By Richie Hecker, Chairman of inSparq

Top trendspotter but Marian Salzman of PR agency Havas Life, can identify the trends that will shape the rest of 2013. That’s because she’s done it before. Salzman offered her outlook at NRF Retail’s Big Show and explained how social patterns will transform world culture, politics, technology and economy this year. Here’s a look at some of the trends and our take on what it means for ecommerce related businesses:

Retail Customer Experience, a website dedicated to helping retailers understand customers, has put together an infographic offering an overview of the top 10 retail brands on major social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube and Klout. Here are the top three retail brands on each platform: – The top three retail brands on Facebook […]

Instagram boasts 90 million monthly active users, 40 million photos shared on its social network every day, 8,500 likes per second and 1,000 comments per second. Yet marketers might not have a good grasp on how they can leverage a potentially large, engaged audience on Instagram to meet their business goals. Here are five pieces […]

Have you heard about HTTPS/SSL encryption for Google searches? Do you know why you should care about it? Don’t let the acronyms fool you into thinking that it’s irrelevant to you. If you rely on organic SEO in any way, you should be paying attention. Chris Horton, a content creator and digital strategist for SyneCore […]

Should content marketers and professional bloggers consider producing long-form content? According to one analysis, longer-form posts don’t necessarily lead to more engagement. Also, maybe long-form content can be better communicated through other mediums (e.g., e-book, webinar, etc.). But for those who want to dive into the long-form pool, know that there are more challenges there […]

Facebook updated its “Nearby” feature in its iOS and Android mobile apps back in mid-December. Now that the revamped Nearby is widely rolled out and with Graph Search on its way to more and more users, it’s high time for small businesses to consider how they can take advantage of Nearby to squeeze out all […]

Yahoo appears ready to make its third M&A deal since CEO Marissa Mayer came on board: The company is expected to announce its acquisition of Snip.it later this week. Snip.it is “a Pinterest-like site for article curation,” according to AllThingsD, which first reported the coming deal. The acquisition would cost an amount in the mid-teens […]

By Tamara Weintraub, content marketing manager, ReachLocal

Online and social media marketing has enabled small businesses to build relationships and promote products and services in new and dynamic ways. So, how can businesses use these platforms to build brand loyalty and encourage repeat purchases that drive long-term success? Many businesses find success with cause marketing, or cause-related marketing, which provides an interest-based outlet to create and build relationships with existing and prospective customers. Here are four things you need to know about cause marketing for your business.

We’re continuing our series of profiles of local-commerce companies by featuring Koopedia. The purpose of these Q&A interviews is to give merchants, marketers and others in the industry a look at what some companies out there are doing. These profiles are also meant to offer different takes on the future of the local-commerce industry. Koopedia […]

Infogroup Targeting Solutions (ITS) and Yesmail Interactive have partnered to take a look at how companies plan on responding to the surge of “big data” in 2013. One of the fruits of that research is an infographic, which includes the following findings: – 68 percent of marketers plan to increased data-related spending in 2013 – […]