Social Media Marketing for Business: Expectation Vs. Reality

When a fast food chain releases a new menu item, there is typically a lot of hype and promotion around the product. These efforts can lead to certain expectations of what consumers can expect when purchasing the item.

Sometimes reality meets the expectation, but more often than not, it doesn’t.

Anytime you explore new opportunities within digital marketing, it can lead way to a certain set of expectations for performance, audience reaction and a host of other variables.

While the reality may not always meet the expectation, there are many benefits to incorporating social media into your digital marketing routine. According to Social Media Examiner’s latest report, these benefits include:

• Increased exposure
• Increase in website traffic
• Development of loyal fans
• Access to marketplace insight
• Lead generation

That same report found that Facebook (52%), LinkedIn (21%) and Twitter (12%) are the most important social media platforms for marketers.

The examples below provide a glimpse into some common expectations that new (and even more seasoned) marketers have about social media marketing and the sometimes harsh reality.

#1 – Set Publishing Expectations

Expectation: When tackling social media for business, it can be easy to assume that you’ll have endless ideas for content and will be a publishing machine.

Reality: More often than not, companies are strong out of the gate and then quickly tire from the attention needed to create and curate compelling content.

Solution: One way to engage your audience is to consistently publish content on your social channels. If you create a routine for publishing, they’ll know what to expect. Tools like Buffer are great for scheduling out your social media content for the week. You can also set up rules for posting frequency and time of day within your preferences. Additionally, Buffer has a handy content curation feature that makes it simple to choose a piece of content that is relevant for your audience and incorporate it into the publishing schedule.

#2 – Assess Organic Conversions

Expectation: Based on all of the awesome content you’re producing, it’s only a matter of time before those contact forms are flying in!

Reality: More realistically, a strong social media presence will likely lead to an increase in referral traffic to your website (if that is where you’re pointing followers).

Solution: An organic social media can be used in combination with content marketing efforts to drive lead generation. While it may not always be a direct conversion to sign up for services, there are other conversion opportunities. For example, use social media to lead your audience to gated content on your website or to a subscribe form to receive updates from your company.

#3 – Effective Community Management

Expectation: Responding to brand mentions and inquiries is easy.

Reality: Keeping up with brand mentions manually can become incredibly overwhelming.

Solution: Continue to create quality content that your community will find useful and use Social media monitoring tools like SproutSocial, Topsy and Social Mention to help identify and respond to mentions of your brand.

#4 – Improve Advertising Effectiveness

Expectation: Using paid social automatically means that you’ll have more conversions (likes, shares, comments) for your facebook page and website.

Reality: Social advertising merely provides access to more people, it doesn’t change the quality of your message.

Solution: To get the most out of social media advertising consider the following best practices:

• Use clear and concise messaging
• Incorporate strong visual assets
• Beta test ads by publishing organically first
• Use platform targeting features
• Rotate ads frequently to avoid ad fatigue
• Design ads with mobile users in mind

#5 – Don’t Take the One & Done Approach

Expectation: You can successfully publish all of the exact same social messages on every platform.

Reality: People use different social media sites for different reasons.

Solution: You need to understand your audience and the social media sites that they use in order to get a true sense of how to position messaging for each platform. The way that most users interact on LinkedIn is vastly different than they would use an Instagram account. Keep this in mind when creating messaging for your business social media profiles and pages.

Begin Setting Realistic Expectations for Social Media Marketing

True social media marketing success requires hard work, patience and attention to detail. Chances are, if you invest your time and money wisely, you’ll begin to see some of your social media expectations become realities.

What have you found to be the most shocking reality about social media that you hadn’t expected?

Images Via Shutterstock: 256990276, 267812159, 152294633, 172622741, 174332258, 173481875, 168059315

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Growth Lessons from Twitter, HubSpot, PayPal and PlentyOfFish

Some call it – *cough* – growth hacking. Others call it optimization. But what we’re all talking about, really, is crazy smart, innovative, results-driven, product-focused marketing that has an outsized impact on your company’s growth and bottom line.

