The digital advertising industry is willing to try just about anything to stamp out malware.
In a new push, the FBI and U.S. Department of Justice began working with the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Anti-Malware Working Group last month, at the newly-formed group's request.
"We have become such a target of organized crime that we think this is the only way to truly be successful long term," said IAB exec-VP Mike Zaneis in an interview with Ad Age.
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Need some creative inspiration for link building tactics? Columnist Erin Everhart has you covered.
The post 21 Link Building Ideas That Have Nothing To Do With Guest Posting appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Google today released security testing tool Firing Range, a Java application that contains a wide range of XSS and a few other web vulnerabilities. A deployed version is available on Google App Engine and since the tool is open source you can check out the code on GitHub.
More to follow
Social media has been a game changer for the holiday shopping season. Once upon a time, gift inspiration came from catalogs, and customer inquiries were handled in-store or on the phone. Now, more and more customers are turning to social media to get both gift ideas and real-time customer service.
When it comes to gift ideas, Crowdtap statistics show 64.8% of shoppers scroll through their social feeds to find ideas for the perfect present. Most small businesses and non-profits have caught on to this trend and share gift guides, mention upcoming sales or specials services, and/or provide year-end donation suggestions. While your holiday marketing efforts on social media may be up to par, is your customer service on social top-notch, too?
Current or potential customers are extremely vocal on social and reaching out to a business publicly on Facebook or Twitter garners the attention of many. With increased sales and inquiries during the holiday season, follow these tips to ensure you offer the kind of social customer service that will wow shoppers this holiday season:
1. Respond quickly
Every comment, question, complaint and kudos should get a timely response. This is true whether it’s the holiday season or not, but it’s even more important when the masses are keeping a close eye on your social sites.
“The immediacy of social media communications creates an expectation from customers of immediate response by brands,” says David Erickson, vice president of Online Marketing at public relations firm Karwoski & Courage. “If customers don’t get an immediate response, it is by definition a negative experience.”
In other words, don’t let feedback sit unanswered on your social sites.
2. Offer a positive experience
Research shows that customers who have a positive exchange with a business on social media are 71% more likely to recommend that business to others.
During the holiday season, referrals are crucial. Every interaction that a social media visitor has with your business should be positive. So, how do you deal with unflattering reviews? You do so with tact. Apologize for any inconvenience, be sympathetic to the customer’s needs, and offer to speak about the problem in private. That’s exactly what an Arizona car dealership did in its response to a customer’s negative experience with its service department.
3. Spread some holiday cheer with images
Keep your social sites updated with current holiday images to show customers that your business is in the holiday spirit. Find a dozen or so photos that you can use throughout the season for your cover art on Facebook, create a holiday-themed Pinterest board and tweet images from classic holiday movies.
4. Give support
During the holidays, customers may have questions about how your product works or need troubleshooting tips. Social media is a great outlet for this. Xbox, for example, answers gaming questions via Twitter. Consider offering this kind of special customer service around the holidays; this could boost your reputation and relationship with buyers.
5. Offer holiday-themed promotions or tools
Your social customer care shouldn’t just be reactive; it should be proactive, too. You want to do more than just respond quickly and politely to feedback; you want to engage with customers.
Research shows customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20 to 40 percent more money with that company. That’s all the more reason to get shoppers socially engaged. Here are few holiday-themed ideas:
How do you use social media to provide customer service? Add to our list of tips in the comments section below.
Visit our Everything Holiday site for more helpful holiday marketing resources, and you can do all your email marketing for free with VerticalResponse!
© 2014, VerticalResponse Blog. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited.
The post 5 Terrific Tips for Stellar Holiday Service on Social Media appeared first on VerticalResponse Blog.
But there's a huge flaw with this strategy. Users interact and consume content on each of these social media channels differently. So to make the most of these platforms, you need to optimize your posts for each social network.
To walk you through the mechanics of a successful status update on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, I developed the following presentation. Over 100K viewers have found it beneficial thus far -- and hopefully you will too.
But I've got to warn you: Social media is constantly changing, and while the data and best practices unveiled here are a strong start to success, nothing beats testing each strategy for your own audience.
