Q&A: Michael Lazerow On The Growth Of Social Media, Social Commerce, And Attribution

Mike Lazerow, Buddy Media

As Chairman and CEO of Buddy Media, a preferred platform for Facebook management by eight of the ten top global advertisers, Michael Lazerow is a widely recognized thought leader on digital media and marketing trends. We caught up with him to discuss the growth of social media, social commerce, and social media attribution, as well as the role tag management plays in helping marketers better understand customer’s path to conversion.

Q: In a recent study your company did with Booz & Company, ”Campaigns to Capabilities: Social Media and Marketing 2011,” you guys revealed that while marketing dollars are increasingly shifting toward social media efforts there are still many marketers who don’t understand ROI. Why is that?

A: There are a couple of factors at play here. Many brands don’t know what they should be measuring or even what they are able to measure. If you don’t decide upon attainable objectives, then it is nearly impossible to gauge any sort of return on investment. Continue reading

Getting Social e-Commerce Ready With Tag Management

As Cyber Monday approaches, a lot of e-tailers are  contemplating the ROI of social commerce. While full service social commerce, such as setting up a store on Facebook might be a viable move for big players, like Procter & Gamble with its Pampers store on the social site, for smaller businesses the major play lies in adding social plugins, such as “Like” or “Share,” to their e-commerce sites.

The truth is, consumers aren’t visiting social networks to do their shopping. A recent simplyZesty article reported that Forrester found that the conversion rate for Facebook stores was equal to that of standard e-commerce stores, at between 2-4%, while also attracting Continue reading

The Value Of Search and Social Retargeting With Smart Tag Management

The landscape of advertising and targeting is changing rapidly. Targeting and personalization are becoming more and more critical to how we target audiences online.

Our VP of Product Marketing, Maggie Neuwald recently participated in a webinar “The Future of Data and Media in 2012″ with Chango, the leader in search retargeting, and m6d (Media6Degrees), a marketing technology company that Continue reading

Infographic: Why Isn’t Online Shopping More Social?

With the assistance of Ghostery, we’ve put together some data showing that social plug-in adoption among IR500 websites lags far behind adoption among all top sites. While 50% of all sites have a Facebook plug-in and 42.5% have a Twitter plug-in, it turns out that only 31% of the IR500 have any social plug-in at all (see our infographic after the jump).

This despite evidence that shoppers are becoming increasingly social, with 58% of online consumers having “followed” a retailer through Facebook, Twitter or a retailer’s blog.

While e-commerce sites generally feature less shareable content than publishers, we have to wonder if Continue reading

Q&A With Bryan Eisenberg, TagMan’s Newest Advisory Board Member

tagman advisory board member bryan eisenberg

Bryan Eisenberg

Speaker, best-selling author, columnist, digital marketing pioneer and more, Bryan Eisenberg has become something of a legend as a digital marketing pioneer, web metrics guru, and all around advocate of digital marketing best practices.

He’s also is the newest member of TagMan’s advisory board (see seperate press release). We sat down with him to discuss why he feels the tag management issue is an important one now, and what role he’ll play in moving the company forward. Continue reading

Google+ Plug-In Now 2X Faster

+1 button loads faster

image courtesy of Catchpoint

The slow-loading Google+ plug-in that significantly drags page load time just got a jump start.

Google has announced a news set of tools it claims will make the button render up to 3X faster. Indeed, data from our friends at Catchpoint are showing significant improvement in load time – if not quite as much as Google claims. Continue reading