Amirite?

In certain circles, the term of art is traction. Traction is what separates fledgling startups from international brands and it’s the name of a one-day, one-track event that brought dozens of founders and growth champions from tech giants like Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Hootsuite, Marketo, HubSpot and PlentyofFish to Vancouver last month.

The day was filled with actionable insights and examples of how small tests, tweaks and tactics can make or break your business. Here are some of our key takeaways.

Product comes first

In many companies, product and marketing are viewed and operated as distinct departments. But one of the prevalent themes of the day was that your product is actually your most important marketing asset.

Indeed, Markus Frind, founder and CEO of dating site PlentyofFish made the crowd gasp when he said that by the time he hired his first employee (and started to build out his marketing team), he already had a hit product with 15 million users and $10 million in revenue!

Neil Patel, co-founder of KissMetrics and CrazyEgg, pointed out that conversion optimization is actually a lot like dating; you need to give people a chance to get to know you before you ask for their hand in marriage. He suggested letting potential customers play around with your product before they have to sign up.

Selina Tobaccowala, President & CTO of SurveyMonkey, said something similar:

The more you can get people using features of the product before they have to upgrade, the better for conversions.

But Tobaccowala also cautioned against pulling the old bait and switch. If you put a paid feature in people’s hands, let them know the price tag before they spend time with something they can’t afford.

Ryan Holmes, the founder and CEO of social relationship platform Hootsuite, insisted that the only reason Hootsuite outlasted or surpassed early competitors like Seesmic and TweetDeck is that it invested in product rather than advertising and PR.

Now that they’re the industry leader, HootSuite has built its marketing around the product – and the role it plays in people’s lives. Here’s how Holmes sees his role:

As CEO or founder your job is tell the story of your product and get people excited about it.

Find the metric that matters

If there’s anything that distinguishes growth-minded marketers it’s a steadfast belief in the power of numbers. As Aaron Ginn, Head of Growth at online retailer Everlane (and formerly of StumbleUpon) put it, a growth hacker is:

Someone who emphasizes data over opinions.

We know that data is big these days (especially “big data”) but that’s precisely the problem: Data is big. There’s a ton of it. And it can be intimidating and unwieldy.

That’s why, before staring into the abyss of analytics, you need to identify the metrics that really matter to your business.

Dinesh Thiru, VP Marketing at online education marketplace Udemy, said that his two main metrics are revenue and student happiness. While user growth is also important, Udemy learned that you have to look at both the quantity and quality of users you’re acquiring. Some users “monetize better than others” and so focusing on actual purchases helps keep Udemy honest.

In terms of tracking student happiness, Thiru said he looks at Udemy’s Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures how likely users are to recommend the company to friends or colleagues. Interestingly, Thiru found that users who reported a higher NPS also had a higher lifetime value. In this way, Udemy’s two key metrics reinforce each other nicely.

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.@Udemy discovered that their most valuable customers were also their happiest ones.
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Allen Lau, the founder and CEO of online writing community Wattpad, said that at his company’s primary metric is monthly active users. This is something Wattpad’s investors insisted the company focus on instead of making money. That said, more recently Wattpad has begun to zero in on advertising as its core business model and so the monthly users metrics now seems less like a vanity metric and more revenue-oriented after all.

Retention is not an afterthought

If you have poor retention, nothing else matters.

That’s a quote from Brian Balfour, VP Growth at HubSpot. It may seem dramatic, but we’ve all heard the adage that it’s easier to market to existing customers than new ones and without retention, traction just isn’t possible.

Balfour enumerated a few reasons retention is so important:

• As you increase retention, you increase lifetime value and can afford a higher cost per acquisition (CPA) – allowing you to spend more at the top of the funnel
• As you increase retention, you increase virality (your longtime customers become advocates on your behalf) and eventually decrease CPA
• As you increase retention, you increase upgrade rates and decrease payback periods (meaning more money in the bank)

The key to retention in the first week after sign-up, according to Balfour, is to get users to experience your core value as quickly as possible through better onboarding, clearer messaging and tailoring the user experience to new customers.

