Latest Web Engagement News & Articles

There seems to be some unrest upon the royal throne, as far as content strategy is concerned. Content was crowned King sometime ago, but current rumblings by the context community are calling for its dethroning.

Ever since Steve Jobs ripped Flurry (news, site) a new one for leaking device data about Apple products, iPhone analytics has been a touchy subject. But this week, a promising startup called Mixpanel is attempting to patch the wound with their iPhone SDK library. 

 This week, Adobe (news, site) announced the addition of some interesting social media features to their Online Marketing Suite. Among them: advanced bid strategies for Facebook ads, and image ad support for the Google Content Network. 

Is there a secret recipe for successful Web analytics programs? If there is, you might help us figure it out. 

 Popular link-shortening service Bit.ly (news, site) is aiming to attract some enterprise-y attention after Twitter (news, site) quit using it as its default service. The attempt comes in the form of a new analytics dashboard, which allows Web publishers to track the distribution of their links on a per-story basis: 

A great press release can go along way in terms of gaining virtually free publicity for your business, especially in an increasingly digital media environment.

Learning to combine old tricks and new in your press release composition and distribution can help you leverage the power of both traditional media outlets, such as newspapers and magazines, and newer ones, such as blogs and social media networks, to effectively get your message to your markets.

Welcome to our new weekly column on Content Strategy. We will serve up a healthy dose of tips, tricks and tools related to content development, design, usability, search engine optimization and other content governance. This week we examine content for the sake of content and what makes it so darn important to the rest of what we do.

Yesterday, Google Image Search rolled out a Bing-like look that features larger thumbnails, less text and a nifty little hover effect. Also along for the ride is a new ad format called Image Search Ads, which lets advertisers include a thumbnail image alongside their lines of text. 

 There are plenty of tools designed for non-technical people out there, but gShift Labs recently scored some extra special attention for their simple Web Presence Optimizer. Voted Most Promising Start-Up of the Year by the York Technology Association, this is a company you may want to keep track of if you're looking to boost your SEO strategy without getting your hands dirty. 

Content management and e-commerce firm Bridgeline (news, site) is going for growth via the shopping spree route.

Living systems get constant feedback from their external environment. To truly succeed, web teams need constant feedback from their customers.

 Gartner (news, site) has officially recognized the growing movement that is Social CRM by giving it a place on the list of Magic Quadrants. So what are they saying about it and what where do all the vendors sit in the quadrant?

Proving that browser-based apps are where it's at, Conduit (news, site) reported that more than 250,000 app publishers and 170 million users are now connected to their network.

SugarCRM is officially out of beta and now on general release. When it was originally released in April — in beta — SugarCRM 6 (news, site) introduced a new user interface that focused on speed, simplicity and interoperability with other web applications and mobile devices.

In the past when we’ve talked about usability testing, we’ve approached it from the perspective of tracking visitors’ behaviors online to help us better understand how customers use a site. But what if you could actually ask each individual a question?
 

In a complex world, innovation shifts from creating and adding to simplifying and removing.

Behold! A new dashboard that pulls Facebook, Twitter, and other online portal activity under one umbrella. Brought to you by Involver, AMP allows users to monitor, publish, schedule and manage brand strategy across the social web: 

When Brad Wilson, GM for Microsoft Dynamics said the upcoming release of Dynamics CRM 2011 will raise the bar in the CRM market, he could be accused of being a tad presumptuous. However, the new release due for public beta in September looks set to challenge Salesforce.com's (news, site) dominance in this space.

Last year Google's Rich Snippets launch initiated a big semantic web push. The snippets enable website managers to show richer search results, making it easier to determine content within a particular page before you've even visited it. The initiative was reviewed at this year's Semantic Technology Conference in San Francisco, revealing usage statistics that will likely influence the future of Google Search. 

In one of the last sessions at yesterday’s Online Marketing Summit Washington, DC featured Dylan Boyd, vice president of sales and strategy at eROI, who helped us to Connect the Dots: Integrating Emerging Channels into your Email Program.