Friday, March 11, 2016
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Why We Should All Be Concerned About the Apple FBI Controversy
The person to follow in the Apple/FBI case is Tim Sparipani. Tim has the best insights and the best background to put this into perspective. He's Founder & Principal, SPQR Strategies, PLLC and the former Director of Public Policy at Facebook.
Tim wrote a story in Forbes.com that has an important perspective we should consider:
"If the U.S. government forces this technology on Apple, it’s also giving this technology to the rest of the world. That means rogue regimes, dictatorships and oligarchs will have access to the same security busting technology as the U.S. government. One nation’s terrorist is another’s journalist, reformer, freedom fighter or human rights advocate. Limiting security on iPhones could put these people, who are often on the frontlines of fights against oppression, in grave danger."
Monday, February 8, 2016
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Mobile Predictions For 2016
The Mobile Explosion
MediaPost is out with some key information to help with mobile marketing.
According to a year end Forrester
Predictions Brief, as the mobile mindshift speeds up even more in 2016,
consumers’ expectations will soar, and more companies will treat
mobile as core to the whole customer experience. By the end of 2016, the
Forrester report forecasts that 4.8 billion individuals globally will use a
mobile phone. Smartphone subscribers will represent 46% of the global
population.”
In 2016, Forrester forecasts mobile and
tablet commerce will reach $142 billion in the U.S., representing respectively
38% of online transactions. More than 30% of sales will have a mobile
cross channel component, meaning consumers will use mobile at some point
throughout the purchase life cycle, from product research to in-store
interactions.
These mobile usage, behaviors, and attitudes
will develop among consumers and employees:
· Consumers will stop considering
the mobile Internet as a scaled-down subset of the “real” Internet. Mobile
devices will become their go-to technology, even in mature economies where
people can use alternative devices at home.
·
Consumers will continue to spend
most of their time in only a few apps but will increasingly turn to
aggregation apps and a handful of platforms to get the content and services
they need.
Friday, January 15, 2016
The Stats Are Staggering!
It's amazing to think about today's landscape and how marketers can actually break through:
- 27 million
tweets sent per day
- 20 hours of
video uploaded to YouTube every minute
- Facebook
users share 2,460,000 pieces of content every minute.
- Instagram
users post 216,000 new photos every minute.
- Source: Edelman
Digital Seattle
Today we have influencers, brands, and
media publishing content, as well as individuals. The average consumer receives
3,000-5,000 messages a day.
The challenge for marketers is how to
effectively break through this clutter and noise, which will only grow in the
coming years.
Friday, January 8, 2016
Tabletop Tech Your Way!
Great story in USA Today sharing the latest in Tabletop Tech from CES.
What's big?
Ziosk, a company based in Texas, created the first touchscreen tablet to appear on tables in restaurants across the U.S. serving more than 50 million guests per month. Diners use the tablets to order drinks, appetizers and desserts, play games and pay their bill.
From a social media aspect, diners can use Ziosk to check-in and share their restaurant experience on Facebook. The built-in camera allows them to take photos and post them to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
One of the first restaurants to partner with Ziosk was Chili’s Grill & Bar .
Saturday, December 19, 2015
Friday, December 18, 2015
Thursday, December 17, 2015
Privacy vs. Security -- What Consumers Want
Jaiswal, J. (2011, 05 06). Mobile
Privacy Consumer Survey Results. (H. I. TRUSTe, Producer) Retrieved 12 16,
2015, from LinkedIn Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/janetjaiswal/mobile-privacy-survey-by-harris-truste
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
Why Is Storytelling So Important?
We Remember Stories, Not Facts!
Gary Vaynerchuk says it quite simply: “The single most important strategy in content marketing today is video.
Whether it's video on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or YouTube, or your website, the content you need to be thinking about creating and marketing for your business is video. Period.” (Vaynerchuk 2015)
“By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco.” (theguardian.com 2014)
Why
is video is the future of content marketing? We love it. It’s
informative, entertaining, and now inexpensive for all size businesses
to produce. It’s about the power of the story, not the size of the
production costs. Here’s an example that demonstrates how a powerful
story has an impact even when the production costs are minimal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcodyFKKdVM
It’s
important all of us to remember the power of video and the
power of storytelling, especially in the emerging media, 24/7 space.
Think about what video stories can share:
• Drama
• Humor
• Emotion
What is also important is the outcome. What’s the goal of the video? What do you want people to do after seeing the video? It’s important to keep your objective in mind.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Friday, October 23, 2015
Customer Service: The Best Practices
It's something we all strive for yet many businesses still strike out.
My advice: Inspect what you expect. I remember working with a major nonprofit. I asked how quickly they thanked their donors and they said within 48 hours. I had a family member send in a donation online and via mail, two weeks later, no thank you. This gave us an opportunity to discuss the system and changes things. Inspect what you expect.
