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How to make your social media go viral is a mystery but social media that goes nowhere is well understood.

via Entrepreneur: Latest Online Marketing Articles

Facebook continues to crack down on the shady side of its social network.On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it has started fighting back against advertisers and Page owners that link to sites that violate Facebook’s rules but hide those links from Facebook’s reviewers.In the past, these offenders would disguise the actual destination of the link attached to an ad or post, or they would come up with ways to dupe Facebook’s reviewers by directing them to a dummy page when vetting a link but would take people using Facebook’s mobile app to the offending page. But Facebook has figured out how to detect these so-called “cloaking” schemes.Source: Facebook “We are utilizing artificial intelligence and have expanded our human review processes to help us identify, capture, and verify cloaking. We can now better observe differences in the type of content served to people using our apps compared to our own internal systems,” said Facebook product management director Rob Leathern and software e…

A comparison of applicant-tracking systems on Software Advice lists 260 products. But there’s a new product to add to the list — a product from the world’s most valuable brand that seeks to narrow the competition in the field. Meet Hire by Google.Hire is an applicant-tracking tool that’s available to companies with 1,000 or fewer employees, and it’s built to work with G Suite applications like Gmail and Google Calendar. In a blog post announcing Hire’s official launch last month, Google says:Hire and G Suite are made to work well together so recruiting team members can focus on their top priorities instead of wasting time copy-pasting across tools.When it says, “wasting time copy-pasting across tools,” Google means those other 260 systems that SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses) might currently be using as recruiting and applicant-tracking solutions. The HR SaaS (software as a service) industry is, understandably, in a bit of a panic. (We should know: Jobvite has been a long-term …

In late 2016, some hockey fans were pretty miffed with the NHL. It wasn’t because of a certain call in a game or a particular player’s draft standing. It was about their team iPhone and Android apps — or more specifically, it was about the fact that their team apps had been redirected to a one-size-fits-all NHL app.While fans could still select their favorite team within the app, the new system didn’t have the local touch of the individual team apps. Red Wings fans, for example, missed their app that played a customized alert whenever their team scored, and some weren’t afraid to be colorful with criticism.The switch was the result of a new partnership between the NHL and Major League Baseball, which also has a centralized app. But for hockey fans, this new, nationally focused messaging wasn’t always a good fit.As I pointed out in my last column on local launches, scaling content while retaining personalization is a pesky problem for many brands, from small startups to national franch…

A robotic lawn mower If you think you’ve finally gotten a handle on customer engagement, buckle up.That’s because “automation is reshaping customer engagement,” according to a recent Forrester report on agents, bots, hardware robots and intelligent self-service solutions that will address customer-facing problems over the next 10 years. (Self-driving vehicles might also relate to customer engagement, such as with taxis or car services, but they were the subject of another recent report from Forrester.)“Automation Technologies for Customer Engagement” gives the example of Dallas-based lawn care company Robin Technologies. Because lawn mowing is the least profitable of its offerings, it partnered with tech development firm Dialexa Labs to create a robotic lawn mowing device.The device lives on the customer’s lawn, recharges from a base station, contains a GPS tracker and is restricted to the property via an installed wire perimeter. Robin handles maintenance, and the new product frees it…

This week, Salesforce is giving eyesight to its Social Studio.Social Studio is the social management tool in the company’s Marketing Cloud and, before today, it did not have image recognition. Brands either manually searched images or conducted text searches of metadata or related posts.Now, it has Einstein Vision image recognition, powered by the company’s Einstein layer of artificial intelligence. Vice President of Product Marketing for Social Products Rob Begg told me that Einstein Vision previously existed in some parts of the company’s Service Cloud.Brands can search Twitter for images containing 2 million kinds of logos, 60 types of scenes (such as beaches or airports), 200 types of foods (e.g., cheeseburger) and a thousand objects. Begg said support for additional social platforms will be added, and searches can be conducted for combos, like logos in airports.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

Metaphorically, Demandbase’s new Real-Time Intent is a kind of early warning system for business sellers. Demandbase helps marketers target content, ads and sales to web users, based on the company they’re coming from and their interests.This week, it is upping its Account-Based Marketing game, announcing new artificial intelligence tech that processes more data more quickly, so marketers get a better idea of what a web user is looking for, earlier in the search.Called Real-Time Intent, it processes much of the same kind of data as previously — website visits, form fill-outs, pages viewed and the like. But it can now treat pages viewed and other data as early intent signals and act on those signals in real time.[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

via Marketing Land

Google is refining the options it gives advertisers for excluding categories of sites from their display network campaigns on the Google Display Network.With this change, several current site category exclusions are being eliminated or recategorized, and a couple of new ones are being added. As of last week, several exclusions are no longer available for newDisplay campaigns. In early 2018, all existing campaigns will be switched over to the new settings automatically.Google began showing an alert in the site category exclusions menu last week. Users with older campaigns may see the following options, shared on Twitter by digital marketer Steve Seeley:Newer campaigns show an updated version of the site category exclusion options.What is changing?There are five primary changes, outlined in a support page:Roll-up: The “Crime, police, and emergency,” “ Military and international conflict” and “Death and tragedy” categories are being rolled up into the “Tragedy and conflict” exclusion cat…