For example, HubSpot was looking to increase adoption of its new email tool, Sidekick. The first step was to understand why users were churning in the first week. A majority of people reported that they just didn’t understand the product or have time to figure it out.

By separating the new user experience from the core application, encouraging users to sign up with their work email addresses (where they were more likely to see the product’s value) and improving their educational content, they were able to significantly reduce churn.

It takes a community

Retention, of course, isn’t just about great user experience or clever email marketing. The key to keeping your customers for the long haul is to empower them to become more than customers.

Here’s the recipe for sustainable growth that Phil Fernandez, Marketo’s CEO, shared:

1. Acquire new customers
2. Grow lifetime value
3. Build brand advocates

Fernandez said businesses need to think about how they’re creating a “shared purpose” with everyone in their “ecosystem,” meaning customers, employees and partners. In other words, you need to build a community.

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.@Marketo’s recipe for growth? Acquire customers, grow lifetime value, build brand advocates
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Part of this comes down to great customer support. Patrick Llewellyn, CEO of Australian design marketplace 99designs, said that establishing a customer support center in San Francisco early on was one of the keys to the company’s remarkable growth; customers would actually call them up just to validate that they were legit.

Another big piece of the puzzle is partnerships. Bastian Lehmann, CEO of online food delivery service Postmates, talked about building a “three-sided marketplace” that has allowed his company to monetize through three different streams:

• Customers, who pay a delivery fee
• Couriers – Postmates has been able to negotiate competitive rates for things like insurance and gear that they resell to delivery staff
• Merchants – now that they have scale (and leverage), they can ask businesses, who they previously ignored, for a cut

Likewise, companies like Uber, PayPal and Dropbox have thrived off of old school referral programs. HootSuite’s Holmes boasted that partners have made hundreds of thousands of dollars off their ecosystem.

Bottom line: Give people a reason to love you and an incentive to spread that love and your boss (or investors or heirs) will love you too.

Mobile is kind of a big deal

Markus Frind, the plainspoken PlentyOfFish CEO, said something else that took the audience’s breath away at the very end of the day. He said that 90% of his site’s traffic is now mobile, which has led him to question whether they even need to support a desktop website anymore (!).

That’s a staggering statement from a tech founder. And he wasn’t the only one who emphasized just how important mobile has become as a lever for growth.

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90% of @PlentyofFish’s traffic is mobile. Their CEO questions whether they even need a desktop site.
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Sameer Dholakia, CEO of email delivery service SendGrid, pointed out that savvy marketers want to be able to run their campaigns across all channels.

Since your mobile users are the same people as your desktop users, you want to make sure the experience you’re giving them on mobile is complementary. It should reinforce the goals of the larger campaign while catering to their needs and intentions at that particular moment, on whatever device they’re using.

The trick is to make the lives of mobile users as easy possible. That means reducing the amount of friction between them and your conversion goal. As Dinkar Jain, Senior Product Manager at Twitter put it, “mobile users rarely want to do anything fancy.”

Alexander Peh, Head of Mobile at PayPal Canada, pointed out that something as simple as entering an email and password on a mobile device can be a “pain in the ass” because you’re forced to keep switching between numbers, letters and symbols on a tiny keyboard. Peh said that when they replaced the email and password requirement with a phone number and 4-digit pin on mobile, usage skyrocketed.

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Don’t trouble mobile users. When @PayPal replaced email login with phone# login, usage skyrocketed.
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For more detailed advice on how to optimize your pages and campaigns for mobile users, check out this handy article.

More learnings

The day was packed with too many awesome tips and insights to squeeze into this article (that and I’m getting hungry) so why don’t I just let you peer into my notebook yourself? You can find my unabridged TractionConf notes right here.

But since there’s nothing like a real life event, you should join us at the Call to Action conference in September. It’s also in Vancouver and you’ll learn a ridiculous amount about conversion rate optimization, A/B testing, copywriting, landing page design and – maybe, just maybe – a new growth hack or two. See you there!

