The Marketing Attribution Roundtable is your chance to share knowledge, experience and best practice on the issues, trends and developments around this topic.
Attendance is limited to 12 - 18 attendees, with discussion chaired and facilitated by Econsultancy to ensure all participants get the most from the session.
The agenda for the day is very much driven by those attending - your priority areas and pain points.
Do you use Instagram for marketing? Are you wondering how you can grow an Instagram following that will build your business? To learn how Instagram can help you engage your audience, I interview Jenn Herman for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is a [...]
This post Marketing Instagram Style: What Marketers Need to Know first appeared on Social Media Examiner.
Social Media Examiner - Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
How to publish a social media post in 10 steps. As told through GIFS.
1. You get an idea for a social media post.
4. You create whatever’s necessary to bring your post to life (images, words, videos)
6. You publish the post!
7. You monitor the campaign.
8. You review the post’s performance.
9. You celebrate an awesome post with a big party.
10. You start planning for the next post.
What steps does your company take when publishing on social media? Leave a comment and join the discussion.
More than 400 large U.S. military drones have crashed in major accidents around the world since 2001, a record of calamity that exposes the potential dangers of throwing open American skies to drone traffic, according to a year-long Washington Post investigation.
When Drones Fall From The Sky
Ethical SEO is a popular selling point for agencies and consultants, but what truly constitutes ethical SEO? Following are some guidelines for performing ethical SEO. By sticking to these guidelines, you’ll keep your reputation, your clients, and the search engines happy! 1. Follow The Search...
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The last few miles of a professional bike race are a chaotic ballet as riders jostle for position just inches apart at over 40 MPH.
A Professional Cycling Sprint Looks Absolutely Terrifying From Inside The Pack
Virtual reality dystopianism and backlash have been in the cards for as long as the public has known about VR, and if anything, our extreme predictions have gotten a little less cool.
A Short History Of Virtual Reality Panic
Motorola is continuing its hot streak of delivering timely updates. Another Moto X carrier version is receiving a jump to Android 4.4.3 right now. This time it is the Sprint version. The exact software version for this update is KXA21.12-L1.22. Aside from this version of Android’s behind the scenes fixes, an improved camera app and redesigned Dialer app are included.
As usual with many software updates, this one is in the form of a staged rollout. Be patient.
Source: Sprint
Come comment on this article: Sprint rolling out Android 4.4.3 to the Moto X
Earlier today, Google announced on its Twitter account that it has added 21 new countries to its list of supported countries for the Google Play Movies. The complete list of new countries is shown below and together with the new additions brings the service’s availability to a total of up to 90 countries globally.
Check out the list of newly supported countries right after the break.
The company announced 35 new supported countries back in March and 13 more back in December last year. You can also check the list here by Google to see a complete list of supported countries for Google Play Books, Movies, Music and Newsstand.
Via: 9To5Google
Come comment on this article: Google Play Movies now supports 21 new countries
Originally, the Motorola DROID line (2013) was set to receive Android 4.4.3 shortly after that version was announced. But due to a security vulnerability that was patched in Android 4.4.4, the company had to wait for the latest version of Android. David Schuster, a member on Motorola’s Software Product Management team, provided the explanation on Google+. Motorola took Android 4.4.4 to work on and it is is now expected that the software update will arrive in about 3-5 weeks.
Hit the break for Schuster’s full post.
Sorry for the delay in giving an update on the 4.4.3 upgrades but I had to wait unit Google announced KitKat 4.4.4 today (I am bound by a NDA). A significant security vulnerability was discovered by OpenSSL (https://www.openssl.org/news/secadv_20140605.txt) and is fixed in KitKat 4.4.4. We had to wait until KitKat 4.4.4 became available. Consequently, all of our 4.4.3 upgrades that were in carrier labs worldwide (including the 2013 Droid’s) had to be respun, tested and resubmitted again. This was a significant unplanned effort that we had to undertake. We should be re-entering labs next week and hopefully getting TA (technical approval) in 3 to 5 weeks later depending on the carrier.