It seems there are as many marketing strategies as there are tech startups in Silicon Valley. Marketers are judged on their ability to pick the most effective strategy, tailor it to perfection and implement it on a tight budget. Every move must support revenue goals.As a result, the expectation is that marketers will shift to become more focused on data than ever. I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a few of my favorite thought leaders in the industry to discuss the latest data-driven strategies that are actually working for them in their startups. Here’s what they had to say:Wes Bush, founder of Traffic Is CurrencyMarketing qualified leads are dead. Like it or not, this is the reality that many marketers face. Simply tracking specific events that a prospect takes on your website and scoring them based on what forms they fill out is not going to cut it. People are tired of jumping through hoops in your marketing and sales process to get noticed and ultimately get value from you.Muc…

It has never been easier for brands to find celebrities, or so-called influencers, to promote their products. And it has never been more complicated.“It’s just legwork. It’s not hard work. It’s just time-consuming work,” said Dave Snyder, senior VP and executive creative director at Firstborn.Earlier this year, Adidas tasked the Dentsu Aegis Network-owned digital agency with arranging an influencer-driven Instagram Stories campaign to promote its latest sneaker. Because the shoe was designed to appeal to the type of cultural curator whose Instagram feed could double as a coffee table book published by Vice, the brand wanted to work with photographers who had substantial street cred and sizable social followings. Specifically, Adidas wanted photographers who were older than 22 years old but younger than 30, had at least 20,000 Instagram followers but fewer than 100,000 and were street photographers who shoot using film.“That allowed us to really narrow in on who we wanted to feature. W…

‘Million’ is a magical word. However, until a few years back, it used to be an alien word for me.I’m from New Delhi, India, and here we talk in Lakhs and Crores. Thanks to globalization and the growth of the blogging and startup industries, “million” is no longer a word that is exciting for me.Why am I talking about this word?Because ShoutMeLoud receives more than 1.5 million page views a month, and one of my goals for this year is to reach 2 million page views a month.I think we can get there…Welcome to this special transparency report of ShoutMeLoud!Every few months, I publish a report like this stating what is happening with our blog, how we performed in terms of traffic and income, and a lot of new ideas and suggestions for bloggers in every niche to grow their own blogging businesses.If you are not sure why I publish such transparency reports, then you should read our philosophy here and check out previous income reports here.To sum up, I want you to be your own boss and live a l…

Whether in an agency environment or inside a business, your SEO team is affected by where it’s placed within the organization.But first, a caveat: there isn’t one correct answer for how every company or agency should do things. With that said, understanding the influences in play with certain organizational placements can help you make wiser decisions as you look at the logistics of categorizing an SEO team.So what are the options for where you locate your SEO team?Separate SEO departmentWe’ll start with the obvious answer. Let SEO be its own department. This works for medium to large teams that are able to have their own leadership structure and growth opportunities.The benefits of having this team operate independently include being able to segment the department into functional groups, such as technical SEO, content marketing, link building, etc.Another benefit is that SEO processes are not biased by another department’s focus. When recommendations come from the SEO department, the…

Marketers regularly harrumph over Snapchat’s indifference to their unpaid presences. Unlike Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, Snapchat doesn’t cater to brands operating organic accounts. It hasn’t rolled out business-specific profiles or made it any easier for brands to attract new followers than the average person. And now marketers are seeing the most success in adding followers on Snapchat by looking outside of Snapchat.A year ago, username searches were the most popular way for brands to add followers on Snapchat. But now, that method has been eclipsed by profile links that brands share on non-Snapchat social networks and their own sites that deep-link to Snapchat, according to a study by Snaplytics that spanned 1,100 brands’ Snapchat accounts and that also found the success of Snapchat’s QR-like Snapcodes to be on the wane.Of the 1.94 million new followers that the analyzed brands attracted in the second quarter of 2017 — a 33 percent increase from Q1 — 1.10 million used deep links…

