2013 March » i3m Blog

Facebook Admits Likes Are Down For Some Celebrities’ Posts, But Claims Up 34% For Most

interface, Internet News 341 Responses »

Mar 052013

Facebook today confirmed dwindling engagement with public posts to subscribers cited by The New York Times’ Nick Bilton, other journalists, and I, but calls us isolated cases, noting public figures with more than 10,000 fans are now getting 34 percent more Likes and comments than a year ago. While Facebook often changes the news feed to improve the user experience, the inconsistency is irksome.

So here’s the story. Yesterday, Nick Bilton of the New York Times wrote that when using Facebook’s Twitter-esque Subscribe feature to post public updates to his subscribers, he’s getting a lot fewer Likes and comments than a year ago. He suggested this is because Facebook is showing more ads instead.

Other journalists including me cited similar experiences, where our Facebook follower counts had grown significantly, but we were getting equal or less engagement now than in the months after Subscribe launched. I suggested that along with the presence of ads, people sharing more posts that compete for news feed space and Facebook’s tendency to give more feed presence to new products may have been responsible for the drought.

In a bit of damage control, Facebook sent out the following statement, hoping to frame these cases as flukes. Here’s the full-text, with my comments in brackets.

How to create a stellar content marketing program

Marketing, Your Brand 63 Responses »

Mar 052013

IMN recently surveyed marketing professionals across different industries to get a clear picture of how they viewed content marketing programs, and subsequently, measured its effectiveness. While the vast majority of respondents understand the value of a content marketing program, have a solid grasp on what the goals of the program should be, and are engaged in content marketing efforts, many are having serious challenges in executing a content marketing program at a very basic level. Internal resource constraints, finding and sourcing relevant content, making sure content passes regulatory compliance, and hiring good content writers were the primary challenges respondents faced when implementing a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing program drivers

Customer and prospect engagement and awareness are two of the top goals for content marketing programs. Combined, these two responses represented the top goal of 51 percent of survey respondents. Customer loyalty, increased leads, increased revenue, and thought leadership are also program drivers. While 82 percent of respondents were either directly or indirectly involved in their content marketing strategy, 29 percent did not feel they had a solid understanding of what content marketing could accomplish in terms of customer engagement.

To achieve any of these program goals, organizations need to map the type of content to the goal. For example, if customer and prospect engagement is a top goal, thinking about the top five questions a prospect might ask and mapping the content to those areas would be a sound strategy.

Opera’s overhauled Android browser now in beta

Internet News, Tech News 214 Responses »

Mar 052013

The first results of Operas WebKit brain transplant are now available for people to try: a beta version of Opera for Android.The new version uses Android-native user-interface elements but preserves many Opera features such as Speed Dial. It gets some new features, too, such as Off-road Mode to enable a proxy-browsing technology designed for slow network connections and the Discovery tool for people who want to browse content tailored to their interests.

Six Social Media Tips for Traditional Media

Internet News, Marketing, Your Brand 400 Responses »

Mar 042013

This presentation on “6 Social Media Tips for Traditional Media” was presented by Erica Swallow on Friday, June 25, 2010 at Social Media Brasil (http://www.socialmediabrasil.com.br/), the largest social media conference in Brazil.

The presentation cover six tips that online publishers should consider when implementing a new social media strategy or improving upon an existing strategy.

Six Social Media Tips for Traditional Media from Erica Swallow

via Six Social Media Tips for Traditional Media.

How Brands are Using Google+

Agency News 555 Responses »

Mar 042013

Launched by Google in 2011, Google+ is the latest social networking tool on the block. Businesses of all types, but especially those in the consumer goods market, are giving the platform a try. In this presentation, attendees will discover the pros and cons of using Google+ from a business point of view, while also learning about how other brands are using the platform.

How Brands are Using Google+ from Erica Swallow

via How Brands are Using Google+.

3 fresh ways to look at keywords

interface, Internet News, Your Brand 243 Responses »

Mar 042013

When it comes to keyword research, there are a number of great articles out there telling you where to look, what tools to use, and how to get started. Instead of focusing on the traditional tactics, I want to focus on some other ways businesses can identify and evaluate keywords using real customer data.

Internal site search

If you have an internal site search function, you’re potentially sitting on a wealth of keyword data. Visitors coming to your website or blog often use the site search function to find information on the company and its products, or to locate pieces of content they’ve read before.

The great thing about site search is it not only helps you discover keywords your customers are using, it can also help you identify navigational or content issues. If your customers are searching for something, it likely means they are having trouble finding what they are looking for. Does that content exist on the site? If so, you need to make it easier to locate. If it doesn’t, get cracking!

Google Analytics will track these internal searches for you. To enable site search, go to your profile settings and set to “Do Track Site Search.” If you need help identifying parameters, head over to the Google Analytics site for more information.

Database House Wants You to Stop Dropping ACID

Internet News, Tech News 51 Responses »

Mar 042013

NoSQL databases have made it possible to store more data faster and cheaper than ever before. Web giants like Google, Amazon and Facebook have come to depend on them in a big way. But they have some fundamental drawbacks that prevent them from handling many software applications. And FoundationDB wants to change that.

FoundationDB is the company behind the new proprietary database of the same name, and it claims to offer the performance benefits of NoSQL without many of the well-known trade-offs. The product has been available to a small group of alpha testers since January 2012, but on Monday, the company is making it available to the world at large.

The NoSQL movement grew out of papers published in 2006 and 2007 by Amazon and Google that described data storage systems distributed across hundreds or even thousands of cheap servers. These papers inspired open source imitators like Cassandra, Hbase, and Riak. But to achieve the mammoth scale that they did, these databases had to break with an old database tradition called “ACID.”

ACID stands for “atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability.” Together, these properties ensure that when you make a change to a database — or a series of changes — those changes are either recorded reliably and permanently or rejected completely.

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