Practical insights on digital marketing, social media strategy, content marketing, and analytics.
After putting all that effort into writing a great blog post, wouldn't it be nice if you could publish a video based on that same content? Video can dramatically increase reach and exposure, ...
After putting all that effort into writing a great blog post, wouldn't it be nice if you could publish a video based on that same content? Video can dramatically increase reach and exposure, ...
After putting all that effort into writing a great blog post, wouldn't it be nice if you could publish a video based on that same content? Video can dramatically increase reach and exposure, ...
Why Your Business Needs a Facebook Page Your Customers ARE on Facebook According to Facebook's latest stats, there are over 2 billion people who are active each month on Facebook across the globe. Of ...
Since Facebook announced their latest News Feed change in January, there has been a lot of debate about what it means for organic reach and for Facebook Pages in general. This post highlights some of ...
"What the Heck is...?" is our series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking. Making Social Relevant Again Facebook just ...
Most of digital marketing success begins before you craft your first blog post or publish your first tweet. The most critical part is your team and the environment they work in.
As the Facebook News Feed continues to be optimized to produce a better user experience, paying attention to these updates is critical to ensure your carefully crafted Facebook posts are seen and ...
Sometimes you get so used to a feature in one application, you expect it to be the there in all the other applications you use, especially when the applications are in the same suite, like Microsoft ...
Account-based marketers just got a huge gift from LinkedIn. LinkedIn recently launched its Matched Audiences advertising targeting product to the public. Unlike LinkedIn’s targeting templates, which ...
Last week LinkedIn officially launched its Matched Audiences advertising targeting product to the public. Unlike LinkedIn’s targeting templates, which allow you to build and save audiences using ...
You've been there: a deadline is looming for The Big Campaign. You have the budget, approved creative is finally in place, you've avoided obvious mistakes, and the ad content speaks perfectly to your ...
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build your social team's digital strategy and improve your digital ...
Since videos in the Facebook News Feed automatically start playing muted, captions can be critical to getting users to watch and engage with your content.
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build your social team's digital strategy and improve your digital ...
One of the most difficult parts of building landing pages, writing blog posts, and posting to social media is finding great photos that don’t feel like overused, clichéd stock photos. Photos are a ...
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build your social team's digital strategy and improve your digital ...
Each month, we answer your questions about a topic in digital marketing. This month, we will be dealing with common questions about marketing on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools for B2B marketers, and it even has a place for B2C marketers as well. Whether you're looking to reach more of your audience for free, get incredibly ...
With so many social media platforms available to brands it can be hard to choose which channels are worth your time and which ones are wasting it. You may have considered using LinkedIn, or you may ...
Here are some of the key takeaways from our content this week, along with actionable steps that you can use right away to help you build and maintain your social team's digital strategy, improve your ...
We've talked about the benefits of LinkedIn Groups for your business, but how do you decide which group is the right one for you to join? Whatever your goals may be, joining and interacting with a ...
Each month, we answer your questions about a topic in digital marketing. This month, we will be dealing with common questions about Facebook Advertising.
Winter is coming up fast, but even though it's cooling down outside there's no reason that you can't be heating up your Facebook marketing efforts.
Professionals overwhelmingly prefer to use LinkedIn to learn more about trends and news in their industry. According to a MarketingProfs.com survey, 32% of people who use LinkedIn use it to read ...
Hubspot recently shared what they've learned about making successful LinkedIn ad campaigns. After almost a full year's worth of data from their LinkedIn ads integration, Hubspot has analyzed LinkedIn ...
For years LinkedIn has been one of the strongest platforms available for B2B social advertising, but a crucial component has been missing in action for just as long - the ability to know whether ads ...
Don't worry, as long as you follow these steps, you won't end up this frustrated. Now put down the giant hammer and let's get started.
How well you are able to track the success of your retargeting campaigns depends a lot on how you set them up. Because these campaigns can have so many ad variations, it makes a lot of sense to try ...
LinkedIn Groups are a great way to build credibility for yourself or your business. You can join up to 50 of them, but why bother? What benefits could you expect to see by joining even one? Aren't ...
Many people use LinkedIn to promote themselves, find a job, share content written by themselves or the company they work for, and to find and interact with LinkedIn Groups that are relevant to them. ...
In my last post on using LinkedIn for business, I touched on the subject of using LinkedIn Groups to promote your brand. In this post I'm going to show you three steps you should take to determine ...
One of the requirements for creating images for a retargeting campaign is to build each ad in the most popular display formats. For display ads, there is 160x600, 728x90, 300x250, 320x50, 300x600, ...
