Hold on to your hats, marketers, because we’ve got some exciting news that’s going to transform the way you use Twitter Ads. 

A little background first: back in June, Twitter rolled out Twitter Cards, their name for the multimedia you sometimes see in expanded tweets on Twitter.com, Android, and iOS applications.

“Two roads diverged in the social media wood, and I, I took the one less traveled,” said 21.7% of salespeople.

In a recent survey of 511 predominantly B2B sales reps and executives published on A Sales Guy Consulting, approximately 22% of salespeople claimed they didn’t use social media to close deals, while an overwhelming 78.3% said they had used social media to sell.

My fellow inbound marketer Sam Mallikarjunan is an internet and social media junkie -- always connected, always checking in, always tweeting, always emailing. He went on a cruise with no internet for a week, and had to leave his cell phone and computer at home. Here's how it went.

Shel Israel writes The Social Beat blog column at Forbes.com and has authored four books about digital media's impact on business. He's now working on his fifth book, The Age of Context: How it Will Change Your Work and Life with Robert Scoble, due to be published in October. 

I got a chance to catch up with Israel to talk about the latest trends in marketing: context, personalization, and the debate over tracking cookies. Here's what he said.

The top of your fundraising pyramid is just that -- a small, concentrated piece of your whole universe, made up of older, rich donors who, though important, won't be able to add to the strong foundation of your future fundraising efforts. While they’re reliable for contributing large sums of money to help you reach your yearly goal, they are high risk, high reward from an investment of time and resources perspective.