How to convince your boss to fund content marketing

 Marketing, Your Brand  408 Responses »
May 092012
 

Though most companies today have some kind of online presence, 22 percent of marketers find that getting buy-in for online content marketing is still their greatest challenge. Even if there’s enough buy-in to give it a shot, marketers still need to convince their companies to invest in the staff and resources that will make online marketing possible. Successful online content marketing begins by convincing your own company that the ROI merits the investment.

via How to convince your boss to fund content marketing – iMediaConnection.com.

5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline

 interface, Marketing, Your Brand  240 Responses »
May 092012
 

Companies that neglect Timelines brand-friendly attributes will fall victim to the ever-distracted nature of the online consumer. At Socialbakers, we continuously analyze social media data to determine how brands can maximize their social media investments by posting engaging content to the most influential online users. Based on millions of points of global data, we have found the following mistakes cause the greatest hindrance to a companys success in using Timeline.

SOURCE: 5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline single page view – iMediaConnection.com.

 

VLC Offers a Free DVD Player, Why Can’t Microsoft?

 Tech News  399 Responses »
May 082012
 

We’ve recommended VLC on more than one occasion, and for good reasons. It’s the swiss army knife of the video playback world. It supports more formats and codecs then we can count, installs quickly, and is updated frequently. With the upcoming release of Windows 8 however, it will start offering a new killer feature most people probably didn’t care about before – DVD playback. Microsoft’s decision to not support DVD playback in Windows 8 unless you shell out the extra cash for media center has created a ton of vitriol in comment feeds around the web, but also a pretty obvious question. If a free and open source app can offer the feature, why can’t Microsoft? ZDNet blogger Ed Bott set out to answer the question, and his findings may surprise you.

Before we get to the answer it is important to understand that DVD playback is made possible by way of two core software components. First you need an MPEG-2 decoder, and second you need Dolby Digital audio support. The cost of adding these to Windows 7 is estimated to be somewhere in the range of $2-$3, so how does VLC do this for free? It helps to be French.

SOURCE: Maximum PC | VLC Offers a Free DVD Player, Why Can’t Microsoft?.

 

The top 10 hottest brands in online video

 Internet News, Marketing  260 Responses »
May 082012
 

In April, the Top Brands in Video chart saw debuts from Chrysler, a long-established American brand, and Tipp-Ex, a lesser-known European brand aiming to make an impact in social video. Additionally, Nike and T-Mobile made comebacks after short hiatuses from the top 10 slots.

Powered by data from Visible Measures, this monthly chart looks at the most-watched brands in online video, across all of their campaigns.

SOURCE: The top 10 hottest brands in online video (single page view) – iMediaConnection.com.

 

6 lessons in launching a branded YouTube channel

 Marketing, Your Brand  323 Responses »
May 072012
 

The idea, in a nutshell, is that brands of all categories must adapt to the new publishing model and morph into something akin to their entertainment cousins if they are to survive and thrive in a media environment where it gets harder everyday to capture a consumer’s attention. Brands that had their own YouTube channels were viewed as cutting edge 18 months ago — or maybe even a little beyond the cutting edge. Today, few people ask whether a brand should have a YouTube channel. Instead, the question is, what should a brand do with its YouTube channel?

While that’s ultimately a question for each brand (and the agencies that handle their business) to answer, there are several larger questions brands should be asking about their YouTube channels. After all, a handful of brands are clearly engaging as if they’ve been in the content business for years, but many more are quite obviously stuck in neutral. So to help your brand take a look at its YouTube channel with fresh eyes, I’ve asked several agencies to share what they believe are some of the fundamental concerns to focus on when planning a YouTube channel.

SOURCE: 6 lessons in launching a branded YouTube channel (single page view) – iMediaConnection.com.

 

Whats Americas Most Engaging Social Network? Youll Be Surprised

 Internet News  458 Responses »
May 072012
 

Try to guess America’s most engaging social network. Facebook? Wrong. Twitter? Wrong. Pinterest? Wrong again. According to comScore‘s most recent social networking data, from the month of March, the San Francisco based site Tagged engages users like no other service. It was the only site to finish in the top two in both of comScore’s engagement metrics.

Tagged users visited an average of 18 times each during March according to ComScore, second only to Facebook’s average of 36 visits per vistor. And each time a Tagged user visited the site, he or she stuck around for 12.1 minutes — which trailed only Tumblr 14.7 minutes and beat out Facebook 10.9 minutes.

Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng says he’s happy about ComScore’s March data, but that his company has been among America’s most engaging social networks for about a year now. The secret to Tagged’s success? A pivot Tseng and co-founder Johann Schleier-Smith made around the beginning of 2008.

SOURCE: Whats Americas Most Engaging Social Network? Youll Be Surprised.

 

Facebook announces initial IPO price range of $28 to $35

 Internet News  317 Responses »
May 042012
 

Facebook is slated to set its price range for its initial public offering (IPO) at $28 to $35, according to an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. The company is expected to be publicly listed on the NASDAQ exchange on May 18 under the ticker symbol “FB.”

