"What's the hottest trend in search-engine optimization that you've never heard of (yet)?" asks Christopher S. Penn in a recent post at the Awaken Your Superhero blog. It's LDA, he reports. Penn cites a series of SEOmoz posts on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA)—a context-based algorithm for determining search relevance. According to ... more

Exposure to impressions of organic search results, paid search results, and online display advertising—and specific combinations of such media—produces both a measurable lift in brand favorability and likelihood to purchase, according to a study by iProspect and comScore. more

Business professionals are more likely to click on digital ads during the weekend, but more likely to take action on such ads during the week—particularly on Wednesdays, according to a study by Bizo. However, a professional's industry is an even better indicator of when one is most likely to take ... more

We've mentioned that you can draw traffic to paid mobile applications by creating a free "lite" version. Once users deem it useful, they may be happy to pay for the full version. But what's a company to do if it can't afford to create a whole new version of an existing app—with ... more

US online retail spending reached an estimated $32.1 billion in the third quarter of 2010, up 9% from $29.6 billion a year earlier, and the fourth consecutive quarter of positive year-over-year growth following a year of flat or negative growth rates, according to data from comScore. more

In the mobile world, luxury brands must find creative ways to reach customers while maintaining a sense of hauteur. Jimmy Choo, for example, captured our imaginations by initiating @CatchaChoo, setting members of wedding social networks loose on the streets of London in a quest to win free shoes. Now it's Gucci's ... more

The forward to Harvey Mackay's bestselling Swim With the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive featured 15 solid pages of praise from VIPs like President Gerald Ford and the Reverend Billy Graham. "The kicker?" writes Hal Licino at MarketingProfs. "By the time the reader read those 15 pages, they were so ... more

"Heresy alert," writes Jason Amunwa at The Zest blog. "I've been struggling with a dark secret recently; you see, I realized that I really dislike SEO. "To me it's like health insurance: I hate dealing with it, I intensely dislike paying for it, and its benefits are difficult for most ... more

"I think Foursquare is a hugely untapped and powerful little tool for small-business marketing," writes Wendy Kenney at the 23Kazoos blog. "Especially if you own a business that requires customers to physically visit your location to make a purchase." If you're looking for cool ways to attract customers to your brick-and-mortar location, ... more

Next-generation media consumers, or "Off the Gridders," are young, educated, and affluent, and they spend less time viewing live TV but more time viewing online and time-shifted premium video content, according to a study by SAY Media. Such tech-savvy consumers are also difficult to reach via traditional broadcast media and ... more

Small-business advertisers spent on average $2,373 on search advertising in the third quarter of 2010, up 43% from the $1,658 spent in the same period a year earlier, and up 6.4% from the $2,231 spent in the second quarter of 2010, according to a WebVisible study based on its small-biz ... more

Although most online campaigns seek to drive conversion-based goals, many still use the click or CTR as the primary metric—mainly because it has been traditionally used to measure success and because it's easy to measure. But that's no excuse for making a mistake that's costing marketers $1 billion a year. more

Female consumers are a powerful force that shape how billions of marketing dollars are spent yearly, and among the most important brands for women are Wal-Mart, Target, and eBay, according to the Women at NBCU Brand Power Index, which measures the top 25 brands most important to women. more

Though search plays an important role in triggering a Facebook user to "like" a brand, fully three in four Facebook fans say they have joined a brand's Facebook page because of a brand invitation or advertising campaign, according to a study by DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research. more

In August, correction-tape brand Tippex launched an attention-grabbing YouTube campaign. Colorfully labeled "NSFW. A hunter shoots a bear!," it shows footage of a reluctant hunter faced with shooting a bear creeping up on his camping gear. At video's end, you're left with one of two buttons to push: should he shoot, ... more

The "gadgetoral" votes are in: The great state of California has the highest per capita ownership of iPhones in the US—casting 83 gadgetoral votes in favor of the device—whereas New Jersey has the highest ownership of Androids, according to a survey from Retrevo. more

For years, writes Stephanie Miller at the Deliverability blog, marketers have enjoyed the linear nature of the email inbox—your newsletters and offers sitting cheek-by-jowl with personal correspondence from a subscriber's friends. But you shouldn't get too comfortable with this privileged arrangement. "The world is changing," Miller says. "A new set of ... more

Far beyond the desktop, the digital world has expanded to an array of untethered devices: US consumers' adoption of laptop computers, cell phones, and other mobile gadgets continues to increase, while the ownership of desktop computers is gradually declining, according to Pew Research. more

Is the buzz around Facebook fading? That is just what a couple of recent studies suggest, so perhaps it's time to bring your fans home—back to your website. Marketers should give serious thought to supplementing their social-media strategies with a strong content-driven website. more

You might think that your small business—say, one with an annual Google AdWords budget of $50,000—has no chance when bidding against larger companies with much deeper pockets. Happily, that just isn't true. "Bidding for keywords on Google is not a straight auction," explains Minda Zetlin at Inc. "Instead, Google multiplies the top ... more

As small businesses continue to navigate the economic recession, their adoption of innovative marketing technologies such as social media has leveled off, while expectations among those who use social media have changed, according to a study by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. Still, among ... more

You might think you've done your rendering homework, but that might not be the case. "Don't assume that the custom template you tested several months ago is still rendering correctly across all ISPs and Browsers on PCs, Macs, iPads," writes Kimbery Snyder at the Bronto blog. "ISPs are always changing ... more

Driven by increasing consumer adoption of mobile devices such as the smartphone and iPad, mobile proximity marketing is forecast to reach $760 million in 2011, and swell to nearly $6 billion by 2015, according to a report by Borrell Associates. more

Time is today's scarcest resource, and everyone is suffering from attention overload. Many marketers have therefore resorted to just getting louder (literally and figuratively). Rather than pushing (and annoying) customers, one way to break through the cacophony is via triggers that redirect customer behavior. more

Though the path toward recovery has been slower in the US than in most regional ad markets, the trend is positive: US advertisers spent an estimated $54 billion during the first half of 2010, up 3.8% from the same period a year earlier, driven by discretionary ad spending categories such ... more