Technology 

Use technology to enable great storytelling

Learn best practices for successful storytelling and how technology can and should enable those practices. Today, brand storytelling is about creating a consistent experience and invoking emotion across multiple channels — meaning marketers have to become masters of those channels and content types. Brand storytelling is at the heart of driving emotional connections with consumers, and successful brands have proven there are many ways to tell stories. Companies need a platform that lets them develop the content, create the stories and post content on social platforms the way they want,…

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Bing 

Bing Ads Improves Google AdWords Import

Bing announced they have improved the import feature from Google AdWords to Bing Ads. Specifically you can now import more from Google to Bing, including more in quantity and more in terms of data. Here is what you can import now: 10 thousand Campaigns 1 million Ad Groups 5 million keywords 4 million ads 2 million ad group-level and campaign-level negative keywords combined 2 million ad group product partitions 200,000 all other entities combined 500,000 targets Aage and gender targeting Negative keyword lists There is a Show Advanced Options and…

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Marketing 

The Challenges of Brand Search and PPC

Controlling the search position of your brand is very important to your business. However, this has become increasingly difficult due to changes in Google brand policies that have opened the door to competitors stealing (or buying) your brands traffic and business. Puneet Vaghela, Head of Paid Search at PHD UK, a global communications planning and media buying network recently spoke about these important challenges: Why is brand search difficult to control in PPC? With brand search, you are expected to get most of the traffic. However, what we are seeing increasingly…

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Technology 

4 Strategies for Enterprise Content Management Success

At the recent Enterprise World 2018 Conference, Stephen Ludlow, VP of Product Marketing at OpenText, spoke about the 4 strategies for content management success. He emphasized that there is actually a shift to content services from Enterprise Content Management. This is because ECM was mostly looked at as the lead application and content services represents a shift to consumable services that can be embedded into business processes and business applications. 1. Differentiate “ECM: Use-Cases “The basics of ECM involving managing large amounts of structured and unstructured information is really differentiating…

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SEM 

Two Top SEM Firms Featured As Offering Poor SEM Results By WSJ

It is not every day you see SEM companies featured in Wall Street Journal articles but a few weeks ago, they ran a story named Small Businesses Search in Vain for Web-Ad Help. It isn’t good. It calls out two very large SEM companies named ReachLocal and Yodle as not delivering on their promises to their customers. Here is a quote: The Federal Trade Commission has received about 60 complaints involving ReachLocal since 2009 – roughly half of them filed within the past two years – and more than 180…

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Bing 

Bing Search Results Now Showing JSON-LD Support

The other week we reported that Bing added JSON-LD support for schema and markup. Well, now if you look at some of the Bing search results and see the markup, some of those results are powered off of JSON-LD and not the Microdata or RDFa formats. Brodie Clark posted an example on Twitter and said “Have come across some interesting Bing structured data examples in the wild now that there’s support for JSON-LD. The click-to-call from SERPs is pretty awesome. Not sure about the blank 320 x 220 image though.”…

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google 

Google Medic Update Complete But We Are Seeing New Search Fluctuations

Google has confirmed that the Google core algorithm update that we named the Medic Update is now fully rolled out. But the SEO community noticed a lot of fluctuations and ranking changes yesterday as well. Danny Sullivan confirmed on Twitter for me that the update is complete, despite the industry noticing a lot of fluctuations in the Google search results yesterday. Danny said the broad August 1st algorithm update is done but “that said, we always have changes that happen, both broad and more specific.” There was indeed significant chatter…

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Social 

Pinterest Rips Away How Their Top Contributors Make Money

VentureBeat reports that Pinterest has notified their top contributors that they are automatically removing any affiliate links, redirects and tracking scripts from their posts. Here is the statement Pinterest gave VentureBeat: We are removing affiliate links to ensure we’re providing the best possible experience for Pinners. Recently, we observed affiliate links and redirects causing irrelevant Pins in feeds, broken links and other spammy behavior. We believe this change will enable us to keep the high bar of relevancy and quality Pinners expect from Pinterest. The thing is, the top contributors…

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business 

Why You Should Build a Community Around Your Small Business (And How to Do It)

Even if you already have a strong customer base, you can grow it further by building a branded community around your business. Many consumers are drawn to these communities because they offer inspiration, encouragement, and support. Your business, however, benefits by getting a boost in brand exposure and credibility, reduced need (and costs) for customer support, better customer retention, and more sales. But as a small business owner, you already have enough on your plate, and building a community for your brand might seem expensive and difficulty. Fortunately, it doesn’t have…

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SEO 

SEO Poll: Would You Work With Competitive Clients?

A Sphinn discussion asks, would you accept new work if that new work is competitive to your existing client’s niche? In short, do you offer official or non-official exclusivity to your clients? Most of the responses in that discussion claim they would never work on a competitive project. They said it just isn’t fair to their clients. Here are some of the responses: Just imagine the situation you could get into with one doing 10 times better than another. Or one gets dinged by Panda and the other doesn’t. Too…

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