Thursday, September 26, 2013


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Saturday, June 8, 2013

Content Marketing Infographic


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Wednesday, June 5, 2013

work in progress...how to create a high-converting landing page infographic


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Sunday, May 12, 2013

The state of eCommerce in china

 infographic which comes courtesy of Alibaba...

The state of ecommerce in China

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Saturday, May 26, 2012

social infographics ||



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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

The Book about you*




check it out...and check out the new book this month
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Monday, May 21, 2012

Video SEO 101

somereason this has been in my drafts..for more 3years...so no idea if the links even still work,....
but anyways



I've been lately uploading some mixes for my sites (hungama+recessiondjs+service SA) so heres some video Seo sites ive been reading up on;
Feel free to bookmark and Enjoy:



SEO for Video (hosted) Tips & Tutorials



Video Sharing & Youtube Optimization Tips



Video SEO Tips from Friends



General Tips & Techniques



Additional Resources


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Helping Your Clients Build an Effective Mobile Strategy

Helping Your Clients Build an Effective Mobile Strategy

It can be a challenge convincing clients to add new strategies to their existing Web presence.
In a perfect world, a client would simply say, "You’re the expert. You know what’s best. Do whatever needs to be done to make it happen!" But, unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that.

Granted, we shouldn’t expect smart business managers to implement every new thing just because we tell them it’s a good idea. That wouldn’t be cost effective. But what if you know in your gut that the future of a client’s business may be at stake?
With Google executives saying things like "I believe that in 3 years desktop computers will be irrelevant…" and studies by Gartner stating that "Websites not formatted for the smaller screen will become a market barrier…" the Mobile Web is one of your gut instincts you want your clients to follow. And follow now!
In a state of desperate urgency, you may be tempted to place all diplomacy aside, and just tell it to them straight, perhaps even reminding them of those other times they put off your advice. I like to call this the "Timeline of Lost Opportunities" tactic.

You may very well have clients who respond to that type of pressure, but more likely, you will need to ease your clients into the idea of a full-on Mobile Web strategy.
Below is a plan that can help. I’ve even included graphics in each step since, as the old adage goes, "A picture is worth a thousand different ways of pleading with one’s clients." (Or something like that.)

Step 1: Show Them the Money

Show Them the Money
The Mobile Web is upon us, whether we like it or not. People are using mobile devices to search, shop and click through on ads at unprecedented rates. And rates that are only expected to grow. Presenting numbers like those shown above, as well as information on how their competitors may already be capitalizing on the Mobile Web, can get your clients listening.

Step 2: Show Them What Their Customers Expect


Mobile device users search the Internet as often as they use apps, so having a mobile-ready website is important. Mobile consumers know what they want from a website, and typically take action once they get there. It’s important that your clients understand that their customers have different expectations of what a mobile website does and provides compared to their existing website. Mobile conversion rates can be impressive, but only if a website caters to the expectations of this mobile audience.

Step 3: Outline Best Practices and Give Them Choices

Outline Best Practices, and Give Them Choices
Once you’ve shown your clients how people use mobile devices, it should become more apparent that they need a mobile version of their website. Mobile website solutions need not be complicated or expensive. Show your clients some options, such as responsive web design or going with a dedicated mobile-optimized version of the site (along with the pros and cons of each) while emphasizing mobile website best practices.

Step 4: Help Them Decide Whether They Need a Mobile App

Help Them Decide Whether They Need a Mobile App
Mobile app usage is impressive, but while people do spend a lot of time using mobile apps, most of that time is spent on games and social networking. So does your client really need a mobile app? You can help them decide by weighing the pros and cons of mobile app development, and presenting ways they can optimize their mobile website as an alternative.

Step 5: Explain the Marketplace and Mobile App Nuances

Explain the Marketplace and Mobile App Nuances
A good mobile app strategy should analyze current marketplace trends and weigh the pros and cons of developing native apps versus web apps. Be sure to explain how the mobile marketplace works as well as the difference between native and web apps. This can help your clients make more informed decisions.

Step 6: Show Them Options and Give Them Choices

Show Them Options, and Give Them Choices
Mobile app solutions vary in price and complexity. Outline options for your client that include using HTML5 or one of the many do-it-yourself mobile app tools available today. Make your recommendations based on the client’s present and future needs.

