1. HTML5, CSS3 and JQUERY
2. Mobile Compatibility and Responsive Layouts
3. Typographic Layouts
4. The Grid
5. Large Background Images
6. Perceived Affordance and Metaphoric Design
7. Social Media Integration
8. Illustration
9. Single Page Websites
10. Parallax
11. Elegant Modal Boxes

1. Be Strategic in Your Profile Picture Selection

This one's especially important with Facebook, Klout and StumbleUpon. Ask yourself: is my company's profile picture representative of my brand? Is it eye-catching, unique and memorable? You can add to this by gathering feedback from your customers and/or asking your business contacts. What's their first impression?
   


2. Who You Know Matters

The study shows that people do look at those thumbnails of connections on your profile - make sure your company is making the right impression! This is especially the case with Facebook, Twitter and Google +.


3. Keep Your Content at the Top of the Page

This one you may have guessed: the top portion of your page is prime real-estate. The further down you go, the less likely people are to engage with the content, although the study found this effect to be less pronounced on Twitter and YouTube. 

1. Know What Your Current Situation Is
2. Know What Your Visitors Want
3. Make a Good First Impression
4. Build Strong Content and Update it Frequently
5. Control the Conversion Path
6. Cast Your Net Over Multiple Channels
7. Experiment and Test

1. Use Your Company Profile More Effectively

   LinkedIn recently added company status updates which work similarly to Facebook’s Wall feature. It’s now possible to post videos, news articles, industry articles, promotions and many other different kinds of content. These status updates are sent out over your company’s followers' networks, resulting in a vast reach.

2. Recruit Staff via LinkedIn

   Posting jobs and taking applications through LinkedIn helps to raise your company’s profile on the network and allows your company to stay connected with potential employees. For recruiters and talent scouts, the ability to view a candidate’s referrals, recommendations, experience and network is also extremely valuable.

3. Go Team!

   Encourage your company’s employees to complete their LinkedIn profiles as much as possible, follow your company page, and help them list their current position with the correct company name, so that their profile will be listed on your page. You can also power up your blog’s reach by encouraging your employees to connect your company’s blog to their profile through the TypePad BlogLink application.

4. Start an Invite-Only Group

   Joining professionals with common interests related to your company’s field and fostering discussion can help to build relationships and network with a well-targeted audience. Building active groups can also help to develop your organization’s strategy and market knowledge.

5. Use Ads and Capture Leads

   Even though LinkedIn company pages are a great headquarters for your business on LinkedIn, they’re not yet customizable enough to function as effective landing pages.  If your company’s goal is to capture a lead from a LinkedIn ad, it’s best to send the visitor to a form that allows them to provide their contact information.

If you have any other tips or tactics for using LinkedIn for lead generation, post them here!

1.   Find Your Editor 

You need to create a content marketing process that works for your organization, one that ensures timely, relevant content in support of your business objectives. When it comes to content creation, envision your company as a traditional print magazine: the best place to begin is to build an editorial calendar, one which lays out all the hot topics your audience would find value in reading and sharing. Be sure to also incorporate any special “ad hoc” events or promotions planning into the calendar.

Don't forget seasonality! Framing your content around milestone holidays can provide instant relevance to your customers.

2.   Get the Right People Involved - Look Inside

Before you think about outsourcing your content creation, look to those within your company. You may be surprised at the number of fantastic writers around you!  Or, at the very least, you will discover those with lots of great ideas who can contribute to your content plan. If you find at least one avid Tweeter, you will already be in a better place to start building your content marketing strategy. This is where your company's subject matter experts (i.e product developers) and customer-facing staff can really thrive. They are the ones with the deepest insight into what you are selling and who you are selling to, including their concerns, interests and priorities.

Find a way to reward these people for their involvement! It can be a prize, or even just bragging rights for the most-visited blog post. Either way, take a note from those gamification gurus and give your colleagues playful incentives to contribute. Also, getting a sense of where everyone's interests lie will help them find fun in the process - some people love Tweeting, others love taking photos - capitalize on people's interests and that passion will translate through into your final product.

3.   Look Outside

Leverage the voices of your customer into your content marketing plan - let them be your ambassadors! For example, if you have some really vocal customers or fans on any of your social media, invite them to help produce content for you. Case in point: MTV did this in 2010 with their search to find a Twitter "jockey".

4.   Use Variety

They call it the spice of life for a reason! Experiment with the types of content you produce. Enlist the help of your creative department to produce unique, highly-valued infographics, and link to relevant audio and videos (think interviews!) Not only will your audiences be instantly drawn in, it makes your content easy to distribute across platforms and channels, reaching more people.

5.    Don't Launch and Leave

Monitor your blog comments and social media sites and keep your responses timely - the more active you are in responding, the more willing your readers and followers will be to engage in dialogue with your business. Don't forget to make it share-able by implementing social sharing plug-ins to your blog.

Following these simple tips and tricks, your organization will be in a much better position to build a sound process, with opportunities to evolve your content marketing strategy over time.

