ReadWriteWeb

In April, Apple began banning apps using pay-per-install methods, such as those provided by Tapjoy and others. Now W3i, a mobile application monetization company, has come up with what it says is a workaround for developers whose incentivized app install revenue streams have since been closed.

With W3i's new product called the "Mobile App Ad Platform (MAAP)," developers can offer their iOS apps for free for 24 hours and market them via banner ads that display within other applications.

As social marketing continues to grow in importance for brands of all sizes, should businesses consider outsourcing social media tasks to offshore third parties?

It might sound like a questionable idea to some, but doing so can decrease the costs of Facebook page management by as much as 60% , according to a post on All Facebook.

James Gross and Noah Brier have talked to a lot of people at a lot of different companies around the world and they say the number one most-asked question by corporate execs about to jump into social media is almost always "but what should I Tweet about?"

The blank white box, as Gross and Brier refer to the interface presented by almost all other social media publishing tools, is a path to writer's block or ineffective self-promotion for most corporate participants in online social media. These two experienced practitioners from the advertising and marketing world have now launched a much-anticipated new service called Percolate that aims to give people something to talk about. They've quickly built up a small customer base, have bootstrapped a team of 7 employees and this week they are opening the service to the world. The first 300 ReadWriteWeb readers to visit the site through this link can access Percolate right away.

Socialcast (which was recently acquired by ReadWriteWeb sponsor VMware) ran an interesting infographic these week visualizing, among other things, a social media study conducted by the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth on the use of social media in Fortune 500 companies (we covered part of this study back in 2008).

The majority of companies studied found social media - such as blogging, social networking and online video - to be successful. Even as far back 2007 (why does that seem like so long ago?), a majority of the companies surveyed found social media to be at least somewhat important.

A new mobile app platform called WiO is set to revolutionize the TV watching experience by allowing customers to immediately get information about the products and services they see advertised on screen, both in TV commercials and within the shows themselves.

Through a mobile app running on customers' phones, marketers can offer a variety of follow-up actions to the TV viewer, including coupons, reminders, contact info and more. In total, there are 10 follow-up actions offered. And the consumer is in complete control of which ones, if any, they respond to.

For small, local businesses using Facebook for social marketing, building up a fan base is important, but only so far as the people clicking the "like" button actually live nearby.

While some businesses can sell their products and services online to customers regardless of location, truly local businesses who serve a particular locale need to narrow their social marketing focus down to ensure they're connecting with the people most likely to actually spend money with them.

As Facebook approaches the 700 million user mark, it's easy to take for granted that pretty much everybody you know is a member of the social networking behemoth's site.

Although the total number of Facebook users continues to climb, many people simply don't want to have a profile on the site, whether because of concerns over privacy, information overload or their marriage-crippling Farmville addiction.

For online marketers and other content creators, the need to optimize one's content for search and social media is now well-known. What's less clear for many is how to go about it. Which keywords are best to use? How frequently should you use them?

It was with these questions in mind that Eightfold Logic created InboundWriter, a new social writing Web app that analyzes the keywords in a given block of written copy and provides feedback about how to more effectively optimize that content for search and social.

There's an enormous communication gap between we digital marketers and the startups that are trying to attract our dollars. Over the past several months, I have met with about four dozen emerging companies that hope to become a part of brand marketing plans. Almost to the company, they appear to think that my colleagues and I are desperate for new ways to cut prices by distributing digital coupons and free product.

"And you can give people a dollar off right in the aisle!" "And you can reward gamers by sending them a free six pack." "And you can offer coupons that they can download right onto their phones." "And you can give your best customers a 50% rebate that appears on their credit card statement." "You'll get lots of people in your stores because millions check in every day to take advantage of 50-90% discounts."

These can be valuable tactics when you have very specific business goals. But for most brands such programs don't actually constitute marketing. They're the opposite.

Facebook recently published a PDF document giving businesses a guide to best practices for marketing on the massive social networking site.

The 14-page document, titled "Best Practice Guide: Marketing on Facebook" serves as an official resource on how to take advantage of Facebook's advertising products, social plugins, analytics and other tools to grow one's business.