AdRoll provides an easy-to-use interface to control multi-platform retargeting - they support display ads around the web, Facebook and Instagram (in beta). Just like setting up the Facebook Pixel for ...
There are a lot of potential missteps that you could make when using LinkedIn for business, but these are the 5 mistakes I see most often that will do the most harm to your LinkedIn strategy.
If you're just getting started with LinkedIn for business you may be a little lost. Like any social media platform it is its own beast, with unique best practices and audience expectations. Even if ...
Before you start setting up a retargeting campaign, it is important to lay out the main objective, the audience you will be targeting, and the pages they will visit to trigger the retargeting ads. ...
Advertisers often think that planning their campaigns, setting goals, and wrangling budgets is a mysterious process, but the reality is that there is a lot you can do before your campaign begins to ...
How much content is too much? In our previous post on the right amount of content to produce, we looked at data from Moz and HubSpot and the answer was as much as you can write consistently with ...
Every "brand" is, by definition, just a collection of ideas and expectations in the eyes of the consumer.
Building a successful Facebook campaign is a lot of work, and with almost every step there is a risk that you could make a mistake if you aren't familiar with the Facebook Ad Manager interface, ...
If you're new to running Facebook ad campaigns, or just a veteran advertiser who still has gaps in their knowledge, you may be under the impression that once you've created your ads, your campaign is ...
Are you new to running Facebook ad campaigns, or are you an experience advertiser who is unclear on what metrics you should be measuring and how you can use your metrics to optimize your ad campaign ...
Retargeting: Challenging But Important Retargeting helps convert people who've abandoned your site or app into customers. According to AdRoll, only, "2% of shoppers convert on the first visit" to a ...
Welcome back to our Content Marketing Deep Dive series, where we analyze successful brands that consistently produce great content marketing.
SCOTTeVEST has seen great success on social media due to their effective use of crowdsourcing feedback, allowing them to constantly refine and improve everything they do. We originally profiled them ...
Welcome back to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well and what you ...
Every retargeting campaign needs a trigger - a way to know which people to target based on an action they have taken. With most retargeting platforms, this is done by adding a tracking pixel to your ...
Welcome back to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well and what you ...
AVG Technologies has long offered some form of social self-service support to its millions of users. In 2015, after internal analysis of metrics and user satisfaction decided to change everything. ...
Following my deep dive into Saddleback Leather's great content marketing, we sat down with Keenan Erwin, a member of Saddleback Leather's digital marketing team, to learn how Saddleback Leather got ...
Hear how Facebook's new Reactions give brands a chance to learn how people really feel. Learn why some companies have split their main Facebook pages into many smaller pages. Dive deep into the ...
Retargeting is changing in 2016. Learn what you need to know, why it's important to your brand, and how retargeting will change in 2016!
The release of Facebook Reactions is huge news because it is a huge change - extending the Like button with 5 new emotions. These reactions enable users to express their opinion quickly, both ...
Welcome back to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce examples of great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well ...
While some brands are still focused on building a community with one page, many others are creating multiple pages based on topics, location, or audience. Which is the best option for your page?
Content marketing is all about getting the right content to the right people at the right time. Often, the posts we write are on topics that relate to subsets of our followers, providing solutions to ...
Facebook recently launched a new way to give context to your content with Audience Optimization, and Twitter has started to roll out their algorithmic timeline. In this episode, John Maver and ...
Welcome to our new series, Content Marketing Deep Dive, where we examine successful brands that consistently produce examples of great content marketing. We'll cover what each brand does well and ...
Content marketing continues to be an essential part of digital communication for brands in 2016. In this episode, John Maver and Zachary Chastain talk about Zach's latest post - The Ultimate Guide to ...
"What the Heck is...?" is our series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking.
Whether you're new to content marketing or just trying to revamp and improve your content marketing efforts, this guide will give you all of the information you need to succeed at content marketing ...
A social media competitive analysis is a powerful tool that is commonly used to create a set of benchmarks against competitors within your industry, and by freelancers and agencies to help ...
Your content strategy is broken. Deep down you know it, but you don't know how to fix it. I'm going to show you how to write better content that your target personas will care about, how to position ...
Brands of all sizes around the world, from B2B to B2C have recognized by now that they not only shouldn't, but can't ignore social media. One issue many brands continue to face, even now, is which ...
We've build a great deck with key thoughts from our eBook - Facebook Basics - How to Target Great Facebook Posts. Check it out below:
A cottage industry of services has appeared over the last year with the goal of helping you optimize your Instagram photos to convert your followers into paying customers, and these offerings are ...
With all the content vying for people's attention, how can you create something that people actually will want to watch, and still have it promote your brand? Ziploc seems to have found the answer in ...