Step 7: Introduce Other Mobile Marketing Tactics

Introduce Other Mobile Marketing Tactics
The Mobile Web is more than just websites and apps. From QR codes to augmented reality, there are a host of tactics and tools you can implement to help your clients promote their business on the Mobile Web. Help your clients understand the importance of mobile-optimized landing pages. When they are marketing to a mobile audience, it is imperative that clients ultimately send potential customers to landing pages and other sources compatible with the customer’s mobile device.
The goal should be to educate your clients on the "hows" and "whys" of the Mobile Web and to help them understand their options. This approach can ultimately help them make informed decisions as they consider your recommendations.
This article is based on the book, The Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Mobile Web. The graphics used in this article are part of a sharable infographic available at TheBootstrappersGuide.com, where you’ll also find free mobile website, mobile app, and other mobile strategy worksheets.
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Sunday, March 4, 2012

How To Add The Pinterest “Pin It” Button to a Website, WordPress Blog, or ecommerce CMS

Pinterest


There’s a good chance you’ve heard of Pinterest lately. It has been all over the news, as it’s growing like mad, and driving a lot of traffic to ecommerce retailers. If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, it’s a new social network/application that enables users to pin photos to virtual pinboards, organized by topic. Once pinned, other users can view your photos and pinboards, “repin” photos to their own pinboards, comment on photos, and like them. This had led to an explosion of traffic for some websites, especially ecommerce retailers. Many people use Pinterest when researching new purchases, to organize ideas, etc. For example, I just created a pinboard containing the top golf drivers I’m researching for the 2012 season. That’s if I get to play this year. :)


Based on the rapid growth of Pinterest, and all the buzz associated with that growth, I’ve received a lot of questions recently about how ecommerce retailers could get more involved. Also, website owners want to know the best ways to make it easier for Pinterest users to pin photos that are located on their respective websites. So, I decided to write this post to explain various ways to include the “Pin It” button on a website. I will include instructions and information below for how to include a “Pin It” button on a webpage, on a WordPress blog or website, and how to address adding the “Pin It” button to an ecommerce CMS (which is the most challenging of the three).


What is the “Pin It” Button?

Before we hop into the instructions, I’ll quickly cover what the “Pin It” button is. You have inevitably seen Like buttons, Tweet buttons, +1 buttons, etc. as you travel the web. Those social plugins make it easier for users to share content to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ from websites across the web. Well, Pinterest also wants to make it easier for users to quickly pin content. So, they created the “Pin It” button. In its simplest form, it’s a small button that you can place on a webpage that enables users to quickly pin content to a pinboard, while also showing how many “pins” it has received. You can tailor the code of the “Pin It” button to specify the URL of the webpage, the URL of the image you want users to pin, and the description that populates the “Pin It” form. You can also tailor how the “Pin It” button displays on your webpages.


The “Pin It” button (both horizontal and vertical layout listed below):

Pinterest Pin It Button


Since there are several types of websites, and each brings its own type of installation, I’ll cover a few of the most common methods below. My hope is that the following information and instructions can help you get up and running quickly. Let’s face it, if you make it easier for users to pin content, the greater chance you have of receiving a spike of traffic from Pinterest. Let’s jump in.


Instructions for Adding the Pinterest Button to a Simple Webpage

This is the most basic implementation of the “Pin It” button. Let’s say you have a webpage with a killer photo of your core product. Maybe you don’t have many products, but just sell a handful of core products. If that’s the case, you could use the following instructions to add a “Pin It” button to those product webpages.


Pinterest has created a simple tool on its website to help webmasters create a static “Pin It” button. You can visit http://pinterest.com/about/goodies/ and scroll down to section titled “Pin It” Button for Websites. You will see fields for URL of the webpage the photo is located on, URL of the image located on your servers, and then a description field. The description is optional, but I highly recommend adding that to make it easier for users (since it auto-populates the “pin it” form once the button is clicked). You can also select how the “Pin It” button displays. There is a dropdown that lets you choose if the pin count shows up next to or above the pin button. You can also choose to not show the pin count at all.


Once you enter the required information, Pinterest will generate the code for you below the form. Then you can copy the code and add it to your webpage. There is “Basic” code and “Advanced Code”. The advanced code loads asynchronously, which can help with performance. Also, you should use the advanced code when you want to add several pin buttons to one webpage. You will need to add the resulting code to your webpage (in your html).


Screenshot of what the “Pin It” button form looks like when populated with sample data:

Pinterest Pin It Form


How To Add a Pinterest Button to a WordPress Blog (via a WordPress Plugin)

If you are running a WordPress blog, you are in luck. There are several plugins that you can install that makes it easy to add “Pin It” buttons to your blog posts and pages. I’ll explain two of those plugins below.


