Apr 272012
 

 Mass market paperbacks may be taking a serious hit in sales these days, but check out this infographic showing the explosive growth in e books.

Online Marketing Trends: Digital E Books See 117% Increase..

Apr 252012
 

To engage your fans, you need to post enough content but not too much at the same time. Is there a magical number for the ideal number of posts on Facebook?

No, there is no magical number. The average number of posts tends to range between 2 – 3 posts a day but there are just too many factors that affect the engagement of a post to say that it works for each brand. So what is the right frequency?

Below are the average numbers of posts per day by the top 10 Brands and Media on Facebook. We have gathered data from last month, from March 25th to April 24th 2012.

SOURCE: How Often Should You Post On Your Wall To Engage Fans? – Socialbakers.

 


Apr 252012
 

If you hate those annoying Captcha words you need to figure out before posting on many websites including Dvice, then a company called Are You A Human feels your pain. Their system called PlayThru dumps the unreadable words, asking you instead to play a simple little visual game that requires some human knowledge.

SOURCE: Replace those frustrating Captchas with a simple visual game | DVICE.

Apr 252012
 

Within hours of Google launching its new online storage service, the terms and service have come under heavy fire by the wider community for being able to potentially stifle innovation and harm the users Google seeks to serve.

After Dropbox and Microsofts SkyDrive — the two largest online storage services on the Web — Google was late to the party by a number of years. While Google needed no advertising to drum up support, what may hold back uptake is that as per the terms and conditions of using the product, the files you upload to the Google Drive product undergoes a rights transition.

A quick analysis of Googles terms of service shows how the search company owns the files you upload the minute they are submitted, and can in effect do anything it wants to your files — and thats final. But there is a small catch.Heres what the terms say:

SOURCE: Who owns your files on Google Drive? | Internet & Media – CNET News.

 


Apr 242012
 

More than half of Facebook users are worried about timeline, according to a poll of 4,110 people by Sophos.

More specifically, of the 4,110 respondents to the Sophos poll:

  • 51.29 percent said timeline worried them;
  • 32.36 percent said they didn’t know why they were still on Facebook;
  • 8.39 percent guessed they’d get used to timeline; and
  • 7.96 percent liked timeline.

According to  Sophos, the type of Facebook user who would respond to one of its polls is likely more security-conscious than the average user on the social network.

Still, more than 50 percent expressing concern and fewer than eight percent giving timeline the thumbs-up isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users.

 


Apr 242012
 

Out of Facebook’s  845M monthly users and 2.7 billion daily likes. Of those 845 million, 161 million came from the U.S., while 46 million from India and 37 million from Brazil — two areas that are key source of growth, according to Facebook. The company further broke out its user penetration by country:

  • 80 percent of all Internet users in Chile, Turkey, and Venezuela are on Facebook
  • 60 percent of all Internet users in the U.S. and U.K. are on Facebook

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook’s US users down to 20% ,as global numbers set to reach billion.

 


Apr 242012
 

To start, they represent the top BuzzFeed articles in terms of the amount of views received in a single hour over the past year. In other words, these three articles saw the biggest spikes in traffic of anything weve published recently. But the similarities dont end there — these spikes all occurred within the same two-hour period of the day!

Theres always been the sense among publishers and marketers that content is key, and I dont disagree with that. Each of the examples above owes the majority of its success to the fact that people found the content interesting and sharable. But the fact that each example took off at the same time of day also illustrates a pivotal role that time of day plays.

SOURCE: How time of day affects content performance – iMediaConnection.com.

 


Apr 202012
 

To its credit, Philips managed to make most of these things happen. Its new L Prize Pro bulb puts out 93 lumens per watt while using only 9.7 watts, it should last 30,000 hours (20 years of four hours per day of use), and the light is natural and warm. The one thing that Philips didn’t quite get right is the price, which currently stands at a rather ambitious $60 per bulb.

It’s certainly true that on average, a bulb like this will save you about $8 worth of electricity per year over an incandescent, meaning that the bulb will pay for itself in savings in just eight short years and the rest of its lifespan is gravy. We’re not really wired to think about things in the long term, though, and most people are probably going to find the $60 entry price hard to justify.

Philips says that its plan all along has been to have utility companies subsidize the up-front cost of the bulbs by $20 or $30, and Philips itself has decided to knock $10 off the price right away for consumers.

SOURCE: Energy-saving L Prize bulb goes on sale Earth Day | DVICE.

 

Apr 202012
 

As more and more marketing dollars pour into Facebook, it only makes sense that there will be increasing curiosity and scrutiny in how those pages work to influence readers.

Facebook’s announcements last month make it clear the social media giant is ushering businesses into a content marketing world. And in that world, knowing what type of content is most effective is paramount.

For anyone interested in analyzing what types of content drive what types of engagement, there isn’t a much better place to look than Facebook. It offers the richest mix of content types, combined with clearly defined interactions, or engagements — all of which can be tracked with unprecedented access to information.

SOURCE: What consumers share on Facebook — and why – iMediaConnection.com.

 


Apr 202012
 

Another report Thursday focused on what materials Apple will be using to build that redesigned body. Computerworld claims Apple will be using an exotic material known as LiquidMetal to create the phone. Apple spent $30 million acquiring the rights to use LiquidMetal in 2010.

Rumors have circulated before that it plans to use the alloy to build a phone, however, recent reports indicate that the company will make good on those rumors with the release of the iPhone 5.

LiquidMetal is a mix of several different metals, allowing the phone to be more durable while giving it a liquid-like exterior feel. Light like plastic but durable like aluminum, LiquidMetal would allow the phone to weigh less and have a thinner profile.

SOURCE: iPhone 5 to Be Made of ‘LiquidMetal’, Arrive in October [REPORT].