There is nothing more irritating than spending time to create a great post image, only to see it get trampled by the formatting quicks of the social platforms on mobile. To keep that from happening, ...
The self-service advertising experience within LinkedIn has come a long way in the last couple of years. With 40% of its revenue now coming from content marketing (via direct sponsored content) ...
You have your persona all mapped out, you understand who your ideal customer is, what type of language they use what their interests, goals, and challenges are. You've learned a lot about what types ...
These days, we all need to create a lot of content. Great blog posts aren't often written on the first try, but with a little effort before and after you write, they can get a lot better. Often, the ...
Doing a social media competitive analysis is a critical part of running an effective digital marketing program. But, they can be big and time consuming. In this episode, John Maver, Cappy Popp, and ...
We've build a great deck with key thoughts from our eBook - Facebook Basics - How to Write Great Facebook Posts. Check it out below:
Your brand influencers may not be everything that you think they are... Recently Dan Sullivan, CEO at Crowdly, revealed an important truth about the state of influencer marketing. What he found is ...
Periscope says they now has over 10 million accounts who are watching over 40 years of video each day! Hannah Jane Parkison at The Guardian has spent the time to categorize the Periscope broadcasters ...
Content marketing obviously depends on having something to publish, but how much content should you actually be producing? A recent experiment run by Hubspot and Moz tested just that and they got ...
A friend recently shared a video on Facebook from the Facebook page "NowThis" about President Obama's plan to help make college education more accessible to prisoners. What struck me even more than ...
We have just launched our first podcast episode! Join John Maver, Cappy Popp, Zachary Chastain and guest Jas Dhaliwal for a discussion of how much content really needs to be produced. We will be ...
While there is of course a relationship between the amount of traffic sent to an article and the number of social media interactions, you may be surprised to learn that this correlation doesn't ...
Recent changes to the Facebook News Feed algorithm mean that the advantages of using native video on Facebook truly outweigh the inconvenience of supporting yet another video channel. Here are the ...
Welcome to part 4 in our series on Writing Great Facebook Posts! In our latest post we talked about the importance of targeting and how to use personas to reach the right audience with content that ...
Welcome to part 5 in our series on Writing Great Facebook Posts! In our previous post we talked about how you can build your own personas to help you write great Facebook posts, as well as tips for ...
Welcome to part three in our series on Writing Great Facebooks posts! Now that you understand the basics of how to identify great Facebook posts, it's time to add to your knowledge by learning how to ...
Knowing your audience is the first step in creating great communities and getting better engagement on your social media posts. However, you likely have two different audiences - the one you want and ...
Welcome back to our series on writing great Facebook posts! Now that you know how to recognize a great Facebook post, you should also learn to recognize a bad post, understand why it didn't perform ...
In The Difference Between an Influencer and a Brand Advocate, I said that Influencers are better used for spreading brand awareness, as long as you can find a way to mesh your product with their ...
Welcome to our series on writing great Facebook posts! In our first post, we'll be covering some of the positive post success metrics that Facebook offers you, what the value of each is, and how they ...
Focusing on metrics that track to specific objectives is the key to successful tracking of marketing campaigns, said managing VP Julie Hopkins and mobile marketing lead Mike McGwire of Gartner at ...
In previous posts we've talked about how important a quick response is when providing social customer care. However, this can be a daunting task when you're working with a small team or even a single ...
This guide will walk you through 4 steps to drive more social shares on your content. These steps are tailored to work specifically for your community!
Cappy Popp was recently featured at CMSWire.com discussing how the metrics provided by social media marketing tools just aren't cutting it anymore.
I was recently asked to answer a question on Quora about whether a Facebook page could be banned for spamming other pages with messages to come like their page. Rather than just informing this ...
I recently answered a question on Quora asked by a community manager who is wondering why his organic Facebook likes are decreasing after running a Facebook ad campaign to increase his page likes.
Reach for Facebook Pages continues to decline, hitting 2.6% on average, and a very low 2.6% for Facebook Pages with more than 1 million fans, according to Locowise.
Now that we've covered how to get started with a proper social media customer care program, it's time to dive deeper into using social media customer care to retain customers. Social customer care is ...
Everyone, including Facebook, hates fake likes. While a higher Total Fans vanity metric may seem nice, each fake Fan actually can decrease your organic and paid reach. Thankfully, Facebook has been ...
The AddThis team did an analysis of what was most effective in their last 90 days of tweets and came up with the following 3 lessons:
At Facebook's recent F8 conference, they gave a talk on how the News Feed works. Although we have covered individual changes in the past ( What The Heck is The August News Feed Change?, What The Heck ...
Planning to effectively provide good customer service through social media can be difficult, but you've already recognized how beneficial it will be for your business and your customers, and that's ...
