Daniel Burstein says, “Responsive design. It’s more than just a buzzword. It’s an optimization challenge. After all, what responsive design really means is that you need more than one optimized design. It is a marketing challenge not to be overlooked. After all, it’s hard enough to discover one effective design for a website that is optimized for conversion. With responsive design, you need three, four or maybe more designs to present optimized experiences for customers on many different devices. To help you overcome this and other mobile marketing challenges, I interviewed Michael Layne,... [...]

Re/code team says, “In the spirit of Black Friday, I’m sending along my holiday wish list to Twitter. I’d like a better search feature, please. And the Direct Messages tool could use a facelift, too. But if there’s room for just one gift this year, I know what’s at the top of my list: Changing the 140-character limit. Since Twitter’s founding in 2006, all tweets have been constrained to 140 characters. It made sense in the early days. Users initially received tweets as an SMS (text message) which had a 160-character limit. No one wanted to receive three or four texts to read a tweet... [...]

Patricia Chui says, “Content is everywhere on the web – and there’s a lot of it. What we consume each day is just the tiniest fraction of what’s out there. So how are we to find great articles and videos that we often don’t know exist? Adam Singolda founded Taboola in 2007 with the goal of bringing content to readers, rather than making them go out and search for it. Advertisers and publishers (including Business Insider) now use Taboola’s discovery widgets to distribute articles, videos, and slideshows across the web, to the tune of 150 billion overall recommendations... [...]

Alex Abeli says, “While you may never have to battle gangs of ninjas, jump from flaming helicopters, or defeat eye-patch-laden villains in bloody shootouts, an entirely different type of action is required of today’s marketer. If you’re facing opposition in the form of endless reporting that never seems to make a difference, it might be time to find the hero within and add some action to your everyday work life. Are you ready to act strategically, rally supporters and face the adventure of changing your organization for the better? Every week, our sister publication MarketingSherpa holds... [...]

Anthony Coraggio says, “I’m receiving more and more questions from clients about how best to leverage paid content distribution and paid social platforms (here referred to together as ‘paid promotions’). There’s a lot of reason for increased interest—as content production has ramped up in digital marketing, it has become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and reach the audience you want. Facebook shutting down companies’ free lunch social distribution has only further pressed the issue—and sometimes you’ve simply maxed out on other paid... [...]

Re/code team says, “Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, said on Thursday the firm will set up an international version of its e-commerce marketplace Taobao to serve shoppers worldwide in multiple languages, including English and Chinese. Alibaba currently has an international e-commerce platform specializing in wholesale goods called Aliexpress, but does not have a similar offering for consumers to sell to each other. Ma made the comments on the sidelines of a meeting in China’s eastern city of Hangzhou between China’s Premier Li Keqiang and Chinese and foreign... [...]

John Tackett says, “I’ve always loved this quote: “Brevity is the soul of wit.” – William Shakespeare To me, its beauty rests in the powerful meaning packed in six simple words. Brevity can also be used as a tool to aid your marketing, as I discovered from a recent email experiment. But first, a little more detail about the experiment. Background: A global producer of high-quality audio equipment and accessories. Goal: To increase clickthrough rates in an email. Research Question: Which email will generate the highest clickthrough rate? Test Design: A/B multifactor, radical redesign... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Forrester, the respected market research company, has a history of releasing reports that cast Facebook in a bad light in the eyes of advertisers. Last year it suggested Facebook was “failing marketers” by “abandoning” its promise of social marketing. Now Forrester is truly hitting Facebook where it hurts: it is advising advertisers to stop using Facebook if they want to build social relationships with their customers. The release of the “Social Relationship Strategies That Work” report follows Facebook’s announcement on... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Gobble, gobble. YouTube’s dominance of the worldwide video market is under threat as Facebook continues to ramp up its charge to increase its share of the lucrative online video market. In recent months Facebook began seeding autoplay videos into the News Feed, shortly followed by premium autoplay video ads; the company has increased its mentions of the importance of video in its quarterly earnings and investor calls; and it is reportedly actively trying to poach YouTube stars to create content made specifically for its platform. The results of energized... [...]

Madeline Stone says, “With more than 7 YouTube million subscribers, her own L’Oreal line, and a growing e-commerce beauty startup, hair-and-makeup guru Michelle Phan is one of the most successful YouTubers ever. But getting to the top was no easy task. Phan told Re/code that she was once rejected from a job at a Lancome makeup counter because she had no sales experience, and she and her family lived on food stamps for a period of time. Phan recently released a book called “Make Up: Your Life Guide to Beauty, Style and Success – Online and Off.” In it, she tells the... [...]