“Facebook, Inc. is offering 180,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 157,415,352 shares of Class A common stock,” the company wrote in the S-1 filing.

“We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders. This is our initial public offering and no public market currently exists for our shares of Class A common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $28.00 and $35.00 per share.”

However, one WSJ reporter also noted on Twitter that some investors, including Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and venture capitalist), Microsoft, Greylock (another VC firm), and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself are already looking to cash in to some degree before the IPO on non-public stock that they had held so far.

At the listed opening price range, the company is expected to raise over $13 billion, and would put its market capitalization, or estimated total worth, in the $77 to $96 billion range, just shy of Amazon’s current value and about twice that of HP’s. But that’s still relatively low compared to the Silicon Valley titans. By comparison, Google’s market cap is at about $200 billion, and Apple is hovering around $540 billion.

SOURCE: Facebook announces initial IPO price range of $28 to $35.

 

Google Docs boasts 450 new fonts and 60 new templates

 interface, Internet News  348 Responses »
May 042012
 

The 60 new templates are designed for work, home, school, fun, holiday, and more. Examples of some of the types of templates include resumes, newsletters, recipes, photo sharing, and legal invoices.

Google has worked on vast improvements to its word processing program since it launched in 2007, including the addition of more than 200 updates to the core apps suite in the past year. These changes are apparently causing some users to make the switch from Microsoft Word.

Other Google Docs announcements from today include more options for inserting images into documents, charts in spreadsheets now have support for minor gridlines and customization, and users can set the default page size for new documents.

SOURCE: Google Docs boasts 450 new fonts and 60 new templates | Internet & Media – CNET News.

 

How a fake Justin Bieber “sextorted” hundreds of girls through Facebook

 Internet News, Law  298 Responses »
May 022012
 

Police in Biloxi, Mississippi received a disturbing report in the summer of 2011: someone using the e-mail address dalton.powers1@yahoo.com had been contacting young girls in the area through Facebook. “Dalton” said he was new to Biloxi and was looking for friends. When girls aged 9-16 responded, he struck up conversations. These led quickly to a question game in which he asked the girls about their bra sizes, sexual experiences, and bodily imperfections.

When girls responded, Dalton then demanded that they go further and send him topless images. If they did not, he would take the information provided by the girls themselves and send it to their parents, friends, and school officials. Numerous girls complied, though some could only bring themselves to pose in their underwear. Nearly every shot came from the cameras on the cell phones each girl owned.

Of course, a single picture wasn’t enough. Dalton demanded that those in their underwear send him topless shots, that those already topless send him fully nude shots, and that those who had posed nude send him live webcam footage of sexual activity. Some girls, even very young ones, did so in order to avoid further embarrassment.

Parents complained to police after several girls revealed what had been happening. “They didn’t want to play his game anymore,” Biloxi police Detective Donnie Dobbs told a local paper recently.

Connecting Facebook accounts and e-mail addresses to an IP address is trivial; connecting those IP addresses to real-world Internet subscribers is no harder. So the Biloxi police had little difficulty tracing Dalton to a house on Melbourne Circle in Montgomery, Alabama.

The only problem: while IP address lookups may be accurate, they never identify people. And the family living in the house on Melbourne Circle certainly hadn’t been conducting criminal extortion on Facebook. So what was going on?

SOURCE: How a fake Justin Bieber “sextorted” hundreds of girls through Facebook.

 

8 social curation tricks for Pinterest and beyond

 Internet News, Marketing, Your Brand  405 Responses »
May 022012
 

Today’s web does not limit the act of curation to those with a doctorate degree. Anyone and everyone can, and do, curate using everything from bookmarking sites to social networks. “Social curation,” as we call it, is simply the act of sharing, categorizing, and spreading content to others. The content can be your own or someone else’s. And, because you are sharing content that lives in its place of origin via linking, it is not considered stealing.

Why do people spend hours online bookmarking, pinning, and reposting? The answer is different for everyone, but we can be sure that it’s for the same reason a woman might show off her shoe closet to a friend to hear, “OMG, those are so cute where did you find these?!” Or, a man might sit through an entire dinner carefully talking through the history of aviation and the ins and outs of his profession. We all want to be recognized for our expertise, talents, and savvy. Posting content we care about displays our creativity, interests, opinions, and personality. Being social creatures, we naturally want to share the best of things with our circles and get recognition for the good find. On the receiving end, people enjoy discovering and exploring things that are highly relevant and interesting.

Of course, when human behavior shifts, brands are quick to follow suit. In this article, we’ll discuss how marketers can get in on the social curation boom in a meaningful way.

There are a lot of websites out there offering curation-type services. They crop up and disappear with the latest craze. To get a clear sense of how a brand might leverage curation, we can break them down into categories.

SOURCE:  8 social curation tricks for Pinterest and beyond (single page view) – iMediaConnection.com.

 

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