Source: +DavidSchuster
Come comment on this article: Sudden arrival of Android 4.4.4 pushes Motorola DROID line (2013) update 3-5 weeks
As a company, you want to create memorable experiences across every customer touchpoint. The emails you send are a key touchpoint. Too many emails and the customer will get annoyed with your company and file you as spam. Poorly designed emails won’t reflect well on your company and the products you offer. And with more people viewing their emails on mobile, it’s imperative that your mobile emails look flawless across multiple devices.
In our responsive design post, we share how companies can take advantage of readers who are opening emails on a mobile device.
When crafting a mobile email, it’s important to keep all things readable. Buttons and text should be the right size. There should be pinch and zoom required. Check out our webinar for more ideas on creating mobile emails.
Today’s infographic shows you the elements of a perfect mobile email. Use this as a helpful guide when crafting your emails. Thanks to Litmus for providing us with today’s infographic.
Google's Nest on Friday revealed it will acquire Dropcam, makers of the eponymous Internet-connected smart home monitoring camera lineup, for $555 million.
Google-owned Nest to acquire connected security camera firm Dropcam for $555M
When the Charlotte Hornets revealed their jerseys yesterday, eagle-eyed observers like Uni Watch's Paul Lukas noticed something odd — the NBA logo, which had previously appeared on jerseys on the upper left chest area, had been moved to the back of the uniform. That's an awful lot of blank space created, but worry not; the NBA knows exactly what to do with it.
NBA Jerseys Make Room For Ads
Shelly Sterling asked for an emergency motion from a court to protect herself, because her estranged husband, Donald Sterling, has been leaving threatening voicemails on the phones of the two doctors who found him mentally incompetent.
Donald Sterling Is Threatening Doctors And Lawyers On Their Voicemail
In case you missed it, here are some of the top stories in mobile marketing and advertising we’ve been following this week.
There’s an old saw (pun intended) among carpenters: measure twice, cut once. It’s intended to convey the idea that measuring is serious business — and that cutting before making sure of the dimensions leads to wasted time and money.
What do marketers do when everyone has a mobile device? It’s not rocket science. While the boom times for social network adoption in the UK are over (new user growth is set to slow to a near standstill by 2018), the growth is coming from users expanding their social network activity to mobile devices.
What would happen if a retailer could pinpoint a shopper with whom it had connected previously via mobile? Ideally, the retailer could target such a shopper for a better in-store experience. Because — think about it — what’s the point of spending on mobile to attract customers but not having anything special to reward them for making the investment of time and effort to visit the store?
Amazon on Wednesday lifted the veil on the Fire Phone, representing the online retail giant’s bold foray into smartphones. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says the long-rumored device is designed specifically for Amazon Prime customers.
Upscale hotel brands are booking more mobile investments to regain sales lost to online travel agencies. That’s the conclusion of a recent report by L2, a subscription-based business intelligence service that benchmarks the digital competence of brands.
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Starting this week, Android users can now search Google for a musician, band, or song, and tap a link to open the music right into a music application (Rdio, iHeart Radio, Spotify, Google Play, Tunein, or YouTube) on their smartphone.
Painting by Mike Odden
People have been trying to answer questions like this for years: How can I make a song a hit? How can I play in the NFL? How can I become world famous?
The reality is, for the vast majority of people, this is simply never going to happen.
For the 5% of bloggers that are able to create blog posts “that go viral”, the answer is to work your ass off until you get lucky. Then try even harder to figure out what’s working and refine what you write to connect with those key elements that resonate with your audience.
Sure, you might learn a few superficial tricks from Buzzfeed and Upworthy, but how important is a flash in the pan post vs. ongoing engagement with the people you’re actually trying to connect with?
On this topic, I just have to tell it like it is: Most people asking how their blog post go viral are too lazy or impatient to do all that hard work. They’re focused on the superficial social proof that comes from high social share counts and not on creating value.
I think it was Thomas Edison who said, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”.
When I look at our most popular posts based on page views vs. the posts that refer traffic to our company site that generate leads, it’s not the same at all. These three posts alone have over 16,000 social shares, but they’re not “lead gen” posts.
