E-CONSULTANCY.COM — A large chunk of any online marketer's time is spent on engagement. Engaging bloggers and sites to chat about your content, to check out your products and if you prove valuable enough, sign up for a glittering platinum subscription. If we receive a conversion, we can be pretty sure that our new member is actively engaged with the site right? You want to engage visitors, have them convert, or at least stick around on a semi-regular basis. It’s all about traffic numbers. One of the largest problems online however, is that we still don’t have a cut and dried method for measuring engagement. Let’s examine the phrase ‘online engagement’ for a moment and I’ll show you what I mean...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — Twitter's new Promoted Tweets ad platform may be new, but it's already gotten top ratings from advertisers. Online investment brokerage Zecco announced Promoted Tweets has increased the company's engagement rates on Twitter by as much as 300%. Why is the company so pleased? According to Zecco CEO Michael Raneri, it has to do with engaging Twitter users: "I think it's one of the first online brand engagement opportunities out there." Since starting to work with Twitter two months ago, Ranieri told Econsultancy:...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — In-game advertising is nothing new. From automotive giant Jeep advertising in Tomb Raider in 2007 (image below) to FarmVille based incentives from Bing this month. The question is; how does it work? Have companies and game providers cracked the method of getting into our psyches to get us to do what they want? With the global in-game advertising market set to hit the $1bn mark by next year (it's likely we’ve already surpassed this), this is turning into a big business. Social gaming has grown an army of enthusiasts prepared to spend valuable time and money on virtual rewards and companies are all queued up to capitalise on this...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — I love to see brands generating innovative, engaging and creative advertising online. Yet, I’m always surprised at how little effort companies put into Facebook from a creative perspective, especially given the noise they make about using the platform and the levels of engagement often put in. Arguably, Facebook does have a static format that needs changing, but it’s not that difficult – or expensive – to come up with some great landing page manipulation through Facebook Markup Language (FBML)...And some brands are taking advantage of this, to great effect. Here, I’ve skimmed through a few lists of top global brands and have picked 25 of the best...

E-CONSULTANCY.COM — The first venture into social media for many companies, whether a small start up or a big brand, is to create a Facebook page to 'experiment' with social media, which is seen as an add on to other marketing activities. But just putting a page up onto Facebook, with no coherent social media strategy, is unlikely to do anything for a brand...