That said, click through the following SlideShare to view the entire presentation or scroll below to read the 30 tips in non-visual form.
 | Facebook Best Practices |
According to Facebook, on average, 1,500 possible stories are filtered through per day on an average Facebook user’s News Feed -- but only 300 of them actually make it into a user's News Feed. So how do you ensure your content is included in that 300? Let's explore Facebook-specific best practices for posting.
Although Facebook has made moves to crack down on photo posts with links, so far it seems that images on Facebook remain among the most engaging posts. While I'm in no way suggesting you should post photos just for the sake of clicks, it seems that photos are a key play for garnering engagement on your Facebook Business Page.
While optimizing image upload size isn't a make-it-or-break-it recommendation, it's best to have the visuals you upload fit in the specific dimensions Facebook allows for posts. Here are three key image dimensions to know:
Keep your copy succinct by removing the horrendously long URL you're sharing from the text in your post. Your update real estate is precious, and you want to ensure any characters employed are purely for the sake of sparking a reader's attention. Any user can click on the generated thumbnail or title for that URL to navigate to the blog post, web page, or any URL you're linking to -- so no need to include it in the copy of your post as well.
According to a study from TrackMaven, posts with 80+ words garner 2X as much engagement. While this by no means implies every post published should be a novel, it does make it clear that updates that require certain context should employ such -- Facebook users are willing to read!
According to the same TrackMaven study, various punctuation uses on Facebook garner different results. Each is worth testing for which works best with your audience. Here are the specific ones mentioned:
While albums on Facebook are great for organization, including photos within an album limits the engagement per photo uploaded. We've seen zero engagement on photos added directly to an album. However, if we upload that same image directly onto our News Feed as a one-time update, it suddenly receives much more traction. I recommend first uploading onto your News Feed, and after the initial engagement wears off (about five hours), you can go back and organize that photo update into one of your albums if you really want to.
When you're uploading a link directly to your News Feed, if the original post has a lengthy title, be sure to click into the title to edit it. Any title above 100 characters gets cut off when posted on your Facebook Business Page, and you don't want the core message to disappear as a result!
According to the aforementioned TrackMaven study, posts published after hours (5 p.m. - 1 a.m. EST), see 11% more interactions than those published during the day (8 a.m. - 5 p.m.). They also see 29% more interactions than those published before work (1 a.m. - 8 a.m.). This calls on a need to publish our weekly posts at varying times, including after folks have clocked out of work for the day.
In a similar vein, TrackMaven found that posts published on Sundays get 25% more Likes, shares, and comments than Wednesday posts -- even though fewer than 18% of posts are published on weekends. A similar pattern emerges with email open rates, highly suggesting the need to experiment with week social media and email promotion.
According to an AMEX Open Forum study, emoticons can result in a few different results on Facebook:
 | LinkedIn Best Practices |
According to LinkedIn, more than four million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages. Furthermore, 87% of users trust LinkedIn as a source of info that affects decision-making. How do you ensure your content is among the trusted sources? Let's look at the LinkedIn-specific best practices.
When you're uploading a link directly to your LinkedIn Company Page, if the original post has a lengthy title, be sure to click into the title to edit it. Any title above 70 characters gets cut off when posted on your Page.
Similar to the link title limitations, the description associated with your status update is given 250 characters before it's cut off with an ellipsis. So shorten your meta description to properly display on LinkedIn.
According to QuickSprout, including a link in your LinkedIn posts drives 200% more engagement. (Click to tweet!)
Just be sure to follow the tips 11-12 to optimize those link updates!
According to QuickSprout, posting images results in a 98% higher comment rate. (Click to tweet!)
According to QuickSprout, linking to YouTube videos results in a 75% higher share rate. (Click to tweet!)
According to LinkedIn, publishing 20 posts per month allows you to reach 60% of your audience. (Click to tweet!)
While you have to strike a nice balance between gated and ungated content on all social networks, LinkedIn is a little different. Our data shows that LinkedIn is 277% more effective for lead generation than Facebook and Twitter. LinkedIn users are more welcoming to lead gen content -- so long as the content truly is valuable to their success.
