Today’s post comes from Laura Clarke,a blogger and lover of all things social media. Laura currently works on behalf of Sentiment Metrics, a leading provider of social media management software. appreciate Laura sharing her thoughts/experiences with customer engagement via social media channels! Never has social media been such a brilliant marketing and customer relation tool. As Facebook, Twitter and Google+ continue to grow year on year social media monitoring is now more crucial than ever to find out what your customers are saying about you, whether it be good, or bad. Leave a comment! MORE >>

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! The web is dead! guess all those business owners who’ve told me all these years that their customer doesn’t use the web were right. really hate being wrong. It rarely happens. Yet here we are. What What are we going to do? discovered this disturbing news as I’ve been reading about the Facebook purchase of Instagram. You know, the $1 billion purchase they made of a company with only 12 employees and no revenue? Yeah, that one. I’m scared to death there is going to be another bubble burst. The web is just dead. If so, get rid of it! MORE >>

Tweet. During the past years, we have seen an increasing involvement of social media in sports – especially American sports with Super Bowl being the prime example. So much so, that the amount of tweets created during this year’s Giant’s-Patriots’ game reached an astounding 12,233 tweets per second (TPS) and 10,245 TPS during Madonna’s halftime show. Real time interaction between fans and stars. The real time interaction between social media and sports is closely connected to the interaction between fans and sports stars. How to handle social media –  or not?! . MORE >>

Today’s guest post is written by Geoff Livingston. Local and mobile are two really hot topics in marketing. They embody the spirit of the current customer media experience and where they are in any given moment. Increasingly, companies are turning to cause marketing to show their cultural values and enhance their brands. Consider that 83 percent of Americans want their favorite brands to invest in causes. This is why events (mobile), which are local and cause-oriented, can be a great boon to businesses. What can we say? Who will be America’s most generous city? MORE >>

I don’t like reading things like this, I really don’t. But today I came across a report released by Modern Survey which found that we have a lot of work to do around engaging our employees. Modern Survey isn’t the first firm to report low engagement numbers, Gallup and Blessing White (along with others) have all found low engagement rates within our organizations. The questions, approaches, methodology, and data that all of these firms get is different but the trend and overall findings remains the same. What is an employee’s intent to stay with their company? MORE >>