IMEDIA CONNECTION — Susan Bratton makes her living by enriching others' lives. As CEO of Personal Life Media Inc., she oversees a platform that produces and distributes podcasts, blogs, virtual workshops, and downloadable training systems meant to motivate and inspire. Handling the content, talent, and monetization of Personal Life Media, Bratton is an expert at keeping her ear to the ground, seeking out valuable trends and tools, and filtering out the noise...

EMARKETER BLOG — We recently spoke with Jami Lawrence, associate director of mobile marketing at Publicis Modem & Dialog. Here’s a clip from the full interview on eMarketer Total Access, in which Lawrence discusses best practices for developing a mobile application strategy that can strengthen the relationship between brands and target consumers...

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW — Social media are all the rage in marketing, but should they be? Sure, Facebook is growing fast -- it had more than 350 million accounts late last year, 50 million of which were added in the fall alone. But how much do businesses really influence consumers when they launch pages on the site to attract "fans" and to pepper them with messages and offers? To begin to answer that question, we did the obvious: We set up one company’s Facebook page and measured the effect on customer behavior. Our partner in this experiment was Dessert Gallery (DG), a popular Houston-based bakery and café chain...