Twitter is one of my top slam-dunk assets for trying to displace negative content in search results. If your reputation has been harmed by some negative content that ranks when your name is searched, a strong Twitter account could be one of your primary resources for pushing the bad stuff lower on Google and Bing. Unfortunately, many individuals, small businesses and reputation agencies do a poor job of optimizing Twitter profiles to enable this to happen. Read on for my ninja-level tricks for Twitter SEO!When searching for the names of individuals and businesses in search engines, Twitter accounts can appear on page one of Google and Bing if they have been properly optimized. For example, a search for Coca-Cola shows the brand’s main Twitter account on page one in the second position, just below the corporation’s listing for their official website.In another example from Bing, if you search for Pepsi, you’ll find the official Twitter account of the brand appearing on page one for its…

Welcome to Part 1 of this series: “A Nine-Part Practical Guide to Martech Enablement.” This series will outline a process to building a data-driven, technology-supported marketing organization within your company. Much is being written about martech, digital transformation and digital maturity, but there’s scant guidance on how to actually go about this journey. This series is about the process of martech enablement.Defining martech enablementI define martech enablement as follows:The process of bringing marketing and technology together to create the team, define the strategy, identify, implement and integrate the tools, and execute the strategy that enables an organization to engage most effectively with their customer. Ultimately, it’s getting the right information at the right time into the hands of marketers so they can effectively engage their customers to build brand, market products and services and assist the sales organization.Transform and mature, huh?As I said earlier, a l…

The artificial intelligence of today has almost nothing in common with the AI of science fiction. In “Star Wars,” “Star Trek” and “Battlestar Galactica,” we’re introduced to robots who behave like we do — they are aware of their surroundings, understand the context of their surroundings and can move around and interact with people just as I can with you. These characters and scenarios are postulated by writers and filmmakers as entertainment, and while one day humanity will inevitably develop an AI like this, it won’t happen in the lifetime of anyone reading this article.Because we can rapidly feed vast amounts of data to them, machines appear to be learning and mimicking us, but in fact they are still at the mercy of the algorithms we provide. The way for us to think of modern artificial intelligence is to understand two concepts:Computers can ingest millions of data points per second and make instant calculations and predictions based on this data set.Very specific rules can be writ…

Here’s our recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:Online retail sees continued growth with digital commerce up 14% YoY [Report]
Aug 8, 2017 by Amy Gesenhues
Salesforce Cloud Commerce’s Q2 2017 shopping index shows growth in nearly every area of the e-commerce landscape.Facebook looks to clean up Audience Network with higher standard for counting clicks
Aug 8, 2017 by Tim Peterson
Facebook will stop charging advertisers for clicks on ads running across its Audience Network when people bounce back in less than 2 seconds.Measuring social traffic effectiveness when conversion is not the goal
Aug 8, 2017 by Mark Traphagen
What if your primary objective isn’t to convert? How do you measure the success of your content shared on social? Columnist Mark Traphagen explains why average time on page isn’t the answer.Crimson Hexagon boosts its visual recognition of social pics
Aug 8, 2017 by Barry Levine
So…

Pinterest is officially pressing play on its autoplay video ad business.A few months after it began testing autoplay video ads, Pinterest is opening up the ad format to all advertisers, including those buying ads through Pinterest’s self-serve ad-buying tool or its advertising API, the company announced on Tuesday.Aside from the expansion in availability, nothing appears to have changed with Pinterest’s autoplay video ad product since the testing phase was announced in May, though I’m waiting for a Pinterest spokesperson to confirm that.The ads can still appear in people’s feeds and in search results. They still play with the sound off by default. Videos can still be up to 30 minutes long — though why? — and can be formatted however a brand wants — square, horizontal or vertical — though Pinterest recommends they be vertical or square. Pinterest will continue to bill advertisers by the number of impressions their ads receive, including when someone quickly skips past an ad while scrol…

Marketing conferences are the shortest route to increased knowledge, exposure and opportunity.

via Entrepreneur: Latest Online Marketing Articles

Tracking the online behavior of 500 million global shoppers, Salesforce Commerce Cloud’s Q2 2017 shopping index spotlights the various ways digital commerce is continuing to grow.From shopper spend to mobile site traffic and social traffic, the report shows increases across the board during Q2 of this year. Specifically, digital commerce was up 14 percent year over year, retail website traffic was up 6 percent, and online shopper spend was up 8 percent.The mobile traffic share for digital commerce saw a 23 percent year-over-year increase last quarter, rising to 57 percent. Social traffic share grew 42 percent year over year, driving a large portion of the mobile traffic growth.Among the shopping verticals tracked by Salesforce, active apparel saw the biggest increase — nearly double the overall growth. The only vertical that saw a drop was luxury apparel.Q2 2017 Digital Commerce Growth by Vertical“Buying Intent continues to tick up, and is about to breach its all-time high — even incl…