Tomorrow (3/30/12) marks the day for all brand pages on Facebook to automatically be switched from the current UI to Timeline. Since f8 occurred, there has been a great deal of discussion surrounding this change, considering that the new Facebook Timeline, among all of Facebook’s other UI updates have resulted in both positive and negative buzz.
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A person’s Twitter following is sort of like their own fan club—a group of individuals who, by choosing to follow you on Twitter, are essentially telling you that they find you—or the content you create—meaningful. It’s a great feeling to see who’s following you and an even better feeling seeing that people are actively sharing the content you post.
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After moving into our new offices at One South Wacker earlier this month, we were surprised to receive a congratulatory note from Chicago Mayor, Rahm Emanuel. Mayor Emanuel sent the letter congratulating Rise on our recent expansion and relocation. He further went on to mention how he was proud that Chicago is the home to our company. Read the rest of this entry »

Pictures, ratings, and review rich snippets have all revolutionized the way users interact with search engines. To take user engagement to the next level, video snippets are now popping up everywhere. Their most common uses include video demonstrations, product testing, cooking and how-to videos. While video rich snippets are still not standard, now is the time to implement them to make your site stand out among the competition. Read the rest of this entry »

As anyone within the digital marketing space (and many outside digital marketing) is aware, Pinterest is one of the hottest topics at the moment. Within marketing, the focus is effective monetization. With all the excitement, I worry people aren’t looking at the water before jumping in. Specifically, I have 3 major concerns about the future of Pinterest for marketing.

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As someone who has spent their career building the brands and driving leads for B2B organizations, I have seen how slow we are to react to new channels of marketing, especially compared to our B2C peers. That is not to say this is a bad thing—it is good to let someone else be the guinea pig sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »

As a Chicago flat-lander, I have forgotten how wonderful it is to wake up to the view of majestic snow-capped mountains.  With that backdrop, I walked up to the Salt Palace Convention Center for the official start of the conference.  Adobe offers ubiquitous coach buses to shuttle attendees, but I found it just as quick to walk from our hotel once the buses make all of the requisite stops.  But on to what really matters, the content. Read the rest of this entry »

Great keynote today with 4,000 of my fellow Adobe Kool-Aid drinkers, 2x as many as last year.  The highlight was hearing from Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen.  He discussed the visualization and predictive nature of analytics and attribution. This was followed by a great demo of some of these cutting edge tools.  Very inspiring! Read the rest of this entry »

Google Search Changes Overview

Google will begin to make major changes to its search engine over the next few months.  The company is trying to transform the search engine so that it can more easily recognize the quality of websites, making the search engine more useful, accessible and user-friendly. With these changes, Google hopes to present more facts and direct answers to search queries at the top of the search-results page. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of recent interest around tracking Pinterest referral traffic, including a particularly elegant solution using referral traffic by @jgianoglio.  While this method might be great for understanding the impact of Pinterest traffic (and even specific Pinterest traffic) on your overall analytics, marketers looking to use Pinterest to market products and services require a method that integrates Pinterest as a marketing channel (typically the source in Google Analytics) instead of a website referring traffic.  While looking at ways to create detailed Pinterest analytics, I came across a small bug I hope Pinterest will address in the near future. Read the rest of this entry »