Remember Foursquare, the mobile game where users check in to gather badges and mayorships at their favorite local spots? If you're not a brick-and-mortar retailer, it's understandably hard to imagine how to leverage this strange new breed of socnet, which now serves more than 800,000 users worldwide. To help you get ... more

Worldwide online advertising revenues are forecast to reach $61.0 billion in 2010, up 12.4% over 2009 levels, according to MagnaGlobal. It forecasts global online advertising to grow 11.7% in 2011—and thereafter by an average annual rate of 11.0% through 2015, reaching $103 billion in global spending that year. more

When people click on your unsubscribe button, there's a good chance it takes them to a preference page where they can confirm the unsubscribe request, or adjust their subscription to a topic and frequency they prefer. But what about including an offer that tempts them to stay? In a post at ... more

With the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa set to begin on June 11, US Internet searches related to the World Cup during the week ended May 29, 2010 were up 10% from levels recorded a week earlier, and up 64% from a month earlier, according to Experian Hitwise. more

Facebook has more than 400 million active users who collectively spend more time on the platform than on any other website in the world, sharing detailed information about their likes, dislikes, and preferences. No wonder advertisers are salivating at the chance to reach Facebook users with precisely targeted ads. more

Most online consumers (53%) now own a smartphone or Web-enabled mobile device, and among them 35% say they participated in some type of mobile shopping in the previous 12 months, such as comparing products and prices, up from 17% who said so a year earlier, according to a survey from ... more

A few years ago, John W. Ellis wrote the post, "If Paid Search Isn't Working, Then You're Doing Something Wrong" at the Search Engine Land blog. Recently, now at his own blog, Ellis reviewed the article to see how current it was—only to find that it is still spot-on! "The fact ... more

Nearly seven in ten (69%) adult Internet users—or 52% of US adults—now use the Internet to watch or download video content, and 14% have uploaded video to the Internet—nearly double the 8% who did so in 2007—according to a report by the Pew Research Center. more

New digital and social media tools are more likely to be under the strategic and budgetary control of corporate PR and communications rather than marketing departments, according to a study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. more

In March, Facebook hosted 484 million unique visitors worldwide, up 22 million from February, per comScore. On average, people log in 11 times a month, meaning a big pile of people increasingly treat the site like home base for sharing and discovering what's cool and in and groovy. Good news for marketers: ... more

Social networks are the fastest-growing mobile content category, both via application and for browser access, confirming the increasing popularity of social networking via mobile devices, according to data from comScore's MobiLens service. more

Millennials are hard to sway using traditional advertising and media channels that don't promote interaction: Only 17.7% say their favorite TV spot has led them to purchase an advertised product, while nearly one-half (48%) say that word-of-mouth communications influence them more than TV advertisements, according to a study from Mr ... more

Some 30.3 billion videos were delivered to US Internet users in April 2010, down 3.0% from 31.2 billion in March, and 177.8 million people watched online videos during the month, down 1.3% from 180.2 million in March, according to comScore data. more

Conversation marketing. Engagement marketing. Social media. Earned media. Consumer-generated media. User-generated Content. Crowdsourcing. Outsourcing. Co-creation. No matter what you call it, the evolution of the way brands reach and interact with consumers has led to mass experimentation with the alluring, yet often hard-to-execute marketing tactic: the video contest. more

Newspaper websites in the top 25 markets continued to grow at rapid rate, reaching 83.7 million unique visitors in April 2010, up 10.1% from a month earlier, and up 15.0% from January 2010, according to data from comScore Media Metrix data released by Newspaper National Network LP (NNN). more

Total measured advertising expenditures reached $31.3 billion in the first quarter of 2010, up 5.1% from the same period a year earlier—the first increase in quarterly ad spending since the first quarter of 2008 and the largest gain since the first quarter of 2006—according to data from Kantar Media. more

Despite widespread consumer adoption of social media, advertisers on average allocated just 4% of their media spend to the channel in 2009, relying instead on traditional, proven online media choices that were in place before the economic downturn, according to data from interactive agency Razorfish. more

If we were to suggest plain text for your next email campaign, you'd probably laugh in our faces. "The superiority of HTML email to plain-text email for driving response has become an accepted truth in email marketing," says Mark Brownlow in a post at the Email Marketing Reports blog. "Alchemy ... more

To successfully reach the Hispanic audience, marketers should understand that what works with the general market can't simply be transferred to the Latino market. Instead, messages must be culturally adapted to capture the thought, meaning, and feeling, not just the words. more

Most companies know they need to pay attention to social media, because it provides the richest data sets of consumer information that have ever existed. So brands know there's an opportunity, and they fear being left out if they aren't tapped in. But what's the difference between monitoring social media and ... more

In an article at MarketingProfs, Dan Skeen writes that search-engine optimization provides several return-on-investment measures with a greater potential impact on a company's bottom line than many traditional tactics. However, he notes, because SEO is less tangible than some other areas of marketing investment, it's often harder to clearly show ... more

The consumption of Internet video—content stored and distributed over Internet protocol (IP) architecture—is forecast to overtake the consumption of broadcast TV programming by 2020, according to a report by The Diffusion Group (TDG). more

Mitchell Harper of BigCommerce recently wrote a cool piece on Mashable detailing how companies can use YouTube to boost their brand SEO. Step One? Consider creating a YouTube channel, he advises: "Every video you post to your channel can be tagged and indexed, increasing the odds your brand name will ... more

Though most marketers understand the value of connecting with consumers on an emotional level, nearly two-thirds (62%) say their brand's messaging is focused on rational and functional elements rather than emotional benefits, according to a survey form the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). more

Over two-thirds of high-tech marketing professionals (68%) say lead generation is their top marketing priority this year and 74% cite social media as among the top emerging marketing channels for lead generation in 2010 and beyond, according to a Unisfair survey slated for release in late May. more