The Internet superhighway can be particularly cruel to ecommerce marketers, what with more than 50% of all shopping carts abandoned prior to purchase according to Marketing Experiments. It's no accident that the most successful ecommerce companies take a strategic, calculated approach to their product pages and shopping cart usability. Simple, oft-overlooked tweaks can yield dramatic results. Consider a product page’s load time, for example. Amazon calculated that one additional second of load time on their product pages would cost them $1.6 billion in annual sales. Yikes. MORE >>

Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife. am likely to step on a few toes here. Don’t worry, though, because whatever seems like an accusation of the Internet and social media marketing “news” industry applies to me as well. In other words, I ain’t perfect. What I am, however, is a little frustrated. have been “reporting” on the Internet and social media marketing space for the better part of four years now. That doesn’t make me a wily Internet veteran, although I was working in the space during the first bubble burst all those years ago. MORE >>

by Peter Armaly | Tweet this It’s not corporate espionage, but the way some businesses treat their customers can seem downright criminal. In the age of the Internet, customer support should be everyone’s concern. Failing to take it seriously can result in catastrophe for your brand. Just ask this guy! ). Consider this: At any given moment a significant percentage of a corporation’s current and future revenue is exposed to the interactions customers and prospects have with a company’s frontline employees. Did you hear anything I said? Okay, you said it with such confidence that it must be right. MORE >>

Use the News to Capture Free Publicity for your Company. David Meerman Scott  ( @dmscott ), who was interviewed by Jeff Ogden, President of the lead generation company Find New Customers via Skype at Social Media Camp NYC , has a new book, Newsjacking. just purchased it on my iPad and read it. Why don’t you do that too? I intend to discuss this idea in my keynote presentation at the BMA-NJ Social Media Symposium next Tuesday. We’re also using this in our new client engagement.). But the idea is simple, and David explains it well in this post. ” to his associate. MORE >>

Friday, again? And - APRIL? Really? When did that happen? And, how did we escape April Fool's Day intact?). Well, the Easter Bunny may be hopping down the bunny trail, but all our marketing buddies have been busily hopping down the blogging trail - dishing up lots of fabulous posts to inspire and educate. Here are our favorite picks of the week. Hope you enjoy them & that the Easter Bunny brings you some awesome eggs. Complex Sales Processes Drive Need for Content Marketing, Content Curation by @GetCurata. Great overview of how to get started with content marketing. the right way. MORE >>