We are at a unique place and time. The crossroads of environmental and economic crises provide agile companies with the ability to capture market share in a down market by cutting their media buys and engaging their fan base in new ways. more

You know your company needs to jump in to social media to compete in today's Internet-based marketing world. But which channel is right for you? How can you find the right social-media fit? more

Two key indicators of online video usage are up 24.8% year over year, according to Nielsen's September US Online Video report. YouTube remains the leading source of online video, delivering almost 6.7 billion streams in September. more

Research coming out of Penn State reports that 20% of tweets—those wee messages published on Twitter—are brand-oriented. And not the way you'd naturally expect. While researchers originally thought they'd find lots of brand engagement in the form of product reviews or referrals, what they discovered was this (hold on to ... more

The following 10 elements of dynamic Facebook fan pages will set you head and shoulders above the rest (and keep your fans coming back for more). more

Want to get started with an effective earned-media marketing program? Here are three tips for launching, measuring, and monetizing a low-cost earned-media program that will drive a surge in online word-of-mouth traffic about your brand. more

Not long ago, Elaine Fogel used a post at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog to discuss her case of "Social Media Rejection Syndrome." It all began when someone not only rejected her LinkedIn invitation but also sent a note explaining why: "I only make connections with people I've met personally ... more

Visiting social networks such as Facebook or Twitter except for clear business reasons is discouraged or outlawed outright at a majority of US workplaces. more

New FTC guidelines will affect marketers who use blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and the like for word-of-mouth and viral campaigns, starting Dec. 1. more

There's nothing we love more than solutions—top-notch insights from top-of-the-line experts that help solve common marketing problems. Here's this week's solution, featuring SAS, which offers us a solution to the following problem: How does Marketing convince the CEO that it's time to embrace social media? more

For the small-business owner, getting your name out via local search is a must. And to many marketers, that means optimizing for Google's universal results. After all, Google is the leader of the search-engine pack these days. But as David Mihm points out in a recent article at Search Engine ... more

According to The Wrap, ABC has chosen an unorthodox way to promote a new comedy on its fall schedule—by keeping it hush-hush. "The network is offering the sneak peak of '[Modern Family]' only to members of a special online fan base it's built called ABC Inner Circle," writes Josef Adalian. ... more

Social media poses the greatest challenge to engaging customers today, according to a recent poll of more than 200 professional marketers. more

This summer, Pear Analytics released a study that got plenty of play in the Twitter/blogosphere. According to the Pear research, 40.5 percent of the messages published on social-media-darling Twitter are "pointless babble," and a mere 8.7 percent of tweets have pass-along value to others. The piece won itself a lot of ... more

Starting today, Google will invite 100,000 users to beta-test its much-buzzed Wave. What will the hugely ambitious communication and collaboration platform mean for marketers? more

With an increasing number of its members talking about the American Automobile Association via social media, the company decided it needed to monitor and respond. more

"If you're interested in building a flourishing online brand and website that generates links and traffic organically as part of your Internet marketing efforts, it's important to develop an active base of subscribers and fans," says Adam Singer in a recent post at the Online Marketing Blog. Here are a ... more

We've seen Sarah Haskins critique advertising that patronizes women, and now it's time for Bryan Safi's take on commercials that handle gay topics with varying degrees of respect. In this occasionally off-color video from Current TV, he begins with a few ads that use gay men as the punchline for ... more

"We were looking at all the conferences coming up," says Guy Kawasaki at the beginning of a video from the Revenue Bootcamp conference, "and everything was about social media and Twitter and basically gathering eyeballs, but nobody was talking about monetizing people. And so we thought, what a concept, maybe ... more

Time spent on social network and blogging sites accounted for 17% of all the time Americans spent online in August 2009, nearly triple the figure for August 2008. Ad spending more than doubled over the same period. more

Facebook has entered into a multiyear partnership with Nielsen to allow better measurement of the effectiveness of advertising on the widely popular social networking site. The alliance is yet another move by Facebook to heighten its attractiveness as a marketing platform. more

Women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter than average adults, according to a newly released survey. They're big on word-of-mouth, and some 15.3% maintain a blog. more

There's nothing we love more than solutions—top-notch insights from top-of-the-line experts that help solve common marketing problems. Once a week, this column will pose a problem, and invite a MarketingProfs speaker—past, present, or future—to help solve it for you. more

"The rise of blogs and social networks has fueled a bull market in personal opinion: reviews, ratings, recommendations and other forms of online expression," writes Alex Wright in a recent New York Times article. "For computer scientists, this fast-growing mountain of data is opening a tantalizing window onto the collective ... more

The best kind of personal branding combines real-world communications with virtual visibility and community-building via social media. Online brand-building enables you to reach beyond the people you can connect with in person and allows you to measure the impact of your actions. Since online personal-branding efforts are easier to track and measure, ... more