But… they do work together with content that is meant to convert. And that is the point of this post: Create content that’s meaningful and package it for exposure. Don’t just make content for exposure.
Here is generally how I organize the kinds of content we publish here to capture attention and to engage.
Content intended to generate awareness. Those are the large lists posts, thought leadership posts, influencer posts, event posts, recognition posts, crowdsourced / co-created posts, and visually spicy posts are the content getting a ton of shares and creating awareness – attracting new and passively interested visitors.
These are posts that focus on answering specific questions that buyers often have, whether they are early or middle stage in the sales cycle. Examples, how to’s and lists of tactics work pretty well to create the kind of value that create confidence and inspire an interest in seeking out more information.
This type of post isn’t published very often on our blog. That’s the job of our agency website. But when we do, these are posts that explain specifically how we work to deliver certain kinds of services, case studies and particularly clever ways of solving difficult marketing problems.
Any of these types of content could “go viral” but the focus is more on relevancy to the target audience, the inclusion of our messaging and approach, packaging and promotion for exposure. “Going viral” gets you page views, but often not a lot else – unless you’re delivering value through meaningful information that is relevant to the community.
What are your objectives for blogging? Is it to get as much attention with each post as possible? Is it all based on relevancy to brand and audience? Or do you use a layered or combination approach?
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Bing Ads has announced that their Bid Landscape tool can now be used at both the keyword and ad group level by all U.S. advertisers. The bid landscape tool, which was originally released in March, is similar to Google AdWords’ Bid Simulator Tool.
If you want to boost your website traffic overseas, you need a localized strategy for each market. Here are five SEO tips to keep in mind during that localization process. Read the full article at MarketingProfs
Five SEO Tips for Global Marketers
The Google+ Direct Connect feature in which you could quickly find Google+ pages in the search results by using the “+” command has quietly slipped away. A Google spokesperson said it was no longer a focus for Google moving forward.
Perhaps the most important feature of the new Amazon Fire Phone announced this week is Firefly, in which the handset uses its camera to recognize physical and media products in the real world and then links them to buying options on Amazon. It’s what makes the Fire Phone a shopping phone.
When Firefly is scanning an item, like a box of Cheerios, you’ll see bright little dots (fireflies) on the screen gathering around the item in the camera’s view. Once Firefly has recognized the product, a link to additional information (metadata, buying options) then appears at the bottom of the screen.
When Firefly is scanning the image, it pulls out only the uniquely identifiable pieces of the image. When scanning a box of Cheerios, Firefly would pull the outline and color of the box and the item’s logo.
Above: Firefly listens to the soundtrack of a TV show to detect the title and episode.
The outlines of those shapes, not the whole image, zips to Amazon’s cloud servers, where the system looks for a match from among the thousands of images in its product catalog, according to Fire Phone product manager Cameron James.
If the product that you scan does not appear in the Amazon product catalog, Firefly won’t recognize it. The main reason for Firefly, after all, is to help people recognize items that they can then easily buy on Amazon. Ultimately, the Fire Phone is more or less a vending machine for Amazon products.
To find the right match without going through millions of product images in the Amazon product database, James says his company uses “heuristic approaches and computer vision” to narrow down the results.
The algorithm might look for certain characteristics of the scanned image — like its color or the shape of the bounding box around the scanned image — and then looks only at images with similar general characteristics for matches.
Once Firefly finds the match, and this usually takes only a few seconds, it displays a link at the bottom of the screen that leads to other content related to the product it has found. It finds this stuff by using a code that is common between the found product and all metadata and related material.
My colleague, John Koetsier, wrote a story this week called “Amazon’s Fire Phone might be the biggest privacy invasion ever (and no one’s noticed)” about the privacy implications of the new Fire Phone. But Amazon says it doesn’t use Firefly scans for anything other than the shopper’s convenience and for improving the online retailer’s product-detection chops.
