Social Media, Social Engagement News & Guidance

Small business all-in-one sales and marketing provider Infusionsoft has announced they’ve bought GroSocial, a social media marketing software company. With this acquisition, Infusionsoft aims to create a one stop marketing tool for small businesses.

The function of the public library is changing, according to a new report from The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.

The Terms of Service faux pas Instagram made last month doesn't appear to have permanently damaged its upward membership trajectory. The company has posted that it now has 90 million monthly active users, a 10% increase from the previous month.

A report by Yesmail surveyed 700 marketers at two large conferences last October, and the resulting analysis found marketers are pretty much in the same boat as everyone else on big data. They have lots of information, but don't quite know how to make it sing.

Attend virtually any sales or marketing conference today and you’ll see numerous graphs depicting marketing and sales funnels that take leads from awareness through interest, discovery, decision making and ultimately the purchase itself. At each stage, a percentage of leads makes it through to the next stage.

It’s been a slow start this year in terms of predictions and lists. Normally at this stage in January we have to stop looking at them. There are many possible reasons why this year is different, the most likely reason however could be the economic uncertainty and how businesses will deal with it this year. That said, Gartner has still been able to identity a top ten digital technology wish-list for 2013.

In the United States, the past 36 hours have been a whirlwind of political pomp and circumstance as we watched President Obama get sworn in for his second term in office. Intentionally less dramatic than when he won his first election in 2009, more than 600,000 people gathered on the National Mall to bear witness to the historic event, while millions more watched from their living rooms or from their desktops.

Steve Faktor is the author of Econovation and the Harvard Business Review article “Happiness Will Not Be Downloaded.” Faktor is an entrepreneur, futurist and digital commerce expert. He was a senior executive at American Express, Citi and MasterCard.

For this week’s Facebook App of the Week, we’re looking at Post Planner, an application that auto-posts information to fan pages or groups.

As CMSWire reported, Facebook has unveiled Graph Search as a potentially massive new feature to help find relevant results among the photos, likes and other information that users put up on the social service. But what can it do for digital marketing?

In their most recent update to the Facebook Messenger application for iOS, Facebook has introduced a free calling feature via wi-fi or data connections for US users. 

Think having a Chief Marketing Officer is just an empty figurehead, created to shift blame onto when companies fail to meet their online goals and attract the attention of new customers? Think again. 

Marketers, and particularly those in the CMO positions will be forced to deal with the changing nature of the field in 2013. In addition, many marketing departments in all industries will need to become much more technically sound.

  At its mystery-shrouded event in San Francisco, Facebook has unveiled Graph Search as a potentially massive new feature to help find relevant results among the photos, likes and other information that users put up on the social service. 

Curious about what’s on the horizon for social business in this new year? According to its recently released predictions, Actiance expects social governance, compliance requirements and the increased use of social networks to directly affect social business strategies for 2013.