Google released 52 algorithm updates and changes in April 2012—1.73 per day. The Panda and Penguin updates received the most attention because they affected the most sites, but 50 other updates impacted search results as well. Most were focused on Google’s crusade to improve the quality of sites that rank the highest in their search results, but others included updates to changes in indexing, spelling, sitelinks, sports scores features and more. Of course, April 1st also brought a new round of Google’s April Fools’ pranks including the super geeky 8-bit Google Maps and Google Australia’s Street Roo instead of the usual Street View. [...]

Marketers are up to it again, and technology platforms are, for the moment, riding the bubble and cashing in.

Consider some buzzphrases from the not-so-distant past:

“We’re going to shoot a viral video.”
“We’re going to pay a company to dramatically boost our search rankings.”
“We’re going to roll out a new CRM platform, at which point we’ll be doing always-on, 1-to-1 marketing.” [...]

As our own CEO Kelly Mooney wrote a few weeks ago, the rise of the visual web is upon us. Both Instagram and Pinterest have quickly built massive followings around platforms uniquely tailored to sharing and experiencing images. Despite Facebook’s status as the largest photo repository online, participation in the creation of those images has been largely relegated to other players, positioning Facebook as a network of pipes dependent on outside sources for water.

Instagram has been one of the key pipelines pouring content into the News Feed and it seems only natural that Facebook’s attention would turn to encouraging and optimizing the content that generates the ad opportunities the platform relies on. [...]

t’s been seven years since YouTube uploaded their first video. Since then, online video has moved from novelty to Internet juggernaut. Now, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute and more than four billion videos are viewed each day. According to Cisco, these numbers will continue to grow. In fact, they predict that by 2014, online video will account for 90 percent of all Internet traffic. Considering video’s exponential growth, interactive capability and proven effectiveness, it’s surprising that more marketers aren’t using it.

Video not only gets watched, it also converts browsers to buyers. According to a study by the e-tailing group, U.S. consumers who discovered product videos on websites watched them 60% of the time. And, of those surveyed, 36 percent said they had watched five or more product videos on brand or retail websites during the preceding three months. [...]

A storm is coming, and unless marketers are smart, strategic, patient and targeted, they run the risk of drowning consumers, or at least dampening their interest, by pouring excessive or unwanted marketing messages through the most personal and connected device in our lives: the smartphone.

To avoid drowning, consumers will rapidly become more selective and cautious and will punish brands they consider invasive or insensitive to their needs. Marketers must rethink the broad demographic targeting and channel-centric distribution of one-size-fits-all, one-way marketing communications of the past and leverage the inherently personal nature of mobile to become more relevant to their consumers. [...]

“I am not the target customer.” This simple phrase is one that I frequently remind myself and my team to remember as we embark on creative exploration—whether it is for a campaign, a website, or any digital experience we might be working on for one of our clients. This phrase serves as a useful reminder that it doesn’t matter what I personally like or what I personally think—what matters is what the target customer will think, feel and do when encountering our strategies, campaigns, designs, and experiences.

So, as someone who has celebrated more than one 39th birthday, I realize that I am probably not the target customer that JCPenney is talking about when they say their current reinvention “will appeal to a younger customer who lives in a different world than the traditional JCPenney customer.” And I’m not exactly the current “traditional” target customer, having defected to specialty retailers Nordstrom and Macy’s years ago. [...]

Search engine optimization for multinational sites isn’t all that different than SEO for a single U.S. site. It all boils down to the same three pillars: getting indexed, being relevant by using the most popular keywords and being popular by acquiring links and social mentions. That said, the specifics of those three pillars are different for multinational sites versus a single U.S. site.

Each country has its own language, languages or even dialects within a language. Each country has a different mix of search engines that are popular among its citizens. China has Baidu, Japan still clings to Yahoo and most of the Americas, Europe and Africa prefer Google. In addition, international SEO multiplies the challenge of optimizing a single site by the number of countries targeted. [...]

I’m a designer by education. A highly visual learner. I can’t even think, write, brainstorm or communicate without sketching. Maybe that’s why I’ve often relied on Google Images as a starting point for articulating thoughts, fragments of ideas. Is there an existing diagram, comic or inspiring image that can jumpstart my process? Well, the answer used to routinely be a resounding “Yes!” But my go-to source for visual inspiration, Google Images, has been one-upped by many players in many ways. Start-ups are fueling the “rise of the visual web” as Andrew Lipsman, comScore VP, referred to the trend that’s catching fire. [...]

For years as digital marketers, we’ve been preaching context-relevant, optimized mobile experiences. It was all true. But somewhere along the way marketers started confusing context with devices, making broad decisions for users based on those assumptions. Sometimes they were the right decisions, streamlining for key tasks. But at other times, the elimination of content and functionality was frustrating, confusing and condescending…and unfortunately supported by data that agrees that mobile web experiences are generally poor. The idea that “mobile” meant “mini” lost sight of the very purpose of the web: to enable users to access content, to complete tasks, to be entertained, and to interact. [...]

Welcome to this blog post. Before you read much farther, let me warn you that I just dropped (or updated) a cookie on your computer or smartphone. It’s what I do. It’s what your website does, too. It’s how I know if you’ve been to the site before (and how long ago that was). Does that creep you out? My guess is that it doesn’t, because you’re a marketer, and you realize that web analytics are a vital tool for improving a website over time. But, you’re not your target customer, are you? At least some of your target customers [...]