Some 85.6% of marketers participating in a CMO Club study say that customer data stuck in silos prevents them from running multichannel campaigns that use data to personalize the experience. The study calls them omnichannel -- as in all-encompassing.

Consumers opened two-thirds of emails sent by multichannel retailers on mobile devices in 2013, up from previous years for most industries. Multichannel retailers had the highest percentage of mobile opens this holiday season, with 65%, as well as being the only industry to receive more than half of their clicks on mobile, per Experian Marketing Services.

The names Branch and Potluck might seem like events written into a whimsical children's novel, but the models for these two services from Branch Media are anything but childlike. In fact, the sister companies are backed, in part, by Twitter cofounders Evan Williams and Biz Stone.

Keyword search terms that consumers query on google.com correlate to interesting trends. Searches for Facebook -- more than any other term -- have some sort of relationship with the unemployment rate.

The media consumption patterns of Generation C are quite different than others. They are mostly part of the Millennium generation. Technology empowers this psychographic. They are driven by community and thrive on creating, consuming and connecting online. In fact, 94% of U.S. Gen Cs create content at least once monthly, and 78% curate content at least once weekly.

The longer phrases spoken in voice search queries create a much closer match. It serves a more relevant ad to consumers, improves the quality score of the brand, and produces a lower bid for the phrase. In this scenario marketers will pay less for the top position.

There's nothing more aggravating than wading through a bunch of garbage in a press release to find the punch line. Optimizing press releases may seem boring, but similar to Web sites and ad copy, in this busy world it's become a necessity. Business Wire Wednesday released a guide to optimization, highlighting 10 tips to optimize press releases for search engines. It also provides standards for social media, mobile behavior, and search engines as algorithms change. It includes some interesting tips that marketers can use for Web site and content design.

Billions of dollars are wasted on ads that consumers never see, according to a joint study from Infolinks and EyeTrackShop. The findings, released Tuesday, analyze pitfalls surrounding ad location, responsiveness and brand recall to provide tips on how marketers can successfully tackle banner blindness that drives down click-through rates and conversions. Although the focus of the study is banner blindness, there are many insights that search marketers can apply from these findings.

Google has been testing ads in expandable Knowledge Graph listing in search results. Marketing Mojo CEO Janet Driscoll Miller shares results from a Knowledge Graph search based on a few keywords for a car on sale at a local dealer, Jim Price Chevrolet. The description, such as price and availability, serve up in the results by searching on the keywords "Chevy Malibu" when in the local area. What if ads from Carmax, Craigslist, and Edmunds.com did the same?

Special operations teams handling tactical maneuvers for U.S. military and law enforcement could become the next viable industries for Google Glass. It could explain some of the acquisitions the company made late last year.