In previous posts, we have talked about the importance of Brand Advocacy and the 3 types of Brand Advocates. However, there is often some confusion when people hear the term "Influencer" about ...
Yesterday Twitter launched Periscope, its long-rumored live-streaming mobile app service. Hot on the heels of the SXSW darling Meerkat, Periscope is designed to give the ability for anyone with the ...
Building excellent landing pages that result in high conversions is undeniably hard. The most important goal for a landing page is to get your visitor to take a specific action. Nothing else. ...
YouTube annotations have long provided brands a way to increase the interactivity of their social videos. However, the huge problem was that they didn't work on mobile devices ( currently supplying ...
In 2015 you may think it's weird to say social media is the future of customer support, after all, aren't most brands offering customer support on social media now? Well, yes and no.
Content marketing is king today - we have to create great content to offer value to our readers and to satisfy Google's new search engine requirements. But, it often turns out that the content we are ...
This Week in Social is where we bring you snippets of the most important and interesting news in social from the previous week, along with commentary on what this means for you and your social media ...
A Twitter user tweets "I love this latte", a Facebook user comments on a post from Car & Driver Magazine, and a Pinterestuser pins their 5th wedding dress. Each of these actions may establish an ...
Here are some of the key things you should know from the world of social media this week:
Copying boiler plate posts between multiple networks using Buffer, HubSpot, Sprinklr, Hootsuite, Salesforce or other cross-posting tools is better than nothing, but you can expect about the same ...
Here are some of the key things you should know from the world of social media this week:
Today on SocialMediaToday.com Digital Strategist and blogger Jacob Curtis shared a post on the impact of becoming an employee advocate by using your own network (or building one) to spread the ...
Making a Cover Image for Facebook Pages, Twitter Profiles, or Google+ Accounts that look great on the desktop is pretty routine now, but that desktop cover image doesn't look the same at all for ...
Becoming a Twitter power user has it's benefits (more on that below) and, like many things in life, it is deceptively simple, but extremely time consuming. If there's one key takeaway from this blog ...
With the transition of Facebook Pages from destinations to becoming publishers in the News Feed, how much does the Facebook Cover Image still matter?
Facebook just launched Atlas, a platform that it believes will fix many of the problems with today's cookie-based advertising methods. They describe it as a shift to "people-based marketing". In this ...
These 3 practices are holding you back, don't waste your time on them! This post is going to explain to you exactly which social media marketing practices you need to put out to pasture, and what you ...
This blog post started its life as the answer to a question on Quora. If you enjoyed this post, please give my original answer an upvote! Quora Question: Can somebody better explain the Facebook ad ...
This is part 2 of my discussion with Kentico CEO Petr Palas, regarding the 2014 Kentico Content Marketing Survey results. You can read part one of my discussion with Peter Palas here.
Social media analytics are hard. That's one of the biggest problems with social media. Anything that makes them easier is awesome. Anyone that has spent professional, quality time with Radian6, ...
As a follow up to my previous blog post about the 2014 Kentico Content Marketing Survey, MSR Communications reached out to me on behalf of Petr Palas, CEO at Kentico, to ask if I'd be interested in ...
We've been given early access to Kentico's new Content Marketing Survey! The survey addresses some very interesting questions about the state of content marketing for businesses of all sizes, and ...
Posts by Adweek and Valleywag today are saying that Facebook is throttling down the already very low organic reach of Facebook Pages down to 1 or 2 percent. This follows on the heels of previous ...
Today I'm bringing my Veritasium Facebook Likes Fraud video series together with this summary!
"What the Heck is...?" is our new series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking.
My blog post on Derek Muller (Veritasium)'s Virtual Cat Facebook ad experiment turned out to be way too big for just one post, so I've broken it up into two posts. This is the second post, where I ...
Yesterday in part two of our series on Derek Muller (Veritasium)'s Facebook Like Fraud video, we covered Derek's own experiences with advertising through Facebook on the Veritasium Facebook page, ...
"What the Heck is...?" is our new series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking.
Yesterday we started our series on deconstructing the Veritasium video regarding fake likes being provided by Facebook advertising. We started by taking a closer look at Derek Muller's first example, ...
By now you've almost certainly seen the below video by Veritasium, discussing issues with Facebook's advertising platform providing branded Facebook Pages with "fake" likes, fake like being likes ...
Brands on Facebook really have to work hard to engage their fans. After creating posts with content and images that are both engaging and meet business goals, it can be frustrating to find out that ...
In my last post we talked about how to prepare for your first targeting experiment. Today we're going to talk about creating the content that will go into your targeted posts. You probably have a ...
