For those brave souls willing to dig through analyst calls and investor statements, a bounty of interesting tidbits awaits in Facebook’s 2012 financial results. The social networking behemoth clocked in at $5.089 billion in revenue, up substantially from the $3.711 billion from 2011. More interesting for us marketers are these few tidbits. Monthly active users…
David Tames of Kino-Eye gave me a piece of advice years and years ago at one of Steve Garfield’s Boston Media Makers meetings that I’ve carried with me ever since and has made a huge difference in everything I do with video. He said: “Great video begins with great audio. Think about it for a…
When I first saw Vine, the new 6 second video sharing app from Twitter, I thought to myself, well, that’s thoroughly unhelpful. But then I watched it in action and realized it was something old that was new again: an animated GIF maker. For those old souls in the digital marketing world, you likely remember…
I’ve discovered something over the past year as I focused on story. For a long time I called stuff like storytelling “fluff”, things that distracted from the raw goods, from the “real” information. I had, until last year, discounted the need to pad and fluff up information, from marketing materials to martial arts, to the…
Before we sit down to discuss this question, I invite you to read two blog posts by my friends Chris Brogan and CC Chapman: Content Marketing That Gets You Buyers by Chris Brogan There Is No Wasted Content by CC Chapman All done? Welcome back. Confused a bit about who’s right? Should you have an…
What’s the power of brand? It’s not just name recognition. Branding sets a floor underneath your expectations, a point where people know what to expect. Stand in front of two restaurants, one with a well known brand and one that isn’t. What goes through your mind in a split second? The brand of one reaches…
During the webinar I did yesterday with my friend and colleague Chris Brogan, one of the most popular questions was, “which 3 metrics should you pay attention to?” There are two answers to this question. The short, convenient answer is that you need sales to drive revenue. You need leads to drive sales. You need…
If your business has any physical presence at all (meaning not just a PO Box somewhere), even if you don’t take walk-ins, you need to do this: This is a Google Local Business registration. You put your business name and address in, and claim your local business on the map. Tag it with the industries…
Once upon a time, search engine optimization and branding lived apart. They dined at separate tables. The SEO guys (and they were almost always guys) tooled away in a server room or a windowless closet, coming up with awkward twists of language like BEST COLLEGE STUDENT LOANS. The brand marketers and PR folks, meanwhile, were…