The first plugin I’ll cover is called Pinterest Pin It Button, and it provides some great functionality. Using this plugin, you can add “Pin It” buttons to your posts, pages, homepage, archives, etc. In addition, you can choose to show the “Pin It” button either above or below your main content. For even more customization, you can use a shortcode in your post to add the “Pin It” button within your main content. For example, you can use the shortcode [pinit] within your post to add the “Pin It” button within your content (versus just at the top or bottom of the post).


The Pinterest “Pin It” Button plugin settings in WordPress:

Pinterest WordPress Plugin


The second plugin I’ll cover offers basic “Pin It” button functionality. The Pin It on Pinterest plugin adds a “Pin It” button at the end of your posts, and it enables you to select which image should get pinned, as well as what the pre-populated description should be. Once installed, you will see Pinterest options in your post editor within WordPress.


How to Add a Pinterest Button to an eCommerce CMS

I mentioned earlier that adding a “Pin It” button to an ecommerce CMS is the most challenging to address. The reason is simple. When you have hundreds (or thousands) of products being handled dynamically by a content management system (CMS), you can’t simply add a static pin it button like we did earlier in the post. The code needs to be dynamically tailored based on the product at hand. There aren’t separate pages for each product within an ecommerce CMS, but instead, the CMS dynamically handles each product via database-driven code. This means you cannot simply ftp product pages to your server for each product you sell on your website. The underlying code needs to determine the right URL’s and description for the “Pin It” button.


In order to add any code to an ecommerce CMS that addresses the specific URL, images within the post, etc., you will need to understand the specific functions and variables that your CMS uses. By the way, even WordPress works this way. WordPress is a CMS, although many people don’t realize this. For example, there is a function that WordPress uses to determine the current URL, and it looks like this:


  2. <?php the_permalink(); ?>


In WordPress, the_permalink() returns the current URL, which can be used to populate the “Pin It” button code. This is the approach you would need to use for your own CMS. The good news is that any reputable ecommerce CMS will provide a reference guide that includes the various functions and variables that can be used. Actually, it’s common to use these functions and variables to perform other tasks.


For example, here is a webpage explaining how to add a pin it button to Shopify. You’ll notice that the example includes variables specific to Shopify for determining the current URL, image URL, and description. Again, your own ecommerce CMS provider should provide similar variables you can use when adding the pin it button to your website.


A “Pin It” button on a Shopify ecommerce website:

Pinterest Pin It Button on a Shopify ecommerce Website


My recommendation is to contact your ecommerce CMS provider and track down the necessary code for referencing the current page, images within product pages, and the description you want to use for the image. Once you have that information, you can add the necessary code to your CMS template or theme to handle the “Pin It” button. It will then dynamically pull the correct information for each product page on your website.


Summary – Enable Users to Pin Content Easily

I hope this post helped you understand more about Pinterest, including how to add a “Pin It” button to your website, WordPress blog, or ecommerce CMS. Pinterest is growing rapidly and adding the “Pin It” button to your website can make it easier for users to share your content. This can give you a greater chance of having that content get noticed, shared, etc., which can result in increased traffic, exposure, and sales. And that’s what ecommerce is all about!


I recommend you start thinking about Pinterest today. You should speak with your development team or programmer to see how you can implement the “Pin It” button soon. Pins are waiting. :)

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Saturday, October 15, 2011

Who Owns Your Meme? User-Generated Content Ownership on Social Networks

Who Owns Your Meme? User-Generated Content Ownership on Social Networks:

There have been instances of user-generated content (UGC) being reproduced as commercial items, like t-shirts or bumper stickers, without the express permission of the creator. Sometimes, when these items are sold by large corporations like Hot Topic, the creators and social networks can get riled up about the corporations profiting from a network’s creativity and hard work.



Maybe it wasn’t ‘hard’ to draw the rage guy, but you get the point.


Users aren’t clear on whether they still own the copyright to their rage comics, original memes, and other UGC once it’s been published to social sites like Reddit, Digg, or Fark. And sometimes, networks are defenseless against other parties re-posting and recycling their network’s goods.



Wait . . . isn’t that the goal of social networks (sharing, social diffusion, etc.)? It’s clear why this topic is so tricky. Let’s go network by network, and review the Terms of Service and all of those boxes you click accept to without reading, to find out if your content is free game.




TOS


Except as expressly provided otherwise in the Privacy Policy, you agree that by posting messages, uploading files, inputting data, or engaging in any other form of communication with or through the Website, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, translate, enhance, transmit, distribute, publicly perform, display, or sublicense any such communication in any medium (now in existence or hereinafter developed) and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so.


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You are sharing with the world. Though you retain a copyright, the content becomes public.