Last time we talked about how to get started with targeting your Facebook posts using insights from data that you already have. Now that you're ready to get started, let's walk through a few tips ...
In my last blog post I talked about why you should be targeting your posts on Facebook. In today's post, we're going more in depth to learn how to get started with targeting experiments that will ...
If you manage a community on Facebook, I'm sure you've noticed that advertising is only becoming more and more essential to compete with the noise other brands are making as everyone makes a land ...
"What the Heck is...?" is our new series about the most important updates and changes in social media and how it will affect YOUR goals, presence and ranking. What is "High Quality" Content? Facebook ...
I've wanted to write a post about customer service via social media for a while now, and it just so happens that last week I stumbled across a personal story from a friend, and eventually found ...
Do you have a strategy for Facebook hashtags, or are you just porting over your plans from Twitter? Instead, learn how to use Facebook hashtags to enhance your community and make your life easier! ...
In my last post, 3 Questions to Ask Before Starting an Online Community, the first question I recommended asking yourself is "Should I be using social media?" I also mentioned that you should have a ...
As I've pointed out before, with so many people urging every business and every brand to use social media channels to create their own online community, it's important to first stop and ask yourself ...
After our last few posts, you now know how to build an online community and what steps you should take to maintain a strong community. Our first recommendation for maintaining a strong community is ...
Recently we talked about what it takes to maintain great communities, and some of the roadblocks you might face while building up your community. Here at Thought Labs, we feel that advocacy is an ...
Last week I had the pleasure of attending a Google+ Hangout about online collaboration. It seems that everyone in attendance was grappling with some type of issue where they were trying to implement ...
Most brands have a Facebook presence, and most of those Facebook pages are managed by a dedicated community manager, or for smaller brands, someone who has community management duties added to their ...
Today, I read through a great slide deck put together by the Weiden+Kennedy agency called "How to (not) Fail." It is 110 slides long, and goes through several thought provoking points. I definitely ...
UPDATED. Facebook's new News Feed will begin a very slow rollout today. The biggest changes focus on much larger pictures, consistency across devices, and multiple new feeds. (And also bigger ads)
We all know social search is coming. We've discussed the details of Facebook Graph Search in a previous post. But there are several major hurdles that need to be cleared in order for it to truly ...
Last Friday Facebook announced that it had discovered a bug in Facebook Page Insights. The bugs were likely introduced around the same time that Facebook made changes to its EdgeRank algorithm, ...
On February 22, Cappy Popp will be doing 3 consecutive sessions on Social Search - how EdgeRank and Graph Search affect what we see on social networks and how to prepare for it.
Facebook just released their new Graph Search last week, and already there has been a lot of excitement and speculation. Learn what Graph Search is, why you should care, how it works, and how you can ...
Here at Thought Labs we're looking forward to all that 2013 has in store for us, and to celebrate the start of this new year, we're bringing together 5 of the most useful blog posts we wrote in 2012!
When we talk about social media metrics we often focus on proving success or proving a return on investment. It's important to show that we are helping the business reach its goals and produce wins, ...
Just a few hours ago, a post on Harvard Business Review was brought to my attention. Dan Zarrella claims to have spent months creating a formula which accurately measures the value of a like on ...
By now most have heard about the latest high profile social media goof, this time the credit goes to American Apparel with their Hurricane Sandy Sale, just in case we get bored during the storm. Now, ...
In the past I have done analysis and recommendations/lessons from multiple brand's Facebook Pages as part of my Brand Focus series. I'm now adding a second type of analysis to my brand focus series. ...
Last Saturday my girlfriend and I were out for a drive. During our impromptu trip I happened to notice a small, rural gas station which had a sign near the road urging me to "like" them on Facebook. ...
When used properly, humor can be a powerful tool for interacting with your communities, gaining some attention, and amplifying your message. However, when used improperly, it could just as easily ...
So far, I have covered the importance of brand advocates, the three types of brand advocates, and gone into detail about the first type - the Casual Recommender. Now, I will introduce the second type ...
Are you talking with your Facebook Community, or at them?
In my last post, I wrote about the importance of a brand advocacy program. Brand advocates can be a great blessing for a company to really connect with users and multiply the effectiveness of their ...
There are a number of reasons you might want to run a competition for your Facebook page, some of the most popular being to bring in new fans or to promote the launch of a new product or service. ...
We see fans on TV all the time. Turn the channel to a football game and the camera will soon cut to screaming people with painted faces, big foam hands and jerseys with team logos. There are fans in ...
Today we have the second installment in our Brand Focus series of blog posts. We will be examining the AT&T Facebook page to identify their strengths and weaknesses across four categories ...
