands, write Niche co-founders Rob Fishman and Darren Lachtman in a blog post.

By acquiring Niche, Twitter will be the rare social network that stands to directly profit when an influencer works with a brand. But it won’t be alone. Tumblr last month launched Creatrs Network,

Facebook will round up your friends’ posts and photos from a particular place, like Manhattan’s famed Dominique Ansel Bakery, so you can see what they liked (the cronut, obviously) and what they didn’t. Place tips will also include information from the business page, like hours of operation, events, and menu details.

To determine your location, the app will use Wi-Fi, cell networks, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons placed at particular locations (a limited number in New York City so far).

But place tips will make better use of Facebook’s data, putting information front and center rather than making you comb through search results. The network’s rollout of Bluetooth beacons is a move to watch. Apple has been distributing iBeacons since the launch of iOS 7 in 2013, and we’ve seen some interesting uses of the technology, but it hasn’t yet gone mainstream. With Facebook now on board with beacons, we might see businesses adopt them at a much quicker pace. After all, few marketing moves make businesses happier than highly targeted, location-based, actionable ads.

For the first time in Pew Research findings, more than half (56%) of internet users ages 65 and older use Facebook. Overall, 71% of internet users are on Facebook, a proportion that represents no change from August 2013.

For the first time, roughly half of internet-using young adults ages 18-29 (53%) use Instagram. And half 0f all Instagram users (49%) use the site daily.

Women dominate Pinterest: 42% of online women now use the platform, compared with 13% of online men.

Nielsen competitor ComScore is trying hard to create a product that will loosen Nielsen's grip on TV ratings, but that's a nearly impossible task. The question is less whether Nielsen's TV ratings will go away than whether traditional linear cable agreements will eventually go away and Nielsen's ratings system will become obsolete

There's just too much that's too similar on TV, and the wars of attrition with cable operators mean all packages just aren't going to contain all channels anymore. They can't afford to.

Third parties like Acxiom and Experian have an incredible amount of information, and the CEO of Acxiom told us consumers should have to pay to prevent their financial data from circulating among anybody who wants to buy it, basically like getting an upgrade on an airline.

“The days of the big bang campaign are gone. We don’t have time to spend months baking ideas and putting a big bang into market.” Article Highlights: The way we think about and execute marketing is in flux. Agile for Marketing (A4M) empowers organizations to be more responsive to the market.Now is the time to create a new competitive advantage through innovation and responsiveness.

CMOs adopting A4M have an unprecedented ability to tackle corporate and market realities with ease, speed, and intelligence. And our research shows that translates into stronger business performance and higher employee satisfaction.

agile firms grow revenue 37 percent faster and generate 30 percent higher profits than nonagile organizations.

In today’s fast-paced, multichannel world, marketers no longer have the luxury to spend months crafting large projects; they must innovate and produce on the fly and respond immediately to market disruptions. In their new report, the researchers explain, “Agile for Marketing (A4M) drives long-term marketing strategies with short-term, customer-focused iterative projects that improve responsiveness and relevance. It allows for faster creative, more testing, smarter improvements and better results.”

63% of marketing leaders indicate agility as a high priority, but only 40% rate themselves as agile.

The CMOs we spoke with needed a solution that would help them orient marketing activities around the constant change in the marketplace—a solution that allows them to be more dynamic and flexible in their operations, more productive, and more collaborative and integrated in their work product.

Google is launching a new “Store Visits” metric in AdWords, designed to use your customers’ location to determine whether they’ve visited your stores, restaurants, and hotels after clicking on an ad.

“…most mobile research leads to a purchase, just not on the smartphone.”

“In a March 2014 survey conducted by Nielsen for xAd and Telmetrics, between 70% and 80% of US smartphone or tablet users said they had completed or would soon complete a purchase related to their smartphone search. The study also found that more than 40% of consumers considered a smartphone or tablet their most important media resource for a purchase decision.”