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Most company executives apparently understand how important mobile is for their business, but few of those companies actually provide proper mobile experiences, an IBM report has found.

Only 4% of 500 business professionals surveyed said they provide an excellent customer experience across channels, an IBM and Econsultancy report found. Kudos for being honest, but the fact so many companies know they aren't providing great mobile experiences shows just how disruptive smartphones and tablets have become for most organizations.

IBM seems to think it has the tools to help businesses with their customer experience strategy, and it is laid out in the Reducing Customer Struggle 2013 report. Those surveyed said about 20% of their online traffic came from mobile devices, but most are still shoveling content from their websites onto a smaller screen for mobile visitors

If there's one thing you can be certain of in social media , it's that things will change. And change again. And again. Fortunately, there's almost always an infographic to help you deal with that ...

Vine has seen impressive growth since its January launch.

The app was released for Android users earlier this month, and has since surpassed Instagram in both downloads and social shares.

With more than 13 million users, and counting, it’s now fair to say that Vine is here to stay.

It is also clear that Vine means business.

We saw brands jump on the Vine-wagon fast and fearless. However, a few early adopters have since become social dropouts.

Take Oreo, for example. After their Superbowl social stunt, there was a lot of positive buzz surrounding the brand. They started off strong on Vine (and gained some “brownie points” when they showed me how to make Oreo sprinkles), but soon lost their way. After two A+ Vine posts, they went on to post 10 videos over the span of just one day, then dropped off completely over the past month.

Back to basics: consistency is key. Tisk tisk, you delicious cookies you.

Search Engine Optimization, due to its constantly changing nature can be difficult to fully understand. Combine this with the different viewpoints many marketers hold about the components of SEO and you get a field of marketing that’s rife with speculation and a smattering of not-so-good practices.

Honoré de Balzac is said to have consumed the equivalent of fifty cups of coffee a day at his peak. He did not drink coffee, though—he pulverized coffee beans into a fine dust and ingested the dry powder on an empty stomach. He described the approach as “horrible, rather brutal,” to be tried only by men of “excessive vigor.” He documented the effects of the process in his 1839 essay “Traité des Excitants Modernes” (“Treatise on Modern Stimulants”): “Sparks shoot all the way up to the brain” while “ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages.”

In a recent post for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson investigates what drives people to read content online. As a writer for a popular news site, it’s of interest to Thompson to find out what people are clicking on and why when navigating through the endless amount of web content available. Though it sounds like a boring study of analytics at first, his findings and references are actually super interesting.

Readers want to be told what to read/listen to/download first. There’s too much information out there to take it all in at once, and The Atlantic – along with most other sites – tries to provide its audience with the freshest content in the (supposedly) most accessible places. That said, Thompson and his analytics team found that the majority of readers aren’t clicking on that content; they’re clicking on the content that’s hidden all the way at the bottom of the page, but under a very specific headline: Most Popular.

An interesting study conducted by two sociologists showed that people chose to download and listen to songs that were classified as “Most Popular,” even if they weren’t actually the most popular downloads of the time. Thompson triggered a realization for me: people want to consume content that others are consuming. This might not be the best content, but they trust that it will be worthwhile because it’s popular. We trust the opinions of our peers over the opinion of the site hosting the content.

I don’t always trust sites to give me what they believe is their top content; of course they think it’s great — they wrote it. Of course an artist thinks his music downloads are the best — he created them. Most Popular lists are the most community-based way to organize the content on the Internet, and that’s why people flock towards them. Most Popular lists do have a flaw, though. According to Thompson, these lists can be fixed effortlessly. The consequence of this is that readers are tricked into consuming and “liking” things that they might not have liked or found useful if not for a number 1 or 2 next to the title.

The solution:  Human curation. We need to provide readers with lists and collections of content that are popular within a certain field because they are genuinely popular to those who know about or are interested in that field. Most Popular lists on websites are generated by algorithms, making them extremely easy to game (by clicking the same content repeatedly, for instance) which in turn leads readers to believe they’ve found good content when they oftentimes haven’t. It’s the job of the curator, as a human, to let other humans know what they (the curator) are finding to be the best pieces of content on a topic — as someone who knows about a specific subject or interest.

If news sites and other content providers paired up with expert curators to create lists of content that would be popular among those with the authority to judge, then the most valuable content would naturally become the most popular content. Combining the power of fellow readers’ and curators’ opinions with the positive impact which rankings of popularity have on content consumption is the key to create an environment where the most popular content is also the best content. In that place, everyone wins!

One of the biggest challenges facing marketers is achieving engagement with email marketing. Obtaining someone’s email address is an awesome privilege, but getting that person to open an email can be an impossible task.

In this post, we’ll be discussing three steps for achieving more engagement through email, from start to finish. Each step will need to be completed successfully in order to get engagement. For example, if you have a bad subject line, people won’t open the email, and then you’ll have zero engagement. So I’ll provide examples of good subject lines and messages and hope you will be inspired by them. Let’s begin.

Sure there is. While the content that you post on Twitter will vary depending on your business, paying close attention to how you tweet can dramatically improve your engagement rates. Having a clear call to action, being mindful to use proper punctuation and shortening URLs (with Bitly) are simple steps everyone can take to optimise the quality of their Twitter output, maximising reader interest and significantly improving ROI.

Vine has seen impressive growth since its January launch.

The app was released for Android users earlier this month, and has since surpassed Instagram in both downloads and social shares.

With more than 13 million users, and counting, it’s now fair to say that Vine is here to stay.

It is also clear that Vine means business.

We saw brands jump on the Vine-wagon fast and fearless. However, a few early adopters have since become social dropouts.