How to use email marketing with a Facebook fan page  After we posted about the drop in Facebook Likes on fan pages, we set about looking for some examples of brands that are doing it right. (It's easy to find plenty of ones that are doing it wrong.) We do a lot of work in the daily email marketing world and one of the heavy hitters is Tasting Table. With a huge email list of rabid foodies, the brand does a nice job of letting you opt-in to particular areas of interest. Things like "Chef's Recipes...

The always interesting digital marketing and tech rag, Mashable, had an interesting article on the slowing of Facebook “Likes” for brand pages.  Ah, it appears the easy days of throwing up a Facebook fan page and getting tons of instant likes are over. Now the hard work begins around having to provide a remarkable experience for interacting with a brand on the platform. The chart below shows a remarkable downturn for the top 50 brands. By the end of last year the growth was hovering around 2%. (Source: Ignite Social Media) Have we all grown blase of the complete...

  This past December we finished out the year in San Francisco for the sold-out An Event Apart web design conference. If you've read any of their articles on A List Apart, you know this is a community passionate about making websites. If you ever get a chance to take in a conference – do it. Fantastic speakers and surprisingly great food make for an engaging and enjoyable way to spend a few days. A couple key themes emerged across the presentations. Mobile will continue to shape a web developer's life. (Current research shows 3.3 smartphones are sold for...

Seriously, take it from IDEO - you need to play more. Learn how from two of IDEO’s toy designers. Overview From time to time we do some guest-blogging over at the 99% around creativity, careers, and pushing boundaries. I often find that at the end of writing an article there are scraps that for whatever reason don’t quite fit into the flow of the piece. It’s a shame because there can be some good stuff still wiggling around on the editing floor, so we thought we’d go ahead and publish those here on...

Word of mouth endorsement is still the holy grail of marketing. We trust our friends and with the explosion of social networks it's now easier than ever to reach out and ask our trusted circle what works and what doesn't. For a marketer, cracking into this inner circle and getting a positive endorsement is a serious challenge though. So we set out to tackle this challenge with one of the most proven marketing channels, email. Overview Over the past six months we've been building and testing a Tell-A-Friend (TAF) feature on several clients' websites across industries like...

2011 is the year that QR codes took off. You see them everywhere in print and outdoor advertising and hear the hype surrounding smartphone adoption. (Here’s an overview on how it works and 6 mistakes to avoid). Marketers seem to be telling clients, “Finally, a great way to tie online metrics to traditional advertising.”   But while everyone is busy generating these codes and awkwardly stuffing them into ad layouts, it seems the user experience has been completely forgotten.   Forgive us for a moment while we pick on Home Depot.   It’s a muggy Sunday...

Top 10 iPhone Apps for Web Designers at $7.98 Getting a unique web design concept is about collecting inspiration, code concepts, and seeing trends. Having a mini computer in your pocket can be quite handy for web designers seeking to tie all these concepts together. Killing a few minutes waiting for a coffee? That’s time enough to explore different variations of a color palette using Saturation. Saw a great chunk of text? Snap a pic and have the app tell you the font. We rated an App based on a couple criteria: Does it help you collect, organize, and execute...

Today was all about field trips. Google Okay, so obviously not a start-up but we had the pleasure of having lunch with a friend who works in their ads division (formerly DoubleClick). There are some fantastic ideas that will likely be reality very soon around optimizing creative, content, and calls to action in almost near real-time. I’ve been lucky enough to be to Google’s Mountain View, California and Boulder, Colorado campuses and they never disappoint. The food really is pretty close to fine dining and the campuses just kinda have an indescribable buzz about them. Check...

Are Cookies Going to Die? There's been these types of whipsers for over a decade. At Internet Week a fascinating panel was convened for those interested in marketing analytics, entitled  'The Death of Cookies...What's Next?'. With concerned voters making noises, governments are getting increasingly interested in how privacy works on the web. This panel was moderated by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, the Technology Reporter at The Wall Street Journal's technology blog, Digits. The panel was made up of David Norris,  CEO of BlueCava,  Colin O'Malley, VP, Business Development and Privacy at Evidon, and Willis...

We had the chance to spend the afternoon at an event hosted by Webtrends around Facebook marketing tactics.  The presenter, Justin Kistner (@justinkistner), did a great job of pulling research numbers together to guide digital strategy. Perhaps the most cited graph of the afternoon was this: Chart from Webtrends Social Commerce Whitepaper. That 'thud' you see was a 23% drop in visits in 1 year. That's an incredible shift in online behavior - so where did everybody go? Facebook. One of the speakers characterized the shift above as the end of the Google era. While Search is still important, many...