Now that Uncle Sam has made his rounds and emptied your pockets, it’s as important a time as any to get back in that marketing saddle. Yet, with a lighter wallet load, most of us don’t have the discretionary business income to spend on hit or miss marketing campaigns.

Pinterest is no longer just the new kid on the block - it is officially one of the big boys. One of the fastest growing social networking sites in the world, it has captured the imaginations of millions of people from the United States to Britain. And although it shares a few similarities with other services in the social space, a strong creative element makes this particular beast as unique as they come.

Huge companies such as Amazon have been deriving significant benefits leveraging their database treasure troves to provide enhanced customer service, but the benefits of “big data” have been slow to trickle down to small online marketers. Up until now, customer information has been seen by smaller marketers as nothing more than a way to upsell, but the true advantages reside in the provision of a level of service that makes the customer think “hey, this company really knows and cares about me!”

As internet powerhouses like Facebook and Twitter continue to grow, more brands are starting to realize that social media can no longer be ignored. That is the good part. The bad part is that so many of them are approaching it all wrong. An alarming number of brands are rushing to tally up the most friends, likes and conversions when they should be focusing on creating the type of content that automatically drives that action.

If you’re a fan of movies you’ll have noticed all your childhood favorites coming back into circulation. There are a lot of remakes, a lot of chain sequels on something that might have been a bad idea to start with and a lot of completely unoriginal movie plots. Take the new Avengers film, which is based on an old idea and the characters themselves were already introduced independently within a string of prequels. Yet the film has already broken box office records on its rapid ascent to $1 billion in tickets sold worldwide.