Last week the internet was abuzz with the deal that Bulgarian digital rights activist, Bogomil Shopov scored. He managed to purchase 1.1 million user email addresses for the meager price of $5. The majority of the email addresses were from the US, Canada, UK and Europe and featured email addresses, user names and Facebook account numbers. Initially the data was believed to be secured through Facebook apps run by the list seller. The listing stated: "The information in this list has been collected through our Facebook apps and consists only of active Facebook users, mostly from the US, Ca [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Facebook | Facebook: Privacy | Legal: Privacy

Social media marketing is evolving so rapidly. Just last week Twitter added gender targeting. Facebook’s new Suggested Posts now allow you to reach people who have no connection to your brand. And Pinterest may drive even more visits now that it’s a top-50 trafficked web property. With major developments coming daily, it’s difficult to sort through the opportunities. At SMX Social Media Marketing, we won’t just tell you what’s new. We’ll give you the tactics and strategies to benefit most from paid, earned and owned social media. Join us December 5-6 in Las Vegas for 4 inte [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Internet Marketing Industry: Search Marketing Expo - SMX | SMX & DMD Alerts

I've spent the weekend playing with a new Windows 8 computer as well as a Microsoft Surface tablet. My first impressions so far? Isn't it a pity that Microsoft ruined Windows with all this touch stuff. I'm going to keep playing with both and trying not to have a knee-jerk reaction. But Microsoft's big picture with Windows seems to be that touch-capable devices are part of our future, so we'd better touchify everything. The problem is, what works on a desktop computer doesn't necessarily work on a tablet -- or on a non-touchscreen computer. With Windows 8, trying to open the import [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Features & Analysis | Microsoft: Windows | Top News

Google's big Android event on Monday in New York City was supposed to be the rain on the parade of Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 event happening on the same day in San Francisco. But Google's event is literally being washed out, now officially canceled because of concerns over Hurricane Sandy. The huge superstorm is expected to hit the New York area late Sunday, and Google's decided wisely it's better to play it safe than sorry. I just received this message after asking if the event was still on: We are canceling our Monday morning event in New York due to Hurricane Sandy. We will let you kn [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Google: Mobile | Top News

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed that the company is testing a change in its user interface that would replace the "heavyweight" Favorite button with "lightweight" options such as "Star" or "Like." According to V3.co.uk, Costolo told the Internet Advertising Bureau's Engage conference yesterday that Twitter is thinking a change of terminology might increase engagement with the feature. "We're testing some alternative terms for favourite. Favourite feels a little bit too heavy weight so we're testing some lighter weight terms. Engagement begets engagement. The lighter weight and mor [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Top News | Twitter: User Interface

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: Marketing Biz: Interactive Tweets, Outbrain Self-Service & PerchThis week Twitter continued to showcase how sexy they are to advertisers Twitter Cards and Raven integrated new content marketing features. Outbrain opened up their platform and Closely launched a SMB competitive intelligence app. We also saw the first acquisition by Mayer-led Yahoo, as well as funding for Rewarder and Inigral. Just don’t get me [...] How Market [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

This week Twitter continued to showcase how sexy they are to advertisers Twitter Cards and Raven integrated new content marketing features. Outbrain opened up their platform and Closely launched a SMB competitive intelligence app. We also saw the first acquisition by Mayer-led Yahoo, as well as funding for Rewarder and Inigral. Just don't get me started on News.me. This is ... Marketing Biz. More interactive Tweets, in more than 2000 ways Earlier this summer, we introduced the ability to expand Tweets to see content previews, photos and videos right within a Tweet. At that time, we [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Marketing Biz

Recently, most users of iPhones, iPads and iPods went on a downloading rampage -- frantically upgrading to the then-just-released iOS 6. This new release includes a number of great features that marketers can take advantage of to increase their reach and presence online. In this article, you’ll learn what an iOS is, how iOS 6 is different, and how you can utilize these changes to improve your marketing. What Is An iOS? Your first question might be, “What is an iOS?” iOS stands for iPhone Operating System and is the foundation for Apple’s mobile devices. Similar to Windows 7 for you [...]

Related Topics: Apple: iOS | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing Column

There are almost 2X more Android handsets in the market than the iPhone. However the iPhone (and iOS devices) generate higher eCPMs and almost twice the ad revenue of Google-powered devices. This comes from Opera, which owns mobile ad network/mediator AdMarvel and released the data as part of its Q3 State of the Mobile Web report. Opera saw eCPMs of $1.48 in Q3 on the iPhone compared to an average of just $0.88 from Android devices. Across iOS devices the eCPM average was $1.64, because of a massive $4.42 eCPM from the iPad. Most of the ad revenue in the Opera/AdMarvel network (7 [...]