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Using Solar Power in Your Home

Residential solar power is becoming an attractive option for many people. They can use the sun’s energy to operate various devices and to heat their homes. It is also earth-friendly and economical way to bring the power in your home. Solar energy can help reduce external energy consumption by 50-70 percent. There are several different ways you can use solar energy in your home, which may include the use of solar panels and solar thermal systems to produce electricity.

Once you have installed solar power in your home, you can use water heated by solar energy to produce hot water and heat your home. There will be a collector mounted on an elevated area, such as the roof, and is used to absorb thermal energy from the sun. Often increases the heat and stores the resulting hot water. This heat can be piped through radiators to heat the house and provide hot water. Besides reducing your electricity bills, it can add value to your home if you decide to sell your home.

The main reason why many people are using residential solar power is helping to reduce the cost of their utility bills. Depending on the type of solar system used in a dozen years, the solar panels can pay for themselves. The Department of Energy United States hopes that by 2020, solar energy will become common place in homes. They also expect to see the normal cut energy consumption by seventy percent in that time.

The solar electric panel is the technology used in solar power, which uses photons to produce electricity. Solar electric panels, known as photovoltaic panels (PV) can be installed in a variety of ways, such as:

• Free standing rigid sheets
• Adjust your ceiling
• peel and stick laminate

How dependent are installed ceiling. The captured energy is converted into electricity through a modified grid system. It has an installed meter that reads the amount of solar energy used in your home compared to normal electricity used. The meter will then subtract the power of solar energy is used and what is left is then applied to your electric bill.

Most solar energy systems that are used are also able to store some of the energy they generate so if there is a surplus of energy can be used at a later time. Besides using the stored energy to generate rooms hot water and heat, it can also supply for other electronic equipment and light your home. The main cost of solar energy is the cost of installing the system and solar panels.

Content Marketing Measurement & ROI Advice From Experts at Kraft Foods & 3M

Understanding the potential risk and return on any investment is imperative for making a sound business decision. It doesn’t matter if the investment is monetary or that of time or resources.

In recent years, marketers have begun investing more and more into digital marketing programs. Content marketing investment specifically has been on a steady uprise and will only continue to increase in the coming years.

However, only 21% of B2B marketers say that they are successful at tracking content marketing ROI. That means that 79% of B2B marketers are investing in strategy and execution but are not able to track the success of their programs.

Have no fear, we brought in reinforcements. TopRank Marketing recently had the opportunity to interview Julie Fleischer of Kraft Foods and Carlos Abler of 3M as part of our Content Marketing World eBook series.

Julie Fleischer – Kraft Foods
Sr. Director Data + Content + Media

Content Marketing Measurement

With all of the articles and surveys and agencies calling for an increase in the amount of strategic content that marketers are producing, it would be easy to believe that we have universally arrived at the Era of Content Marketing.  Finally, the industry has come around to the belief, so well articulated by Michael Brenner, that it’s time to “stop interrupting what people are interested in and be what people are interested in.”

Flawed Measurement Models

Unfortunately, content marketing measurement lags far behind the common sense belief that if people don’t pay attention to it, they can’t be persuaded by it.  Marketing Mix Models, while painfully flawed, have the solid advantage of having been around for decades; they are built into volumetric forecasts.  They are the basis for financial investment.  They are the starting points for every media plan.

And yes, they represent a gross approximation of reality and cannot read small spends, emergent media, or the diverse, intimate, personal, service- driven nuances of content distribution, but they have been around forever, so what CMO is going to forgo their guidance to approve a plan that is wholly ungrounded?

And how on earth can the esoteric, precious, and unproven metrics we’ve been using in content marketing unseed the dominance of Mix?  If trust is built on credibility and credibility is built on consistently delivering what you say you’ll deliver, how can convenience metrics ever win? The fact of the matter is, they can’t.

