Facebook confirmed its long-rumored acquisition of Atlas from Microsoft. Rumors of the acquisition first surfaced in December. And yesterday, AdAge reported the acquisition would be announced today. No price was mentioned, but TechCrunch speculated that the figure was considerably less than $100 million. Microsoft acquired Atlas when it bought aQuantive in 2007 for more than $6 billion, which was Microsoft's largest acquisition at the time. Redmond essentially wrote off the full value of the acquisition a year ago. The primary value of Atlas for Facebook is in proving ROI and attri [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook: Acquisitions | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Business Issues | Top News

Federated Media Publishing's CEO, Deanna Brown, is stepping down to be replaced by the person she replaced herself -- chairman, founder and former CEO John Battelle. Brown joined FMP in 2009 to take the media company "to the next level." In a blog post, Battelle says Brown came to him earlier this year saying she wanted "to move on and do something smaller and more directly related to content creation." Though the two initially tried to think of a candidate to replace Brown, Battelle eventually decided to come back to full time work at the company he founded in 2005. Brown isn't yet talking [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Display Advertising | Display Advertising | Internet Marketing Industry

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: Hewlett-Packard Is First Company With 1 Million Followers On LinkedIn LinkedIn finally has its first company with a million followers: Hewlett-Packard. HP announced the milestone yesterday on its LinkedIn profile page, and LinkedIn followed up today with its own announcement, and more background on how and why HP uses the social network. The company has benefitted from LinkedIn’s follow button, which rolled out about a [...] Foursquare [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

LinkedIn finally has its first company with a million followers: Hewlett-Packard. HP announced the milestone yesterday on its LinkedIn profile page, and LinkedIn followed up today with its own announcement, and more background on how and why HP uses the social network. The company has benefitted from LinkedIn's follow button, which rolled out about a year ago and let companies grow their fan bases similarly to how they do on Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn also says that HP used targeted Follow Ads to add about 300,000 followers over a two-month span. "LinkedIn has been critical for [...]

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

At the 2011 SXSW, Foursquare brokered a deal with American Express to offer special discounts to users who made purchases as specific locations using an AMEX card. This week Foursquare as partnered up with the two largest credit card providers, Visa & MasterCard to create a similar partnership. To kick it all of off, Foursquare also announced a major deal across all 6,500 Burger King locations. In order to sync your Foursquare account with your credit card to redeem deals, simply head to the card connect within the settings section on Foursquare. Savings will then automatically occur i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Local | Foursquare | Top News

I recently began teaching a class in mobile content marketing for MarketingProfs University, taking over for the user experience expert and content strategy pioneer Karen McGrane.  At the time, her book, Content Strategy for Mobile, had not yet been released, so I relied on other resources when putting together material for the class. First I gathered what I knew about adaptive content from her online writings and presentations. Then I added some information gleaned from my own experience with content marketing to mobile users. My goal was to present a well-rounded overview of solutions t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Google: Mobile | Mobile Marketing | Mobile Marketing Column | Search Marketing

Finding offline customers online is one of the Holy Grails of online marketing, and that's what Facebook’s “Custom Audiences” advertising product is designed to do. As Facebook puts it, “Custom audiences let marketers find their offline audiences among Facebook users.” The feature allows you to match phone numbers, email address, or user IDs gathered offline to actual Facebook users. That contact information might come from customer loyalty programs, applications on Facebook, prospective customers or elsewhere. Any contact list that you have is usable. Custom Audiences is the s [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook Marketing Column | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Marketing

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: Instagram Reaches 100 Million Monthly Users Instagram has hit the 100 million monthly user mark. CEO Kevin Systrom announced the milestone yesterday in a lengthy blog post that waxes poetically about Instagram’s growing community. He also features a couple stories about Instagram users, highlighting the San Francisco-based Mission Bicycle, a small business with more than 42,000 followers (of course, followers are [...] Facebook Expands [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

Instagram has hit the 100 million monthly user mark. CEO Kevin Systrom announced the milestone yesterday in a lengthy blog post that waxes poetically about Instagram's growing community. He also features a couple stories about Instagram users, highlighting the San Francisco-based Mission Bicycle, a small business with more than 42,000 followers (of course, followers are fine and good, but revenue is what matters most) and Sightglass Coffee, another San Francisco small business on Instagram. The milestone is interesting primarily in light of the dustup that Instagram faced late last ye [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook: Instagram | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Social Media

Last year, Facebook introduced Custom Audiences, which enables companies to upload customer or prospect databases and target those individuals on Facebook by matching customer IDs with Facebook IDs, phone numbers or email addresses (subject to privacy protections). That capability was recently expanded with "Lookalike Audiences," which enable marketers to find segments that generally match specific Custom Audiences on Facebook. Today, Facebook further extended the functionality of Custom Audiences by announcing that information from third-party data vendors Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Mobile | Facebook: Privacy | Top News