Related Topics: Apple: iOS | Apple: iPad | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage

By now, we've all seen Sponsored Stories popping up in our news feed, and a new ad unit may increase the overall number of posts. New "suggested posts" will allow companies to display posts directly in users' feeds, no connections required. Facebook's popular Sponsored Stories ad type shows posts from pages but must come from one of the user's connection. This new "Suggested Post" ad type would allow brands to advertise a specific post to users who have no interactions or connections with a brand. This ad unit makes quite a bit of sense for Facebook. The traditional ads on the sideb [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Top News

Until this week the image hosting site Imgur has been most widely known as the most submitted URL to the social networking site Reddit. Imgur allows folks to quickly upload and host photos and has widely been adopted as the favorite hosting choice of Redditors. Earlier this week Imgur announced they will now be doing more than just hosting images, they will be running their own socially driven enhanced "gallery" with user moderation, reputation and advanced content sorting. Having an image be included in the new "gallery" is an option that users must choose when uploading.If this opt [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Reddit | Social Media Marketing

Twitter advertisers can now target their promotions based on gender. This type of targeting join the existing mobile, geographic and interest-based targeting options already available. Gender targeting may sound a bit strange since Twitter users don't have to declare if they're male or female anywhere in the account settings, but Twitter says that it's confident the science behind the new targeting is strong. Similar to our approach to interest targeting, we're able to understand gender by taking public signals users offer on Twitter, such as user profile names or the accounts she or he [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Advertising | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Advertising

Apple released fiscal Q4 earnings this afternoon. It was a good news/bad news scenario for Cuptertino. Revenues were somewhat higher than expected at $36 billion (vs. $28.3 billion a year ago). And Apple surprised with higher-than-expected iPhone sales, but iPad sales feel short of what analysts had anticipated. Apple posted quarterly net profit of $8.2 billion vs. $6.6 billion a year ago. Now for the device numbers: iPhones: 26.9 million (vs. analyst estimates of 25 million) iPads: 14 million (vs. estimates of 15 million) Macs: 4.9 million (1 percent increase vs. a year ago) i [...]

Related Topics: Apple | Apple: iOS | Apple: iPad | Apple: iPhone | Channel: Mobile Marketing | Top News

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: Twitter Now Has More Than 2,000 Interactive Tweet PartnersTwitter’s interactive/expanded tweet product is growing. The company says that it now has more than 2,000 partners taking advantage of the ability to include various media in tweets via what are called Twitter Cards. When the expanded tweets product launched this summer, Twitter had a relatively small group of participating publishers like TIME magazine, the [...] Mayer&# [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

Twitter's interactive/expanded tweet product is growing. The company says that it now has more than 2,000 partners taking advantage of the ability to include various media in tweets via what are called Twitter Cards. When the expanded tweets product launched this summer, Twitter had a relatively small group of participating publishers like TIME magazine, the Wall Street Journal, WWE wrestling and TMZ. Today the list has expanded with groups like The Weather Channel, shopping site TopFloor, Fandango and the music app Soundcloud, which includes song previews and more in its interactive twe [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Top News | Twitter | Twitter: Cards | Twitter: User Interface

Marissa Mayer has made her first buy as Yahoo's CEO, and it's a company with strong Google connections. Yahoo announced its acquisition of Stamped, a mobile/social recommendations service. And Mayer herself shared the image above on Instagram. The acquisition is more about the "who" than the "what." Stamped launched in 2011 as the brainchild of a few ex-Googlers: Robby Stein worked at Google for four years. Bart Stein (not related) was involved in Google's Creative Lab. Paul Eastlund worked at Google for five years. The company's about us page lists 11 employees (including an intern) [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Mobile Marketing | Yahoo | Yahoo: Business Issues | Yahoo: Mobile

A new survey from online shopping portal PriceGrabber argues that mobile devices will play a major role in holiday shopping this year. So for all those marketers and retailers still without a mobile strategy: you were warned. The PriceGrabber data come from a US online survey conducted during two weeks in September. The survey had 2,469 responses. The survey found that 31 percent of consumers "already have shopping-related apps on their smartphone," with 82 percent of those people planning to use them to save money over the holidays. Roughly a third of survey respondents said "they plan to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

Those who've relied on Betaworks' News.me apps to find the most meaningful content from their followers are going to need to find another solution. News.me for the iPhone and iPad is no longer available in the App Store. News.me was a popular way for users to find the top content from their social connections -- something that Twitter has been focusing on internally with the Discovery tab. Betaworks stated that the News.me apps were deemed to be in violation of the new Twitter API display requirements and that they had to be either completely re-worked, or removed. And removed they were. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Digg | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Gone are the days of broad, fingers-crossed advertising. Advances in mobile location targeting technology now allow large national brands to reach their audience at a local level without the sweat once involved. Finally, the promise of location targeting is a reality…. so why aren’t more national brands using it? Here are five reasons why local targeting will finally show national brands (and the world) the real value behind mobile.  1. Builds Local Brand Awareness (Where Sales Happen!) Whether you’re a brick and mortar-based business or an online retailer, local consumer awareness [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing Column

Back in April, Google released new AdWords features aimed at marketers of apps, including the ability to track conversions in the Google Play store. This week, the company followed up with a similar feature for iOS, which allows tracking of iOS downloads in the Apple app store when they are generated by an ad served in a mobile app. Although Google has built the tracking into its AdMob ad serving system, there's still no tracking for iOS app downloads driven by ads served on Google search or on the Google Display Network. To implement the conversion tracking -- which will enable advert [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Google: Mobile | Mobile Marketing