TOS


You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Twitter.




TOS


You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through yourprivacy and application settings.


For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (IP content), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You maintain ownership of content, but grant unreserved rights to Facebook, and accept that other users will maintain the content even if you delete it on your end.





TOS


For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and YouTube’s (and its successors’ and affiliates’) business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Service (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels. You also hereby grant each user of the Service a non-exclusive license to access your Content through the Service, and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service and under these Terms of Service.


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with YouTube and users until you delete the content.







TOS


By creating and posting content to Digg, you warrant that you own all rights to the content, agree that the content will be dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, available at http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ and that you will not object to the use of the content by Digg in any context. To clarify, the above does not apply to the content on external sites linked to by the original submission.


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You maintain copyright, but agree to share it with Digg.






TOS


You agree that you are solely responsible for your own Submissions and affirm, represent, and/or warrant that you own or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions to use and authorize Fark.com to use all patent trademark, trade secret, copyright or other proprietary rights in and to any and all Submissions to enable inclusion and use of the Submissions in the manner contemplated by Fark.com. You retain all ownership rights in your Submissions. However, by submitting the Submissions to Fark.com, you hereby grant Fark.com a non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Submissions in connection with Fark.com and Fark.com’s business, including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of Fark.com (and derivative works thereof) in any media formats and through any media channels/outlets.


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Fark.






TOS


We do not claim ownership in any “Content” (which means any and all postings, e-mails, messages, recommendations, comments, text, files, images, photos, video, sounds, works of authorship, feedback, bug reports, or other materials) that you post on, deliver to, or otherwise make available to the Services, but to be able to legally provide you with and promote the Services, we have to have certain rights to use such Content in connection with the Services, as set forth below. In return, we also grant you certain use rights to the Content that we (or our licensors) own and use to provide the Services to you and other Users, as set forth below.


By posting any Content on the Services, you hereby grant to us an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to use, copy, perform, display, create derivative works of, and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution method (now known or later developed) throughout the world. Additionally, by posting any Content on the Services and making your Content available to others (“Third Parties”) via RSS distribution, you hereby grant to all Third Parties an unrestricted, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully-paid and royalty-free, license (with the right to sublicense through unlimited levels of sublicensees) to copy, display, and distribute such Content in any and all media (now known or later developed) throughout the world. No compensation will be paid with respect to the Content that you submit, upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.


LAYMAN’S TERMS


You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with StumbleUpon.






TOS


Your Member Content is yours; AVOS does not claim any ownership rights in your Member Content. By posting, submitting or transmitting any Member Content on or through the Service, you grant us and our third party service providers and partners a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, adapt, modify, distribute, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, broadcast, access, view and otherwise exploit such Member Content in any and all media or distribution channels (now known or hereafter created). For example, this license allows us to make your public “bookmarks” and comments available anywhere and everywhere in the spirit of the Service i.e., for use by other Members, our partners and via other media platforms. No compensation will be paid to you with respect to your Member Content as a result of your posting, submitting or transmitting Member Content through the Service.


LAYMAN’S TERM


You maintain copyright, but agree to unreservedly share the content with Delicious.


CONCLUSION


Regardless of the forum or the TOS agreement signed, if you are lawyered-up, there’s still a chance that your UGC can be protected. For example, if a third party wrongfully posts your original content, then the TOS have been violated and are nullified in many cases (think stolen sex tapes).


However, under ordinary circumstances, a good rule of thumb is that if you posted it for free, it is free for general use. Also, under most TOS above and elsewhere, you grant explicit rights to the social network to use the content any which way they please.


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Saturday, October 8, 2011

2 of my favorite websites.

www.moat.com

www.bounceapp.com
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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Using evolution to understand the challenges faced by business in the face of web 2.0/GFC and other hard to understand acronyms.

Business analysts are constantly throwing around terms like the ‘web revolution’ and the ‘evolution of social media’ typically right before they ask you to buy something. But, are these metaphors actually useful or are they just the bubble wrap to soften the sales pitch blow?

In my experience the metaphor can be more useful to an organisation than the rest of the presentation and the sales pitch combined. The metaphor that I hear the most is ‘the evolution of social media’ and ‘the evolution of web 2,0’. It irks me, but not because the metaphor isn’t useful, rather because most of the people using it don’t understand evolution well enough to draw out the real lesson.. Evolution is a widely misunderstood concept and one that has been constantly updated revised and improved since Darwin, but it’s core is very simple. Darwins evolution is based on situations where there are too many individuals for a given amount of resources and therefore most die. 

