A new report estimates that the the global coffee house giant, Starbucks, has received the equivalent of $67.8 million in free brand exposure through its use of social media marketing channels. The findings will rubbish criticism that social media doesn’t offer a great return on investment. Starbucks, which has more than 18.8 million Facebook fans [...]

The announcement from the Gawker (http://gawker.com/) group of websites that it will radically update design and place more emphasis on multi-media points to a major evolution in website thinking. For any firm thinking of revamping their Internet Marketing Strategy, Gawker’s plans give a great insight into how one of the most aggressive sites on the [...]

Recent posts here have focused on the great potential of online coupons as a key plank of any Internet Marketing Strategy. Perhaps Google has been reading our previous postings, because according to the New York Times, the search engine giant is ready to pay up to $6 billion for Groupon, one of the websites featured [...]

Technologists sneer at newspapers as the “deadwood” industry because of its reliance on paper to produce its physical product. But until now, new technology has not managed to create a mass-market product that can help leverage the global newspaper industry off its reliance on the printed page and halt its genteel decline. The reason, quite [...]

Facebook may have more than 700 million registered users, but many small firms are still sceptical about the benefits of social media services as a business tool, according to a new survey by RatePoint. The detailed responses demonstrate that, unlike consumers, small businesses are not convinced that social networking can help them reach customers. Instead, [...]

Coupons were traditionally a very simple demand generation tool that consumers could, for example, cut out of newspapers and take to their local supermarket for discounts on groceries. The concept has taken a while to find a comparable niche and really take off in the Internet age, but new services like Groupon and Social Living [...]

The importance of appearing local while operating globally is not lost on the world’s largest search engine Google, which is introducing a crucial adjustment to the way its key search software operates. The changes point to the growing significance of geolocation tagging and other social media services that don’t just offer up general information, but [...]

A major new survey of 50,000 people in 46 countries has found that in many emerging markets around the world, people are spending more time on social networking sites than on email. The startling result, is just one of many insightful conclusion in the report from British research firm TNS that can be viewed here: [...]

High street fashion chains have been much slower than other business sectors to embrace the Internet over the past decade, as they feared the online marketplace could cannibalise their brick and mortar presence, without adding value of its own. But this sentiment appears to be changing as the world’s largest fashion chain retailer, Zara, has [...]

Google has announced key changes to its Gmail service and its core search engine that will challenge Internet marketing strategy decisions. And, it signals similar changes by other major web services in the months ahead. Google says the updates will make life easier for consumers and make their services more intuitive, but they raise uncertainty [...]

The consumer market is getting even more crowded as the big online giants try to expand their own footprints into new areas of the social networking landscape at a quickening pace.  Whether it’s social bookmarking, geotagging, following friends or looking for online music providers the distinctions between the services are becoming more blurred by the [...]