There are three prominent challenges with selling electric vehicles. They are generally more expensive than their gas counterparts, the infrastructure for refueling is a concern in some areas, and the long-term cost savings can be a challenge to demonstrate. If your dealership sells electric vehicles in the following 11 states, this infographic should be up on your showroom floor wall:

1. Washington
2. Idaho
3. Oregon
4. Utah
5. Wyoming
6. Montana
7. North Dakota
8. Arizona
9. Nevada
10. California
11. Nebraska

These are the states where the difference between the cost of gas and the equivalent cost of a electrical recharging are the most pronounced. It's funny, as this infographic actually says "Top 10 States" while they list 11, but hey, it's better than listing 9.

Let's state this for the record. I am not convinced that using the new image features on Twitter is the best way to go when it comes to marketing your business. It still smells too much like spam and if it's not handled properly it could do more harm than good.

With that said, there are definitely instances when it could do VERY well, particularly when it comes to gaining exposure and picking up more Twitter followers. The key is making sure you're keeping a 2:1 ratio aspect ration for your images.

They are displaying that way regardless of the size or shape of the image when seen in the screen. They can be enlarged, of course, but that's so old school. With the new Twitter feed displaying them inline without a click and the fact that they've added the engagement actions under each post across all of the platforms, it makes sense prevent people from having to click to see the whole picture.

Look at the example below, a tale of two Tweets. As you can see, the top image that I just posted fits perfectly into the frame that Twitter gives us. The one below it forces you to click through to see it. It doesn't matter how compelling the message is, only a handful of people will click to find out what the punchline was. They're much more likely to skip right past it, particularly if they're like the majority who check Twitter on mobile.

If your images are twice as wide as they are tall or close to that ratio, you'll be able to get the most impact out of your Twitter image marketing. Don't go out and make a bunch of ads at that ratio. Again, this can be abused and you'll turn more people off than ever before if you spam the system (and feeds). Keep it legit and everything will be just fine.

Yes, I know I've been on a Google+ kick lately, but it has been it's like Michael Corleone in Godfather 3. "Every time I think I'm out they pull me back in."

Hopefully, I won't have a heart attack immediately after saying the line the way that Al Pacino's iconic character did. Also, I'm not in the mafia, in case you were wondering. I am, however, fully entrenched into Google+, which is why these stats mean something to me. Hopefully, they'll mean something to you as well.

I would love to connect if you want to circle me there: https://plus.google.com/+JDRucker/posts

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Infographic courtesy of Mihi Digital.

Earlier last week I wrote a controversial piece about responsive website design that brought the ire of professionals within my industry and a flood of emails calling me all sorts of names. Yes, there were those who agreed as well, but they were the minority.

In retrospect, I sold out. I looked at the data, saw how responsive websites were not performing very well on mobile devices in industries that were heavy on data, and came to the conclusion that adaptive was a better solution for some. I stand by that statement based upon practicality, but there's an addendum to that answer: if you want to do the absolute best practice possible, it would be to build your website from mobile up rather than from PC down.

It's always easier to make a site more complex than to simplify it. Adding features is simply easier than taking them away. If you build your websites with the following three ideas in mind, you have the greatest chance for success:

1. Mobile is huge and getting huger. Assume that your website will be accessed as much if not more on mobile devices in the near future than on big screens.
2. People love mobile designs because they're used to them. If a website displayed on a PC operates much the same as it would on a mobile device, it will perform better. That's not to say that you need to sacrifice design or make your website look amateur on a big screen, but strive to make it "mobilesque".
3. Touchscreen functionality and the art of scrolling rather than clicking is becoming more of a "thing" for desktop websites. Keep that in mind when you build pages.

If you take into account how your website will load, operate, and perform on mobile devices and build up from there, you will find that your overall website performance will improve. The problem with responsive websites in some industries is that they cram as much as they can to fill out the big screen and then it looks terrible and performs poorly on the small screen. Work from the small screen up and the website will do better regardless of the device.

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Article originally posted on Soshable.

Earlier this week I wrote a controversial piece about responsive website design that brought the ire of professionals within my industry and a flood of emails calling me all sorts of names. Yes, there were those who agreed as well, but they were the minority.

In retrospect, I sold out. I looked at the data, saw how responsive websites were not performing very well on mobile devices in industries that were heavy on data, and came to the conclusion that adaptive was a better solution for some. I stand by that statement based upon practicality, but there's an addendum to that answer: if you want to do the absolute best practice possible, it would be to build your website from mobile up rather than from PC down.