Those that survive to reproduce are those best suited to their environments and they pass on their favourable traits to the next generation. Thus the species changes slowly over time. The parallels to economics are obvious, there is a constant stream of competing organisations in a market that is unable to support all of them. Effective companies thrive, ineffective companies go extinct. It’s not a bad start but it’s based on a highschool understanding of evolution, if we unpack evolution in a more detailed way we can learn a hell of a lot more that can be of practical use to companies in uncertain times and competitive markets.



Not your great great grandfathers evolution

Our understanding of evolution has grown in leaps and bounds since Darwin and is still improving. Punctuated equilibrium is the theory most reflective of the the fossil evidence, the basic concept being that there are long stable periods where there is little change and the short periods of massive changes where new levels of complexity are introduced and the number and types of species is radically altered. There are also five mass extinction events recorded were many species went extinct in short time periods and recovery was slow. Much bloodier and more brutal than what most people picture when they talk about Darwin’s gentle gradual change, and also much more in line with the modern economic climate.

Evolution is at it’s core a mechanical process. Variation + Selection = Evolution, Selection in the absence of variation typically leads to extinction. Just like in business, extinction is by far the most common outcome, with 99.9% of all species that ever lived now being extinct. Winning at evolution is hard and millions of years of ruthless competition has created successful strategies that are of huge benefit in any competitive arena for those patient enough to decipher them. So how much can evolution teach us about commerce in the world of web 2.0? 
let’s look at dinosaurs.




Why the Dinosaurs went extinct   




The dinosaurs were sent extinct by meteor strikes, right? well, yes but not really. The theory is that a large meteor impacted the earth and created a cloud of dust so thick that it decreased decreased global temperatures and photosynthesis worldwide, it also created clouds of acidic gases, megatsunamis and quite possibly gigantic firestorms which is a mite more complicated than dinosaurs getting hit by space bullets but also a lot more useful. There was a stable ecosystem for a long period and just like a stable economic system this meant that certain strategies were favoured and species or organisations that used those strategies tended to dominate. Then everything changed. In biology we call this a shift in selective pressures, tech nerds refer to December 1974, the rest of the world calls it the start of the internet. 

Just like a meteor the Internet is powerful not because of the businesses that it directly replaces but because it changes the environment that all organisations have to compete in, and the changes aren’t simple.Just as it was probably the loss of plants and drop in temperature that sent the dinosaurs extinct it’s the the increased levels of connectivity assocaited with widespread internet use that are changing our environment. Social media and web 2.0 are the meteors of our generation.


Social media is powerful in a way that’s fundamentally biological (more on this in other articles). Humans communication is built on a foundation of evolutionary psychology, the millennium old lizard brain that pushes us to survive and reproduce. As a social animal that is generally pale, weak and useless when alone (that might just be me) social connectivity is crucial for survival. The need to connect with peers and form groups is just as powerful in suburban Sydney and cosmopolitan Paris as it was for our early ancestors who roamed the Savanah. Because it is so fundamental to our nature anything that affects the way we communicate is able to acess our most primitive and most powerful biological drives. How powerful are these drives? They push us to work hard to succeed, determine who we choose to mate with and explain why we can’t all get along. Social media is more than just a facet of the internet, it is web 2.0 and it’s changing the way we connect and communicate. For companies this creates a simple scenario just like it did for the dinosaurs, we have to adapt...... or die. 

But all the dinosaurs died, didn’t they?








Not really, birds are an offshoot of the tree that created dinosaurs, so are modern crocodiles, for that matter we are just a slightly more distant branch. Vertebrates were a diverse groups and whilst many went extinct some were unaffected and some were able to thrive in the new environment and become the dominant species in their ecosystems. 

Just like meteors social media doesn’t affect everyone. Crocodiles are basically the same animal as lived when other dinosaurs were around. In fact the distinction between the massive hugely powerful reptilian predator and dinosaurs isn’t one I’d like to try and justify to a biologist (especially if that biologist is me). Other, smaller, avian dinosaurs survived much the same as they had before the meteors (we call those birds). Some companies will be entirely unaffected by the social media revolution, if your main business is in defence contracts or counterintelligence for example you probably don’t need a facebook page. Nor would I recommend a twitter account for a company specialising in mobility aids for senior citizens, at least not yet. But most of the dinosaurs weren’t crocodiles and most of our companies need to deal with social media.  

But is extinction really that bad?


