“Things I’ve Learned from Lately” is a regular compilation of articles that have made me a smarter social media marketer. Hopefully, they’ll help you, too.

Living Our Digital Lives – Digiday shares the trend that we’re now in an age in which there are no boundaries between our real lives and our digital lives. Everything is tied together, and this is only going to get more true.

Key Takeaway: The data marketers can leverage to better reach their customers comes from more than just their customers themselves. Social signals, information created from a user’s social connections, also play a heavy role. We can now consume socially-curated “newspapers” and get recommendations based on the behavior of our friends. Marketers would do well in identifying the intersection of their customers’ digital and real lives. How are your customers’ social connections impacting the content they consume?

How HBO Goes Social – FastCoCreate shares an interview with HBO’s head of social media marketing, Sabrina Caluori in which she shares HBO’s perspective on social media.

Key Takeaway: The article first and foremost communicates that social media is not a campaign. It’s a commitment that may have some campaign elements, but at the end of the day, it’s an always-on brand commitment.

It’s also important to remember that it’s very easy to get overwhelmed by what is measurable in social media and what truly matters. You need to approach metrics just like tactics—choose what matters most.

Doing Isn’t Enough – A recent study from Recommend.ly found that Walmart’s 3,500-plus local Facebook Pages aren’t performing as well as their local competitors’ Facebook Pages. Overall, the Walmart Pages are unresponsive to fan comments, do little to generate conversations, do not participate in posts and do not spark responses from fans.

Key Takeaway: Walmart’s initiative was ambitious, which is commendable, but creating a Facebook presence is a commitment to building a community. Walmart put a stake in the ground and didn’t put a plan in place or provide the proper framework to turn it into something valuable. The Pages are there for the sake of being there.