Facebook’s usefulness for businesses has been dragged into the spotlight lately, thanks in part to public comments made by businessman Mark Cuban. It’s all a response to Facebook’s tweaks to its EdgeRank algorithm, which takes into account affinity, weight and time decay. Some research shows that the latest version of the algorithm is causing some […]

If you love social media and are a sucker for stats, you might want to sit down for this one. Simply Zesty has put together an exhaustive list of 101 social media statistics to help marketers plan their 2013 strategies. Here is a quick preview of what you’ll find: Auto-posting to Facebook decreases likes and […]

Armed with plenty of information about their customers’ habits and whereabouts, AT&T and Verizon Wireless are getting in on the daily-deals game. Both mobile carriers are offering customers location-based coupons and daily deals. AT&T Alerts is an SMS location-based offers platform. Verizon Selects, a pilot program, leverages the demographic information stored in its customer databases, […]

When people talk about using social media to get clicks and drive actions, they’re only focused on one part of the purchase cycle. “Whether you’re buying lip gloss or a new database system for a business, buying is a process, and to simplify buying to the single point in time where we take action means […]

Marketers sending fresh and manually crafted emails? That’s so 1995. Today marketers are all about automated emails, which may pull fresh content from various sources but usually don’t. These emails are set up and let loose to do their thing for months on end. For lead-nurturing marketers, this presents the challenge of keeping workflows fresh, […]

This continues our series of profiles of local-commerce companies. The purpose of these Q&A interviews is to give merchants, marketers and others in the industry a glimpse at what some companies out there are doing. These profiles are also meant to offer different perspectives on the future of the local-commerce industry. This week we’re profiling […]

Epic Marketplace Inc., an online advertising network, has settled with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on charges that the company used “history sniffing” to surreptitiously and illegally gather data from millions of consumers about their interests in medical and financial issues. The history-sniffing technology enables online operators to “sniff” a Web browser to see what […]

Monetate has generated an infographic about the challenges and opportunities presented to retailers by the emergence of “big data.” The company notes that retailers knew how to use customer data to run their offline operations, but the mobile and social explosions have changed things. Here are some of the interesting pieces of data included in […]

Compelling the recipients of your emails to unsubscribe from your list is a good thing. No, there’s no typo there. If your argument against this is that the cost per lead makes it foolish to simply let leads slip away and that it would be akin to setting fire to a pile of cash, you’re […]

Now that the pope has joined and Chris Brown has rejoined, all is well with the Twitterverse