To finish off, here are some useful quotes about content marketing. Hopefully you find them as inspiring as we do!

Many of you are already familiar with it,
but LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. What exactly is it? LDAP refers to a centralized system that automates the management of user data, security and resources. Not sure if your organization has such a system in place? If you are given a single username and password that lets you log on to any computer and software at your workplace, chances are you have an LDAP system. If you’re still not sure, ask someone from your IT department (they’ll love the shop talk!)

You may still be asking yourself: so what? If you’re a larger organization with multiple web management users, segmenting access to certain parts of your website is essential to streamlining the publishing process. It supports collaboration while also maintaining the integrity and security of your web content. However, as you can imagine, it can require a lot of effort and resources from your IT team to manually manage each user’s various sets of credentials (particularly with staff turnovers). That’s where LDAP comes into play.

Your organization may already have users and groups defined in an LDAP system, but it’s of great benefit to have a CMS that can integrate seamlessly with LDAP. Here’s where Marqui fits in: Marqui’s CMS already has a nifty feature that allows you to restrict access to pages, digital assets or even whole folders to user-defined groups. What’s more (drum roll, please)…the next release of Marqui features LDAP integration! With the LDAP integration, users will be able to access restricted sections of your website using the same username and password they use to access other network resources.

The beauty of single sign-on? It eliminates the need for you to maintain user access groups in Marqui while your IT department maintains the same information for the rest of your organization. It also ensures that your users won’t need to remember (yet another!) pesky password. Best of all, once Marqui/LDAP integration is configured by your Account Manager, neither you nor your users will need to do a thing.

Hopefully this helps to demystify the world of LDAP; if you don’t have it yet, you may want to consider it. If you do, be sure to consider those CMS options that are capable of full integration with your LDAP system, like Marqui.

User- Generated Content
The aim here is to provide incentives for visitors to generate their own content on your site. Not only will it increase engagement, it will make your site richer and more SEO-friendly. UGC can be encouraged through feedback mechanisms such as ratings, reviews and comments. How can you reward people for this type of user-generated content? One way is to consider providing “badges” to those users who comment or participate frequently.

Feedback Tools
You’ve heard of the Facebook “like” button and Google’s “+1”. Both of these are tools for people to share content while also providing their feedback on it. One way to encourage this is to reward users for “liking” or taking some kind of action on your site. Often this is done through an activity feed, which shows popular articles or pages on your site, along with top users' activities (i.e those with “badges”).

Social Login
Keeping with the social nature of today's web consumer, it follows that many visitors will participate in game-like scenarios if the benefits of doing so extend beyond the game itself (i.e users are more likely to become involved in activities that those in their social circle are engaged in).

These tactics really are just the tip of the iceberg - check out these resources for more in-depth info on gamification and examples of successful gamification-in-action.

When taking a survey of current mobile websites, it's more than evident that many are being built for fingertip navigation. Many elements including search fields, menus and images are created large enough to accomodate finger-clicking.
The tactile nature of today's mobile web experience should always be kept in mind when designing a mobile website.







 

 

 2.     Simplicity

Capturing the interest of today's attention-deprived mobile user is no small feat. Complicated mobile websites are clumsy and difficult to navigate, making it difficult for users to access the info they need on-the-go. For this reason, current mobile websites feature functional, minimalist layouts. With a fraction of the navigational choices offered by the full website, these scaled-down versions make the internet experience much more accessible to mobile web users, who are more demanding and time-constrained than ever.





 
 3.     White Space

 White space is a must for any good web design,  and its importance takes on special meaning in 
 the mobile realm. An instant detractor from any  mobile website, visual clutter can be distracting  and frustrating (picture those times when  you've clicked on the wrong link because there  isn't enough whitespace!). The most          compelling mobile website designs today are  built with this fact in mind.







  


4.    Increasing Number of Videos
       and Images                                                                  

With a rising number of unlimited data plans and the growing popularity
of the 4G network, concerns around loading times and data consumption are not as prevalent as they once were. Although it is always important to keep these factors in mind, today's mobile web designers have found more flexibility in creating visual interest. With this, there's a growing trend towards video galleries, image sliders and other forms of dynamic content on mobile websites. 







 
 5.    Designs Borrowed from Apps

 With the success of touchscreens, 
 mobile  website designers have used the 
 app layout, adapting menu items into
 buttons or icons similar to those found in
 apps. The result is a clean, icon  
 driven design that many mobile users  have grown accustomed to.













 6.    Social Networks Integration

The nature of mobile usage is incredibly social, so lots of mobile websites are 
catching onto this wave by incorporating links to all their social media channels,
along with incentives for "liking" them on Facebook or "following" them on Twitter. Whether they're waiting in line at the grocery store or having lunch with friends, the mobile web allows your business to establish a social, casual connection with your customers, one that's interwoven into the fabric of
their daily lives. 


