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 Daniel Goldstein

If your business would have had a mobile-marketing campaign during the holiday season, your sales may have increased by as much as eighteen percent.

That is the opinion of Razorfish Vice President of Mobile Paul Gelb. “I think the biggest takeaway from 2011 holiday marketing was the emergence of an enormous mobile-marketing gap amongst retailers,” he told Mobile Commerce Daily. “Retailers that are not ready are ceding high ground to their competitors and may have trouble leveling the playing field in the future.”

And Gelb is not alone. Hipcricket CMO Jeff Hasen observed that:  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

Most of our previous blog-posts on search-engine marketing (SEM) have focused on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search-engine optimization (SEO). Here, we wanted to address another important aspect: linkbuilding.

As you may know, Google ranks search results based primarily on two factors: relevance and authoritativeness. The first is obvious: If you search for “Christmas gifts,” you do not want the latest Philadelphia Phillies scores to appear. In simplistic SEO terms, on-page optimization is an effort to tell search engines the topic of each page of your website.  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 Daniel Goldstein

In February 2011, Google unveiled the first in a major series of updates collectively termed “Panda” to its search algorithm. The latest Panda update occurred on November 18, and many websites lost search-engine rankings (and thereby traffic) on and after that day. See the comments in this post for just a few examples of the many that we have seen.

What the Panda updates aim to do overall is devalue the rankings of poor-quality websites including content farms, spammers, built-for-advertising sites, and those with little original content or text that was copied (or “scraped”) from elsewhere. The most-egregious offenders sometimes have their sites removed from Google’s index completely. In a nutshell, Panda wants to judge the quality of a website from a human point-of-view rather than that of a machine.  Read more...