Most of the large land based dinosaurs were unable to cope in the new conditions whilst smaller warm blooded mammals thrived. Dinosaurs died out, mammals rule the world (and invented pants). This is where we have an advantage over dinosaurs, the strategies that dinosaurs had optimised to allow no longer worked but their collection of new strategies were limited by their biology. Literally how many different types of DNA they carried. The strategies we use in business aren’t limited. New environments mean the rules have changed.

The strategies developed and tested since the industrial revolution can no longer be accepted as fact. We have no idea what works this new environment. Strangely the answer is also found in biology, species can not anticipate meteor strikes, or climatic drift, or the formation of mountain ranges or any of a hundred thousand other things that can change the selective environment rapidly and completely. They don’t try to. Instead species that have survived have done so because of their store of genetic variation, differences in DNA that allow for different variants that may do better in different environments. A huge number of studies both in captivity and in the wild have shown that the more variation the more rapid evolution is and the more a species can change with it’s environment to avoid extinction. Multiple strategies creates multiple opportunities to succeed.


An article by David Silverman in the Havard Business School suggested that powerful and innovative companies were founded during the depression because consumers spending more time thinking about their purchases. I’d agree use evolution to suggest something else, when conditions are tough, be that because a connected world lost it’s shit on the back of bad financial management, or because giant rocks fell from the sky, it does more than create problems. The new environment means that the giants of yesterday have lost their advantages, it’s scramble time and those that scramble the best get to dominate the new environment. That’s just as true for companies that aggressively pursue new strategies and test ideas in the market as it was for mammals which rose to dominate most of the ecosystems on earth. 


But I have to deal with the aftermath of the GFC, now isn’t the time for aggressive or flexible strategies




If I had a penny for everytime i heard business owners complain about the effect of the GFC I’d put them in a jar and put the jar under my bed, let’s face it, it’s safer than a bank. The GFC was heavily influenced by the speed at which information travels through the world and more important the speed at which the confidence of the community was shaken to it’s core. Speed enabled by the internet and bought home directly by social media. This, for me, is all part of the new ecosystem and we shouldn’t treat it as an isolated event but rather a sign of the increased power and pace of boom-bust circles in the connected world. I like to go back to evolution.

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is that the size of change determines whether it needs to be adapted to. That’s not actually true. Any change that makes some species do better than others, no matter how small, will certainly send species extinct if they don’t adapt to it. Bigger changes just do it faster. So then the question isn’t even what do we have to do, we have to rethink the way that we do business, but rather how long do we have to come up with sucessful stratergies. It depends.... how powerful do we think social media is? 
It organised the riots in london, toppled the government in egypt and the creation of Justin Beiver as an international megabrand suggest it might be a heavyweight to rival Mike Tyson. That means that those who don’t act fast won’t be around long enough to act at all.

If we view the new environment as an opportunity rather than a burden and move decisively   
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Monday, September 26, 2011

hate the new facebook ... go back to myspace!

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Friday, September 23, 2011

How to Detect Facebook Friends Who Have Unfriended You

Facebook is all about creating friends and that the first time you signed up an account, you have nothing else in mind but to fill your friends list. As time goes by, you may have realized that it's quite unfit to have someone you really don't know personally seeing all your private information. In that case, you would "unfriend" them.

Self-preservation is innate to us and that is what also keeping us being a human. Anything that degrades us even in insignificant ways is factually frustrating; so we always tend to retaliate. This is very true when it comes to Facebook. Anyone who has "unfriended" us is not just right especially if we are not even notified about it with a valid reason. Not really degrading but sort of an offense to our ego if we have befriended someone in Facebook and yet that someone has actually "unfriended" you in unknown time.

The purpose of this post is not to make you bad but to keep your self-preservation intact. In simple term, I am giving you tips on how to detect Facebook friends who have unfriended you so you could delete them in your list.

The new Facebook allows seeing your timeline when you have activated it. This timeline feature allows you see a rundown of friends you have lost.

Here are the steps:
  • Activate your Facebook Timeline.
  • Choose a year in the timeline and find the "Friends" box.
  • Mouse-over and click "Made X New Friends."
  • As soon as the list is made available, scroll through it. Those Facebook friends with "Add Friend" next to their profile link (with photo of course), are the ones that have “unfriended” you.



This is just easy but quite an effort to some. Well, let's just hope that Facebook will have this notification feature on "unfriending" activities. But I think, Facebook has this in mind that it's just right not to have this "unfriending" feature to prevent people from feeling frustrated when they know someone has "unfriended" them.
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Saturday, August 20, 2011

¶ Could Mobile Apps Be Wilting in the Heat of Summer?




