Many companies have stated before that when it comes to social media, the customer is in charge. Well new research from the Aberdeen Group (as mentioned in a recent eMarketer post ) has found that more than half of the retailers who are currently involved in social media felt like they were “pushed&# into it by their target audience. According to retailers, because their audiences were choosing to use social media as a “primary shopping vehicle&# and their competition was adopting it quickly for that reason, they felt like they had no choice but to get involved. MORE >>

This week’s web marketing digest post has another TED talk video on making connections and an infograph on designing a social business capability. This video , which features Sebastian Seung , a computational neuroscientist, discusses the ways in which our brain makes connections between events and interactions. The basis of the video explains how personal connections are related to neural connections, and goes on to state that the more you connect with a person, the more impact they have on your lives. Image by HIjod.Huskona on Flickr MORE >>

Most businesses either already are, or are thinking about, taking part in social media. They've heard that social media can have an enormous impact on their lead nurturing and relationship building and that it can help them with their targeted customer acquisition, and all of these things are true, but they're not, unfortunately, a given. Many companies jump into social media without really understanding what they should be doing and as a result they often make the 9 mistakes we've listed below without realizing it. You didn’t do your background research! What they are looking for. MORE >>

We’ve written before about how you can combat list fatigue to keep your email list engaged, but often, despite your best efforts, there are subscribers who become inactive, or "emotionally unsubscribed" without actually unsubscribing themselves from your list. These are the subscribers that receive your emails but don’t open your messages, don’t click-though and essentially don’t interact with your emails in anyway, but—they haven’t unsubscribed. Having a large number of inactive subscribers is completely normal for most companies' email lists. MORE >>

As usual after each of our bi-weekly webinars we write a blog post to recap the most relevant questions we answered during the webinar and to answer the ones we didn’t have time to get to. Is there a best practice for how many times you can use a primary call-to-action in one email? This is going to be fairly subjective based on the content of the email itself. Depending on the length and size of the email you’re sending you may want to have the call-to-action repeated more times than someone who’s sending a shorter email. Thanks to everyone who attended our webinar. MORE >>