Most Facebook Page Owners should be seeing substantial increases in the reported reach of their posts after Facebook announced and fixed a bug that affected its reach and impressions data in Page Insights. The folks at EdgeRank Checker studied about 1,000 Pages, comparing reach on posts that were published on two days: February 18th (before the bug announcement) and February 25th (after the announcement, and when Facebook told Page owners to start looking for improved data). The results are significant: the studied Pages saw a median Total Reach gain of 31 percent per fan, Organic Reach [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Channel: Analytics | Facebook | Facebook: Insights | Facebook: Pages | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Google AdSense turns 10 today. For Google, AdSense was its first big push into advertising beyond search ads. It led directly to Google's eventual growth in display advertising. It led to the birth of new, good sites being able to fund themselves easily off of ads. It also gave birth to "made for AdSense" garbage sites that Google has to fight against. Time for some reflection... You won't find Google marking the AdSense anniversary today. Similar to how Google itself has at least two different birthdays, AdSense also has several. Today's date marks ten years since Google launched its [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Features & Analysis | Google: AdSense | Top News

Mo Analytics, Mo Problems -- other than a terrible use of the great Notorious B.I.G. song, this phrase accurately reflects how marketers feel about their analytics. If marketers aren’t versed in the finer details of the different metrics, they can easily draw the wrong conclusions with their on-page optimization and reporting. 1. Thinking Greater Time On Page Equates To A More Engaged Customer Average time on a page is a core metric to assess your page performance in many analytics platforms. However, marketers often incorrectly assume that it’s a good measure for customer engagement [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Analytics

Google is promising that its new Google+ Sign-In is a way to avoid all that "social spam" that unnamed other services (cough, Facebook) "spray" into your social timeline. Hey, I know Facebook can get aggressive. But how about a reality check on Google's supposedly altruistic move? Google Account Sign-In Had No Social Worries For one, I had a perfectly good way of logging in to things via Google without worrying somehow, some application or website was going to create the social spam that Google's worried about in its blog post today. It was called a Google Account. Not a Google+ Account. A G [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook: Buttons & Plugins | Google: Google+ | 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: Report: Nearly 40 Percent Of Internet Time Now On Mobile Devices Many marketers still treat mobile as a marginal or still-novel use case that they can afford to think about “later.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The device and Internet landscape have forever changed. The PC is now just one of several pieces of hardware that people use to access the Internet, and increasingly, [...] Google+ Sign-In Launches For Secure, “S [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Other | Marketing Day

Many marketers still treat mobile as a marginal or still-novel use case that they can afford to think about "later." Nothing could be further from the truth. The device and Internet landscape have forever changed. The PC is now just one of several pieces of hardware that people use to access the Internet, and increasingly, it won't be the "primary" device. The PC will be "at work" or "in the other room." Consumer PC sales are flat and are unlikely to grow again in the future, absent some radical change (Surface probably ain't it). In the past, people might have bought multiple PCs; now t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media | Top News

Today Google officially entered the social sign-in space with the launch of Google+ Sign-In. This new functionality will allow Google+ to compete against Facebook who has been the leader in the space since 2011. Instead of a normal Google account the new feature leverages Google+ credentials to sign-in to a mobile or Web app. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydTPnIjAHI[/youtube] So why would marketers use Google+ Sign-In? Besides targeting social spam (as they claim), the biggest benefit is that Social Sign-In helps make the overall experience seamless. With the vast variet [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Google | Google: Google+ | Top News

Google has tried to walk a fine line with Android. While trying to be true to its "openness" rhetoric about the platform, it has also tried to prevent increasing fragmentation. In addition, it has also sought to prevent any single partner or third party from having too much sway over Android. Google's challenges on both fronts are illustrated by cases involving a rival and a close partner: Yandex (the rival) and Samsung (the partner). At the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain, Google rival Yandex formally introduced its own Android app store. (The Yandex Store was first ann [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Google: Android | Google: Business Issues | Google: Mobile | Samsung | Top News

ICANN, the agency that oversees the domain name system, is planning to launch what it calls a Trademark Clearinghouse next month to help companies and individuals protect their rights as new top-level domains roll out later this year. According to ICANN's announcement, the clearinghouse will open on March 26th at trademark-clearinghouse.com. Rights owners will be able to submit their trademark information into a central database for verification and, once verified, they'll have two primary benefits: "Sunrise Registration" will give verified rights owners the chance to register their [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content Marketing | Domaining | Top News

[caption id="attachment_34163" align="alignright" width="175"] Image courtesy of DepositPhotos[/caption] Remember that time long, long ago (in a land far away) when the term “web analytics” hadn’t even been coined? Fast-forward to 2013: web analytics data is the tip of the iceberg, “big data” is readily available, and many new tools on the market do the work of collecting data, storing it, manipulating it and reporting on it. No doubt about it, Data-Land is a much sweeter place than No-Data-Land, and as marketers, we’re lucky to have arrived here. Data provides insights that [...]

Related Topics: Analytics | Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Analytics | Facebook: Insights | Google: Analytics