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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2016 2:12 AM
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Whether you are a web designer, a marketer or a just an owner of a small business you know what it’s like to be dealing with images on a daily basis. Now, making the background white or transparent (in case you want to use your image layered elsewhere and believe me you will), may seem a bit complicated for those of us coming from the nondesign background. Well, I’ve got good news for you! It doesn’t need to be! Today we’ve got plenty of both online and offline options that will let you do anything with your backgrounds without any knowledge of specialized software such as Photoshop or GIMP. The following tools can be a great alternative, won’t cost you a penny and you’ll be surprised just how easy it can be to edit backgrounds. Afterall, do you really think all these bloggers spend hours learning how to edit their visuals? Nope, they’ve got a couple of tricks up their sleeves and so can you. So, let’s explore that creative zen!...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2016 1:53 AM
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By 2020, nearly a million minutes of video content will cross global IP networks every second (Cisco Visual Networking Index, 2015-2020). That’s a tsunami wave of video content that we are already splashing around in. We stream Netflix, Snapchat in real-time, and experiment with Facebook Live. Feeds are filled with viral videos, bite-size recaps of major events, and more. Video is everywhere, but online video is more than just an “exciting” trend. It’s a titan in the digital space, and it will only become more popular. According to Cisco, globally, IP video traffic will be 82% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2020, up from 70% in 2015. With all that video streaming on devices and platforms, there are more opportunities than ever to reach your audience. So, are you in the game? Does your content strategy consider video? If it doesn’t, you might be in trouble. Here’s why online video is here to stay....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2016 12:56 AM
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In thinking about how to prepare this post, I couldn’t help but remember the 2006 Samuel Jackson movie, Snakes on a Plane. The name of the movie always makes me squirm because it gives away just how awful the plot line is by providing a correspondingly awful title. The title did receive a lot of press, albeit for how controversial it was. However, when it comes to your press release, you want your headline to work across the board. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of equally distressing or controversial headlines found in press releases. To be fair, I haven’t actually seen Snakes on a Plane. And, in all honesty, the title has its good points: It’s succinct and we get a very clear vision of what the movie is all about. If only all press release headlines incorporated that measure of clarity, but without the negative press attention. Take a look at a couple of examples of headlines that make you go hmmm….
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 11:33 AM
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Wal-Mart is offering free shipping with no minimum purchase on all online orders during the week of July 11, its latest move to steal some thunder from Amazon's much-publicized Prime Day shopping event, which takes place July 12. SWal-Mart will offer the free shipping option alongside 30-day free trials of ShippingPass, a $49-per-year program giving members free two-day shipping on many items. Wal-Mart has seen daily ShippingPass sign-ups more than quadruple in a week compared to the previous week, Internet Retailer reports, although the retailer didn’t disclose how many customers have signed up.In addition to touting its shipping deals, Wal-Mart is holding a sale to rival Prime Day this year, as it did last year. Stores including Target, Sears and Banana Republic also are offering deals coinciding with Prime Day, notes USA Today.Wal-Mart is aggressively targeting Amazon Prime Day, offering discounts on merchandise from televisions and clothes to furniture this week, Reuters reports. And while Prime Day deals are available exclusively to Prime subscribers, Wal-Mart is imposing no such restrictions. “We believe saving money every day is better than just one, and that all customers should save, not only some,” Wal-Mart said in a statement....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 11:16 AM
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Snapchat on Wednesday unveiled Snapchat Memories, a new feature that lets users save and share snaps and other photos and video that they have saved to their phones. While some said Memories would make Snapchat more addictiveand others fretted that it would ruin the app’s spontaneity, the new functionality will also likely change how news organizations use the app. With Memories, users can save snaps and then edit and resend them to other users or add them to their Snapchat Story. Users can also now upload photos and video that they’ve shot outside of Snapchat. However, saved photos and videos that are uploaded as stories or snaps have a timestamp to show when they were originally taken. Users can access Memories by swiping up from the camera section of the app....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 11:00 AM