LinkedIn announcements can serve as a powerful tool in increasing your LinkedIn lead generation. On the days we send an announcement from a LinkedIn Group, we see a spike in leads for the day. We also see the impact of that send trickle over the next day or two. Now, while you can create your own group, you'll need to nurture a strong following to start generating leads from the announcements. Another option is to engage in a set number of groups and then find a way to use one of the group's announcements for your own (relevant) marketing.
 | Twitter Best Practices |
According to Twitter, it took three years, two months, and one day from the first tweet sent to get to the billionth tweet sent. It now only takes one week to send a billion tweets. So how do you ensure your content is seen among all that noise? Our final best practices are all about Twitter.
There are two reasons behind why we should keep our tweets short:
If you're sharing a quote, stat, or article from a brand or user, be sure to include that brand or user's handle in the tweet. This will increase the likelihood of them seeing your tweet and retweeting it to their own audience. The more your content is shared, the more following you'll gain, and the more your message will be spread.
This rule is always confusing. In order to understand how your content is being shared, you need to understand how your content is being seen. When you place a Twitter handle directly at the beginning of a tweet, you're directly sending a message to a user, but it is not a private direct message. That tweet can also be seen by anyone who follows both your account and the account you're tweeting to. If you want everyone to see your tweet, regardless of whether they are following both you and the person you're mentioning, a common tactic is to add a period as a character at the start of the tweet.
As if seeing #every #other #word in a #tweet as a #hashtag isn't irking enough, a report from Salesforce even revealed that tweets with one or two hashtags receive 21% higher engagement than those with three or more hashtags.
At the time of this post being drafted, the top trending hashtag was #ReplaceASongNameWithTwerk. I don't know about you, but I'm not sure how to include that trend into my business tweets ... yet the recommendation to incorporate trending hashtags still exists! Unless it's a relevant industry hashtag like #INBOUND14, just stay away. In fact, Twitter reveals that 17% of the top 1,000 search terms on Twitter "churn over" on an hourly basis. So if popular search terms are churning at rapid rates, what's the use of forcing your content into those queries?
While visuals are important for multiple marketing channels, they are often forgotten on Twitter. An analysis from Simply Measured shows that while photos are not shared as frequently as normal tweets (tweets that are solely text-based), tweets with photos receive the highest engagement. While this could be related to the fact that less photos are shared than text-based tweets, it's important to test out using visuals.
In fact, our own analysis has shown that tweets with images see a 55% increase in leads! (Click to tweet!)
This is the mistake I see most often on Twitter -- stop sharing your Instagram photos directly to your Twitter profile! When an Instagram photo is shared, a user must click on the link and be directed away from Twitter just to view the image (it doesn't appear automatically in the feed). Instagram photos are also not indexed in your collection of Twitter photos that are featured prominently on your profile. Data from the aforementioned Simply Measured analysis also mentions that photos directly uploaded on Twitter receive about five times the engagement per tweet as photos with Instagram photos. So please, just stop it.
When uploading an image in your tweets, be sure to optimize them for the actual Twitter Activity Stream. For the perfect image appearance in a user's activity stream, upload photos 440 pixels by 220 pixels.
Twitter allows you to tag users in your photos -- you know, so you don't have to use up your precious 140 character count with user handles. Tagging a user will notify them of your photo upload, increasing their likelihood of retweeting or favoriting the content.
I know this is tedious, but when possible, place links about 25% of the way through a tweet. Data from Dan Zarrella shows that links placed earlier in a tweet receive much higher clickthrough rates than links placed at the end of a tweet. Presenting the link earlier catches a reader's attention faster, and is different from the majority of tweets placing the link at the end.
When sharing links, another best practice is to shorten those links. Not only will shortened links host tracking information for you to assess the effectiveness of your tweets, but they also appear much cleaner in a tweet. A link can be around 20 characters before Twitter crops the tweet with an ellipsis.
As important as how you tweet is when you tweet. More data from Dan Zarrella highlights two key tweeting times. His data shows that the highest number of clicks appear between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. Monday to Thursday. The data also shows that the best time to get retweet is from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays.
