Online Marketing News Vacation Edition: Icky Gmail Ads, Twitter Oops!, LinkedIn Bandwagon, Google Dominates the Web

I’m on vacation this week, so today’s news post is light and fresh for your reading pleasure.  Enjoy!

From the [email protected] Slideshare post: Every day people have millions of conversations about brands around the world. Many of these are advocacy mentions that help brands significantly amplify their marketing.

Research suggests that up to 80% of reach from marketing campaigns now comes from network amplification through advocacy. This means brands that can’t generate substantial advocacy will simply pay more to market less efficiently than those who make advocacy a brand priority.

[email protected] analyzed 7 million brand social mentions across 4 countries (Brazil, China, UK, US) and 22 brands (with data from partners CIC, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and Visible Technologies) to analyze the key drivers of advocacy.

In Other Online Marketing News…

Along with the auto-organizing inbox, Google starts placing ads that look like emails in Gmail – Time. This news is quickly followed by advice on how to opt-out – Information Week

Slideshare now offers an infographics player along with reporting on views and embeds. Pro users get all new enhanced analytics options including graphs and the ability to drill down into more specific data – Slideshare

Google Announces The New Nexus 7, Android 4.3 And Chromecast – trendblog

Twitter fakes real users’ tweets to promote ad platform – SF Gate

Report: Web site advertising is a buzz kill. Satisfaction rankings for search engines, social networks, and news sites drop almost 4 percent from last year according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index – CNET

LinkedIn Introduces Sponsored Updates for Companies. The new change follows in the footsteps of Facebook and Twitter to enable the 3 million plus companies on LinkedIn to run paid promotion of their updates to the broader network beyond those that follow the company page – Mashable

Facebook sales of ads on wireless devices now on track to surpass revenue from desktop computers – Bloomberg

Foursquare Opens Self-Service Advertising to Small Businesses – Search Engine Watch

Flipboard Brings Its Mobile Magazines To The Web – TechCrunch

Google sets Internet record with 25 percent of U.S. traffic – CNET

From The Online Marketing Blog Community:

On the post, “Does SEO Still Matter?”, Patrick McFadden says:
The struggle many face with marketing online is a misguided impulse to put various tactics into separate boxes, instead of seeing each as an aspect of one strategic process. People still refer to content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO) as three different things — as if each is a tactic that can get you there alone.

On the guest post by Brian Sheehan, “How the World’s Top Marketers Make Emotional Connections to win in the Marketplace” Brent White says:
A loved company has longevity because with emotion as the driving force boredom seldom will be a concern or an issue.

What’s Your Take?

Do you think email-like ads in GMail are the right move for Google? Will you try to opt-out? What about the growth in social advertising? Will you try the new options from LinkedIn to promote your company posts?