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The Pew Research Center’s latest report supports much of what we already know about news media: Print is dying, digital is growing, and the future lies with mobile. What stand out are the findings about our news sharing habits, which suggest that sharing overwhelmingly remains a low-tech, offline activity. Despite huge growth in the use of social networks, 85 percent of US adults still prefer to share news by word of mouth rather than digitally, according to Pew. That’s not surprising if the news comes from a traditional medium, such as newspapers or TV, but even consumers who primarily got their news online were nearly three times more likely to share the news verbally than to post on social media, according to the report.In fact, active engagement with news on social media is relatively low in general. The proportion of people who often liked, commented, posted, and shared news was less than 16 percent, while those who did it only sometimes accounted for less than half of those surveyed. Interestingly, although young people are more likely to get their news online, they are no more likely to engage with news online than older people; indeed, Pew found that people over 50 were most likely to comment on news posts. That could be because young adults are less interested in news than their elders and discuss news at lower rates....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 10:49 AM
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There’s a widening gap between how marketers and consumers feel about brands collecting data and tracking customer journeys. According to a recent report by Edelman and The University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, 77% of marketers believe their organization should invest in predictive data and 71% of consumers believe that brands with access to personal data are using it unethically. Much of this data is collected by tracking customer journeys, which has gotten more complicated as consumers juggle devices over the course of considering and making a purchase. An OMD report revealed that people swap devices 21 times an hour. The traditional tracking cookie falls short....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 2:43 AM
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How much do you love your smartphone? Aaron Chervenak loves his enough to want to marry it—and he did, in a little chapel in Las Vegas. In a video that document the “slightly unorthodox ceremony”, Chervenak discusses the reasons why he wants to tie the knot with a piece of technology. According to him, “we connect with our phones on so many emotional levels—we look to it for solace, to calm us down, to put us to sleep, to ease our minds”, which to him is what a relationship is about. While this unconventional union is not legal, Chervenak hopes that his wedding would “act as a symbolic gesture to show how precious our smartphones are becoming in our daily lives”....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 2:10 AM
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One of the best things about covering social media and digital marketing is that there’s always something new happening, some new update or feature being rolled-out to cover. But some of them are relatively small-scale so they’re not necessarily worthy of their own, individual post - though they are still relevant and worth knowing for anyone working in the field. To keep you up to date on these smaller changes and features, here’s a rundown of five upcoming or “in-test mode” features that are currently being trialled on some of the major platforms - starting with Twitter, which is testing some new customer service focused options....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 1:45 AM
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Whether you're a published author or just getting started with blogging, it's not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something. But every marketer should be able to write -- and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It's just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing. Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 1:23 AM
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I can’t offer universal advice for managing content marketing costs. Your company has unique challenges. I simply want to help you budget smart. And to do so, I believe you need to begin by getting a handle on the main disciplines where you’ll put your content marketing money. My objective with this article is to give you deeper insights into the costs of content marketing, so in the end, you need not use the word “costs” to describe them. You’ll call them smart investments....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 12:36 AM
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Even though Snapchat is said to have over 150 million daily users, many are still at a loss for where the app fits into their marketing plan. Think for a moment about some of your most embarrassing moments. Perhaps you fell off of a chair in the middle of a painfully hip, packed restaurant (me). Maybe you fell asleep in the middle of a meeting and got called out by your coworkers (me). Perchance you were at a professional development event at a colleague’s family cabin and broke the host’s hammock (spoiler alert: me). Whatever your most cringe-worthy moments, I bet you wish they could disappear forever after 10 seconds. This is what sets Snapchat apart. While it can’t erase embarrassing memories from your life, Snapchat’s fleeting nature has been both a blessing and a curse for brands using the image-sharing platform. With the maximum lifespan of a Snap being 24 hours, businesses and brands have had to approach marketing differently on the platform. To help you navigate these uncharted waters, we asked our community for their top Snapchat questions and answered them below....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 8, 2016 9:38 AM
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Amazon is bringing back "Prime Day," its annual Black Friday-like sales event where hundreds of thousands of special discount offers are made exclusively to its Prime members. Last year's inaugural Prime Day brought in an additional $400 million in revenue, according to JP Morgan. This year's event is expected to be even bigger in terms of revenue and the number of deals offered, making it by far Amazon's largest single-day sales event in history. But according to a note published by JP Morgan on Thursday, the implications of Prime Day are much bigger than the single day's additional revenue....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2016 2:00 AM