Image credit: Financial Times



It’s hard to believe, but mobile marketing didn’t really get going in earnest until Apple launched its App Store in 2008. Three years later there are now marketplaces on all five major device platforms - Apple’s iOS, Android, BlackBerry, HP WebOS and Windows Mobile. What’s more, there seems to be a constant footrace between brands not only to be first to market with their own apps, but to refresh them for a fickle public.



Some of what’s driving this is the zeitgeist. Overnight, it seems, apps have become deeply embedded in our culture. To stand out at a dinner party you better pack some apps. The New York Times now has a weekly column covering them. And even Sesame Street, arguably a mirror image of American society, posted a video ode to apps on YouTube that has been viewed nearly 750,000 times.



This columnist, too, has gone ape for apps. A year ago I posited that, as smartphone and tablet adoption rise, mobile applications could unseat the web as the primary means we interact with content. Now I am second guessing myself. Things are once again changing.



This summer, the app ecosystem started to show signs that it maybe fraying at the edge. Several major players in media and social networking including the Financial Times, Twitter, LinkedIn and
Facebook have all launched rich web applications. These sites, thanks to the magic of HTML5, run in any modern browser and come very close to matching the functionality of their “native” app cousins.



Now none of these companies has abandoned their Apple or Android apps. Still, the sudden interest in web apps is notable. There are arguably three factors driving it.



First, HTML5 has finally matured into a strong alternative to native iOS and Android apps. These web apps can even run offline.



Second, it shows that perhaps developers are frustrated that they need to support multiple platforms. Android devices alone come in so many shapes, sizes and resolutions, that supporting them is a difficult and expensive challenge. Web apps solve this conundrum.



Finally, there’s freedom. Apple, most notably, recently changed the way that developers can sell content from within their applications. If a developer links out to their own online store, they must also allow consumers to purchase content using an iTunes account. However, Apple takes a 30% cut of the latter.



Most content companies have reluctantly relented to Apple’s rules. However, a few, notably Amazon, chose not to provide any e-commerce functionality in their iOS ebook apps. Amazon instead responded by launching the Kindle Cloud Reader, a web application that runs in a browser across multiple platforms. It features a rich, engaging shopping and reading experience that rivals their native apps. Downloaded books can also be read offline.



To date, no major brand has made the jump to prioritize an HTML5-based web application over a native app. This is for a good reason. Most consumers are still downloading smartphone and tablet apps in droves.



However, this could change over time as marketers get more comfortable developing for mobile devices, start dabbling with new web development tools from the likes of Adobe and aspire to exert greater control over user experience.



Here are three trends to watch when considering your own strategy.



First, there’s Apple. To date, the company has backed off on some of its more draconian policies. Still, they remain strict. However, if more companies start to prioritize their web apps over iOS apps, Apple may blink to protect its ecosystem and relent further.



Second, there’s Google. While Google has thousands of native applications in its Android Marketplace, the company has also been actively promoting HTML5 as an emerging alternative, starting with its own sites. Web applications are arguably more important to Google than native apps. They encourage users to browse and search more and thus could drive ad revenue.



Finally, there’s the global economy. The fragmentation in mobile space shows no signs of abating. Marketers may decide it’s more cost effective to develop a strong web application and control the experience end-to-end, rather than support hundreds of phone and tablet formats.



Time will tell how this all shakes out. Remember that just a few years ago there were hardly any mobile applications. Today there are hundreds of thousands of them. Things can change fast if developers are motivated.



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How to Use Facebook Places and Facebook Deals for Local Business




www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkAgiv6EE-g




Facebook Marketing for Local Businesses


As more customers become smartphone-savvy, local businesses can leverage the opportunities offered by Facebook Places and Facebook Deals to get new customers to come to their location and to reward current customers. Mari shares what you need to know.


check-in

Discover how to get more business from smartphone-savvy customers.


Facebook Places


You’ll learn how to claim your business on Facebook and take advantage of your Facebook Place page so you can make offers through Facebook Deals.


claim your business

Find out how to claim your business so you can start offering Facebook Deals.


Facebook Deals


Find out about the four different kinds of deals and how your business can use them.



  1. Individual deals: For one-time offers

  2. Loyalty deals: To reward repeat business

  3. Friend deals: To incite up to 8 people to check in at once

  4. Charity deals: To get people to donate to a charity


And Mari shares how some brands are using deals to grow their business.


mcdonalds deals

Hear how McDonald's used a Facebook Charity deal to promote their business.


Be sure to listen for Mari’s hot marketing tip to find out how you can also include Twitter to leverage your Facebook marketing with Places and Deals.

