With the inception of eCommerce in the 1990s and continuous developments being made in mobile commerce technology, the processes through which consumers choose to make purchases have changed dramatically. In addition to viewing traditional brick-and-mortar stores as an option for making purchases, today’s consumers also turn to the Web to find more attractive deals. Web-only companies such as Amazon.com, eBay, Craigslist, and most recently Quibids have been major contributors to drawing consumers away from brick-and-mortar locations.

The past year has seen rapid developments in wearable computing technology. Google launched its glass product, which has been randomly spotted throughout New York City and on Runways during Fashion Week. Telepathy, which was founded in January of this year, announced that it is in the process of releasing the Telepathy 2. This product is a competitor to Google Glass and is actually expected to hit the market first. Additionally, there have also been rumors that Apple’s next big product to come to market will be an iWatch. With all of these new developments, the social experiment of wearable computing is expected to reach a new level.

Mobile technology can provide a wealth of data about its users based on the variety of sensors and signals found in today's smartphones and tablets; one of the most compelling pieces of information that marketers and advertisers are leveraging with increasing frequency is location. With GPS technology integrated in the majority of smartphones and tablets on the market today, along with more platforms tapping into these types of location-based services, opportunities abound to deliver more contextual, hyperlocal experiences to users that help drive value and results.

It's been over three years since we first highlighted location-based services for marketing on Tuesdays with Tukaiz. Back then, a lot of the applications that utilized location data were user-initiated, such as finding the nearest store or checking into a physical location on a social network like Facebook or Foursquare. While those use cases are still prominent and the experiences around them have been enriched over the past few years, marketers are figuring out new ways for location data to provide greater relevancy to target audiences. One key enabler to these new experiences is geofencing.

The use of multiple screens in peoples' everyday lives is becoming commonplace. According to a 2012 study conducted by Google and Ipsos Research entitled The New Multi-screen World: Understanding Cross-Platform Consumer Behavior, found 90% of consumers move between multiple devices-smartphones, tablets, personal/work computers, and in the near future, smart televisions-to complete tasks throughout the day.

This reality is a challenge for marketers and advertisers that increasingly want to deliver a holistic experience to their target audiences across all of these devices. While strides have been made over the past year or two to use intelligence to tailor content for specific devices and even specific contexts, being able to actually track how an individual moves from screen to screen and have marketing and advertising follow that person remains a major complication.

Last week, The Pulse Network-a digital media and event solutions company-hosted the New York City leg of its Inbound Marketing Summit (IMS), which highlights the latest trends and practices marketers are using to succeed with inbound marketing. The overall goal of inbound marketing is to make it easier for companies, products, and services to be found by prospects, which is commonly achieved through content marketing like blogs, videos, whitepapers, eBooks, social marketing, search engine optimization, and more.

Content is a critical enabler to effective inbound marketing, making it a key underlying theme of IMS NYC 2013. Specifically, the issues of quality and authenticity came up quite a bit. While all marketers battle with the same challenge of quantity-the need to constantly be pumping out content to a growing number of digital channels-quality and authenticity are critical success factors. Content being used to attract new prospects and customers needs to resonate with the target audience and built trust; quality and authenticity helps further those goals.

Over three years ago on Tuesdays with Tukaiz, we emphasized the increasing importance of inbound search marketing with a three-part series that detailed its practice. A lot has changed in three years, including increased automation, new capabilities, and the explosion of mobile devices that emit signals to influence the context of search and ad results.

The variety of smartphones, tablets, and now "phablets" on the market has created a big challenge for search marketers, because on most ad platforms they had to create hundreds of campaigns to reach people based on their device type, location, time-of-day, and other attributes. This inherent complexity for mobile search marketing also prevented smaller advertisers from going mobile, even as mobile search volumes grew.

Maintaining a clear and consistent brand identity across all media channels is something that marketers strive for executing marketing and advertising initiatives. Many times, that's easier said than done, although technology is helping open up new models that increase marketing efficiency and effectiveness, especially for marketing content. Establishing a clear structure of corporate brand governance for procurement of marketing content across the entire organization is essential to achieve a holistic customer experience with a brand.

According to a recent study conducted by InfoTrends entitled Understanding Vertical Markets: Enterprise Communications Requirements, 98% of enterprise organizations surveyed currently have some type of an approval process when purchasing marketing content. Even with the prevalent use of approvals, the workflow process differs depending on the structure of the company and the protocols around brand governance. Brand governance around marketing procurement can be separated into four models: