Devcourt Media

It seems like social media is everywhere these days. But the 2010 Business Monitor United States report — commissioned by UPS — shows that when it comes to small- and medium-sized businesses, social media is still a missed opportunity. A mere 24% of respondents said they’ve received sales leads from social media, with just 1% [...]

When Google upgraded their Local Business Center to Google Places, it launched the opening salvo in what we expect to be a long war for local advertising dollars. With local advertising revenues expected to reach $144.9 billion in 2014 according to BIA/Kelsey — and more and more dollars are shifting away from traditional media toward [...]

Facebook may not have made any big announcements about local business marketing at last week’s f8 conference, but the company is certainly stepping up its efforts in that area. Today, we discovered that Facebook is sending out window decals with text-to-Like SMS instructions to select local businesses. Twitter user B.J. Drums, who works with the [...]

Search isn’t an isolated experience. The act of looking for information is now fused with validation, which means the socialization of search will unite discovery with context and relationships. It all begins with where we purposely search for relevant content and also where we respond to interesting information that crosses our path. ComScore’s most recent [...]

Social media is on the minds of marketers everywhere. With its increasing popularity, marketers are thinking, “We need to be on Twitter! Let’s create a Facebook fan page! Crank out the viral videos!” Unfortunately, this often has no strategy behind it, and organizations are flying blind on the social web. While social media isn’t “killing” [...]

Foursquare is a location-based application that works on the iphone, android and blackberry smart phones.  It brings a game aspect and some competition into the mix and you can use that to your benefit as a small business in regards to how you market yourself locally.  I’ll tell you how you can use it for [...]

How do you attract a flash mob of 150+ people to your restaurant?  Offer the possibility of a Foursquare Swarm Badge, of course! Last week, restaurant owner Joe Sorge attracted 161 Foursquare users at the same time to his burger joint in Milwaukee, AJ Bombers (pretty impressive considering there are approximately only 300-400 total Foursquare users [...]