We’ve been so focused on measuring what’s easy to measure and what’s unique by platform, that we’ve failed the basic tests of marketing metrics:

• Do they measure what we really need to know?
• Are they material?
• Can they predictably guide our businesses?

Determine Critical Measurements

The most important thing you can do as a content marketer is determine what measurements are critical in driving spending decisions at your company and then build an analytic methodology that answers it for content.  Is it ROI?  ROAS?  CPA?  What will it take to prove the worth of your content vs every other form of marketing spend available?

The sooner we build methods to measure the true attributable impact of content marketing on product sales in a way that can be compared directly to other marketing investments, the sooner content marketing, with all of its common sense virtues, can finally replace dated, ineffective and failing forms of marketing communications.  It’s all in the measurement.

Carlos Abler – 3M
Leader: Content Marketing Strategy

Using Science to Create a Sound Approach to Content Marketing ROI

I want to focus on the notion of blending socio-behavioral sciences methodologies with data sciences and content and application marketing. Today, marketing is being moved sideways into social socio-behavioral sciences but doesn’t quite realize it.

A number of years ago I worked on an initiative where we used intelligent content highly tailored to the personal change management psychographics of individuals, merged with behavioral and other data with the goal of increasing smoking cessation. The results were phenomenal and a testament to how powerful content can be in transforming behavior.

Ultimately marketing and sales goals are about changing behavior. Ideally in an ethical fashion to the mutual benefit of all. And you can’t beat micro-segmentation at levels optimized to leverage principles of motivational psychology. But to even speculate as to how this type of approach can be leveraged in marketing requires education that marketers simply don’t have.

Create a Blended Team

Another skill most marketers don’t have is knowing what real science looks like. They need a lot of help to understand what it means to set up solid research, and to draw VALID CONCLUSIONS from the evidence. If you put together a team that has a blend of social sciences skills, data sciences, and solid editorial and application development practice, all within an agile framework, you would see some really powerful results.

While this may seem a little outlandish, it really is the logical conclusion for tracing the ROI of content marketing efforts. People are doing this kind of work whether they are any good at it or not. It’s the same situation as businesses becoming publishers. We also need to acquire these scientific methods to realize the full competitive opportunity that the digital disruption as afforded us.

Find the Solution That Works for You

Julie recommends that marketers focus on the basics for beginning to measure content marketing programs. However, when it comes to ROI Carlos suggests a scientific approach for determining true value.

What blend of practical sense and a scientific approach do you think will have the biggest impact on your content marketing measurement and ROI?

Header Image: Shutterstock

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© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2015. | Content Marketing Measurement & ROI Advice From Experts at Kraft Foods & 3M | http://www.toprankblog.com

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5 Articles That Will Turn You Into a Data-Driven Social Media Marketer

You mean to tell me you’re not using data to direct your social media efforts?

Social media marketing is often used to pull in new followers at the top of the funnel. People cast a wide net but in many cases, completely miss the mark when it comes to tracking their efforts.

They neglect to set concrete, measurable goals – in other words, they neglect to run structured social media campaigns.

Why should you be running social media campaigns? They are the rudder that steers the boat in a particular direction, charting the course for your activities. And setting finite start and end dates allows you to track your progress so you can iterate and get even better results.

If you’re not using data to direct your social media campaigns, then you’re missing out on massive opportunities. The opportunity to get to know your audience better, the opportunity to reach a larger audience, and the opportunity to fully understand the results of your efforts… so you can optimize them accordingly.

So how do you get the most out of social media with data?

If you want to become a more data-driven social media marketer, you’ve got to learn from others who are already doing it well – and the web is overflowing with articles that can help on that front.

We’ve rounded up five articles that break down how you can use data to get the most out of your social media campaigns.

Ready to reap the benefits? Read on.

1. How to create buyer personas with social media data by Pierre Borodin for Hootsuite

On landing pages and on social media alike, you need to know your customers’ needs before you attempt to speak to them. For that reason, buyer personas are a part of the foundation of any successful social media marketing campaign.