Amazon uses these images to help Firefly recognize similar images faster and with more accuracy. Here’s how the company explained it to me in a follow-up email after my 40-minute interview with James:
“As Jeff described in his presentation, computer vision is a complex problem and the more data we have to train our image recognizers, the more accurate the Firefly technology will be for customers,” James wrote. “For example, if we have multiple, different images of a single item, the recognizer can use common qualities among the images to more accurately identify the item.”
Firefly stores all of its scans in its servers, until you go to a storage-settings page on the phone and deletes the images.
Firefly does not geo-tag scans of products, Amazon says, but it does geo-tag scans of phone numbers because it wants to be able to attach area codes to numbers that don’t have them. Firefly will do this only if a customer has enabled location services during phone set-up. Users can disable location services at the Firefly app level, Amazon says. Firefly can also capture URLs and email addresses.
Nor are Firefly scans combined with personal photos taken with the phone’s camera app and stored in the Amazon servers. “The Firefly app has nothing to do with the camera app,” James said.
Firefly also can recognize and find matches for music and movies. But Firefly doesn’t actually watch video, so no need to hold the camera up to the set. “We’re recognizing the audio in the scene to recognize what you’re watching,” James said.
As the phone listens to audio, the “fireflies” on the screen gather in a tight square and appear to vibrate together.
The sound sample zips to the Amazon cloud, where it is compared against all the sounds in songs, movies, and TV shows in the Amazon catalog. For music and movies, too, an algorithm detects general characteristics (is it music, dialogue, or both?) to narrow down the number of sound files it must it must compare the sample against.
When a match for a song is found, Firefly returns a series of links and metadata about the music. It might provide a link to buy the music at Amazon, and a link to a third-party app like iHeartRadio which will use the sound sample as a seed for a new radio station.
When a match for a TV show is found, Firefly identifies the episode and even the part of the episode that was scanned. The link on the bottom of the page links to iMDB data about the show and the actors, and links to the steam, download, and physical copy buying options at Amazon.
Firefly can also identify live TV from 160 broadcast stations. This has nothing to do with selling products in the Amazon marketplace; once Firefly finds a match, it returns information about the show and the people in it from the iMDB database. It also provides some options for sharing the content on via social media.
Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where cu... read more »
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If you’re wondering about the latest recipients of money in the technology business, you’ll be happy to hear that one of the more active venture capital firms in early-stage deals, Khosla Ventures, is among the newly funded. Read to learn more about that deal and others.
Khosla Ventures has announced plans to raise another very tall pile of money to invest in startups. The company disclosed a new $1 billion fund, Khosla Ventures V, L.P., in a filing today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We asked multiple Khosla executives for comment and got no-comment responses. The new fund would nearly match the $1 billion fund Khosla Ventures raised three years ago.
Read more on VentureBeat: Khosla Ventures starts to raise a heavy-duty $1B fund
Enterprise-focused cloud file-storage company Box has been on a difficult road to an IPO, and it might be raising some extra money before it actually goes public. Box is in talks with private-equity firm TPG to raise a new round of funding, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The round could total $100 million or more, according to Re/code.
Read more on VentureBeat: Box could raise another $100M before its IPO
Disney’s recent acquisition of YouTube network Maker Studios shows how much firms value video these days — and MiTú just got some swell money for its own network. Today, Latino media company and video network MiTú announced that it has raised $10 million in a second round of funding to continue building its engineering and sales efforts and expand its production facilities in Los Angeles and Mexico City. Some of MiTú’s original investors joined Upfront Ventures in the round; Upfront was one of the original investors in Maker Studios. MiTú was founded in 2012 by Doug Greiff, Beatriz Acevedo, and Roy Burstin. Its previous investors include The Chernin Group LLC, Machinima chairman and chief executive Allen DeBevoise, and Advancit Capital.
Read more on VentureBeat: Latino YouTube network MiTú just bagged $10M
GUEST POST
At this year’s WWDC, Apple made a big announcement: the introduction of its new CloudKit developer framework. The word “new” might be misleading — this isn’t Apple’s first foray into cloud application programming interfaces (APIs). The API set for iCloud was previously available to developers, providing an easy way to use core data (a very powerful, proprietary data store available on iOS and Mac alike, where contents are then stored in iCloud.)
