Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

ShareThis's consumer sharing behavior report, which analyzed data collated from 52 million unique users registering more than 1.9 social signals, found that each travel share generates 18 click-backs - 40% more than other types of shares.

Furthermore, 10% of social media users share travel-related content and 19% of those who are in the process of planning travel share travel-related content.

While most travel-related social sharing takes place on Facebook and Twitter, the study reveals that users are most engaged with travel content on Pinterest, Blogger and email when in the throes of travel planning. Users still prefer to use a desktop computer for travel research, while smartphones are the preferred device for sharing....

Google has gone through a lot of executive changes this year. Last month, the company's chief business officer Nikesh Arora announced he was leaving. And in February longtime ad boss Susan Wojcicki left that post to replace YouTube chief Salar Kamangar as the CEO of the Google-owned video service.

Ms. Wojcicki's appointment overshadowed another leadership shift. A year after being charged with running Google's advertising and commerce organization alongside Ms. Wojcicki, Google Senior VP-Advertising and Commerce Sridhar Ramaswamy had taken full responsibility for the division that accounted for more than 91% of the company's $55 billion in revenue last year.

The 11-year Google vet, who started in 2003 as an engineer on Google's search-ads team, now oversees search, display, video, analytics, shopping, payments and travel product lines. He discussed his new role in an interview below....

According to a recent survey of more than 300 CMOs in the U.S. that Booz & Company conducted with the Association of National Advertisers and Korn/Ferry, 72 percent said that building capabilities in the area of digital marketing is vital.

The challenge is that there’s no one set of capabilities that applies universally, therefore “companies must identify what kind of marketing organization they need to make their strategy a success, choose a digital marketing model based on their strategic objectives, and then focus on developing a handful of marketing capabilities that will allow them to bring that model to life and consistently excel.”

Booz & Company identified four equally successful digital marketing models. S+B elaborated that “a company’s focus for marketing investment might have elements of each, but odds are that one of these models represents the right marketing organization for your company.”...

According to a study by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs only 38% of B2B companies think their content marketing is effective. The same study also states that only 35% of the companies have a documented content marketing strategy.

My guess is that some of these companies do not even know whether they are effective or not. They cannot say what “effective” really is in regard to content marketing without goals, metrics etc. It would certainly help with effectiveness of content marketing to have a strategy at hand.

Here are 9 essential elements any content marketing strategy should include....

Twitter is adding another feature to its fledgling e-commerce stable, today introducing Twitter Offers, which will enable advertisers to offer digital coupons within tweets.

Twitter users who see the tweets will be able to claim the offers by linking their credit or debit card accounts to Twitter. The discounts can be redeemed using the synced card, either online or in a retail store.

This brings some obvious benefits for retailers, who have long struggled to link digital marketing with retail sales....

Not only are you hectically hurrying to close out the year on a good note, you’re also pressured to produce your budgeted marketing plan for the year to come. It can often feel like the month itself is draining your very life force… but maybe it’s not just the month. Maybe, you have something stalking you from the shadows… Maybe something is steering you down dark paths you’d normally avoid… Maybe… you have a vampire in your midst, and nowhere would it be more apparent, than in your content.

Your content, you see, is a reflection of the lifeblood of your organization. It carries all the qualities, characteristics, and attributes that make your organization unique and valuable to your target audience. Certain dark forces, however, can eat away and this energy in your content. These marketing vampires can manifest themselves in multiple forms, so to swiftly slay these evil spirits, here are 5 of the most common vampire varieties along with their most effective weaknesses.

Ninety-three percent - that’s how many organizations said they rely on content marketing for brand building and demand generation this year according to the Content Marketing Institute. With 87% of buyers stating that digital content has a large impact on their purchasing decisions this year, it’s clear that content marketing is on the ups.

So who’s doing it really well? Which brands have rocked the boat and set the example? We scoured our archives and asked content marketers to weigh in, and here’s our list of the 25 Top Content Marketers of 2014....

In anticipation of The Mashies, Mashable is running a weekly series celebrating some advertising "firsts." Watch for new installments in the series every week. As opposed to other advertising "firsts" like the first TV ad or the first print execution, bringing banner ads into the world seems like a dubious accolade.

Joe McCambley, the guy often credited with inventing the ad unit in October 1994, is somewhat conflicted about it. He recently wrote a Harvard Business Review op-ed arguing that after a promising debut, banners were a spent force by 1998: "We were back to delivering what TV spots, radio spots, and print ads had delivered for years: sales messages," he wrote. "The rest, as they say, is history."...