Build your site around its user—consider their expectations, needs, feelings; build the site so that it’s useful, valuable and meaningful for the end user.

Digital spiders crawl the world wide web, archiving and collecting data. Servers store and call up data; acting as air traffic controllers funneling information here and there, directing it to its final destination. An Internet property—a website, a social media profile, an ad—is just a set of code written in languages computers understand. The Internet is composed of robots, programs and technology, but it was built by humans, for humans.

With the possible exception of some of the programmers in our building, most of us don’t think like computers. Most of us also have little comprehension about the complicated nature of web design and development. Some of those creating properties and generating content for the web think it’s enough to just cram whatever information they think is relevant [...]

Superman comic #199 (1967) introduced geekdom to what is now an age-old question: in a race around the world against the man of steel (Superman) and the human speed demon (Flash), who is the fastest man alive? The answer is irrelevant (it’s obviously the Flash—he’s a man; Superman is an alien). But let’s apply it to retailers and marketing: in the race to reach the consumer, who is the fastest brand alive?

This is an age of near-instant gratification. Consumers have access to the products and services they’re looking for right at their fingertips. Mobile commerce and browsing continues to rise and brands have the potential to reach their target audience at any time, wherever they may be.

But how efficient is the brand at satisfying the customer’s needs? The old adage of the tortoise and the hare does not apply to e-commerce: fortune favors the swift. But many brands haven’t quite [...]

“The more a piece of content looks like genuine editorial content, the more valuable it becomes.” —Felix Salmon, Reuters

Felix Salmon’s quote succinctly describes the value point for native or content marketing—it’s a way for an advertiser to hold the attention of its target audience without the audience member realizing it’s being marketed to.

Done effectively, a relatively cheap-to-produce piece of content can be worth tens of thousands—maybe even millions—for the advertiser.

Buzzfeed has pioneered native content marketing and drawn many brands to the site to populate the native feed with sponsored content. Unfortunately, some of the sponsored content falls short of the mark; it’s clearly advertising fodder.

Consider this example from Zipcar:

Zipcar is a relatively small brand, but the offense is being committed by big brands as well, shown by this example from Pepsi:

In both examples, readers can already see that the content is sponsored by a particular brand. It’s overkill to tease [...]