Interactive Marketing News & Articles

It’s been fifteen years since the Webby Awards were launched. The awards, which honor excellence on the Internet, have become synonymous with good design and innovation. As the web has evolved, it has brought new elements and platforms with it, namely new categories and ways to keep their finger on the pulse of the Internet.  

When we talk about interactive marketing, we’re talking about marketing efforts that engage the user directly and, oftentimes, specifically. Whether it’s display advertising, search, mobile, email or social media marketing, these types of interactive engagement are becoming more popular and, as a result, better funded by advertisers.

During a special meeting today in Singapore, the ICANN board of directors approved a plan to dramatically increase the number of Internet domain name suffixes (e.g., .com, .net, .org) -- called generic top-level domains (gTLDs) -- from the current set of 22 to a nearly unlimited range. The change opens the field for domain personalization by digital marketers and finally paves the way for domain names in new languages and scripts.

Forrester (news, site) says interactive marketing is the future of marketing. But you don't need, nor should you have, a separate team solely responsible for it. If you are considering how interactivity fits into your marketing strategy, heed some of Forrester's advice.

"We'll make our website mobile friendly." A common phrase heard these days among organizations who have finally accepted what you've all known for a while now -- the mobile channel must be addressed.

Nice to get to this point, but the solution is not as simple as taking your existing website and creating a mobile friendly version. Not at all. The prevailing wisdom is that you must re-think the mobile experience. Luke Wroblewski, previously Yahoo!'s Chief Design Architect, advocates for this approach, giving you three points to consider:

1. Mobile is exploding
2. Mobile forces to you to focus on what the user really needs. Here getting the user experience right is critical.
3. Mobile extends your capabilities to include things that a traditional browser based website does not, such as location awareness.

"We really need to shift to start thinking about building mobile first. This is an even bigger shift than the PC revolution", Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe.

In this shift we are all students again. Addressing that reality, Ektron is holding an educational webinar tomorrow May 19th at 10am PST / 1pm EST entitled The Mobile Revolution -- Moving Beyond Mobile Friendly. The event is hosted by Morehead State University and Ektron's Chief Marketing Officer, Tom Wentworth. During the live session you'll learn about the business case for mobile as "the" primary customer channel.

Some say this is a bigger shift than the Internet revolution. That may sound a little over the top, but it may be closer to the truth than you realize. Register here to learn more.

Cloud computing is about services, but more specifically it is about self service. What people want more than anything from self service is speed and simplicity.

People are on the Web to do something very specific. Great navigation relentlessly focuses on what is ahead.

Our capacity to produce information is exploding. Our capacity to consume information however, remains relatively static.

When it comes to selecting the best-fit Web Content Management (WCM) software, a great deal of confusion continues to haunt vendors and buyers alike. Industry analysts have done little to make this any easier. It's time to move beyond Web CMS.

 When it comes to being quick off the mark SDL Tridion (news, site) must be one of the quickest. Only last week it released the results of a survey that indicated that online shoppers want companies to track them. Two days later they released a new set of web forms that can do exactly that.

In fairness, the company has been developing WebForms for quite some time, so the timing of their release may just be coincidental with the What the Customer Wants survey. However, the release of the two within days of each other is quite timely.

In what appears to be a continued effort to differentiate themselves from the rest of the web content management marketplace, Bridgeline (news, site) offers a new solution to support the management of eCommerce enabled websites.

Forrester kicks of 2009 with their review of the latest community platforms. The Forrester Wave™: Community Platforms, Q1 2009 is based on lab evaluations and interviews of nine community platform vendors. The top contenders are not really surprising, considering the market the review was based on.