Each weekend, I saddle up on my mountain bike and ride 24 miles round-trip to Trader Joe’s. I’m sure I look silly in my bike shorts and giant backpack, but what can I say?—I live far away, don’t have a car, and love the store.

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Even though e-mail is one of the oldest ways of connecting with others over the Internet, some companies are still asking, “How do we make sure that our e-mails get read?” That question’s really not too surprising, though, since e-mail has evolved to include spam filters and consumers have gotten great at tuning out advertising (and nothing says advertising more than a direct e-mail with a title that reads, “FREE SHIPPING”). Give ‘em a clever subject line time and again, on the other hand, and your chance of getting people to open your e-mails goes up dramatically. Here’s how.

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The difference between the words “cheap” and “affordable” is much like the perceptual difference between the prices ninety-nine cents and a dollar: it’s a shift that can mean the world to the people marketing a product, while remaining a minor distinction to the people searching for that product. This, in essence is why SEO is so important—because marketers and consumers often consult different frames of reference in searching for the same thing.

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In adolescence, a bounce rate might’ve referred to how much air time you could get on a trampoline. In website design, however, a bounce rate refers to the percentage of initial visitors who leave your page rather than exploring other pages on it. The formula is simple: bounce rate = total number of visits viewing only one page/total number of visits.

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Earlier this month, Fast Company magazine launched an experiment called The Influence Project with the goal of discovering the most influential people online. The part that’s fun for everyone is the guarantee that all participants—not just the most influential ones—will have their “picture appear in the November issue of Fast Company magazine as part of an amazing photo spread," where those with the most influence will have the biggest pictures. We signed up immediately.

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If you want your brand’s marketing efforts to thrive instead of just survive, you have to track them consistently.

Thankfully, the digerati built ways to track user activity within the mediums they created, making an otherwise demanding task much easier. But tracking marketing efforts to their full potential doesn’t mean just getting the most accurate statistics; it means incorporating those statistics into your web strategy so that your company works to maximum efficiency in engaging your target consumers.

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Because of its conversational nature, some companies see social media as a channel that doesn’t really apply to them. Or that’s just a fad. Careful.  Brands that take social media lightly may actually cause themselves major brand damage. What follows are five strategic tips to help your brand succeed in an area where it’s all too easy to fail.

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The answer is “yes,” and “no.” It often depends on how you make the dollars you have work their hardest for every piece of virtual space that they occupy.

So what’s a key strategic element for companies new to Web 2.0? One of your main concerns should be to develop a good web presence. As long as you know your business and your audience, setting up the following accounts shouldn’t be too hard. Interacting, however, is more challenging. Whether you’re already on social media or about to get into it, here’s how to get the most attention on two of the most popular social media sites.

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Sometime within the past 15 years, consumers developed x-ray vision. It’s just that instead of gaining the ability to see through walls, consumers gained the ability to see through logos. This, like so many other things, is an instance in which both the Internet and social media have been caught red-handed, although consumers eventually would probably have realized en masse that a logo doesn’t solely constitute a brand. A brand, according to label mastermind Andrew Sabatier, is “the overall experience of a particular identity.”

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Believe it or not, all media is social. The Dark Knight’s success is measured in dollars, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlets inspired colonists to gather, and Ayatollah Khomeini smuggled cassettes into Iran in the ‘60s to set the stage for the Iranian Revolution. Yet there’s still a crescendo in recent years of people barking about how online social media is revolutionizing the you-name-it industry. These people are both right and wrong: the Internet changed everything, but it also didn’t make traditional advertising entirely obsolete, as Super Bowl ads are more expensive than ever. What the Internet actually did was give people social media that allows them to simultaneously be alone and part of a community. Today, people are interested in forming connections more than they’re interested in transmitting information. And connections—perhaps more than anything—are based on trust.

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