A new study released today by global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget finds 93 percent of Facebook users click the “Like” button at least monthly, but the meaning behind “Like” varies considerably by age and context.

Featured in The Meaning of Like, the latest in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans and Followers research series, the study found the most common uses of “Like” related to posts made by friends, followed by clicking the “Like” button on sites outside of Facebook as a form of ‘social bookmarking.’

“With Facebook such a vital part of the online social fabric, marketers need to be smart and strategic when developing campaigns on Facebook,” said Jeff Rohrs, vice president, ExactTarget’s Marketing Research and Education Group. “A click of the ‘Like’ button means different things to different people. It creates an opportunity for further engagement, but it is merely one step toward the types of meaningful, cross-channel relationships marketers need to succeed.”

According to the research, a universal meaning of “Like” has yet to emerge largely because a click depends on the individual consumer and the context in which the “Like” button is used, Rohrs said.

Key findings of the research include:

— 45 percent of Facebook users say they “Like” a company at least monthly, while 35 percent say they never “Like” a company.

— 44 percent “Like” something posted by a company on Facebook at least once a month.

— “Like” is not the same thing as permission — 15 percent say “Liking” a company’s Facebook page should “Always” be interpreted as permission to post marketing messages that appear in a user’s news feed, while 39 percent say their “Like” should “Never” be interpreted as permission.

— People who “Like” a lot of brands (11 or more) are more likely to be motivated by rewards in the form of coupons or exclusive deals in exchange for their “Like.”

— Younger consumers (age 18-26) tend to use “Like” for self-expression and public endorsement of a brand.

— Consumers 27 and older are more likely to expect something of value in exchange for their “Like.”

— Among people that have “Liked” at least one brand, 31 percent have avoided “Liking” more brands because they do not want to push things into their friends’ newsfeeds.

— The average U.S. Facebook user “Likes” an average of 14 companies/brands.

“Facebook has emerged an essential interactive channel for brands to create engaging experiences and share relevant content,” said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget’s chief marketing officer. “The Meaning of Like provides marketers exclusive new insights on what consumers expect from brands on Facebook and offers recommendations on how to integrate the channel into the broader marketing mix.”

Based on a series of focus groups, interviews and surveys conducted in May and June 2011, The Meaning of Like is the tenth report in ExactTarget’s Subscribers, Fans & Followers research series. For more information about the study and to access the Subscribers, Fans & Followers data, visit www.ExactTarget.com/sff .

The debut of the research comes less than a week after ExactTarget launched its SocialPages application, a solution that enables marketers to create and integrate branded Facebook pages into cross-channel interactive marketing campaigns. Built as an application on the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub, SocialPages provides a drag and drop interface to create and manage branded Facebook tabs and monitor real-time performance and cross-channel engagement across email, mobile, social media and the Web. For more information about ExactTarget’s SocialPages application, click here.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub(TM) technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Adobe Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based cross-channel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com .

The company dedicated to providing digital relevance for deserving brands, Slingshot SEO reviews the recent ExactTarget Connections 2011 conference, held in Indianapolis.

The three-day event, held as an annual user conference for ExactTarget clients and partners, attracted more than 3,000 attendees and featured more than 50 breakout sessions ranging from interactive marketing best practices to case studies and advice on how to build engaging interactive campaigns across email, social media, mobile and the Web.

Slingshot SEO participated as a proud sponsor of the event. As a participant in the event lineup for the week, and presenting a case study with Angie’s List, the Slingshot staff found true value in its involvement with Connections. Slingshot SEO gave rave reviews on Connections 2011.

“Scott Dorsey and his team at ExactTarget set out to inspire, educate and entertain — and they 100% delivered on that promise,” said Aaron Aders, Slingshot SEO Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder.

“Nobody puts on an Internet marketing conference like ExactTarget. No contest! The Connections conference was nothing short of breathtaking and over the top, both in content and entertainment,” Jeremy Dearringer, Slingshot SEO Chief Research Officer and co-founder, said.

“I found out just how valuable our partnership with ExactTarget is by virtue of the activities and contacts made at their conference,” Jay Love, Slingshot SEO CEO, said. “Then to top it off, it was truly fun!”

“ExactTarget Connections 2011 was masterfully executed with keynote speakers, compelling breakouts, great company, and after hours events that kept us wanting more,” Kevin Bailey, Slingshot SEO President and co-founder, said.

Brian Tomey, Slingshot SEO Enterprise Account Executive, said, “ExactTarget’s Connections 2011 — ‘The Power of One’ — will be remembered as ONE of a kind! Remarkable brands, fantastic content, and outstanding entertainment.”

