by Dan Lenehan
Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to all of you! For those of you who have the day off, I hope you’re taking the opportunity to give back to your community in some way, big or small, as service has rightly become the focus of this holiday. And for those of you (like me) who are working today, I hope you pause for a moment and reflect on the man being honored today and the message he conveyed.
I found an interesting article in the Christian Science Monitor this afternoon about how kids increasingly don’t know much about King (aside from the fact that they get to miss a day of school because of him). I’ve certainly come to take King’s struggles and achievements for granted, and this piece made me stop and really consider why today is a national holiday.
That, of course, is unrelated to the Marketing Monday Roundup, for which we’ve compiled several other interesting articles about technology, social media, and online marketing. Here are the winners this week:
Why Social Is So Disruptive to Traditional Marketing
I appreciate Judy Shapiro’s piece in Social Media Today because she helpfully articulates the shift from a content distribution platform to a community distribution platform. She also serves as a model of a marketing industry veteran who’s adapted to the new landscape (or rather, is adapting) and is embracing new ideas about what marketing is in the social web.
Justified – Beginning Steps To Proving Your Internet Marketing Point
Carrie Hill’s post on Search Engine Land is specific to using Google Analytics and AdWords to measure marketing success — which is useful in and of itself — but I also like her opening point about the need to justify marketing expenses and why it’s essential to have clear metrics to measure your success.
11 useful tips for marketing your brand on LinkedIn
A well-written, concise set of tips from Katerina Walter on The Next Web for how to use LinkedIn as a business.
What’s in a gTLD?
We’re accustomed to a rather limited set of top-level domains: .com, .net, etc. We’re now seeing the expansion of TLDs to the point that someone could conceivably own “.beaches” and license the subdomains of it (for instance, “spain.beaches”) to others. This insightful column in The Economist nicely contextualizes this development.
Online Shoppers Are Rooting for the Little Guy
Not exactly a triumphant story about small businesses rising above the online retailing behemoths, but an encouraging New York Times piece nonetheless for small and mid-sized retailers.