It's always easier to make a site more complex than to simplify it. Adding features is simply easier than taking them away. If you build your websites with the following three ideas in mind, you have the greatest chance for success:

1. Mobile is huge and getting huger. Assume that your website will be accessed as much if not more on mobile devices in the near future than on big screens.
2. People love mobile designs because they're used to them. If a website displayed on a PC operates much the same as it would on a mobile device, it will perform better. That's not to say that you need to sacrifice design or make your website look amateur on a big screen, but strive to make it "mobilesque".
3. Touchscreen functionality and the art of scrolling rather than clicking is becoming more of a "thing" for desktop websites. Keep that in mind when you build pages.

If you take into account how your website will load, operate, and perform on mobile devices and build up from there, you will find that your overall website performance will improve. The problem with responsive websites in some industries is that they cram as much as they can to fill out the big screen and then it looks terrible and performs poorly on the small screen. Work from the small screen up and the website will do better regardless of the device.

We are seeing the "Facebookification" of Twitter happening before our eyes. No longer will we see a nice, minimized feed of Tweets presented to us on our smartphones or computers with several Tweets lining top to bottom on the screen. We'll see pictures, ads, and videos taking up more space by themselves than three Tweets presented the old way.

We will see Facebook. Rather than comment, we will be able to reply. Rather than share, we will be able to retweet. Rather than like, we'll be able to favorite. These are not new interactions that you can have with your Twitter feed - they've been available all along. The difference is that now they're present in the stream under each new post, just like Facebook.

Any change like this will have good and bad associated with it. The good is that some, particularly those who have a properly vetted and tightly pruned list of people they follow, may find that this change makes it easier to experience Twitter, particularly on a smartphone. The need to push the little picture link in the Tweet has been replaced by the need to scroll further to see more. The need to open up a Tweet in order to interact with it has been put inline within the feed, again making for fewer Tweets per screen but an easier path to engagement.

The bad is that this will utterly destroy the Twitter feeds of anyone with a poor list of accounts they follow. Businesses are going to fall into a trap thanks to this new expansive Twitter feed. It's possible that things you would never want to see on Twitter are now exposed rather than hidden safely behind the wall of a necessary click.

Overall, this is a great move from Twitter's perspective pre-IPO. They will be catering now to the people checking out the service for the first time before investing rather than the experienced Twitter user who knows how to play the game. It makes sense - the old users will adapt and the new users will be able to figure it all out more easily. If they've been on Facebook, they'll probably recognize many of the functionalities that are now common between the two networks.

Now, about that business trap...

Don't Flood the System

I'm already starting to see it. Businesses and marketers are seeing things in their feed and realizing that they can get their visual message out to people more readily. They don't have to click to see images, so why not put the messages in the images themselves, right?

Wrong. For some reason, the old ways of thinking with captive audience marketing have never been abandoned in free audience marketing. You can load people up with all of the ads and business messages that you want on television, print, or radio, but the moment you post something to social media that might turn the audience off, they can easily turn YOU off by unfollowing you. Some would say that the remote control and the car radio tuner have the same basic effect, but it's not true. They might turn the channel during commercials, but they will likely return to the station and give you a second, third, fourth, or tenth chance to reach them with a different commercial later, but in social media, when they "change the channel" by turning you off, you will likely never have another opportunity to reach them.

Businesses, this is a tremendous opportunity to truly participate within the Twitter community in ways that have eluded you since the beginning, but that's not a license to flood people's feeds with material that won't resonate with them. The example above isn't that bad. It's just an announcement that someone had joined the team, but it's enough to make me want to unfollow them. No offense to the person who joined the team but I don't want those things popping up on my smartphone.

Thankfully, I don't follow those who blatantly spam all the time, but I've seen other feeds with marketing messages embedded into images that will clearly turn people off.

Twitter is in a constant state of flux and this latest change is going to be embraced by some, panned by others, but eventually accepted as the norm for all. We've transitioned from the click to the scroll as the general method for seeing more. It was described best in the best article I've ever read on Buzzfeed:

What this Twitter update does, in that context, is lower the barriers for interacting with tweets, which in turn reduces the threshold for sharing and for virality. It turns Twitter into a more unstable, interactive, sensitive, and potentially explosive ecosystem, a place where you feel like you at least have a chance of breaking through.

It's that time of year, again. We're going to eat a lot of different foods that we rarely eat the rest of the year and we're going to hear a lot of predictions about the future of marketing. The future, of course, is made up of a ton of digital marketing practices. Every year, it gets bigger. Every year, there are more options.

It can actually get pretty confusing.

One of the common themes of the hodgepodge of statistics in the infographic below is that spending will continue its shift away from traditional advertising and more into digital. This trend has been happening for over a decade now and it shows no signs of slowing. The funny part is that what's not mentioned in the graphic is any indication that traditional media such as television is shifting dramatically to include the second screen as a way to interact with content being shown on ads. This is a no-brainer, yet it seems like very few are doing it right.

