Economists marked the end of the recession over a year ago, but consumers are still tightening their belts and maximizing their spending dollars. We discussed Recessionista Chic trend in Sparxoo’s 2010 Trend Report, which explored comparative shopping to maximize savings, but there has also been a boom in digital discount sites, like Groupon, Jetsetter and Gilt Groupe. The popularity these sites suggest consumers want targeted content, with new, fresh deals to get the juices flowing and get awarded for passing on the savings. Continue reading
What sets apart for-profit and social cause events? They both require creativity, people power and a set of goals. Social cause events, however, deviate from traditional venues because they often require grass roots efforts, passion, creativity on a budget while incorporating anyone and everyone to participate and effect change.
Read more about how to create an effective event for a non-profit. Continue reading
Now more than ever consumers are purchasing with a purpose. In the fourth annual Edelman goodpurpose® Study, experts indicate that what consumers want goes beyond just form and function to include a positive community impact.
As a business leader, are you doing the best job possible to develop sales if you focus on innovation, design, and brand loyalty? Not really. According to the study, nearly half (47%) of respondents said that social purpose ranks higher than brand loyalty and design and innovation as a purchase motivator. In addition, another recent PRWeek/Barkley Cause Survey suggests that a full 88 percent of American men say it’s crucial for a brand to support a social cause. Continue reading
We recently interviewed Eran Eyal, a crowdsourcing entrepreneur and founder of Evly.com. Eran and the Evly team launched Evly.com as a culmination of their aspiration to create a software platform that would let anyone build a crowdsourcing or crowdfunding website, quickly and easily.
Of crowdsourcing, Eran says, “Crowdsourcing is all about aligning the right crowds to help them achieve unified intent. Whilst social media is amazing in the sense that businesses and their consumers are able to interact, crowdsourcing provides the reason, focus and impetus for that conversation to occur meaningfully and toward a tangible and quantifiable end. Most importantly to point out at this stage is that it is not something particularly new – humans have been doing it since we were Nomads who came together to achieve goals tacit to our basic needs of survival and adaptability. This is just technology catching up with one of our most basic and natural tendencies as a species. Tribes formed to solve problems – not for banter.” Enjoy the transcript of our interview which shares insight into crowdsourcing and entrepreneurship. Continue reading
At Sparxoo, we are passionate for health & wellness (see our coverage of the healthy eating trend. In our journey for better health, we have become a fan of Carrie Kukuda, a health and fitness coach in Tampa, and an emerging entrepreneur. In addition to leading a series of outstanding boot camps, Carrie publishes advice on health and fitness. Carrie has really impressed our team with her commitment to leading a healthy life. In the spirit of the holiday, Carrie has shared her 26 Tips to Fighting the Holiday Bulge. Our favorite is tip #21: split a treat.
1. Start Strong: eat a healthy breakfast. If you don’t, you will tend to overeat the rest of the day.
2. Curb your appetite. Drink a glass of water before every meal. It will help you fill up faster & help you eat less. Continue reading
The idea behind PageRank is that if a page is important, other web pages will link to it. The more important the linking page is itself, the more weight (“link juice”) that link would have. This system works amazingly well, instantly bringing up relevant pages for almost any search, without giving benefit to “keyword stuffing” and other attempts to trick the search engine into ranking a page higher. It works so well that Google is no longer the only search engine that is shifting to a link-based algorithm…
Read more about link building strategies. Continue reading
For the past 5 years, Google AdWords has been one of the most effective ways to drive high ROI marketing. As AdWords competition increases, you can make some improvements to get the most out of your campaign. The Sparxoo team spoke to the Google AdWords Energize team and has some tips to improve your Google AdWords performance…
Read more about Adwords. Continue reading
Google Instant is changing the playing field — Google Instant saves users an incredible amount of time by auto-filling search queries in real time, while simultaneously retrieving relevant ads. If everyone uses Google Instant globally, Google estimates this will save more than 3.5 billion seconds or 11 hours daily and 350 million hours or 500+ human lifespans annually. Users are going to more quickly find resources relevant to their search query — therefore narrowing the search time. Accordingly, webmasters and advertisers need to be more cognizant of how relevant they are to end users…
Want to learn more about how Google Instant has changed the marketing game? Read more. Continue reading
onsumers Are Searching For a Green Thumb — Consumers’ expectations are changing and holding brands to a higher, more eco-conscious standard. Sixty six percent of consumers think it’s important or very important for companies to offer green products. Just because you cannot offer a bio-degradable bag, you could reduce the size of your packaging — making it not only eco-friendly, but cost effective — or make your distribution routes more efficient.
Read more about social marketing stats. Continue reading
In 1983, American Express helped restore a deteriorating Ellis Island with $1.7 million by offering $0.01 for each card transaction and $1 for each new card issued. Lee National Denim helped organize workplace drives in which employees contributed $5 for the right to wear jeans to work on the first Friday in October, totaling $75 million for breast cancer research and advocacy over 13 years. Integrating a social cause into the broader company mission can elevate the brand image by engendering good will in the community while creating an opportunity to connect with new customers and rallying your team behind a uniting cause. Continue reading
A couple of years ago, you might have heard about Charity Water’s Twitter fundraising initiative, called Twestivals. In 2010, non-profits are stepping up their game when it comes to adopting new ways to generate buzz for their charity by focusing on geo-location — in particular, NYC-based social media phenomenon, FourSquare. As of August 2010, Foursquare had close to 3 million users worldwide and there were over 15,000 venues experimenting with Special Offers on Foursquare…
Read more about how geo-location social networks can help out your non-profit. Continue reading