The SalesForce Blog offers 5 Best Practices for Exceptional Customer Service:
1. Use the Customer's Preferred Channel
As a business, it is your job to provide an omnichannel customer experience with the same quality of service—regardless of how the customer reaches out to you. It's no longer just about the basics, it's about staying on top of how your customers are engaging and anticipating new channels before they even ask for them.
2. Make the Move to Mobile
Your customers are developing a mobile-first mindset in droves — are you? Consider the wealth of options that mobile offers: text messaging, live chat, in-app video conferencing
3. Content is Your Friend
Customers want to feel empowered to solve their own problems and answer their own questions. A crucial tool in enabling them to do so is useful content, like blog posts, webinars, social media posts, or white papers. Not only can you provide your customers with the information they need to help themselves, but content is shareable so that they can spread the wealth with others.
4. Implement Gamification
Gamification is most often associated with sales teams, but the opportunity is there for gamification to transform your service team as well. The goals and targets may be different between the two teams, but the overarching idea is the same: motivation. Realtime contests can encourage reps to engage with their colleagues, strengthening your company culture and improving morale by injecting fun into monotony.
5. Hire an A-Team
No matter what technology or tools a company has at its disposal, a customer service team will not succeed without driven, skillful team members at the helm. This starts with the interview: determining what motivates the interviewee and whether he will be a good cultural fit with your customer service team is the key to getting the right hire.
Saturday, October 17, 2015
Thursday, October 15, 2015
Monday, October 12, 2015
Fastest Growing Retailers See Beacons As High Value
The majority of successful retailers expect the Internet of Things to drastically change how companies do business.
They also see beacons as high value for in-store customer communications, based on a new study.
The majority (54%) of winning retailers, defined as those with sales growth above the average, say the Internet of Things will drastically change the way companies do business in the next three years, according to the research.
The study, the Internet of Things in Retail: Great Expectations by Retail Systems Research (RSR), comprised a survey of 138 retailers, 47% with revenue in excess of $1 billion.
Of those with average or below average growth, only a third (33%) sees the IoT impact on retail.
Most interesting is that retail winners are more aggressive about the opportunities they see around IoT applications for their business.
Average and below average retailers have a very different view in every category.
For example, fewer than half (44%) rank beacons for in-store customer communications as a high value IoT technology and only 28% see using beacons for store perimeter marketing as high value.
The good news is that many of the fastest growing retailers see the impact of the Internet of Things ahead and can plan accordingly.
Only time will tell if the others will follow and what impact that may have on determining if the stay below average.
Thursday, October 8, 2015
Friday, October 2, 2015
Thursday, September 17, 2015
Power of Social: How Social Media Rallied In Support of #IStandWithAhmed
Case Study: How quickly people rallied behind Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year old boy from Irving, TX, arrested for taking a homemade clock to school.
As you probably know by now, he was hoping to impress his teachers with his technical skills, but they thought it was a bomb. Using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed the internet buzzed about this kid for all of the right reasons.
Social Times reports: "According to data from ListenFirst Media, #IStandWithAhmed was tweeted 1.3 million times and the profile @IStandWithAhmed mentioned 118,000 times. Mentions of both the hashtag and the profile peaked around midnight on September 16."
Per Pixlee, #IStandWithAhmed has reached 56.8 million people across Twitter & Instagram. On Instagram, posts with the hashtag have gained 99,000+ likes.
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
New Stats on Social Media Use!
The Digital Media team at BI Intelligence is just out with new data from over a dozen sources about how social media demographics and preferences are still shifting.
Here are a few of the key takeaways from the report:
- Pinterest has tremendous reach among women. Among US female internet users, 42% reported being on Pinterest in Pew's late-2014 survey, compared to only 13% of men.
- Instagram has become the most important and most-used social network for US teens. 32% of US teenagers cited it as their most important social network in Piper Jaffray's twice-annual teen survey, compared to only 14% saying that of Facebook.
- Snapchat, Vine, and Tumblr had by far the most youthful user bases of the social networks we looked at. 45% of Snapchat's adult users are between 18 and 24, followed by Vine (28%) and Tumblr (28%), according to comScore.
- LinkedIn enjoys high adoption among highly educated and high-income users. LinkedIn is used by 44% of Americans with income of $75,000 or more, according to Pew.
- Messaging apps also have become more broadly popular, but still skew young: 7% of all people in the US aged 12 and older use WhatsApp, according to the Edison Research and Triton Digital survey.
- The aging of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Pinterest is more apparent than ever. That's especially true of Facebook: Less than two-fifths of Facebook's adult user base in the US is aged 18 to 34, according to comScore.
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