This week in marketing was a hodgepodge or mélange of different themes.
There were beginnings with SEMPO and Google looking to grow digital marketing talent in the future. And there were endings with Payvment closing up and being acquired by Intuit. There were advances in new platforms like mobile analytics as well as advances in old platforms like email. We also saw a flurry of activity around social marketing software.
This is … Marketing Biz.
The summit will feature educational presentations, workshops, and panels composed of leading national and local professionals. Students will learn about the landscape, business, future and potential careers that are tied to search and digital marketing.
Talent in the digital marketing and search industry is often difficult to find. (I’m trying to be nice here.) Not only that but many college students don’t seem to view these industries as viable career options. So it’s great to see SEMPO and Google doing a bit of advocacy and education. We need more of this.
Rest assured that Foodspotting will continue to live on as a standalone product, as OpenTable deeply values the Foodspotting community and your contributions. You’ll still be able to spot food anywhere in the world, from street food stalls to seven course meals. But you can also look forward to smarter recommendations, better restaurant information and a more visual, social and design-driven dining experience as we bring the best of Foodspotting to OpenTable.
The trend continues. First it was Adobe snapping up Behance. Then ZURB acquired Forrst. Now OpenTable acquires Foodspotting. Tool-focused companies are embracing content and community and integrating them into their marketing plans. Whether grown or acquired, these robust communities and the content they throw off are vital in the new marketing landscape.
Mixpanel is designed to encourage exploration of data. We already give our customers the ability to measure how their customers use their apps and to communicate with them in a more relevant, measurable way. Now, with Revenue Analytics, they can easily use Mixpanel to instantly assess the performance of their business based on the ultimate key metric–revenue–and instantly measure who their most valuable customers are.
This is sort of a no-brainer. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Mixpanel has been a cult favorite for many and the addition of revenue will only make the data they provide that much more useful. If you haven’t tried Mixpanel yet this certainly provides extra incentive to do so.
Social commerce platform Payvment today announced it will be ending service on Feb. 28, after nearly three and a half years of powering Facebook storefronts through which users could buy items from merchants.
I can’t say I was ever sold on Facebook stores (pun intended). Even with consolidation I’m not sure that the context of shopping fits Facebook’s social environment. Do we really need (or want) eCommerce to be in the walled garden too?
“The problem with email is the fact that people see it as just that: email,” said Dan Quintero, COO at AdStack. “Email is a core channel, and recipients aren’t just numbers in your database, they are unique individuals. LiveOptimizer makes it possible for organizations to treat their customers as individuals by serving personalized content on the fly, and in doing so, marketers avoid being bogged down in heavy database queries to extract segmentation data. That said, all the personalization in the world is meaningless unless the message reaches the inbox. That’s where Message Bus comes in, they ensure that content designed to drive conversions reaches the intended recipient.”
Email is part of that dark social everyone is talking about lately and for good reason – it’s still a huge and powerful medium. So while you should certainly be exploring shiny new social and mobile opportunities don’t ignore the advances being made in the steam engine of many customer relationships.
These best of lists are based on the ratings we give to millions of places on Foursquare. We use signals like tips, likes, dislikes, popularity, local expertise, and nearly 3 billion check-ins from over 30 million people worldwide to determine how much people love a place.
Foursquare continues to evolve and is on a crash course with Yelp in the recommendation vertical. At this point most local business should be managing their Foursquare presence. While these ‘best of’ lists aren’t well optimized for search now, I predict that over time they will and that’s when Foursquare’s outside in strategy will gain traction.
The result was a product that allows salespeople to “spend more time communicating with their customers and less time on data entry.” Close.io is the first sales performance tool to combine customer management with communication tools like VoIP calling and two-way email, meaning users can execute all of their core tasks within a single interface. Within the product, salespeople can make and receive calls, while taking notes tied to each address book contact, without leaving the application or ever picking up a desk or mobile phone.
There’s another quote in this piece about everyone using Salesforce but no one really loving Salesforce. I’ve heard that sentiment echoed by a number of people as well. Is the reduced friction that Close.io promises enough to get people to switch? You’d think sales teams would do nearly anything to improve yet there seems to be a lot of inertia in the industry. Whether Close.io becomes a major player or not I think they’ll push the market in the right direction and that’s good for everyone.
Through its holistic, white-labeled Private Ad Exchange, Admeta offers premium publishers the possibility to have 100% control over their brand, advertisers’ relations, and inventory through the creation of their own ad marketplace. Admeta’s Private Ad Exchange provides a complementary offering to premium sales and bypasses intermediaries such as DSPs, SSPs, and costly agencies and trading desks.
Control, that’s what Admeta really sells and there are plenty of publishers out there who desperately want it. I anticipate that Admeta will continue to grow along with other private ad exchange offerings. The advertising ecosystem remains a convoluted mess so any company bringing some amount of sanity to it will be in a very good position.
And Then …
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