Sep 252012
 

Top 50 Web Site Properties in US

Google Sites ranked as the #1 property in  Q3,2012 ,August with 187 million visitors, followed by Microsoft Sites with 170 million and Yahoo with 164million

Facebook  was at  no 4

Linkedin was no 26

Twitter.com  was at no 28),

Tumblr.com   ranked no 39

Myspace ( no 43) and Instagram.com ( no 48) all ranked among the Top 50.

MOREOnline Marketing Trends: Comscore Ranks 2012 Top 50 US Web properties ad networks.

 


Sep 042012
 

These new platforms are social at their core. So it’s instantly about more than putting a few images on a page; it’s opening a window into your brand. What companies share must strike a balance between bringing to life a genuine brand story and providing content that inspires and compels action. Furthermore, marketing strategies for how brands engage with consumers should reflect how and why consumers are using those channels.

Following are tips for navigating the waters of these new visual platforms using a combination of direct marketing best practices and our learned understanding of digital and social behavior.

If you’ve ever been a part of a website implementation, you know the biggest sticker shock is always the photography — how much it costs to produce high quality photo inventory. Yet the rise of new visual platforms has made this component more important than ever. Brands must consider the quality of photography and what images should represent their products and services.

MORE:  How Pinterest and Instagram are changing your brand strategy – iMediaConnection.com.

 


Jul 272012
 

Like. Read Later. +1. Tweet. Tumblr. StumbleUpon. For the last few years, little chiclet buttons have been spreading like measles across the web, appearing and vanishing as new tools and services rise and fall in popularity. The popular ShareThis button, which offers site owners the chance to at least corral all these social services into one pop-up box, currently offers over 120 potential destinations – and while nobody ever actually lists them all outright, it’s often hard to tell exactly who all the options are helping.

It’s a problem in need of fixing, and one that both Google and Mozilla have solutions in the works to handle – Web Intents and Web Actions/Activities respectively. Their executions vary, but the basic goal is the same: to move away from the site/app creator having to link to specific services to get things done, in favour of simply enabling them to provide verbs that the browser can handle on a user-by-user basis.

What would this mean in practice? Well, for example: at the moment, there are many different bookmarking tools, with two of the most popular being Delicious and Pinboard. To integrate a bookmark button on the end of an article, the site owner has to add two different chunks of code. In a Web Intents/Actions world this would simply become one ‘Bookmark This’ button. When the user clicks it, their browser sees the verb, consults its list of registered services, and hands over the data.

That’s only the simplest possible scenario, though. What stops Web Intents/Actions being a glorified ‘mailto: link’ is that they’re capable of far more, including two-way interaction that make them suitable for full web applications as well as simply chiclet replacements. Current Web Intents specifications handle the verbs Discover, Share, Edit, View, Pick, Subscribe and Save. With very little coding, for example, you can both send an image to an editor and receive the touched-up version back, just as easily as pulling information like contact details out of an external address book and into a specific form – all without a single custom API call or even knowing what the second party actually is.

MORE:  Web Intents: the future of web apps | Feature | .net magazine.

 


May 302012
 

These days, most websites include buttons for sharing content via social media services. Bucking the trend, designer Oliver Reichenstein has, in a piece called Sweep the Sleaze, said such buttons should be eradicated. He states that buttons do more to promote social network brands than your site, can make you look desperate and that there’s really no need to remind social network users about the likes of Facebook and Twitter. “We find content through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest and so on, not the other way around,” he said, and cited a recent Smashing Mag tweet, where the publication noted its Facebook traffic went up after removing social media buttons.

Designer Hilton Lipschitz told us he had much the same experience. Buttons were slowing his site by over a second, which made him concerned some potential visitors would leave, and many were rarely used: “One article got 22,000 page views, but there were no Google+ or Facebook Likes and no Tweet shares.” He said people are probably used to seeing these buttons but blank them out like adverts, and added that his traffic – which mostly arrives from Twitter, Reddit and Hacker News, has not been negatively affected.