As this article from Hootsuite by Pierre Borodin outlines, buyer personas are representations of the people who are buying, or might buy, your product. With buyer personas, you ‘re able to understand your customers better.

By more fully understanding your customer through buyer personas, you are taking the first step toward creating campaigns that really speak to their needs.

Image source.

In order to get the best information to create buyer personas, you need data. And guess what?

You can collect that data through your different social media channels.

Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, LinkedIn Groups and other tools contain the information you need to learn about your customers in and out.

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Crafting buyer personas? Glean insights about your customers through social media analytics.
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This article explains that by listening to your customers through these channels, you’ll build models that clearly outline who your customers are, which will ultimately allow you to create the right messaging for that audience.

2. Why we stopped focusing on direct social media ROI: a new way of measuring conversions by Kevan Lee for Buffer

With the rise of several tools that allow marketers  to calculate social media ROI, many articles are pushing the importance of tracking the impact of your  social media campaigns on your bottom line.

But all too often, these articles focus  on “clicks” or “conversions” – failing to account for the fact that everyone makes their journey to conversion a little bit differently.

In this Buffer blog article , Kevan Lee explains how Buffer has started to look at social media ROI a bit differently – by tracking deep down the funnel.

To illustrate this concept, Kevan explains how he started using Buffer (a social media scheduling tool) months before he started working there. He breaks down the story of his journey toward conversion, and how that journey included a lot more touch points than just social media:

Kevan discovered Buffer on Facebook, read the blog, and then continued to return to the site through various means and social media channels before finally converting.

Kevan goes on to explain why Buffer is measuring email signups as their number one social media campaign goal, with conversions from their blog as the number one metric.

The point is to create a base of engaged customers who, while they may take their time to convert — and may not do so directly from a social media click — have all the resources they need to make an informed decision.

3. How does social media affect SEO? by Andy Crestodina for Orbit Media

If you’ve ever wondered whether social media affects SEO, this is the article for you. As web strategist and co-founder of Orbit Media, Andy Crestodina, points out:

The answer: Yes. But not how you think.

As Andy explains in this article, social media doesn’t affect SEO because of the social links themselves, but because people are spreading the word about your content.

If the content is noteworthy, if it provides value to readers, they will link to it (like I’m doing here). Those incoming links help to build authority for that page, which helps search engine ranking.

Image source.

In the end, the point is to have content that people want to share, and that those who read it will want to talk about.

4. Hashtags aren’t gimmicks by Jordie Black for KISSmetrics

KISSmetrics has data that shows how hashtags can help businesses share more effectively. A hashtag does not have to go viral every single time — hashtags can be used for increased audience interaction through Twitter chats, as Jordie Black points out.

Buffer uses the hashtag #bufferchat every Wednesday. From the article:

Twitter chats are a perfect way to show your audience you are listening. It’s a way to understand your audience and find out what it is they want to know. It’s a way for your audience to ask you questions and get answers.

When this article was published, Buffer had achieved the following with #bufferchat:

• 113,658 Tweets
• 8,170 Contributors
• Total Reach: 49,993,695

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Buffer has reached almost 50,000,000 people on Twitter with #bufferchat
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Buffer manages to reach a wider audience through the people they are connected with on Twitter, as we see below.

Image source.

Through these followers and the interactions through the hashtag, they’re able to reach a much wider audience.

Because these followers also have a large number of followers, those who are following them get to see the interaction, and are made aware of the hashtag and, subsequently, they become familiar with Buffer.

In a nutshell, this article explains that by using hashtags as both a connection and a listening tool, you can get a lot more out of social media than you would by just waiting for people to find you.

5. How many Facebook fans visit your website or convert? by Jon Loomer for JonLoomer.com

What is the value of a Facebook fan? Jon Loomer, a Facebook marketing consultant, wanted to find out, and he shared his findings in this post.

To get to the true value of a fan, you’re going to have to go past your Facebook Insights and Google Analytics.

A look at the process of building targeted audiences for Facebook ads. Image source.

