jatiN mahindrA doT coM

Social Media Lessons from the Big Brands: Intuit Edition

A recent survey from E-Consultancy, in association with the Online Marketing Summit, found that most businesses are still only experimenting with social media. With this in mind, it seems worth paying attention to how some big and successful brands use social media in their own strategies. Are you still in the experimentation phase with social media? Tell us about it. One company that is finding...

Online Ad Spending To Outpace Print In 2010

Spending on online advertising and marketing will surpass print in 2010 for the first time, according to a new report from Outsell. Companies will spend $119.6 billion on online and digital strategies, from search engine keywords to webinars, while committing $111.5 billion to print such as newspapers and magazine ads. Overall, U.S. spending on advertising and marketing will increase in 2010, but...

Microsoft To Spend $2 Billion On Bing Ads In The UK

As fans of "The Office" may know, it’s fairly common for the entertainment industry to take a successful concept and adapt it for use overseas.  And now, Microsoft’s performing a similar conversion, launching a "Bing and decide" advertising campaign in the U.K. It’s a good bet that you’ve seen a couple of these amusing TV spots by now; they feature one...

Marketing Should Be About “And” Rather Than “Or”

You’ll often notice than when a new web service or marketing strategy gets starts getting some buzz, it will often be referred to as a "_____ killer", when in most cases this turns out to be greatly exaggerated or just plain wrong. For marketers, it’s important not to get too caught up in this kind of mentality, because as long as you have an audience and they can still be reached...

SEO and Social Media Matter for Press Coverage

When businesses think about search and social media, a great deal of the time, they are thinking about traffic, customer engagement, and brand awareness. While these are all good things to consider, there may be more to that last one that you have spent much time thinking about. Brand awareness goes beyond just having a random customer find your site in a set of search results or through a link from...

Social Media Marketing Spending Spirals Up

When you start hearing about social media taking up more budget rather than having to struggle for dollars and attention, it’s clear that the practice is gaining in legitimacy.    Remember the days of having to gently introduce the concept, or of having to prove that in fact it’s something that’s a coming trend? We had to deal with skeptics – the same type of people,...

FDA Asked To Investigate Online Marketing By Drug Companies

The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) has asked the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to investigate the online marketing and behavioral targeting practices of pharmaceutical companies. The CDD says few U.S. health consumers are aware they are being identified, labeled, profiled, and tracked on the Internet while they search or access information on specific conditions or concerns. "The health...

SEO Consulting: How To Construct Great Proposals

Like in any consulting field, SEO is rife with competition. There is only one way to win in such an environment, and that is to set yourself apart from the crowd. Not in a bad way, of course Here are some ideas on how to construct winning proposals. Size Isn’t Everything, But It Does Count Large proposals take a long time to do. On the upside, large proposals can look impressive, simply by...

Beating the Logic & Creativity Out of You

I remember in 2nd grade when our teacher was teaching us how to do math I raced ahead and was doing lessons for today, tomorrow, and next week. The teacher rewarded my efforts by yelling at me and ripping up the pages from the book and giving me a 0 on that homework. In fourth grade we would play around the world with math flash cards where you raced to say the answers, and I would literally go all...

Academics Endorse Social Media Marketing At OMS

It’s an unfortunate fact that the speakers at some conferences can be self-serving; few people are going to go onstage and not promote their own company, never mind admit its faults.  However, when it comes to social media, it’s hard to accuse the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania of bias, and so an OMS keynote on the subject run by two Wharton representatives was rather...

Moving Forward With Email Marketing

As reliable and useful a marketing tool as email’s proven to be in the past, it’ll be better than ever in the future, according to one expert.  The Director of eMarketing Education at ExactTarget explained during a session at OMS how things are changing and how marketers can continue to use email to their advantage. (Coverage of the Online Marketing Summit 2010 continues at WebProNews...

Context Optional Launches Facebook Brand Management Suite

Social marketing company Context Optional has launched Social Marketing Suite (SMS), a customizable platform for brands to manage and build their presence on Facebook. "Brands that have taken social seriously need to find more efficient ways to stay involved in consumer conversations while keeping pages interesting and free of profanity," said Kevin Barenblat, co-founder and CEO, Context...

Google Super Bowl Ad = True Love and Traffic!

Super Bowl 2010 will be forever remembered for a few things: New Orleans winning their first championship, Peyton Manning’s locker room walk-of-shame and Google running their first Super Bowl commercial. Editors Note: WebProNews interviewed CEA, the first company featured in Google’s commercial (there were 15+ featured). Even though they were only seen for a split second, you’ll...

Funny Dilbert SEO Comic Strip Cartoon by Scott Adams

And all this, only to find out there was a missing ingredient the whole time Of course, if Dilbert had a text version of the cartoon and perhaps a more relevant alt tag in his embed code that would help too. Just saying linkscolor = "000000"; highlightscolor = "888888"; backgroundcolor = "FFFFFF"; channel = "none";

Good Books On Blogging, PR, Social Media & Advertising

The inbox of books has gotten high enough that I need to review a few so I can see beyond my desk. Today’s episode of Social Media Explorer TV features four books well worth your time to read, depending upon your need and comfort level with the various topics. And the four books offered this time around take a nice stair step up the ladder from beginner to advanced use for internet...