By Samuel J. Scott

If you follow marketing news, you have probably heard of national brands launching large social media campaigns like Kohl’s and Target on Facebook and Radio Shack and Nestle on Twitter. Still, it is very easy to use social media for business even if you just have a local store.

In Boston, where I lived for nine years, one of the most-famous pizzerias is Santarpio’s in the neighborhood of East Boston. If you live in Eastie – as Bostonians call it – and order delivery from somewhere else rather than take-away from Santarpio’s (pictured), your neighbors will think that you are crazy or have bad taste in pizza.  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

After Google unveiled first its +1 social-sharing button and then its Google+ social network last year, my colleague Daniel Goldstein predicted that the changes will eventually influence organic-search results. Google, he argued, will increasingly personalize search results based on what an individual searcher has “+1ed” in the past.

Well, that time has arrived. And if your company does not adapt, you will miss out on a tremendous amount of valuable traffic to your website.

On January 10, Google announced its “Search, plus Your World” revamp of its search-result pages:  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

A lot of business and marketing is impossible to measure quantitatively but still widely regarded as valuable. Take branding, for example. Companies spend millions on logos, product appearance, communications, and guerilla marketing – among countless other tactics – to ensure that consumers think of a desired connotation when they think of a brand. It’s not a cheap endeavor – it can take years to build a solid brand.  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

When I was a kid, I loved “Alf” – an NBC comedy that ran from 1986 to 1990 and was about a lovable, sarcastic space-alien living with a suburban California family. I even had an “Alf” stuffed animal that my mother had bought for me when I was six or so.

So, when I was bored one day, I scanned Facebook pages for TV shows, saw one for “Alf,” and “liked” the page. I had forgotten about the “like” until much later, when I saw this item in my Facebook news-feed earlier today while catching up with the latest news from my friends and family:  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

Have you ever sat at a restaurant table, opened the menu, and then saw that there was something approaching fifty options? If you’re like me, it probably took you ten minutes or longer just to make a choice: “Well, I haven’t had steak in a while… but the chicken looks delicious! Wait, but what about the smoked salmon…? Oh… I don’t know what to order!”  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

In the so-called “Silicon Valley of the Middle East,” start-ups in and around Tel Aviv are increasingly the life-blood of many global companies that operate in the high-tech sector. According to the authors of “Start-Up Nation” – former Bush-administration official Dan Senor and former Jerusalem Post editorial-page editor Saul Singer – these are a few of the reasons (via the Wall Street Journal and Freakonomics):  Read more...

• Government per-capita spending on civilian R&D is 4.5% of GDP – double the percentage of the United States, Germany, and South Korea