Jon outlines the process of setting up custom audiences in Facebook, which can then be used to learn the true number of visitors your website receives by segment. From there, you can drill down to the number of fans who converted. Jon says:

We often hear about uncertainties regarding the quality of fans. Well, I know that 31% of my fans have visited my website during the past 180 days. Considering my page has been around for more than 3 1/2 years now, I consider that to be quite good.

What he’s found out is that he has managed to build a quality audience. By following Jon’s method, you’ll be able to find out for yourself the real value of your Facebook fans with real data – and ultimately assess the ROI of your efforts on social media.

The proof is in the putting (it on social media)

Using data to direct your social media campaigns allows you to make more educated decisions about your campaigns. You’ll find out how well they’re doing, and you can use the information to create more successful, results-driven campaigns in the future.

Have you read an article that has helped you social media marketing? Tell us about it in the comments below!

Online Marketing News: G+ Brands Stripped, The Mayor Has Returned, Facebook Gives You A Cut

The 75 Most Important Social Media Acronyms – Acronyms are a natural fit for social media networks. These platforms are based on short and snappy communication, so it makes sense for people to rely on abbreviations, especially for common phrases. Check out this infographic and see how many you know. Sprout Social

Google+ Brand Posts Have Been Stripped From Knowledge Graph Cards – Brand posts on Google+ will no longer be displayed in the Knowledge Graph cards, instead they’ll be treated like all other social updates in the traditional search results. Search Engine Land

Facebook Pages See Organic Likes Rise 0.2% in May (Report) – A total of 43.36 percent of Facebook pages advertised on the social network in May, according to the latest research from social analytics and reporting firm Locowise. SocialTimes

Move Over YouTube: Facebook Will Offer Video Creators A Share Of Ad Revenue – Video publishers will get 55% share of revenue for ads that appear near their content in a new algorithmically created Suggested Video feed. Marketing Land

Facebook Taking into Account More Actions on Videos – Facebook has begun to take other actions outside likes and comments into account from those viewing their videos. See what they are. Facebook

Snapchat Launches Native Video Ads – Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has been talking vision a lot recently. Just last month, he spoke about the future (aka: business model) for Snapchat being advertising. This week Spiegel took his pitch to the Cannes Lions Festival to talk more about turning Snapchat into a platform for storytelling. SocialTimes

Google Offers Olive Branch To Journalists & News Publications With Launch Of Google News Lab – Google says it wants to collaborate with journalists and entrepreneurs to help build the future of media. Marketing Land

The Google Mobile Search Carousel Adds Pinterest Pins, Vines, Houzz & Food Network Recipes – The Google Search news carousel gets a bit more social with Pinterest Pins, Vines and more. Search Engine Land

Claim That Crown: Swarm Mayorships Are Back – When Swarm/Foursquare first launched Swarm, you fiercely battled your friends for a chance at a Mayor crown. But it just wasn’t as much fun. That’s why today we’re upping the ante and letting you compete for mayorships against everyone. Foursquare

Facebook Testing ‘See First’ News Feed Customization Feature – Facebook continues to experiment with ways to let users customize their News Feeds, and See First, which appears to be an expansion of a test that was spotted in April, is the latest example. SocialTimes

Microsoft Signs 10-Year Deal For AOL To Use Bing’s Ads & Listings – Google loses deal it held since 2002, but AOL matters far less than it once did. Search Engine Land

What were the top online and digital marketing news stories for you this week?

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Infographic: Sprout Social

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Customer Service is Marketing

My son, Harold, is huge into video games and video game culture. He knows more weird and deep-level memes and obscure details than you’ll ever know. Harold has convinced me to take him to the SCG Convention in Texas. To say he’s hyped and excited is to really underplay how he feels about it.

As part of this, I’ve encouraged Harold to do as much of the planning and deciding as possible. Harold chose the Aloft hotel chain. Swell by me. He picked it because he loved the videos. I prepaid for the days of the conference. And then, I ran into a snag.

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