We all seem to love videos, considering the growing demand for more authentic and personalized video content. That's why around 6 months ago Hubspot started to provide marketing, distribution and customer service departments with tools that allow them to quickly and easily create personalized videos that are almost reminiscent of Instagram stories. The new features range, for instance, from creating own videos to video hosting or embedding calls-to-action and forms in videos.

Some social media key performance indicators (KPIs) only relate to individual social media platforms while others have overall significance. Therefore, as with almost any social media target, the question arises how marketers can measure success - or failure.

2019 promises to deliver incredible new developments in the way designers approach customer experience. Improvements in personalization and artificial intelligence (AI) are enabling independent designers and marketing professionals alike to create experiences that truly delight their customers.

Adobe announced the global availability of Adobe Experience Platform, the industry’s first real-time platform for customer experience management (CXM). The open and extensible platform brings together all kind of data from across the enterprise by leveraging Adobe Sensei artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. In a nutshell, Adobe Experience Platform brings together all data sources from across the enterprise and rationalize the data for real-time actionability.

High-quality visual product content is widely accepted as an increasingly critical element of an effective e-commerce merchandising strategy. Brands and retailers adapting to a “digital first” world must produce high-quality visual product content at scale to engage with their customers across many channels and platforms. The good news are, that Bright River, a global leader in end-to-end visual product content solutions for e-commerce, just announced its integration partnership with Capture Integration’s ShotFlow, offering more scalability to photo studios serving the e-commerce industry.

The spread of language assistants, such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, heralds a new evolutionary stage for user interfaces. In fact, now it is expected now, according to forecasts by market research firm ComScore, which also finds that at the latest by 2020 around 50% of search queries will be voice-based.

Customer experience (CX) is expected to overtake price as a key product differentiator by 2020. However, businesses are already urged today to keep pace with customer experience innovation that can help gaining insight, scale and connect customer journey touch points, from the tested online experience to the monitored customer service experience, since CX has been growing exponentially over the past years.

Pegasystems Inc., a provider of strategic software solutions for sales, marketing, service and operations, points out the stumbling blocks the customer journey is facing commonplace in practice:

Thirty years ago, the physicist Tim Berners-Lee proposed a network of computers for the nuclear research institute CERN, thus laying the foundation for the World Wide Web (WWW). Today, after 30 years, he warns in a letter against data abuse, disinformation, hate speech and censorship, calling on the world to counteract intentionally disseminated malicious content with laws and computer codes. Business models that promote the dissemination of misinformation could be prevented, he believes, and is campaigning with his "Web Foundation" for companies, governments and civil society to sign a contract for a better web.

Fifteen years after being founded in Mark Zuckerberg's college room, Facebook has become a world power with unprecedented opportunities to reach out to its users in a targeted manner - be it advertising or opinion-making.

Telcos are scrambling to offset loss in revenue from traditional communication services and are aggressively pursuing opportunities in online video. They have yet to recognize that where audiences go, advertisement dollars will follow, and are backing the wrong horse…

Storytelling is often sold as the latest marketing trend, but we know that storytelling is neither a trend nor a novelty. Nevertheless, many advertising agencies are still mainly design-oriented and only slowly becoming aware of the power of good stories. Thanks to digital marketing, this power can also be measured accurately and quickly, proving that communication without a story cannot compete with story communication in terms of conversion rates.

The convergence of social and demographic trends, consumer behavior and new technologies like the blockchain, mobility and various facets of “the cloud” are continually re-shaping mission-critical business areas across industries, and the supply chain is no exception.

When Hootsuite was born back in November of 2008, four-year-old Facebook had 100 million users (2.27 billion today) and new kid on the block Twitter had just 6 million (336 million today). The world was without Instagram (more than 1 billion users today) as it wouldn’t exist for another two years, and Snapchat (300+ million users today) wouldn’t come on the scene for another three.