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The phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is aptly suited to the user experience. In digital design, the user experience is the whole and content is one of its parts. Without the right content cues, your audience may not know how to navigate through your site or find answers. The user experience is more than content, but content is vital to the outcome. Connecting Content With the User Experience Consider this: You walk into a restaurant to meet a friend for lunch. The server is late arriving to your table, the place setting is basic, and the harsh light from the overhanging lamp is glaring in the midday brightness. However, you and your friend have a wonderful conversation about life and you barely notice the background details when the check arrives. That conversation completely changed your lunch experience—and that’s what great content can do for any existing user experience. By the same token, some environments are so distracting that they take away from the conversation. Maybe the restaurant was playing music so loud you couldn’t hear your friend or the waiter was late, the food was cold, and you were overcharged. Even if the conversation was amazing, you’ll walk away overwhelmed by the other bad experiences. To maintain a strong digital presence, you need the right balance between content and other UX factors (e.g. speed, learnability, and information architecture)....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2016 1:13 AM
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The best tool for getting more social shares isn’t a tool at all. Instead, it all comes down to producing high quality, in-depth content. When you create better content than your competitors, it won’t be long before social shares begin to pick up. But, of course, there is always help to be had. Once you create a killer piece of content, you need to do your part in getting it shared across all major platforms, including, but not limited to, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. If you need a little help getting more social shares, the following nine tools could be just what you’re looking for. It’s not likely that you will use each one every day, but you should definitely learn more about all of them....
In a one-to-one school district, teachers have the freedom to create, curate, and share content like never before. Read more to find out how Google Slides can give you such liberty!
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 11:24 AM
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"I'm not at Audible to build podcasts. I'm at Audible to start a revolution. In the way audio is produced, and in the way audio is distributed." “In the audio space, it is hard but doable to produce things of high quality. It is hard but doable to produce a lot of things. It is very difficult to produce a lot of high quality things,” Eric Nuzum, Audible’s senior vice president of original content, told me, continuing a line he’s always held since joining the Amazon-owned group last year to oversee original content (audiobooks has been its bread and butter): that Audible’s ambitions for audio stories are huge. In April, Audible rolled out a new section in its mobile app called Channels, featuring curated collections like “The Daily Rush” or “The Weekender,” shows from many publishers like Marketplace or PBS Newshour, and voice-narrated versions of news stories from places like The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, or The Washington Post (no preferential billing for the Jeff Bezos-owned Post). It teased listeners with an original show: Presidents Are People, Too, hosted by a former Daily Show head writer and a historian. It introduced timely collections — “British Exit: The Global Impact” — with an editor-curated collection of analysis and opinion pieces from a variety of sources. Channels content came with a full Audible subscription, but there was no opportunity yet to subscribe to just Channels....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 11:06 AM
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US internet users are equally divided in their intentions to be plugged in or unplugged to the web while on vacation. Yet, according to research, most ultimately do connect to the internet regardless of gender or age.In March 2016, Intel, along with MSI International, surveyed 1,504 internet users ages 21 to 54 in the US about their internet habits while on holiday. Respondents were evenly split when asked if they had gone on vacation with the intention of being offline at some point in the past year. A disparity did exist when looking at gender: More than half (57%) of men said they did plan to be disconnected, compared to 44% of women. And more interestingly, when looking at age, the older the internet user, the less likely they were to have anticipated on unplugging while away from home. More than three-fifths of those ages 51 to 54 said they had not considered any unplugged vacationing, compared to 44% of millennials ages 21 to 30....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2016 10:53 AM
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The landscape of content is evolving. In an age where most advertisements fall victim to the "skip" button, it takes something truly creative to make people pay attention.It's no longer enough to simply create a straightforward ad -- to shine, content must make us laugh, cry, think, and believe. There is no bigger stage for celebrating advertising that moves us than the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This year's recipients blur the line between marketing and art, delivering pieces of content that push the boundaries of media.Get inspired by 21 of the best below....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 3:45 PM
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You’ve seen AI achieve incredible things like defeat world champions at Go, describe photos for the visually impaired and operate an elevator. But now, a startup in London has finally figured a genuinely useful application: brewing quality beers.