Another shift is the continued growth of social media throughout the marketing spectrum. Whether through email social sharing buttons, increased spending on various social media advertising platforms, or the good ol' content marketing practices that have been driving us all for the last couple of years, social is clearly the biggest gainer throughout 2013 and will continue to make gains (for both the social sites themselves as well as the advertisers) into 2014.

One final omission from the graphic - an emphasis on video. There's no doubt that video is getting bigger every day. People are spending more time on it. Businesses are spending more money on it. Mastering the art of getting your message to flow and resonate on video advertisements is going to get more and more important. Faster devices. Faster internet connections. It's a recipe for success to those who recognize it.

Here's the graphic itself from the folks at WebDAM.

Don’t worry. Women will still rule on Pinterest for the foreseeable future. That part’s not going to change. What will change is that Pinterest is edging its way into the hearts and marketing marketing toolboxes of businesses around the world, whether they’re run by men, women, or both.

As a result, the balance of power is shifting ever-so slightly. As someone who operates 4 separate Pinterest accounts and who has a team that manages another 75, I can give anecdotal observations that a shift has been happening for some time. Women aren’t leaving. More men are joining. More importantly, the men that are joining are starting to realize that this isn’t all about female-friendly topics. Pinterest has an infinite range of uses and the marketing potential on the medium is huge.

Two things haven’t happened properly so far that need to happen before it becomes truly useful in the way that Facebook is. The localization aspect of Pinterest is poor. It takes a lot of effort to locate and entice locals regardless of the business. For retail stores, unless you’re marketing at the store itself and giving valid reasons why people need to follow their boards, they’re just not getting real traction. Pinterest needs to make it easier to localize. That may be what’s already starting to take place with their addition of recommended pins.

The other thing that has to happen is that they need to get advocates and ambassadors, particular male ones. If, for example (and this is a bad example but you’ll get the point), the Old Spice guy promoted the heck out of his board, it would encourage others to see what’s happening over at Pinterest.

The marketing potential is too strong to keep it one-sided. More men will see the value and start participating soon. Many already are. Pinterest already has the attention of the female consumers which is where the bulk of the money lies. Once they get the attention of the other side of the coin, they’ll be primed and ready to be one of the biggest money-making social networks in existence.

If you're like many who use Google+, you may not check your pages very often. With posting and monitoring tools out there, you might not log into your actual account very often. You should. Custom URLs are now available.

For individual users, you should be getting an email if you meet the minimum requirements. These "requirements" are very minimal. Have a profile longer than a month, have at least 10 followers, and have a profile picture. If you can't meet these requirements, you're not really trying.

For pages, you have to log into your page accounts themselves. An option will pop up at the top that looks like this:

It's very easy with pages. With profiles, you have to verify with a text message.

I actually like the way that Google is doing this. I was on a plane when Facebook made the custom URL option available. By the time I landed, my name had already been taken. This method makes it much easier as long as the name isn't too common.

Businesses that don't see the option but that meet the minimum requirements should be fine. Just wait and keep checking until it pops up. If your name is common, it appears as if Google is adding location indicators to the URLs to help differentiate.

Keep checking. More importantly, don't give up on Google+ any time soon. They're still pushing forward and they aren't going to be denied just because so many naysayers call it a ghost town.

I received a question through Facebook chat about whether or not it makes sense for a dealership to have a Facebook profile on top of having a page. The concept is that the profile would be a general "person" within the dealership who could make friends with customers and the like rather than hoping that they'll become a fan.

The perceived benefits to this is that you could add friends rather than waiting for them to add you. With a profile, you can seek people out. With a page, you can't actually follow or friend an individual.

The other perceived benefit is that you can then tag people in images and in status updates to have it appear in their newsfeed. You can only tag people that you're friends with and pages can only tag people in comments (which do not appear in the person's news feed) and only if they comment first.

Both of these are ill-motivated techniques. More importantly, it's against Facebook's terms of service. People get profiles and they have the ability to get pages as well. Businesses, websites, or any other non-persons can have pages only. That's the rule.

Worst of all, both of the perceived benefits for having a dealership profile rather than or in addition to a page are faulty. They require spamming. You do not want to get involved with spamming.

"But, if they add me as a friend then it's not spamming, right?"

Wrong. If they add you as a friend it's likely by mistake. They are not doing so hoping that you'll tag them in pictures or status updates. They might even give you permission to do so with the picture of them that you took after they bought the car, but even that has limitations in regards to their patience. The benefits do not outweigh the risks or challenges.

Build a page. If you're an aggressive, proactive, and business-oriented individual that really, really wants to be able to tag them, ask them to be YOUR friend. Don't take the chance of breaking the rules and making people upset by building a Facebook profile for your dealership.