by Justin Grensing, Esq., MBA
Google has not had a great couple of years in Europe. In March, the company was fined 1.5 billion euros—roughly $1.7 billion—for antitrust violations in the online advertising market. This represents the third such fine against the tech giant since 2017. “With the announcement on Wednesday, the European fines against Google total roughly €8.2 billion, or $9.3 billion,” says an article by Adam Satariano for the New York Times. “But the bloc has not received any of the money yet; Google is appealing the earlier decisions, and is mulling whether to appeal the most recent ruling.”
These fines provide some interesting business lessons relevant to any industry. (more…)
It’s hard to succeed at anything if you’re not focused. Whether you’re golfing, driving, taking an exam or giving a presentation, losing focus on your objective can be disastrous. The same is true of your social media activity. Granted social media marketing is a longer-term activity than golfing or giving a presentation, but the importance of focus is no less important. In particular, we’ve selected three key elements marketers should keep their focus on when engaging in social media. 
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There’s a raging — and quite interesting — debate that I continue to see taking place in various online forums about the relationship between PR and marketing. I’ve found it especially interesting because I recently was engaged in the same debate while teaching PR courses at a local university. Surprisingly to me, there is a group that believes quite strongly that PR is not part of marketing: that it is a separate and distinctly different function within an organization.
Most of us in the marketing business are familiar with the concept of – if not necessarily the term – pull marketing. Pull marketing refers to using your business development strategies to attract customers actively seeking out a product or service to your particular offering. For example, a pizza company might work on increasing its page ranking through search engine optimization (SEO) so that it shows up prominently when a hungry potential customer searches for “pizza near me” in their search engine.
Marketers have a wide range of channels available to them in their efforts to reach potential customers. While some are general – i.e., TV commercials, billboards, radio ads – others are much more targeted and focused. Before the days of email, direct-mail marketing, in which a marketer mails marketing materials directly to a specifically identified group of recipients, was a great way to target likely customers, and it still is. But advances in technology mean that we can take this kind of marketing to the next level through email marketing. 
Marketing is key to not only getting the word out about your products and services but also for convincing potential consumers that your offerings provide the best quality, best value, are the trendiest, etc. Influencers can be a huge benefit in this respect. Influencers are individuals or organizations that have the ability to influence the beliefs, attitudes and actions of others. An influencer might be a popular professional athlete who touts the efficacy of a particular shoe, supplement or clothing brand. Or it could be a celebrity who shows up on the red carpet wearing a particular fashion brand—one that carries your label.
Not so long ago, social media was the wave of the future in online activity. Sites like Facebook and LinkedIn revolutionized how we connect with one another; and apps like Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat altered how an entire generation communicates online. These applications aren’t likely to go anywhere soon, but the landscape has changed drastically in recent years, and social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have been slammed over concerns of privacy, data sharing and online trolling.
A Harvard Business Review case study recently posed a provocative question: when should humans listen to algorithms vs. when should they trust their own experience and intuition? For this case study, the issue related to which of two employees to choose for a promotion. But, given the widespread applications for the use of big data and the power of predictive analytics, the question could be applied to any field or area of business practice—including content marketing.
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