Congratulation to our client AVG Technologies for winning Most Social Business in the Useful Social Media Awards 2012! With over 200 social media practitioners in attendance, 7 of the most ...
One of the most important benefits promised with the advent of Facebook Timeline is increased engagement for brand's pages. As it turns out though, there have been some mixed results. According to an ...
Today we're bringing you a continuation of our two-part series of excellent uses of Facebook Timeline for Brands! As promised, here's 10 more brands that are not only early adopters of Facebook's ...
Today we'd like to share a quick visual guide of how brands are already doing some pretty impressive things with the new Facebook Timeline for brands. This will be a two part series, with a follow up ...
Today we are introducing a new blog post segment, which rates Facebook brand pages in four areas: Branding, content, engagement, and advocacy. We will cover how the brand is doing in each of these ...
This morning on the Today Show Facebook publicly launched the new Timeline view for brand Pages. It's a major departure from the existing look, feel, management, and operation of Pages today. There ...
For many brands that blog, content is a fairly straightforward decision. Many conversations regarding blog content focus on quantity. How often are you posting? How many of your employees are ...
It's almost certain that at some point, you've been told that your brand needs an advocacy program. You're not quite certain what the benefits are, what costs are involved, or how you should approach ...
Have you recently found yourself asking “What is all this buzz about Pinterest?” We’ve been pondering over that very question here at Thought Labs! After some hefty research and critical thinking, we ...
John Maver and Cappy Popp will be holding a workshop on "Facebook: Beyond The Basics" at SES Toronto 2011 on June 14, 2011.
In late January Facebook finally added support for HTTPS, allowing users to browse the site securely. HTTPS provides a combination of the HTTP and SSL protocols, enabling encrypted communication ...
Well, it's gone for another year. Along with my voice and ability to walk without wincing for the next few days. So here's the big takeaways from the show for me:
A big congratulations goes out to our client AVG Technologies who just ranked 15th in the Social Brands 100! It's now the number 2 technology company behind Dell. Among the companies that AVG ...
One of our clients, MediaFriends, is hosting a party at SXSW on Saturday night, right across the street from the Mashable party. It should be a great way to start off the night! Here are the details:
One of our clients, AVG Technologies, has partnered with Zynga to offer FarmVille players an exclusive AVG Biplane with purchase of AVG PC TuneUp for 66% off. So far, AVG is one of very few companies ...
Cappy Popp will be presenting "Implementing and Managing your Facebook Strategy" at Online Marketing Summit 2011 on February 7, 2011 as part of the Social Media Planning & Integration Workshop. ...
As part of his article series for the Japanese magazine Web Site Expert, writer Bart Eisenberg interviewed John Maver and Cappy Popp about the state of Facebook application development and related ...
Join Cappy Popp, Co-Founder of Thought Labs, as he covers an overview of the platform (where we have been/where we are going), a detailed chat about the "Like" feature (and whether or not it has been ...
Cappy Popp was recently quoted in an article in PC World titled "What Is Your Facebook Data Worth?" by Narasu Rebbapragada. Cappy talked about the massive amount of information that users willingly ...
Last week, Jaime Tedford and I talked about the Facebook Open Graph and how businesses could benefit from it. It was well attended, with lots of great questions from the audience. Here are the slides ...
John Maver will be presenting, along with Jaime Tedford of Brand Networks on the recent Facebook Open Graph announcement and how businesses can take advantage of it.
Presented by the Nashoba Valley Chamber of Commerce's Fidelity Bank Breakfast Series. Cappy Popp of Thought Labs talks about social media. Takes place from 7:30-9 a.m. at the Devens Common Center, 31 ...
Today, I was part of a panel discussion on Facebook Connect . Here is a quick summary and key points:
Our book, Essential Facebook Development, is now available.
Today Facebook presented a 6-month developer roadmap. Finally - it's been frustrating as hell writing a book about Facebook and not knowing what was coming from them and when, not to mention staying ...
Twitter is very popular now - getting mentions on daytime talk shows, spurring celebrity competitions, and even receiving governmental uptime requests. People and companies are jumping on to the ...
Kate, from the Other Side Group wrote a blog post about Keeping Social Media Social. She said that people can get to a state with social media where they subscribe to a large number of people, but ...
Thought Labs has published a new Facebook Public Profile for the West Point Directorate of Communications focusing on providing information to the hundreds of Parents Clubs around on the country and ...
Yesterday, Cappy Popp spoke on a panel hosted by the panel hosted by the MetroWest Chamber of Commerce on "LinkedIn - How to Increase Sales.” The panel also included: Mike Langford, Jeff Cutler and ...
In a followup to the previous webinar on creating great Facebook Public Profiles, John Maver will be presenting 10 advanced tips to help brands maximize engagement and virality of their Facebook ...
