Our minds are like the garden before it is planted. You can choose to fertilize your mind with positive brain food or you can let it become neglected. When you are in business for yourself or you are a sales rep for someone else — it is so easy to forget or procrastinate about [...]

As most sophisticated marketers know by now, performance advertising on Facebook is significantly different from search engine marketing. While SEM is fundamentally keyword-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on keywords, Facebook Ads is fundamentally profile-targeted, meaning advertisers bid on people. As a result, the ad copy, call to action, and graphics need to be rethought and re-designed for the “people-targeted” Facebook world – not just copied and pasted from your Google AdWords campaign.

As more advertisers and marketers shift more of their attention and budget to Facebook Ads, Facebook’s performance advertising system, it’s crucial to understand the power of Facebook’s targeting capabilities. Here are details on the 11 ways to target Facebook Ads that every performance marketer should know…

It’s no secret that businesses- even here in Mississippi are re-allocating advertising dollars away from traditional media into new media such as web and social media. Everyone is aware of that fact. What sometimes escapes the novice marketer or business owner is the “why?”. Why is this trend occurring and continuing to gain momentum?

First, understand that web and social media is an entirely different animal than traditional media. It’s a “talk with” mentality instead of a “talk at” mentality. Big difference. As such, you approach web and social media with a drastically different rulebook. Different goals, different expectations. But if you had to compare social media and traditional media side by side..apples to apples, if you will…what would that comparison look like?

Social media is, as we say endlessly, a new form of word-of-mouth. What gets people talking in the social space is…well…something worth talking about. Marketing in the social space is really quite easy if you have a product worth talking about. If you don’t…good luck with that. How about a product that can replace ALL of your household cleaners and last for up to a year? Maybe worth talking about…may even be a game-changer. I’m referring to spray-on liquid glass, which is set to roll out this year. As marketers, we really like this kind of stuff…

The best Super Bowl commercials tend to reflect happier times, when people liked their American cars and privatized health care, nobody was worried about the fate of the world’s polar bears and high fructose corn syrup was practically a food group. We should be so lucky in Super Bowl XLIV — which comes after a year filled with great financial hardship, moral lapses by high-profile leaders and movies that seemed to feature either militaristic fascists hunting down peaceful tree dwellers or post-apocalyptic survivors getting eaten by cannibals.

The Gmail move signals that Google remains serious about becoming a social media force at a time when some of Silicon Valley’s younger start-ups have stolen some of its thunder.

“It might look like a minor feature advance, but this is another blow in the war against Facebook,” said Jeremiah Owyang, a partner at Altimeter Group, a technology consulting company.

These efforts have done little to put Google on center stage when it comes to social networking. Google, in fact, finds itself in a similar position to Microsoft, as a company struggling to figure out how to move into new areas by stretching its traditional strongholds and brand. You’d think that a company as large and dominant as Google cold do better. However, it is all-too-common for industry leaders to be the last and worst at embracing new technologies and market trends. The new-comers always do it better and faster.

Display ads are likely to contribute a little more than $1 billion, or about 4% of Google’s (GOOG) total sales this year—an increase of as much 40% over last year—say analysts, including Doug Anmuth at Barclays Capital. That marks an important threshold for Mountain View (Calif.)-based Google, which makes most of its sales from ads placed alongside search results and which has been criticized for not getting more revenue from other businesses. Demand for display ads, which include marketing messages in videos and banner ads adorning Web pages, may rise faster this year than for search-related ads, according to eMarketer. “You have to go somewhere else to get the next legs of growth,” says Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowen & Co.

Laura Ries says the best ads of Super Bowl 2010 are: Google, Doritos, Snickers, Budweiser, Denny’s Coca-Cola. Among the worst: Audi, Volkswagen, Dodge, Boost Mobile.

One way to think about running a successful business is to figure out what the least you can do is, and do that. That’s actually what they spent most of my time at business school teaching me.
No sense putting more on that pizza, sending more staff to that event, answering the phone in fewer rings… [...]

Color in design is very subjective. What evokes one reaction in one person may evoke a very different reaction in someone else. Sometimes this is due to personal preference, and other times due to cultural background. Color theory is a science in itself. Studying how colors affect different people, either individually or as a group, is something some people build their careers on. And there’s a lot to it. Something as simple as changing the exact hue or saturation of a color can evoke a completely different feeling. Cultural differences mean that something that’s happy and uplifting in one country can be depressing in another.