I recently had drinks with a friend of mine who was the CTO of a hot venture-backed company that went on to be acquired by a large silicon valley company. One of the beautiful things about being a CTO is you don’t have to worry about marketing strategy and execution, and his old company had lots of PR-savvy talent. He’s now striking out on his own with a very cool product that he’s building as a solo entrepreneur, so for the first time he’s doing his own PR. In true lean startup fashion, he smartly did lots of user testing and even brought in a professional facilitator. In the process they discovered the people who were drawn to his product the most are female professionals age 20-35. This insight should help him immensely in targeting his marketing.

via How to know which publications and blogs to pitch – Muck Rack.

1 in 3 social media users have stopped following or “un-liked” a company or brand on a social network, finds Performics in December 2012 survey results. The most aggravating turn-offs for these former followers are irrelevance of posts (49%), over-frequency of posts (38%), and a lack of expected or promised content (35%). A separate study from SocialVibe and GfK finds that 37% have disengaged from their brand connections, with one-third of those blaming too many updates. As that study attests, losing these connections can have an impact on potential sales.

via Why SocNet Users Stop Following Brands – And The Lost Opportunity They Represent.

As many brands have spent the past several years engaging with customers and prospects on social networking sites, marketers have a good idea of what gets web users to connect. Typically, social networkers say they make “friends” with or follow a brand’s posts to find out about special offers and deals, and current research is consistent with that reasoning.Research has also been fairly steady on why consumers sometimes choose to un-friend brands. Engagement advertising firm SocialVibe found in October that one-third of US internet users who had ended a social connection with a brand did so because the company simply posted too many updates.

via Update Overload Remains Brands’ Biggest Social Danger – eMarketer.

4 in 10 emails sent are now being read on a mobile device, says Return Path in a new report, up 300% in the past 2 years alone. In fact, that 38% of email opens in the US now occurring on a mobile device surpasses the share of opens using a webmail account on a browser (31%) and via email desktop clients (also 31%).

via More Emails Being Opened On Mobiles Than Through Browser-Based Webmail.

The six-year-old BuzzFeed is now read by 30 million visitors a month, according to its internal statistics. And most don’t come in through its homepage or Google searches. They come because a friend, colleague, or celebrity recommended an article to them—bouncing from glass screen to glass screen, a network of human connections overlaid on digital ones.

That network has long fascinated Peretti, the Web’s king of viral content. While his site encourages readers to laugh out loud at its stories, he made no jokes as he discussed the history of his company, the future of media, and his plans to make his funny site be taken seriously by the world.

via Inside Buzzfeed With Jonah Peretti – Business Insider.

You think your landing page is top-notch, right? Maybe. Perhaps. Probably not. Most landing pages suck and it’s easy to run a marketing campaign that doesn’t deliver the results you’re hoping for. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Admitting you need help is the first step towards making your page better. But how do you do it? It’s not like there’s a 12-step program for this type of thing. Actually, there is. But for the sake of making this post meaningful, let’s pretend there isn’t.

via A 50-Point Checklist For Creating The Ultimate Landing Page | Unbounce.

The world’s top 100 brands (according to Interbrand) are almost universally using Twitter, although far fewer are actively engaging in customer service over the platform, details Simply Measured in a December study. The study finds that while 95 of the top 100 brands are active on Twitter, less than a quarter of those (23) have a dedicated customer service handle, and only 15 respond to 10 or more tweets per day on such a handle.

via 23 of the World’s Top 100 Brands Have a Dedicated Twitter Customer Service Handle.

With almost 6 million shares, and owing to the success of campaigns such as Project Glass: One Day, Google takes the top spot as the most shared advertiser of 2012, finds Unruly Media, based on data from January 1-November 22. The 5.9 million shares attracted by Google represented a 197% increase from that same time period last year, and vaulted the search engine to the top spot from the #7 ranking last year. In second place was Nike, which drew 166% more shares than last year (5.5 million), jumping from the 6th spot.

via Google Heads List of Top 10 Viral Video Brands of 2012.

Recent research from HubSpot has indicated that Facebook photos generate higher engagement than the average post, and new data provided to MarketingCharts by Socialbakers supports this finding. Socialbakers took a sample of approximately 90,000 posts from 24,000 brand pages around the world during the week of November 26-December 2, and analyzed the top 10% most engaging posts. Of those, 89% were photos, with the remainder being links 4%, videos 4%, and status updates 3%.

via On Facebook, Photos Represent 89% of Brands’ Most Engaging Posts.

Research from Cognizant has shown that companies that involve direct customer input in their innovation processes report higher satisfaction with a variety of innovation areas than those who don’t. For brands looking to go that route, Millennials may prove a willing source of ideas. According to new survey results from Edelman Berland and Edelman 8095, 4 in 10 Millennials (aged 18-33) from around the world want brands to allow them to influence their products (co-creation). In fact, this is the leading way in which Millennials want to be entertained by brands.

via 4 in 10 Millennials Interested in Co-Creating Products With Brands.