“ExactTarget greatly impressed me with their lineup of presenters, speakers and empowering leaders,” Courtney Logel, Slingshot SEO marketing associate, said. “Aron Ralston shared one of the most inspiring stories I’ve heard in a long time. His story demonstrated not only the power of one individual’s will to live, but how the power of many, and of love, can truly save a life.”

About Slingshot SEO
Founded in 2006, Slingshot SEO provides professional SEO services to more than 150 clients across the country. The company’s results are driven by a tireless passion to make its enterprise client base more digitally relevant. In May 2011, Slingshot SEO was recognized as the “IT Company of the Year” at TechPoint’s Mira Awards, the premier technology awards program in the state of Indiana. For more information about Slingshot SEO and to read Slingshot SEO reviews, visit http://www.slingshotseo.com.

Three critical access hospitals in Texas have crossed the meaningful use finish line, qualifying for their share of the government’s $27 billion incentive fund. Parkview Hospital, Stonewall Memorial Hospital and Throckmorton County Memorial Hospital successfully broke the tape far ahead of the pack by leveraging an electronic health records system from Prognosis Health Information Systems.

“We originally started exploring electronic health records and implemented the solution because it was the right thing to do for our patients and for our hospital from a clinical and operational standpoint,” said Ann Fagan-Cook, CEO at Parkview, a 16-bed hospital in Wheeler, Texas. “But I was so happy to be one of the first hospitals to get that official notification from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services saying that we ‘won.’ The fact that we have now qualified for incentive funds is simply the icing on the cake.”

To qualify under the Medicare program, the hospitals demonstrated 90 consecutive days of meaningful use of certified EHR technology through the submission of data for 14 mandatory core set objectives and five out of 10 menu set objectives as well as required clinical quality measures via the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Attestation System.

A meaningful use dashboard in the ChartAccess® Comprehensive EHR enabled the hospitals to continually monitor their progress in relation to the various measures that they had to meet to verify meaningful use. The tool made it possible to move through the qualification process efficiently.

“The dashboard highlighted every component of meaningful use and would tell us if we were passing or failing,” said Calvin Hargrove, an emergency medical technician who spearheaded the meaningful use initiative at 14-bed Throckmorton. “With the automated scorecard, the nurses and other clinicians knew exactly what they needed to do or to correct to meet the government’s requirements. It saved many hours by eliminating the need to search through the electronic charts to figure out what steps to take.”

A shared web-native EHR system delivered via a cloud computing model, ChartAccess software applications are made available as a service over an encrypted health information network. Intuitive and easy-to-use, the system offers built in analytics and health information exchange (HIE) capabilities, which can help hospitals provide consistent, high-quality patient care.

“We are offering a ‘disruptive innovation’ that provides a viable alternative to other options by providing a platform that helps community hospitals overcome the cost, speed of implementation, and usability obstacles commonly cited as impediments to electronic records success,” said Ramsey Evans, CEO of Prognosis Health Information Systems. “Our solution makes it possible to not just get an EHR installed but to quickly tap into the technology to improve care and operations.”

With Throckmorton’s success, all four of the founding members of the West Texas RHIO, an innovative collaborative initiative in which all participating organizations are implementing the same remotely hosted EHR, have now met the government’s Stage 1 requirements. The on-going technical and operational support from Prognosis has been an integral factor in reaching this milestone, according to Michael Curtis, CEO at Throckmorton.

“Prognosis was incredibly hands-on in supporting our success, meeting with us every week and providing a help-desk to enable us to work through each meaningful use requirement as quickly as possible,” Curtis said. “The hard work of the Prognosis team and our super users are what really helped us to attest so early. It’s truly a testament to what can be accomplished with the right technology, the right approach and a real team effort.”

About Prognosis Health Information Systems

Prognosis Health Information Systems (PHIS), Houston, aims to improve the quality and safety of patient care through ChartAccess, a certified Comprehensive EHR. Designed to be fully operational in less than six months at a predictable, affordable cost, the solution enables hospitals to meet meaningful use and improve patient outcomes by leveraging built-in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) milestone and quality measure tracking functionality. PHIS uses 21st-Century technologies to offer small community hospitals a pure browser-based system that can run on-premise or in the cloud. For more information, go to www.prognosishis.com.

ExactTarget, provider of email and interactive marketing solutions, recently announced the expansion of its product suite, designed to provide marketers with new cloud-based solutions to plan, create, automate and measure interactive marketing campaigns in real time.

Built on the ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub, the new solutions extend the capabilities of the company’s cross-channel marketing platform with drag and drop automation across email, mobile, Facebook and Twitter and a framework for third-party application development.

“We are in a new era of marketing — one of an incredibly empowered cross-channel consumer who is interacting with brands via email, Twitter, Facebook, mobile and the Web, all from the phone they carry in their purse or pocket,” said Scott Dorsey, Co-Founder and CEO, ExactTarget. “Marketers must move quickly and embrace the real-time reality of this new era or risk finding themselves and their brands irrelevant.”