CloudKit is now Apple’s return to cloud APIs and its answer to data storage in the cloud. With CloudKit, every application has its own CloudKit container, which includes CloudKit records and CloudKit databases. These records support relationships, they can be queried, and applications can subscribe to changes to this data. CloudKit also comes with support for both shared and public databases for an app, with the addition of private databases for data specific to users. Another new benefit is CloudKit’s high limits for both storage and bandwidth — 1 PB for assets and 10 TB for databases — rendering storage practically free. And Apple says it will also scale and grow storage with every user.
With such promise for cloud storage, backup, and transfer, CloudKit might seem like Apple’s new mobile-backend-as-service (MBaaS) offering. MBaaS concentrates on simplifying the connectivity of mobile apps to backend systems, providing developers a way to link their mobile apps to cloud backends. It has grown in popularity as a mobile development approach, given the benefits to enterprise users, such as the ease of access, scalability, and flexibility in the cloud. But there are marked differences between true MBaaS and Apple’s CloudKit, and enterprise organizations should approach the solution with a degree of caution.
Apple is often positioned as being on the front line of technology and innovation, but the reality is that enterprise organizations deal with a wide variety of devices. A recent ComScore report found that 41 percent of U.S. smartphones operate on the Apple platform, while 52 percent operate on Android. CloudKit’s critical challenge is that it locks your data into the Apple ecosystem, which means that your users on Android won’t be able to access the same data. Likewise, there’s no access for web applications (on desktops), no access for web apps (on mobile phones), and no access to the data for an analytics engine to crunch the numbers.
Such lock-in could be a non-starter with organizations that look for the flexibility of multi-platform deployments. While Apple continues to be a very popular development ecosystem — especially with this added easy access to Apple’s out-of-the-box cloud APIs — the reality is that locking into this one system, or any one system, is ultimately constraining on an organization’s overall mobile efforts. Rarely now are organizations developing their entire mobile strategies solely for iOS. These mobile efforts require access to data and business logic from multiple sources in the cloud, and limiting to CloudKit won’t be feasible in the long-term.
In stark contrast, existing MBaaS providers offer a much more open and flexible architecture, with the ability to export data via REST API or download compressed data for offline, local processing. Users can access data from anywhere.
The question of adoption depends on specific considerations. Where CloudKit supports both consumer apps and enterprise apps, a true MBaaS option can be more enterprise-focused. This includes, but is not limited to, support for services such as caching, user management, and usage analysis tools, as well as online and offline sync to the cloud.
These more sophisticated enterprise-grade platforms can also offer developers easy access to plugins to integrate with all of the popular services such as Salesforce and SAP.
CloudKit also requires that a device have access to an iCloud account on the device. If the user is not logged into iCloud, or if the account changes, it could cause frustrations that are not an issue for MBaaS offerings where there are no end-user account requirements.
CloudKit appears to be Apple’s challenge to Microsoft Azure, and it is an initial step toward MBaaS. But while they are taking a big step forward (especially when it comes to opening up additional new cloud APIs), the new offering comes with risks, including a critical issue of lock-in to the Apple ecosystem. Apple has yet to release any details of a REST API or an export mechanism, meaning that data will likely stay locked into Apple’s systems — unusable across other mobile projects.
Advertised as being able to provide useful cloud storage and promising to allow developers to focus on client-side work, CloudKit may not be enough of a solution at this time for businesses looking toward the promise of enterprise-grade mobility.
Instead, the kit is somewhat shy of the flexibility and scalability required for the large enterprise development projects of today’s mobile-first organizations. Despite CloudKit’s promise, app developers for the enterprise and consumers alike must take note.
A serial entrepreneur, Cathal McGloin is the chief executive of FeedHenry, provider of the industry’s leading open standards-based mobile application platform. Cathal has championed startup ventures in IT and Telecoms, including Performix Technologies which he founded, and Aran Technologies where he was President/VP Sales. His previous enterprise IT career was with Siemens, Germany and Cap Gemini, UK. He is based in Boston.
Apple designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes t... read more »
