One of the trendy articles I've seen recently in business trade publications is about cleaning up your social networking profiles so that you appear to be more professional for businesses looking to hire you. I'm of two minds on the subject. Removing egregious material is definitely important from a personal branding perspective, but only if [...]
In this week's Marketing Over Coffee, we talk LinkedIn Sponsored Content, Adwords Enhanced Campaigns, LeapMotion, and much more: Subscribe now to the Marketing Over Coffee podcast!
Much ado is being made of Gmail's new tabs and whether they are hurting marketers. Stop speculating and find out if they are hurting YOUR email marketing efforts. Here's how. Go into your marketing automation or email marketing system and start pulling reports on your Gmail subscribers.
I was listening with interest to episode 3 of the Marketing Companion featuring Tom Webster and Mark Schaefer, and the debate that formed the core of the episode was: is quality or quantity better when it comes to content marketing for the purposes of winning at SEO?
The folks at Blogworld pointed out that I wrote this piece 4 years ago about whether social media would kill conferences. Clearly, that hasn't happened, but I thought it'd be interesting to see what's happened in the marketing and social media conference space in that time period: For most of the conferences named in this [...]
Every community's strength is built on common ground. From belief in a religious perspective to love of a certain set of cartoon characters, all communities share a common ground. However, common ground isn't enough to keep a community together. There needs to be a unifying mechanism that brings together that community, that reminds and refreshes [...]
I was asked yesterday what I thought the top marketing trend or trends would be for the rest of 2013. The answer is straightforward but challenging for us marketers: search that's beyond measured search. On any given day of the week, a new study pops out on the marketing news website of your choice talking [...]
Today's mailbag question is an oft-repeated one: "What's the best way to handle video in email marketing?" The answer is: it depends. What it depends on most is how your audience reads the email you send to them. Implementation of HTML5 video standards is highly irregular, to say the least.
When it comes to marketing metrics, one of the questions I'm asked most often is which metrics to pay attention to, which KPIs matter the most. The answer is always the same: first, figure out which ones have a direct impact on revenue, and then figure out which one or two of them is most [...]
One of the most popular questions I'm asked is whether Pinterest is right for a particular business. Here are three easy tests to make this determination, assuming you're not active on Pinterest right now. 1. Check the Find Friends feature. Assuming you've got a Twitter account for your business, see how many people who you're [...]
Personal brand and personal branding are once again on the rise, as evidenced by increased search queries on the topics. Rather than go into any lengthy discussion of developing a personal brand, I'd like you to think about the concept of actual branding. This is a baby cow.
I've been getting caught up on my TED Talks of late, and this talk by Ernesto Sirolli is one of my new favorites. While on the surface it's about foreign aid and policy, it's also about how we can all be more helpful in ways that actually matter.
Adam asked in the Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn Group: "Does anyone have any benchmark stats for Facebook, in terms of reach, viral reach and engagement? I want to analyse the growth and engagement of our Facebook page but have nothing to compare it to. Are there any good resources out there for this?
In today's Marketing Over Coffee, we look at Facebook Graph Search and figuring out odd coincidences, wearable computing, stupid job titles, and much more: Subscribe now to the Marketing Over Coffee podcast! If you enjoyed this, please share it with your network! Want to read more like this from Christopher Penn?
Much ado is consistently being made of personalization and customization in the digital marketing world. We as marketers are allured by the (over)promise of personalization and customization because we've been told it's the pathway to profit nirvana. We can supposedly charge more for a personalized, customized product and customers will allegedly be happier and more [...]
We spend an awful lot of time looking for shortcuts in our lives, don't we? Work faster. Eat faster. Live faster. We buy products and services that shorten our time to get more done, to be more productive, and to be cheaper. That haste comes at a price, sometimes a steep one.
I was listening during my morning workout to the Marketing Over Coffee discussion that John Wall and David Meerman Scott were having about how wireless connectivity is essential, and why more event venues don't invest in decent Internet connectivity. When you think about it, this is fundamentally a result of believing that customers are a [...]
Once upon a time, I gave the general advice that you should not only have a Google Places for Business listing for your business, but also set up a Google+ Local Business Page. At the time, it was your standard Google strategy: when they roll something out, if you want to be ahead of the [...]
I was listening with interest to an interview with Tom Webster and Jason Falls in which they both noted that after speaking, they struggle to remember what it was that they said. This is not a rare phenomenon; in fact, it's startlingly common for anyone who is good at what they do.
By the time you read this, I'm likely at an airport or on a plane somewhere. That's okay, though - there's still plenty to read. Today, a quick roundup of places I've been lately to fill your morning reading. Take a look at... A four part interview series on email marketing with Salesforce.com Marketing Cloud: [...]
One of the wonderful things about visiting the SHIFT Communications San Francisco office is that the mighty Pacific Ocean is only a short walk from the office. Nearly every morning, I am privileged to be able to see, hear, and smell the ocean before work, which makes me quite happy.
A lot of people have wondered and speculated about how to achieve more economic equality, about how to level the playing field so that the 1% don't continue to dominate the economy. While this is not a comprehensive solution, Blizzard Entertainment may have given us part of the solution.
Remember how Priority Inbox increased the difficulty of getting email noticed? Google's done it again with their new inbox tabs. For end users, the change is dramatic and immediate: mail gets auto-sorted into one of five different tabs that GMail attempts to guess at: What's incredibly powerful about this is how well GMail guesses: in [...]
What's the biggest challenge facing experience marketing? By experience marketing, I mean the marketing of any experience, from a visit to the movie theater to a vacation destination. Here's what I see: the experience isn't necessarily better than the routine. For example, take the simple movie theater.
Of the many speakers I watch regularly, few are as engaging and impactful as Sir Ken Robinson. Give this one your full attention for 18 minutes as he discussed how standardization of education is setting America back, and how we could recover an extra trillion dollars of economic growth over 10 years: Over the next [...]
