Aug 7, 20146 min read

Marketing Day: Pinversations, Facebook Events Get Insights & Google Lifts Secure Site Rankings

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in online marketing today, as reported on

Marketing Land and other places across the web.

From Marketing Land:

Google’s YouTube Snaps Up Video-Making App, Directr Google has purchased Directr, a mobile video app for businesses and regular people to quickly make videos. The Directr team will be joining YouTube’s video ads division. Directr’s iOS app was aimed at businesses to help them create, edit and publish promotional videos from a smartphone. The company announced the acquisition on its blog: Our […]
Honda Puts It In Social Media-Fueled Overdrive For Summer #Cheerance Campaign Remember when car dealers used to hang banners and flags outside their dealerships that screamed, “Sale! Sale! Sale!”? Okay, so they still do that — but they’ve also learned how to make very good use of the internet. Honda, hyping its summer sales, is hosting several “Cheerance” events this week aimed to move metal and […]
Twitter Realigns Its Ad Product To Meet Advertiser Goals With Objective-Based Campaigns Now, Twitter advertisers can organize their campaigns around specific marketing objectives and pay only when specific actions are taken. Today, Twitter announced the beta release of objective-based campaigns, reports and pricing. Advertisers are now presented with a list of campaign objectives — driving Tweet engagements, website clicks or conversions, app installs or engagements, followers, or […]
Facebook Events Now Come With Insights For Reach, Views & Connections Facebook has updated its Events feature to include analytics, giving Page administrators more information about how events are performing. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed today that the company has added Insights for Events: This is the first step toward helping Pages gain a better understanding of what’s working and not working when promoting their events. These […]
Have Pinversations Without Ever Leaving Pinterest Thanks To New Messaging Feature Communicating about a specific pin within Pinterest just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new feature from Pinterest. The new ‘messages’ service allows users to send pins to other users (even multiple users) for private conversations. To initiate, users can press down on a pin and click the send icon (the paper airplane) […]
Smartphone Penetration Likely To Be 75 Percent By Year End The latest comScore smartphone subscriber figures are out. They reflect nearly 72 percent smartphone penetration in the US. As recently as 2012, comScore used a base of 234 million mobile subscribers (over 13) to calculate smartphone penetration. In this most recent release, the firm said that in June “173 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones.” […]
3 Ways To Avoid Information Overload I’ve heard and used the colloquialism “TMI” (short for “Too Much Information”) in social situations plenty of times — like when my sister wants me to watch a YouTube video of an operation she’s about to have on her finger. But I had never heard “TMI” used in a business setting until last week, when […]
Lawsuit Claims Yelp Manipulated Reviews To Deceive Investors Throughout its ten year history, Yelp has been sued a number of times for allegedly manipulating reviews to generate ad revenue from merchants. This remains a widely held perception though the allegations have never been successfully proven. The plaintiffs in those cases have always been business owners. Now, however, comes an investor class action lawsuit that claims […]
6 Neuromarketing Principles For Designing More Persuasive Websites While most marketers have at least heard of neuromarketing principles, many shy away from these techniques, perhaps because they don’t understand them, don’t trust them or just don’t have the time to learn them. However, neuromarketing principles are actually simple applications of behavioral psychology that allow you to create low-stress, low friction websites that provide […]
How To Market With The New Google Plus Showcase Hangouts In the early days of television, many shows had sponsors that not only got their brand name in the show title (“The Kraft Music Hall” or “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”) but also in all the advertising on the show. In fact, sometimes the advertising would be in the show. (Suddenly one character might breathlessly tell […]
Google Dangles A Big Carrot To Make The Web More Private Google said this evening that it will give sites that use HTTPS a small ranking advantage in search results. This is a very self-conscious attempt to make the web more secure and private and reward those who comply. (See our related story Google Starts Giving A Ranking Boost To Secure HTTPS/SSL Sites.) This is also something that […]
Gmail Pushes Unsubscribe Links To The Top Of More Newsletters Since February Gmail has included an “Unsubscribe” link at the top of many newsletters, a feature intended to give users an easier way to manage their overflowing inboxes. The links only appeared on email filtered into Gmail’s Promotions tab. Today, Google announced that it has extended the Unsubscribe feature into Gmail’s Social and Forums tabs. […]