The app grabs key data from a user’s Facebook page, including recent interactions, tagged friends and frequent commenters to create a “Draft Class” – the 10 friends he or she should take if they won the contest. It comes complete with a draft video unveiling the picks that can be shared with friends.

One of the most important aspects of any social media campaign is engaging potential customers. Visa’s campaign creates a fun way to keep their contest (and thus their brand) in customers’ minds. While obviously not every company has the power to partner with the NFL, even the smallest businesses can find ways to be unique and engaging.

Having a custom domain extension will not come cheap – it costs $185,000 just to apply. For some, it may be a worthwhile investment, as it provides an opportunity to control a branded space and may have some benefits for search engine rankings.

ICANN’s decision to allow for these new extensions, called generic top-level domains (gTLDs), is not without its drawbacks, however. A recent article in internetretailer.com discusses the potential issues with opening up limitless domain possibilities, including potential for consumer confusion and even fraudulent sites. New gTLDs may mean that companies have to undertake quite a bit of expense to protect their interests across a huge range of extensions.

A key difference between this campaign and other location based coupon campaigns, is that the discounts are automatically triggered – as long as the person pays with American Express. This eliminates the potential hassle of trying to redeem mobile coupons, a problem that has plagued similar efforts.

Throughout the year, American Express’s campaign expanded significantly, including the successful “Small Business Saturday” program, where users were offered a $25 credit for frequenting small businesses on November 26.

Particularly interesting is the focus on local ads – those geotargeted to a user’s location. Spending on these types of ads is expected to overtake that of national ads by a 2:1 margin as quickly as 2013.

Access to the mobile web is quickly becoming commonplace, and as this happens mobile advertising will start to become a necessity. In 2011, there were nearly 100 million mobile internet users in United States — that’s a lot of potential customers! Consumers expect to be able to shop from a variety of devices, and it is important for marketers take notice of this trend and create campaigns accordingly.

After examining 255 billion impressions across 216 Facebook advertisers, TBG found improved ad performance in nearly all areas. Click Through Rates saw an 18.5% increase across five major markets (US, UK, France, Canada and Germany) from Q2 to Q3, while Cost Per Click decreased by 10.8%. Sponsored Story ads, which display friends’ recent interactions with brands in the form of advertisements, were found to have improved effectiveness.

As businesses get ready for the new year, now is the time to start thinking about new marketing campaigns. Including Facebook in your efforts is not just a good idea, it is becoming increasingly necessary to compete in the social media marketing sphere.

Marketing for tablet users is fundamentally different from marketing for mobile devices such as the smartphone. While smartphones are largely on-the-go devices, tablets tend to be at-home devices. Users are more likely to thoroughly explore content, providing an opportunity to fully engross consumers in the brand. To succeed, marketers need to develop a tablet strategy that takes advantage of this unique medium and incorporates it into an overall digital marketing plan.

However, you may have forgotten one treacherous roadblock in the world of email marketing:  The dreaded spam filter. Your brilliant new campaign isn’t going to do you much good if your messages aren’t reaching your customer’s inbox.

AllPosters.com was experiencing precisely this issue. A piece from the November 2011 issue of Direct Marketing News discusses how the company went from over half of their messages being stuck in Gmail’s spam filter, to 100% deliverability to these recipients.

Known for being one of the hardest Internet Service Providers to deliver email messages through, Gmail has a very strict spam-filtering system. If a business finds their emails being marked as spam by some users, their messages become increasingly unlikely to be delivered to others.

After working with CheetahMail, AllPosters.com took several measures to see that their messages were actually being delivered. Removing all bounced Gmail addresses from their list and using a slower flow rate for delivery were important steps. The company also moved the unsubscribe button to the top of their emails to encourage those who no longer wanted to receive their mailings to simply opt out, instead of marking them as spam.

Utilizing these solutions, AllPosters.com was able to hit 100% delivery after about 6 weeks, proving that it is possible to combat spam filters if you take the right steps. If you devote time to considering these elements and implement the correct techniques when developing a campaign, you should be able to reach your customers without your messages being blocked.

So you can create a newsletter and send it out once a month.

What you might not know is that you can now create triggered e-mails.  You add the subscriber’s birthday, for example.  Then when the day comes up, a pre-set Birthday E-Mail goes out.  Or perhaps an Anniversary of when that person became a customer.  Thanking them for the purchase and reminding them to come back.

TrueMailer has a lot of neat features.  Let us show you what you can do with this software to keep in touch with all your clients year-round.

He needed a new website that would properly represent him and allow potential clients to easily see all the products and services offered.  He also now has an ability to offer immediate Free and Paid downloads of information and manuals right from the site.

Another interesting feature is the persistent menu, that follows you as you scroll down the page.

Please take a look at www.billfellows.com and let us know what you think!

If you’re interested in targeting people with an ad, it’s great ’cause we know how old you are, what sex you are and where you live.  Why?  Cause you told Facebook when you signed up.  Yay!  Except sometimes those rascally 12 -year olds decide to pose as 18 -year olds.  Oh well, of course that’ll happen.

But did you know that NOT everything is target-able on Facebook?  How about Household Income?  Nope.  No idea.  Now, we can see if you’re  a LIKE of the local Polo team or Country Club, but that’s a little harder to dissect than just saying “Show my ads to those high-income folks”.

How about OWNING your home?  NOPE.  Maybe you can see if they are a LIKE of Home Depot.  But again, not quite the same.

Facebook is a very valuable platform and we have seen huge numbers of impressions generating CPC’s at about half the cost of Google . . . For NOW.  But be aware that we don’t know everything about everyone yet.  And that’s probably a good thing.