Business

Editor’s note:  Iris Shoor is co-founder and VP Product Marketing at Takipi, a service for managing software downtime in the cloud. Before that, Iris was co-founder and VP Product at VisualTao, a B2B web and mobile service acquired by Autodesk. For a long while I thought about marketing as wordsmithing –  putting an abstract idea into a sentence, picking just the right words. But then things started to change – less text please, more graphics – we’d rather see it than read it. This year more than ever, visual content is going mainstream. Pinterest is using imagery as its main content, and within a few months hundreds of different websites have adopted a ‘Pinterest like’ design. Companies are switching to Tumblr instead of traditional blogs, with little text and lots of imagery. Facebook is making your profile more visual with the Timeline and the new image gallery, not to mention Instagram. There’s a change in the air and this time you don’t need to smell it – you can actually see it...

On the heels of Google buying Wildfire and Salesforce nabbing Buddy Media, we have heard from two very reliable sources, plus a third anonymous source, that Gannett Co., the media giant that owns USA Today and other properties, is buying BLiNQ Media. The price for the Facebook advertising software and service is up to $92 million over a period of three to four years, with a quarter of that amount, $23 million, coming up front. We hear the purchase agreement has been signed and the pair are now marching towards a close at the end of this month. The rationale behind the deal is clear: when brands buy ad placements on Gannett properties, it could use BLiNQ to also sell them ads on social sites and collect a solid margin. Gannett is looking to BLiNQ, which has built up a profitable Facebook ads API business, to become G’s equivalent of the Washington Post Company’s SocialCode, its social media marketing and analytics agency (which picked up 15 Digg engineers in May). Gannett and BLiNQ, T...

Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch. Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology. Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University... ? Learn More Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. Several sources and blogs say the sale price was around $250 million. The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+. Wildfire will still operate as a marketing tool for brands on G...

Rip Empson is a writer and rabble-rouser at TechCrunch. He covers startups, music, social, mobile, health, and education. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More It’s no secret that the mobile app landscape has become extremely competitive. Over the last few years, this has led to an incredible amount of innovation and progress, but the cost of visibility — of acquiring new users — is also on the rise. In fact, Fiksu found that the cost of acquiring users hit a record high in December. While December is a critical month for app discovery, it remained to be seen whether or not this trend would continue. Today, W3i, the monetization and distribution network for app developers, released new user acquisition figures for the first half of 2012, and the results tell the same story and are worrying for developers. Assessing hundreds of millions of mobile users from January to June 2012, W3i found that the average cost-per-install (of CPI) of mobile apps increased by 70 p...

It’s of note to mention that BlogFrog has developed a platform that would not be possible without women bloggers. The newly available platform has a network of 100,000 “social influencers.” Women represent 95% of that community. These are women who write about parenting, food, health, fashion and home and garden. It’s with this network of women bloggers that BlogFrog has built what it calls an end-to-end influencer marketing platform that brands use to develop social marketing campaigns that connect blogs, brand sites and their properties on social networks. On BlogFrog, bloggers are tracked and measured according to their social media influence. BlogFrog’s technology platform tracks the posts that bloggers craft. Comments are managed through a BlogFrog widget that allows moderation and distribution of reader comments. Blog posts and reader comments can  then be distributed to the customer’s own web page which is usually a branded asset of some kind that is marketing consumer product...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Netflix announced that it has named former Warner Bros. executive Kelly Bennett as its chief marketing officer, six months after it lost its last longtime marketing head Leslie Kilgore. After 12 years on the job, Kilgore stepped down from the position in January. The resignation occurred after Netflix received an unprecedented uproar over a split of its streaming-only and DVD-by-mail services, a rate hike due to the separation, and the kerfuffle surrounding the re-branding of the DVD business, which it later backed off from. While the moves were driven by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, the company’s communication with its customers proved to be the company’s real downfall. Recently, the company has been in the midst of a turnaround, but it was still in need of a new ...

The day my app (AutoCAD WS) crossed one million downloads on the App Store, the first question that crossed my mind was how did I ever end up doing marketing? I was a techy product manager and never imagined myself in marketing, until my app was in a life or death situation. The startup I co-founded (which was later acquired by Autodesk) developed a CAD B2B app for engineers. After launching our product, we started marketing it by the book – crafting our positioning and working with a PR agency to approach bloggers. This didn’t work. We went at it a second and third time – tweaking our positioning and web site once again, adding more product features and writing to more bloggers. Didn’t work – again. I gradually came to an understanding that when competing with hundreds of thousands of other apps for attention, marketing is not just another ingredient in an app’s success. It’s the main one. We were a small team with a very limited marketing budget, so we declared war the only way we ...

The marketing world is changing. Marketers have more channels than ever to get their message across, but not everyone out there is doing it right. We spoke with Ann Muhkerjee, SVP and CMO of Frito-Lay North America, about where marketing is going as technology and consumers change. " I think what people want are brand experiences ," says Muhkerjee. " I think the days of traditional mass marketing are kind of over ." Companies, especially those promoting big brands, can't settle on launching a national ad campaign that consists of a bunch of billboards and television commercials. They have to hit many platforms, and they have to connect them. "[Marketing] has to be a conduit into the multi-screen world that everyone's living in," she says. "How do you connect TV to social to mobile to apps to outdoor? How do you create a two-way conversation?" Take pop-up stores, for example. Muhkerjee considers them a way to provide customers something t...