9 Essential Steps for a Killer Kickstarter Campaign

 Marketing, Your Brand  437 Responses »
May 142012
 

These days, more Kickstarter campaigns are achieving success than we can keep track of. The iPhone-friendly Pebble watch earned $7.6 million more than its $100,000 goal. And the Galileo iPhone platform closed its Kickstarter campaign at $702,000, far surpassing its $100,000 goal.

Not to mention, Kickstarter recently reported it has raised $200 million from over 2 million backers.

How does one cash in literally on the Kickstarter craze? For starters, it helps to have a unique concept, wicked ambition and one unforgettable pitch. The great news is that Kickstarter provides great tools to showcase all of the above.

We’ve read all of Kickstarter’s guidelines, FAQs and tips, and have researched testimonials from successful campaign alums to compile a set of tips that will help launch you into the Kickstarter hall of fame.

SOURCE:  9 Essential Steps for a Killer Kickstarter Campaign.

 

A separate mobile website: no forking way

 interface, Internet News, Web Design  422 Responses »
May 092012
 

Karen McGrane warns about the dangers of content forking and tells us that the problem responsive design is trying to solve is really a problem with the CMS

The experience of using a mobile website should naturally be different from a desktop experience – not just visual presentation, content should be prioritised and structured differently. The risk, though, is that you’ll wind up maintaining different versions. News flash: this will be a disaster. Duplicate content. Out-of-sync updates. Wasted effort.

When usability pioneer Jakob Nielsen argued that you should “Build a separate mobile-optimised site (or mobile site) if you can afford it” where you cut features and content “that are not core to the mobile use case”, many within the mobile design and development community got out their torches and pitchforks. Seems like people who spend a lot of time thinking about mobile agree that a separate mobile website is “180-degrees backward”.

But what does a “separate mobile website” even mean?

Whether you’re talking about content or code, what you want to guard against is creating multiple versions of your website. It’s called forking, and it’s a forking nightmare from a maintenance perspective. If you fork your website into separate mobile and desktop versions, then you’re stuck updating both of them every time there’s a change. Avoiding this problem is tricky, even with sophisticated content management systems. But before we get there, let’s start with a simple scenario.

via A separate mobile website: no forking way | Opinion | .net magazine.

 

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  389 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.

 

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