Cappy Popp will be speaking at a MITX event Wednesday, June 24, 2009 on a panel titled, 'Web Marketing on a Shoestring - Being Scrappy in a Down Economy'.
Our publisher, Addison-Wesley Professional, has graciously published 'Rough Cuts' - that means they still need final edits - of the first five chapters of our upcoming book, Facebook Development: A ...
Thought Labs's Cappy Popp will be speaking on a panel titled, "Linked in - How to Increase Sales" on Thursday, June 18, 2009 from 11:45A - 1:30P at the Clark University Graduate Management Center in ...
Mike Langford, fellow panelist and CEO of Tweetworks, has posted video of the panel discussion from the Girls in Tech Boston event held on May 6th, 2009 at Microsoft's Cambridge Research Center.
As marketing is moving away from traditional one-way business to consumer methods, and taking on two-way interactive approaches, businesses need a measure for performance. Facebook is arguably the ...
We’ve just received an update from the Hewlett Packard ProLiant team after two months with their new Facebook Public Profile and Twitter account. Below is a summary of the process we went through in ...
On May 6th, from 6:00PM to 9:00PM, Girls In Tech Boston is holding a panel discussion on best practices for social media in organizations.
John Maver will be presenting a makeover of the West Point Association of Graduates' Facebook Public Profile at the Take Your Facebook Page to the Next Level Webinar on 4/23 from 3:00PM - 4:00PM EST. ...
Today Facebook launched a beta feature it calls ‘Quick Transitions.’ This feature supposedly results in faster load times for Facebook Platform Application canvas pages. It somehow uses Ajax to load ...
Today I attended the TechTarget Online ROI Summit. Great seminar: most importantly one of the panels was focused on 'Understanding the CIO's Agenda and Making Sure you are on it.' Interesting panel. ...
Facebook is constantly tweaking their layout and feature set, with the increasing the sharing of relevant information among friends. Recently, Facebook changed a few things about Facebook Pages for ...
One of the biggest fears in dealing with social media (especially on a service as public as Twitter) is how to deal with inevitable negative comments about you or your brand. There’s a right and ...
The chance of coming down with a virus depends on a number of things how many people are exposing you to it whether you have seen it before how much energy is put into fighting it
Long ago, Twitter was abuzz with people talking about The Twitter Secret. Only some knew it, and they weren't telling unless you followed them, paid them, etc. It turned out to be nothing more than a ...
The HP ProLiant team wanted to create a social media hub for their new G6 Product launch. Thought Labs developed a comprehensive social media strategy for them that included:
The new (as of March 2009 - who knows what next week holds) Facebook Pages have become more like regular Facebook profiles. The important thing to note for the purpose of this post is that they now ...
Inside Facebook has the details about an upcoming update to Facebook's Pages feature. This is great news for businesses, as the changes will put Pages on par with the recent user Profile changes. ...
Thought Labs is now writing a book called Facebook Development: A Complete Guide to Smart Application Development for the Facebook Platform. It is due out later this year and will be published by ...
In a May 2008 study and October 2008 follow up, Rosetta found that 59% of the top 100 retailers have created branded Facebook Pages. This number is up from 30% in the May study. Companies are moving ...
Jerimiah Owyang posted a new article on Personal Brands. In it, he talks about how some companies fear personal brands because the people might get recruited once they develop themselves. Jeremiah ...
This is a very handy feature, especially if you have to write your code in Actionscript 2 for which the Flash CS4 debugger is terrible, terrible, terrible. Trace messages are great but when your ...
Facebook says they will soon be updating the developer application that allows you to manage your applications. It's about time. It's a mess at the moment. As long as they don't break the application ...
At the New Marketing Summit yesterday, someone said "Social Media is a commitment, not a campaign". This has been said over and over again in books like Groundswell, at conferences, and in countless ...
Gary Vaynerchuck just did a quick ustream talk in response to a comment he received via Twitter. The comment by @CreativeEmbassy said that companies are waiting for the tipping point before moving ...
Gary Vaynerchuck's post - You Down With ROI?…Yeah You Know Me - says that it isn't the social media companies that will be affected by the current financial environment, it is the traditional media ...
This week I attended the excellent MassTLC unConference. Among excellent sessions on effective use of Twitter, how to generate free PR, common startup mistakes, and others the unConference was a ...
Yesterday, I attended a conference put on by MassTLC called the Innovation unConference. It was probably the most interesting conference I have ever attended for a few reasons. First, the ...
