By Amanda Jurgens, Account Manager

Today Google announces its acquisition of Zagat. Last month the big news was Motorola Mobility. Let’s see what Motorola might mean to the powerhouse.

Last month, Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility in a $12.5 billion dollar deal, giving the search giant increased access to the phone and tablet manufacturing industry.

The proposal was one of the most aggressive in Google’s history. In 2008, Google bought DoubleClick, an online advertising service, for $3.2 billion. While that deal took nearly a year to close, Google plans to complete the Motorola acquisition by the end of the year.

The deal will give Google rights to Motorola’s wealth of patents, giving the company a competitive edge over Apple and Microsoft and the ammunition to defend the Android operating system against possible infringement claims. In addition, Google will gain the ability to integrate its struggling Google TV product with existing Motorola set-top boxes.

Google’s purchase of Motorola could mean exciting changes for the smartphone and television space in the coming months. Stay tuned!

By Amanda Jurgens, Senior Account Coordinator

LinkedIn goes public setting tongues wagging about the future of other social media networking sites.

On May 18th, LinkedIn was the first of the social networking powerhouses to go public. To start, LinkedIn (LNKD) sold 7.84 million shares at $45 each, totaling a $352.8 million IPO. During the first day, the stock spiked as high as $120.75 per share. As the first of the social media companies to enter the public domain, the IPO has stirred up controversy, created speculation of a second dotcom bubble and spurred excitement over which social media companies are likely to follow suit.

Dunstan Prial, a writer for Fox News, points out in his article, “LinkedIn… To 1999?”, that every financial bubble has one thing in common: justification. “This time the justification is that, unlike their dotcom predecessors in the late 1990s, LinkedIn and its high-profile online contemporaries, Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, et al., actually make money.” However, many investors are concerned that the LNKD I.P.O .was highly overvalued: Linkedin’s shares were sold at 17.5 times the company’s 2010 sales. To give perspective, Google’s valuation when it went public in 2004 was only six times that of it’s previous year’s sales. Concerns over overvaluation are compounded with the fact that, while LinkedIn did have a profitable year in 2010, 2008 and 2009 recorded losses and the company is not forecasting a profitable 2011.

The financial industry weighs in on the other side of the argument. Since LinkedIn’s public debut,  speculation over public offerings for companies such as Facebook and Zynga, both of which have seen exponential profitable growth over the past years, has caused excitement. Jake Wengroff, in his article for Social Media Today,“Blowing Bubbles? What the LinkedIn IPO Means for You,” comments that, “LinkedIn has been a tremendous godsend to the investment banking community – which has been waiting patiently for the social media industry to finally start raining.” While LinkedIn’s profits come from field sales, many other social networking sites make money through online advertising or internet services, which are historically more consistent growth industries and thus less susceptible to bubbles and bursts.

After its first month as a public company, LNKD’s stock price seems to have settled around $70 per share—significantly more than it’s initial price listing. Only time will tell whether the story of LinkedIn will follow that of the dotcom bubble, or if it will instead prove to be a Google-worthy success.

By Amanda Jurgens, Senior Account Coordinator

Facebook finds a way to “friend” marketers and take one step closer to its goal: total web domination.

Facebook rolled out Facebook Studio in April to give its advertising agency partners “a place to celebrate innovation, creativity and effectiveness.” The site launch is a response to a  series of criticism about Facebook’s archaic development platform. The site will provide Facebook best practices and give designers a place to meet, share work and build off of new ideas.

The site offers a feature called the Learning Lab which offers Facebook a way to share ideas with marketers on basic strategy and optimization, as well as how to successfully run a Facbook advertising campaign. The site’s home page gives designers and brand marketers a place to share examples and give feedback. Through the use of their popular “like” button, creatives can vote on top campaigns, giving the winners high visibility in their Spotlight placement.

Through Facebook Studio, Facebook hopes to build a relationship with advertisers and marketers while using ego boosting as a way to encourage creativity and innovation. Ultimately, efforts like Facebook Studio bring Facebook one step closer to its goal: eliminating the need for the user to ever leave the site.

By Amanda Jurgens, Account Coordinator

In today’s digital world, consumers are flooded with marketing emails.  How do marketers create email campaigns that stand out and avoid the dreaded “unsubscribe?”

Hours of design, copy and proofing go into sending a marketing email. But, if emails do not solicit a response, why open them? Even marketers are guilty of the mass inbox delete. Despite this, we still analyze open and click-through rates and wonder what went wrong.

Customers are inundated with emails. Nearly everything you buy online or in a store opts you into email marketing campaigns. Often, consumers end up on a list they were never interested in and certainly don’t care to receive nearly constant communication. In a study by ExactTarget, researchers found that 9 out of 10 subscribers later opt-out of email communication, citing that mailings are too frequent, contain repetitive content or are irrelevant because the consumer didn’t realize they were opting in to begin with.

So, as a marketer, how do you convince someone who has already expressed interest in your communications (whether intentionally or not) to take the next step and actually open the email? The answer seems all too obvious: by creating emails that your customers want to read.

Craft emails containing information that makes the reader’s job easier. It is as simple as that. Create emails that offer a reward, emails that make information easier to locate, or emails that offer some tangible value to your particular audience.

Posted by: Amanda Rick, Senior Account Coordinator

Only 66% of businesses who use Groupon report a profit. Yet, according to the popular company, approximately 95% of these businesses would advertise again and new companies are clamoring to be listed. Have businesses stopped caring about profit margin or is there something larger at work here?

Online coupon sites, such as Groupon and LivingSocial, offer daily deal discounts for local businesses through their websites, email and mobile applications. Because the sites have a pre-determined purchase quantity, users feel a sense of urgency to grab the specials before they’re gone and to share the deal with their friends. And those purchasing the deals are not the only ones who benefit. These sites offer popular platforms that don’t charge companies to list deals; they simply take a percentage of the sales.