With these 30 best practices under your battle belt, you'll be prepared to completely dominate on social media.
Editor's Note: This post has been updated to reflect the latest social media features and updates as of November 2014.
More than a year after the previous Penguin update (2.1), last month Google launched Penguin 3.0. So far, the update has affected less than 1% of US/English queries. However, Pierre Far (Web Trends Analyst at Google) has called this a “slow, worldwide rollout” so perhaps, the effects are yet to be felt.
With all of this update news floating around, it’s hard not to feel bogged down by the specifics. Thankfully, I’ve been busy behind the scenes pulling together the latest DistilledU module which could help you identify, prevent or recover from the effects of penalties and algorithm updates.
Think you already know your stuff? Take a look at the below three questions taken from our Penalties module quiz to test your knowledge**.
If you notice a significant drop in the number of indexed pages at the same time as a drop in organic traffic, which of the following causes is least likely to be responsible for the drop?
A typo in your robots.txt file
An algorithm update
Manual action by Google
Misapplication of the “robots” meta tag
Which of the following is not a potential scope of manual action?
An entire site
Certain links to a site
The IP address of a site
Certain parts of a site
Reconsideration requests are accepted when:
The reason for manual action is fixed or removed
It has been demonstrated that any violation was justifiable
Steps have been taken to improve the quality of the site
All of the above
**Find the answers to all three questions at the end of this post
So how did you fare? If you want to brush up your skills with the help of our online training modules, register for DistilledU and get stuck in. It’s just $40 per month (or $33 if you pay annually) and that includes all of our latest conference video footage, to boot. Bargain.
And while we have you, don’t forget to check out the Webmaster Tools set up mini-module too, over in the SEO 101 section.
An algorithm update
The IP address of a site
The reason for manual action is fixed or removed
All I want for Christmas is a gift just for me. Not one that I have to share, or one that was made for someone else. I want it to be in exactly my size, flattering to my shape, and in a shade that makes my eyes sparkle. I believe that this is a perfectly reasonable Christmas wish. I also happen to believe that this desire for something made “just for me” in all aspects of life is not entirely unreasonable.
But alas, I too believe that giving is indeed better than receiving and because of this I also want to make sure that what I give to others is wholly just for them. So this brings me to my point, re-gifting is not acceptable. Not for holiday’s and not for landing pages. You have to make it just for them, in just their size, and if it makes their eyes sparkle, that’s even better.
The easiest, and also the most effective way in many cases to do this is through segmentation experiences. This is especially true if you don’t know the visitor very well. It’s kind of like picking the name of the guy at the office that you only see when getting coffee for your secret Santa exchange. You want to get him something great, but who the heck is he?
The joy of a segmentation experience is that you don’t really have to know the person at all; you just have to know a few basic ways that he may identify himself. You might, for instance, drop by the water cooler and talk about your golf game one day, the latest box office hit the next, or a concert you’re going to on Friday. Eventually, he’s going to show some interest and presto! You’ve got the perfect gift idea.
The same is true of landing pages, if you show a visitor options that they can relate to, one of these choices is going to resonate with them enough to make them want more of what you’re offering. These options can be a million different things, depending on what you’re pitching, but they should always be supported by specific content.
The worst thing you can do at this point is segment your audience and then send them to the same interior page as any other segment. That’s not giving them what they want at all, but rather using that information just to meet your own marketing needs. That’s like getting your best friend tickets to your favorite band’s concert because you know she’ll take you. Not ok.
So this year, be a good gift giver. Give them what they want, and make it just for them; even if you have to ask them what their perfect gift is.
Indian retailed Flipkart has started pre-orders of the Nexus 6. You can grab the 32 GB version for Rs. 43,999 ($713) or the 64 GB version for Rs. 48,999 ($794). You will of course still have your choice of either Cloud White or Midnight Blue. Shipping will take place in early December.
Are you ordering one or is the Nexus 6 too big for you?
source: Flipkart
Come comment on this article: You can now pre-order the Nexus 6 in India