 






 7.    Introductory Pages

 Many mobile websites feature an  
 introductory or opening page  
 containing only branding and a
 large background image. This tactic is a
 good way to instantly capture  
 interest and set the tone of the
 mobile website experience without  overwhelming your visitor with unnecessary  text or  calls-to-  action.









It's always important to note that while you need to keep aware of ever-changing trends, all aspects of your mobile website design should align with your larger mobile marketing strategy. To remain competitive, and to truly evolve your digital marketing presence, any mobile website design initiatives you take on must be firmly rooted in your business objectives.

All mobile screenshots were taken from mobileawesomeness.com.


If you're looking for more info on mobile websites, check out how Marqui can help you with your mobile web design and build, along with mobile website content management .

By now, you’ve heard about Google’s acquisition of
Motorola Mobility. As the largest deal in Google’s
history (a whopping $12.5 billion!), there has
been, unsurprisingly, a flurry of debate
and discussion. There may be some significant change on the horizon, but what does it mean for the industry?

On one hand, the deal puts Google in a position to settle the tumultuous patent wars between the “big 3” industry players: Microsoft, Apple and Google. (Case in point: Motorola’s lawsuit against Apple for violation of patents is merely one of many still pending). Currently, the FTC is undergoing a full-scale scrutiny of Google’s business, which will provide another layer of complexity to this already- tangled battle.

Above and beyond patents, however, the deal works to support the Android platform. With the explosion of Android phones on a global scale (150 million), Google is in an interesting position to take on the dominant mobile device, the iPhone. Some have speculated that this bold acquisition is paving way for a Google phone, and although there haven’t been any definitive claims about this yet, the opportunity is undeniably lucrative. Seizing control of the hardware and software process enables Google to move one step in the right direction to usurping Apple’s domination of the mobile device market.

Another interesting dimension to the deal: it may also prime Google for a competitive edge in the set-top box and cable-modem market. Both Google and Apple have been testing the TV waters (GoogleTV launched last spring with minimal traction so far) and the acquisition may bring some wins for them in this space.

Amongst the speculation, one thing is for certain: the acquisition indicates Google’s commitment to mobile as a key driver of its future growth, and if the deal fuels a retaliatory consolidation from Apple, it could mean some dramatic changes in the mobile space.

Will Google and Apple go head to head? Let us know what you think! For those who love polls, check this one out on Mashable…

Thanks to everyone who attended our latest webinar, “Mobile Web: A Crash Course”. We had a great turnout! 

Our hosts, Richard Sharp, VP of Marketing, and Dan Biggs, Digital Strategist from Station X Communications, provided their thoughts and observations about the impact of mobile on the web.

Here are some highlights from the webinar:

•  The potential user base for mobile sites is growing exponentially
  •   For example, in Canada, 60% of the population is a mobile user, and in the U.S, the number jumps to 77%. In the U.S, there is a 14% per year projected growth of mobile users until 2015.
•   Mobile browsers have specific needs and advantages, and mobile websites need to be designed with these in mind
•   Mobile apps may or may not be the best solution for your business, depending on your objectives
•   Managing content for your websites and mobile websites is much easier from a single platform

If you’d like to know more about mobile web, check out the full webinar here. Stay tuned for the next mobile webinar, coming in September!

We also had a question from Liliana about mobile statistics for EMEA. We hope these graphs help, Liliana!

You have likely heard about the business benefits of a strong Twitter presence: competitive intelligence, increased brand awareness and customer engagement, to name just a few. However, if the Twitterverse is still foreign to you and your colleagues, check out these tips for starting and maintaining a meaningful dialogue:

• Have a clear goal/focus of your tweet(s).  What are you hoping to achieve and how will you measure your success? Will it be based on the number of people participating/retweeting, or on the nature of responses (i.e negative, positive or indifferent)? Remember, your social strategy should always align with larger business objectives.

• Be relevant. The word gets tossed around constantly in the digital marketing world, but what does real relevancy look like?  It involves understanding your followers and target markets. Use surveys, polls, Q&A to learn more about them. Follow topics of interest, trends and news that relate to them as well as your brand. When tweeting, avoid being overtly promotional – it’s a conversation, not ad copy!

• Listen and participate – don’t just lead. Make sure your efforts to initiate are matched by your efforts at joining existing conversations.  Engage with other businesses in your industry. Think of it this way: would you attend a networking event, give your presentation and then cower in the corner during breaktime? Be fearless.

• Build a schedule and stick to it.  Set reasonable, manageable goals and stick to them week over week. For example, instead of tweeting 10 times in one day and then staying silent for a week, try starting a conversation once or twice a week consistently,  leaving you enough time to let the chat grow before moving onto another topic.

• Don’t forget the experts!  If that consultant gave an earth-shattering presentation on the merits of Widget X, ask them to tweet about it. Conversations are nothing without people, and you want to associate your brand with industry thought leaders.

• Passion. Don’t leave home without it! There’s some truth to the age-old adage: if you love what you do, you will be good at it. Others will want to do it too.

Oh, I almost forgot: in the spirit of conversation, let me know if you have thoughts or any other tips to share!