Launched September 16 during ExactTarget’s annual user conference, Connections, new product highlights include:

• Audience Builder- designed to enable marketers to consolidate, analyze and take action on customer data in real time through a drag-and-drop interface and create targeted audiences for campaigns across email, mobile, social media and the web.
• Automation Studio- adds drag and drop automation to plan and power messages across email, mobile, social or web campaigns based on consumer behavior, time or custom attributes.
• Campaign Management- designed to expands central campaign planning and calendaring capabilities to coordinate channels using an integrated storyboard that links campaigns on email, mobile, Twitter, Facebook, web and offline channels.
• HubExchange- opens ExactTarget’s interactive marketing platform for select third-party application development and innovation, including Marketo’s lead management application and Klout’s social influence data application.

Other enhancements include functionality for integrated report, mobile campaign execution, report building and social page creation.

“Marketers must embrace the three new tenants of marketing, create a common view of the consumer across all channels, interact in real time and embrace the reality of cross-channel marketing,” noted Scott McCorkle, COO, Exact Target. “With [these] product launches, we are defining a new era in marketing and leading the industry by providing the most powerful, flexible solution to help organizations market to the power of one.”

Central Desktop, a leading cloud-based collaboration platform company, today announced the appointment of Kristy McKnight as Vice President of Products.

The new role represents key growth in Central Desktop’s product initiatives and puts an emphasis on customer experience. McKnight will be responsible for the company’s product strategy, to which she brings more than 20 years of knowledge in introducing and managing high-tech and software products.

“Kristy is a seasoned executive who has worked with respected companies like Intuit and Networks in Motion, where she helped define their applauded customer-centric product development standards,” said Isaac Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Central Desktop. “We believe her unique background has positioned her perfectly to represent the voice of Central Desktop customers, and be at the very center of future product development and growth.”

Most recently, McKnight was the Vice President of Product Management at Telecommunications Systems, Inc., which acquired Networks in Motion. In that position, McKnight oversaw location-based wireless products worldwide, supporting 38 countries and 10 languages, and global customers including Verizon, MetroPCS, Virgin, Cricket, Telus, Hutchison/3, Sony Ericsson, Hyundai and Daimler.

“I’m excited to help build on the tremendous momentum that Central Desktop has experienced by tapping in to new opportunities in this thriving market,” said McKnight. “I’m confident that we can push this award-winning platform even further into the spotlight.”

McKnight began her esteemed career at Arthur Andersen, before becoming director of product management for Intuit, Inc. There, she led the professional products division and managed end-to-end customer experience, strategy and execution. After almost 10 years at Intuit, McKnight served as vice president of product management and strategy at Match.com — the world’s largest online dating website.

About Central Desktop

Central Desktop is a cloud-based collaboration platform that centralizes the way people work, teams collaborate and managers lead. The company’s comprehensive online collaboration solution centralizes social and workflow tools into one access point in the cloud, streamlining processes and bringing people together to collaborate and engage. Central Desktop customers include CBS, Netflix, SicolaMartin, U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, the Humane Society of the United States, Workday, Harvard University and over 500,000 users. Founded in 2005, Central Desktop is a privately-held company with headquarters in Pasadena, California. For more information about the company, visit http://www.centraldesktop.com .

ExactTarget joined the parade of Facebook page creation vendors with the release of SocialPages, an application for its ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub.

SocialPages features include things we’ve seen in numerous other Facebook page creation tools, such as:

• A drag-and-drop editor allowing for easy placement of design elements into branded Facebook pages;
• Inclusion of forms, YouTube videos, Flickr galleries, and the Facebook like button to the list of drag-and-drop options;
• The option of creating branded content both for public consumption and for only users who have liked the page;
• Real-time analytics, including impressions, fan total, clicks, likes, demographics, and top-performing content; and
• The ability to associate Facebook pages with email, mobile, or other social media outlets, as well as integration of Facebook engagement with analytics and tracking.

Much in the same way that Socialbakers Engagement Builder, profiled by AllFacebook Tuesday, is connected with that vendor’s analytics and benchmarking platform, SocialPages is an offshoot of ExactTarget’s Interactive Marketing Hub, which offers page managers the following features:

• Management of Facebook, Twitter, email, and mobile campaigns from a single dashboard;
• Integration of data from more than 600 technology partners;
• A calendar tool fpr organization-wide planning;
• The Audience Builder segmentation engine, which helps managers to sift through the massive amount of available data and find specific information on customer behavior;
• Automation Studio, which allows managers to automate repetitive tasks; and
• Pulse, a real-time glance at users’ interactive messages, conversations, and campaigns.

