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Social media marketing has so many new and emerging opportunities. One of the most popular these days are the daily deal sites - Groupon and Living Social being the most prominent. However, there are more deal sites popping up all the time targeting more niche spaces. These properties have brought many great deals to consumers, including me, but are they working for the merchants? This post provides some suggestions about how to make one element of social media marketing, the daily deal sites, work financially for the business.

I've read a good deal on the topic of "emotionomics" and it has continued to make an impression on me. Emotionomics in general is the confluence of the products and services with the customer's emotional experience using those products and services. For someone who operates an internet marketing agency, I think of emotionomics as the experience our customers have during a project...a web development project, an seo project, etc. In other words, if we produce great seo results but the process the customer experienced during the project is painful, then the customer thinks poorly of us even though we might achieve awesome results.

Money may not buy happiness, but beauty buys both money and happiness, says a study published online recently that gauged happiness and attractiveness among more than 25,000 people worldwide. This recent study was conducted about how beauty affects happiness and prosperity. This really caught my eye and after reading it, I was fascinated. The researchers concluded that “better-looking people generally earn more money and marry those who are better-looking and higher-earning.” They went on to report that “the top 15% of people ranked by looks are more than 10% happier than those ranked in the bottom 10%.” Remember, these are results from a study, not my personal opinion. Thank God because I'm clearly not the most attractive person around!

A recent survey by American Express and SEMPO revealed that small and mid-sized businesses (SMB’s) are investing more in social media than in search engine optimization. Considering the challenges in measuring social media ROI, I was ambivalent about this finding. I mean on one hand I am not surprised businesses are really interested in social media. After all, it is what everyone seems to be entranced by. On the other hand, search engine optimization is such a powerful tool to actually generating leads and it can be more easily measured.

GroupM Search and comScore, two reliable sources of research about online buying behavior, recently released findings of a new study that focused on the impact and search and social media, and the synergy of each channel. The results were quite interesting and may provide insights that could alter your current search and social media strategies. A meaningful excerpt from the study revealed the following:

Much is being written about the success of sites like Groupon and Living Social. A recent blog post expressed concern that these kinds of location-based promotional sites will ultimately lead to merchants competing on price only. An excerpt from the post read as follows:

Going through some of the finer points in Google Analytics - Conversion University caused me to ask "why don't more people embrace the richness of web analytics data?" I think about some of our clients and many people I run in to who are struggling to be effective marketers and then I look at the power of the data you can get from Google Analytics. I just shake my head in amazement that more aren't embracing the data.

Having led the development of hundreds of websites, landing pages, online display ads and the like, I always find the challenge between creativity and achieving conversions to be one of the most critical elements to online success. After all, finding the optimal balance between creativity and good usability is what separates “the men from the boys” when it comes to effective web design and development. We experienced a recent example of this and here’s the story.

During my many years in the marketing business and through my involvement with the American Marketing Association I've been exposed to several people from ad agencies. Nearly all are bright, motivated, talented people and the work they produce is often awesome. Their capabilities are broad but one area that's seldom an agency specialty is web analytics data, and unfortunately many don't utilize the power of this valuable resource.

Whether your business sells to consumers or other businesses, Twitter represents a real marketing opportunity. This amazing communications platform has grown from non-existence to 125 million users in about 3 years. Many people have experienced the “dribble” of Twitter and there’s even a TV commercial that pokes fun at the senseless things people say on some of the popular social media platforms. Others however, have found marketing success using Twitter – but you have to have the right expectations and something meaningful to offer.