IntelligentX offers four basic beers, including a classic British golden ale, a British bitter kissed with grapefruit, a hoppy American pale ale and a smokey Marmite brew. Once you’ve tasted them, you can chat with the company’s Messenger bot to share your feedback, which its AI (built using IntelligentX’s own machine learning algorithm) uses to improve on its recipes.
That means that each batch of beer will have a unique flavor. In addition, IntelligentX says it will publish every recipe that its Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI) creates, so people can try recreating them on their own....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 2:18 AM
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It's not quite "going where no man has gone before", but it's close. Adrian Leslie of the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) has just finished slogging through a remote corner of the Kootenays known as Darkwoods, the largest land conservancy project in Canada. The trek up and down the south Selkirk Mountains was challenging enough, but Leslie had to do it with a 23-kilogram Google camera strapped to his back....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 1:57 AM
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If you want some insights into where the content marketing industry may be headed, it might just help to take a look at where it’s been. As we pointed out when CMI shared its History of Content Marketing infographic in 2012, brands have been telling their stories to audiences for hundreds of years. Not to mention that storytelling itself is one of the oldest forms of communication....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 1:34 AM
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Is it really that important? Believe it or not, I speak with people all the time who never conduct keyword research. They don’t see the point in doing so and there are many reasons for this: - They already know their two or three primary keywords. - They don’t believe in the power of long-tail keywords. - They are under the impression that it costs too much time and money. If you continually utter these excuses, you’ll never conduct keyword research in the appropriate manner. Subsequently, your website will never reach its full potential. In this post, I hope to show just how simple it can be to conquer keyword research. More specifically, I’m going to discuss 10 tools that can help you reach your goals....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 10, 2016 1:05 AM
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To help you identify what SEO optimizations your website is missing, I have found an infographic that could be your guide. It’s simply called “SEO Ranking Factors” and is created by Coalition Technologies. The infographic lists 200 of the top most important SEO ranking factors that you should have implemented on your site. The SEO ranking factors are divided into ten different categories, and you might have to do some additional research to identify what they mean and how to implement some of them. Doing so, however, will not be too hard. As you might know, SEO is the one most vital aspect of growing the traffic to your website. If you are not already monitoring the SEO scene (and the changes continuously rolled out), you should start now. The amount of traffic that you can have routed to your site by just implementing the right SEO ranking factors is incredible. Whatever you do, do not overlook this free way of increasing the traffic to your site. The SEO ranking factors range from simple additions like implementing size tags on your images to server privacy issues. However, even though you are not very skilled in the makings of a website, most of them are super simple to implement....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 8, 2016 10:07 AM
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Integration is really easy to say and really hard to do,” says Jason Frank, joint CEO of agency MSL Group in the UK. Which begs the question if it is really worth offering integrated services. Would clients prefer to get great specialist expertise from an agency rather than a blend of second-rate services? Frank says: “Many organisations make it too painful for their marketing and communications people to offer integrated services, for structural and/or cultural reasons. PR agencies talk a good game on websites and powerpoints and acquire lots of skills, but integration is about a mindset and culture and most don’t invest in the necessary culture change.” Frank believes that although the advantages of integration are “nose-bleedingly obvious”, some agencies and clients are still reluctant to embrace it. However, he believes that finding integration difficult is no excuse, as “doing” integration makes clients’ lives so much easier as it's cheaper, easier and faster. “Done well it means one brief, potentially one partner, one idea…”...
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![Top 200 Most Important SEO Ranking Factors [Infographic] | Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight | Scoop.it](https://img.scoop.it/x8DhPPQtjdWBbR8pU8vYvTl72eJkfbmt4t8yenImKBVvK0kTmF0xjctABnaLJIm9)
Great blogging and design tools and tips. Recommended reading. 9/10