Wanting to find out more about this subject, we spoke to Reichenstein (OR) about the thinking behind his article, possible dangers of social networking buttons and also the ramifications of removing them.

SOURCE ‘Drop social media buttons’ call | News | .net magazine.

 


May 292012
 

Bragging about your big pile of cash on Facebook isn’t a great idea.

A 17-year-old Australian girl learned this lesson the hard way last Thursday when she posted a picture of some money on Facebook. The girl was helping her grandmother count the loot and couldn’t help sharing that information with her online friends.

SOURCE Girl Posts Pics of Money on Facebook and Attracts Robbers.

 


May 212012
 

Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeeds president, notes that visitors to BuzzFeed simultaneously engage with an endless mashup of high- and low-brow content, from news to wacky animal photo montages. All categories of content are welcome, Steinberg says, so long as they meet BuzzFeeds simple threshold — is it shareable?

According to Steinberg, brands that work with BuzzFeed need to consider three things when figuring out how to create content worth sharing.

  • Does the content have a voice or point of view?
  • Is it a content gift?
  • What does the content do for the brand?

While the last question might seem obvious to anyone who works in advertising, the first two questions are a big part of what makes BuzzFeed such a unique play for marketers. Brands cant buy banners ads, although they can purchase placement for their post in a given vertical. But theres a catch — the content has to be good. If it is good, people will share it. If its a dud, BuzzFeed has an algorithm in place to swap it out for something better.

With just under 3 million unique visitors a month — and climbing, according to Compete — BuzzFeed is clearly a careful steward of its content ecosystem. It also tends to be way ahead of the viral curve. As any BuzzFeed user can tell you, what you see on BuzzFeed today will likely be on Facebook tomorrow. Naturally, thats a huge draw for brands looking to make a social media splash. But engaging with social media takes more than just showing up. So to help marketers reimagine themselves as social publishers, were showcasing five brands that have figured out how to buzz on BuzzFeed.

SOURCE How 5 brands are scoring big on BuzzFeed single page view – iMediaConnection.com.

 


May 162012
 

With the cosmetics and hair care brand, they did a deep dive into data to discover what women were actually searching for when they thought about beauty and discovered a huge number of people were typing specific questions into google, like “how can I do my makeup like Lady Gaga?” In response, Demand worked to produce 1,126 videos in a matter of months and on a budget, each addressing a common “how to” search query.

Some key takeaways from this panel presentation:

– Search queries are getting longer – often ten words are more. People are looking for very specific content when they search, and if you can provide it, that’s a huge service.

– The best videos for this sort of marketing are “evergreen” – that is, they remain relevant for a long time (3-5 years) by containing generally useful content, rather than being attached to a trend, celebrity, or launch. A light touch on the branding also helps the videos feel authentic, and not tied to very specific products so much as the brand.

– If your brand is traditional, start with a test – produce just a few examples of the new content type and see how they perform in search and on your site. Success is your best shot at convincing the old guard to try new tactics.

– Social listening is of the utmost importance – in fact, L’Oriel has changed their call centers into customer listening and insight hubs. Understanding what people are saying about your products, and the surrounding industry, allows you to channel feedback to the right people and meet actual demand.

– Data is the key to staying on top as trends change – know where the landscape is headed, not just what’s working now.

SOURCE: How Brands Can Meet Consumer Demand With Content – Adrants.

 


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.

 


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.

 


Oct 122011
 

 

 

Pinoy-Canadian web developer AJ Batac put together a drop dead simple javascript bookmarklet today that makes it easy to share any webpage youre visiting in Google Plus, along with a comment. The way it works is that your account publicly +1s the page, then gives you the option to share it with whatever Circles you choose.

via You Should Grab This New Google Plus Sharing Bookmarklet, It is Oh So Easy.