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A Quick Start Guide and Checklist for Bing Search Engine Optimization


Bing isn’t the top search engine used by searchers but it still is a powerful tool for driving traffic to your blog and most likely you’ve got a good percentage of organic traffic coming from Microsoft’s Bing – enough to warrant a bit of time learning more about it and how you can maximize some returns.

And the reasons are only getting stronger: If you add up Bing and Yahoo! search queries you might get an accurate picture of what the future looks like for your blog and it’s traffic from Bing since Yahoo!’s search engine is going to be powered by Bing (and co-branded with “Powered by Bing”) starting in early 2012:

Microsoft’s Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft’s online offering.

That’s worth noting – that’s worth mentioning and studying a bit, right? And even without a Yahoo! + Bing partnership it’s been shown that Bing’s marketshare is increasing year over year growing nearly 7% from 23.64% to 30% from 2010 to 2011!

Some people have suggested that at some point the possibility of Bing overtaking Google’s marketshare is possible:

Possible? Likely?

Now I’m not sure if it’s really going to happen but it’s worth my time (and yours) to understand at least the basics of Bing-related SEO strategies, right?

And, of course, we all get traffic via Bing already so it’s also worth it to optimize and maximize if possible:

I'll take any and all traffic, right?

So here are a few suggestions that are relevant to not only search engine optimization for Bing but also most other search engines as well.

Bing breaks it down into 5 main areas: Crawlability, Site Structure, On-Page SEO, Content, and Links:

Your Blog’s Crawlability:

  • XML Sitemaps – Make sure to have one! You can create one here if you have WordPress.
  • Navigation Structure – Make sure it’s easily accessed by crawlers. Learn more about site architecture here and here as well.
  • Limit Adobe Flash – Read more about SEO limitations here.
  • Limit JavaScript – Read more about SEO limitations here.
  • Limit Ajax – Read more about SEO limitations here.
  • Rich Media – If you do use rich media make sure that the user experience is clean and has a down-level experience and flow to it.
  • Keywords – Use clean and keyword rich URL structure. Permalinks and blog post slugs can help.
  • Robots.txt – Make sure you have one!

Your Blog’s Site Structure:

  • Logical Hiearchy – Make sure your content is laid out logically and with a focus on usability.
  • Internal Linking – Make sure your content has a great internal linking. Become a master architect!
  • Clean URLs – Make sure that your links have no extraneous parameters where possible. Examples are adding sessions, tracking, and other calls on the links when not necessary.
  • Sitemaps – Make sure you have sitemaps for both humans and search engines!
  • Rich Media – Make sure they don’t block links or cover up links. See SEO limitations as well here.

Your Blog’s On-Page SEO:

  • Good Titles – Should be unique relevant and between 60 and 70 characters in length. Read this kick-butt post on how to optimize your titles! Only one title per page please!
  • Meta Descriptions – Make sure they are unique, relevant, and 160 characters or less. You can learn all you want about meta descriptions and meta elements here. Only one description per page as well here!
  • Content Tags – Make sure you have the right content tags (H1, H2, etc) in your content. Learn more here.
  • Images – Make sure you are using images well and wisely with ALT tags as appropriate and descriptions with keywords. Learn about images here.
  • Keyword Targeting – Make sure you use targeted keywords for each blog post and piece of content.
  • Internal Linking – Make sure the links have the right anchor text.

Your Blog Content:

  • Keyword Research – This is so important that I dedicated an entire blog post to it! Learn more about keyword research.
  • Usability – Make sure your content is usable and is built for people, not search engines!
  • Design – Design is so important and even more important now for SEO.
  • Copy – Written copy is your ultimate weapon of choice when it comes to creating an attractive blog for search engines.
  • Architecture Depth – Make sure you create deep and content-rich pages.
  • Authority – Create amazing blog content and you’ll be seen as an authority via the search engines. Your level of authenticity helps with this as well
  • Consistency – Create a schedule and have the discipline to produce new content frequently.
  • Unique – Make sure your content is unique and not re-blogged or re-used from other sources.
  • Broken Links – Make sure you’ve captured any 404 errors, broken links, and internal 301 redirects. Have a useful 404 page as well.
  • Canonicalization – Make sure you understand the power and importance of the Canonical tag.

Your Blog’s Links and Link Structure:

  • Links – This is one of your top ingredients for optimizing your blog. Become a master link architect! Internal and external linking strategies!
  • Linking – Make sure your optimizing your links for SEO.
  • Viral Content – Make sure you know which types of blog posts often get a lot of viral traffic!
  • Paid Links – Stay away from paid links. Period.


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