Yesterday, I attended a conference put on by both the Sales and Marketing and Social Media Clusters of MassTLC. The panelists were:
Facebook reported yesterday that they are new Events API calls that will: "...allow applications to create, modify, and cancel events, as well as submit a user's RSVP to any event that the ...
One of the first questions we usually are asked by potential clients involves ROI (return on investment.) It is a valid and critical question, no matter the size of the company or its marketing ...
Marketing Sherpa had an interesting post recently on Facebook Pages. I wanted to comment on it since I think though relevant and timely it missed some really relevant points that our clients face as ...
Here are my slides from my presentation this morning at GSP East. Please let me know if you have any questions. Migrating From Facebook To Bebo from hiscapness
John Maver and Cappy Popp will be presenting at the GSP East Intro To Facebook and Bebo Applications workshop at 9:00 on Monday, June 9th in Washington, DC. Stop by and say hi, if you are there. GSP ...
As one of the first examples of what is possible with the new Hook Mobile API , Thought Labs has released Pic2Phone. Users can now receive their friend's latest photos and comments delivered as a ...
Overview and Objectives Fitness Together Middleton (FT Middleton) launched a dynamic Facebook Page created by Thought Labs to help increase their membership and their member's usage of facilities and ...
Finding pages on Facebook has always been difficult - if you knew the exact term, you could find a business, but there was no listing anywhere. As of last night, Facebook published an alphabetical ...
Introduction I have been answering a lot of email requests for how to get started with a Bebo application. Since applications can be written in any language that supports interaction with the Bebo ...
fb:ref is a way to set a placeholder on a bunch of user profiles, and then update it across all those profiles with a single call. It makes sense to use when you have data or images that would need ...
John Maver has been spending a lot of time over the past few months trying to actively participate in the Bebo Developer forums. After working on the Inner Circle and Doorbell applications for ...
I came across this issue today where I was getting an error when trying to add the to a canvas page of a page-only app. The app was installed on a Facebook Page of which I was an admin.
Bebo is still working on fixing performance problems, and the applications are still down. In a blog post today, the Bebo developers talked about some features that they will be releasing in the near ...
Bebo posted this today: Bebo is slow. Sorry! It's been growing a lot recently and we're not quite keeping up with the demand. Even though apps has nothing to do with the problem, we turned off apps ...
Doorbell on Bebo is growing steadily, despite some randomness in the Bebo platform uptime. One side effect of its popularity was a new error – Too Many Connections. Here is a quick overview of the ...
The Facebook API does have a way to set and get cookies, but it is in beta so is not currently part of the FB PHP libraries. I found it out by searching through forums, by trial-and-error, and on the ...
After having looked at MySpace's OpenSocial implementation I wanted to provide a comparison between it and the Facebook development platform. They are based upon completely different models and ...
Facebook released the Data Store API Beta a few months ago, but I hadn’t had a chance to try it out until recently. There are many blog posts discussing the merits of its implementation, but I felt ...
PHP 4.x introduced magic methods with the __serialize and __unserialize methods. Since then many have been added. Love them or hate them as a language abomination magic methods are here to stay. Most ...
For Doorbell on Bebo, I needed an easy way to play an arbitrary doorbell ring. Previously, I had been creating individual .swf files for each ring, and then using the tag to put them on the page. I ...
We have finished porting Inner Circle for Facebook over to Bebo. It was much easier because of our experience porting Doorbell, and the quick updates Bebo has made to their platform to make it more ...
I happened across this today as I was going through the Facebook developer forums.
Recently, we created a Bebo version of our Doorbell application for Facebook.
When I got to my Profile box today, the message at the top was that I could clean up my profile by moving the applications that I had at the bottom of the page to an “extended section”.
Since Bebo finally opened up their platform for everyone a last week, we thought it would be fun to convert Doorbell for Facebook over to it.
After creating Inner Circle last year, we wanted to try to make something that was light and easy. Doorbell was born.
For the longest time I have used 4NT as a replacement for the Windows CMD.exe shell. It provides an environment variable, _CWD, that provides the current working directory. I never knew that Windows ...
I have had the opportunity to work with the folks at Aleuromedia in the past few weeks on some of our tougher Inner Circle UI workflow issues. They immediately understood the problem and recommended ...
I use the console in Firebug all the time to test out one-liners in Javascript (like regexes for instance), but I had no idea that you could type multiple lines of JS in Firebug and run it. As I ...
The “How Robert Scoble Hijacked My Facebook News Feed” post by Dare Obasanjo a few days ago talked about the repercussions of adding a high-volume content provider like Robert Scoble as a friend on ...
Mike from Blue Dot posted a very nice review of the Circles and Feeds aspects of Inner Circle.
Inner Circle is a new Facebook application that lets you cut through the Facebook noise and get real information about your friends.