Deciding whether or not ExactTarget’s SocialPages is right for you is a matter of whether you like the look and feel of the application. The features are pretty similar to those of the leading page creation tools available from at least a dozen other vendors right now.

Global interactive marketing provider ExactTarget announced the ExactTarget Foundation today, creating a not for profit organization charted to combat childhood hunger, advance education and accelerate entrepreneurship.

The ExactTarget Foundation will provide charitable grants to support projects and programs that address the obstacles facing the growth of global entrepreneurship, including student hunger and access to education.

“Entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of the global economy, and the ExactTarget Foundation will allow us to tackle the challenges that stand in the way of students realizing their dreams,” said Scott Dorsey, ExactTarget cofounder and chief executive officer. “By addressing the growing epidemic of student hunger and bringing access to quality education, we can fuel the next generation of entrepreneurs.”

A November 2010 report entitled Child Food Insecurity: The Economic Impact On Our Nation found childhood hunger to adversely impact school performance, academic achievement and limit lifetime earnings. Published by Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger relief organization, the study found childhood hunger damages the architecture of children’s brains, making it “extremely difficult for them to ever reach their full potential as effective workers and members of society.”

“We have an opportunity to be a catalyst for change and fuel programs that will help students become the next generation of entrepreneurs,” said Traci Dolan, ExactTarget chief administrative officer who will oversee the Foundation. “By addressing hunger and ensuring students have access to quality education, we can create a new era of innovation.”

The ExactTarget Foundation will begin accepting grant applications in early 2012 and will be managed by a board of directors, including Scott Dorsey, Traci Dolan and Todd Richardson, ExactTarget senior vice president.

The unveiling of the ExactTarget Foundation follows ExactTarget’s donation of more than $100,000 to support education and hunger initiatives led by Teach for America, DonorsChoose.org and the Soledad O’Brien and Brad Raymond Foundation.

The announcements were made before a sold-out crowd of more than 3,000 attending the final day of ExactTarget Connections ’11. Centered on the theme of “The Power of One,” Connections ’11 challenged marketers to explore the power of one consumer to change a brand, one technology to change an industry and one person to change the world. The conference features addresses from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, author Aron Ralston and executives from Facebook, Adobe, Yahoo!, Best Buy, Klout and Foursquare. The conference also features more than 50 interactive breakout sessions ranging from marketing best practices to building interactive marketing campaigns.

About ExactTarget

ExactTarget is a leading global provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive marketing solutions. The company’s Interactive Marketing Hub technology provides organizations a single solution to connect with customers via email, integrated text messaging, landing pages and social media. Supported by collaborative global services teams, ExactTarget’s technology integrates with more sales and marketing information systems than any other in the industry, including Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Omniture and Webtrends among many others. ExactTarget powers permission-based multichannel communications for thousands of organizations around the world including Expedia.com, Best Buy, Papa John’s, CareerBuilder.com, Gannett Co., Inc., The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, The Home Depot and Wellpoint, Inc. For more information, visit www.exacttarget.com .

Acronis, a leading provider of data protection and disaster recovery solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, today announced it has entered a distribution relationship with Adistec, a value-added distributor working with VARs and members in Colombia, Chile and Peru to provide computing solutions for business customers and home users.

Adistec’s team of specialized professionals for each area in IT will now sell, market and support Acronis’ product suite of data backup and recovery solutions to resellers and managed service providers (MSPs). These solutions include the recently announced Acronis Backup & Recovery^® 11 and Acronis^® vmProtect™ 6. Under the new agreement, Adistec’s channel partners will have access to Acronis products for data protection and disaster recovery for business and home.

“Acronis gives our customers powerful and easy-to-use, yet affordable solutions for backup and recovery,” said Jose Luis Sperman, CEO at Adistec. “With these highly regarded products, we have expanded our portfolio of data center, security and networking products to deliver the best-in-class data protection, disaster recovery and virtualization software our customers are requesting.”

“We are pleased to have extended our agreement with one of South America’s most successful distributors to develop a new sales channel for our market-leading solutions,” said Xavier Aguirre, director for Acronis Latin America. “We look forward to working with the Adistec team to provide our family of data protection and disaster recovery solutions in South American markets.”

About Acronis

Acronis is a leading provider of easy-to-use disaster recovery and data protection solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. Its patented disk imaging technology enables corporations, SMBs and consumers to protect their digital assets. With Acronis’ disaster recovery, deployment and migration software, users protect their digital information, maintain business continuity and reduce downtime. Acronis software is sold in more than 90 countries and available in up to 14 languages. For additional information, please visit www.acronis.com. Follow Acronis on Twitter: http://twitter.com/acronis_LATAM.

Acronis^®, Acronis Backup & Recovery^®, Acronis Compute with Confidence^®and the Acronis logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Acronis, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries.

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