Many stories are told via emojis, but Twitter and London’s Royal Opera House are taking it to the next level on Monday, July 17, in honor of World Emoji Day, using them to tell the story of an entire opera.
This isn’t the first collaboration between these unlikely partners: They first joined forces to tweet an opera in August 2009.
On Monday, the Royal Opera House will be tweeting all day long using emojis—and only emojis—to share the story of famous operas and ballets. There will be a new tweet every 30 minutes....
AI-powered personal assistant apps are spreading in certain parts of the market while others take a downward turn.
While Apple’s Siri is still the top-ranking personal app based on the number of monthly users, it has dropped 15%, losing 7 million monthly users from a year ago, based on a new report.
Samsung is in a similar situation, losing nearly 2 million users of its S Voice over the same period.
Amazon’s Alexa usage has increased 325% from last year, though from a relative small base. It’s now being used by 3 million people and its regular usage is steady.
Microsoft’s Cortana also is coming on strong, increasing 350% in monthly users, to 1 million. Cortana users also seem to use it a lot, since it has the highest rating of percentage of users returning to the service day after day.
Slidely - Create, share and discover visual moments in beautiful and creative ways. Use our slideshow, video and collage maker to turn your photos and videos into stunning collections.
The best part about all of this is that WordPress, for the most part, is free to use, and there are about 50,000 free plugins available to the public. For any entrepreneur who’s on a startup budget, this is a very attractive feature of the CMS tool.
But how do you know which plugins you need? Which ones are best for busy business owners who need a website that can (almost) run on its own? For every client that we manage WordPress sites for, we make sure that these eight plugins are installed and activated.
A Texas man spent nearly two hours trapped inside a drive-thru ATM room, slipping "help me" notes through the receipt slot before being rescued by police.
The man, working as a contractor, was fixing a lock in the room connected to the Bank of America cash machine on Wednesday when he became trapped.
Corpus Christi Police Senior Officer Richard Olden told KrisTV that the man had left his phone in his truck and so tried to grab the attention of people using the ATM, calling out to them.
He also slipped notes through the receipt slot saying: "Please Help. I'm stuck in here, and I don't have my phone. Please call my boss."
Just like in sports, being motivated at work is crucial for your performance. This rings especially true when you have a looming deadline, an important presentation to give, or colleagues or customers depending on your performance.
To help you stay motivated, no matter what your job throws at you, we decided to compile 22 of the best motivational speeches from business, sports, entertainment, and more. If you want to get fired up for a project, watch these videos. Trust me, I was ready to write a 5,000 word blog post after I saw them. And while the messages vary from speech to speech, they will put you in the optimal frame of mind for tackling and crushing your next big challenge.(Disclaimer: Some speeches -- *cough* Al Pacino *cough* -- may contain NSFW language.)...
Blogging, designing or creating landing pages and other web content? Download and use any background pattern for free. Terrific resource though search is limited.
Blogging,, designing or creating landing pages and other web content? Download and use any background pattern for free. Terrific resource though search is limited.
When starting out with a content marketing strategy, it can seem intimidating to go at it alone, especially without tools, resources, or help from a content marketing agency. I mean, would you ever throw someone into the ocean without a life jacket? Of course not. But when you task your marketing team with the challenge of creating, executing, and measuring a great content marketing strategy without the tools they need to do it well, that's basically what you're doing.
Now, you don't need to assemble a huge team to be successful in content; small content teams can still achieve impressive results. What you do need is to give your team the support, structure, and resources it needs to get the job done.
Luckily, there are tons of free tools out there to make your content marketing process a little smoother. Below, I've listed eight of my favorite free content marketing tools:...
With the help of these tools, you'll be on your way to executing a solid plan to engage audiences and build influence -- all without spending an extra penny from your budget.
With the help of these tools, you'll be on your way to executing a solid plan to engage audiences and build influence -- all without spending an extra penny from your budget.
Though curation can be an impactful and excellent way to establish your brand online as well as serve the needs of your audience, it requires both art and science to see real benefit.
Is anything really new anyway? Does content have to be new to be relevant? How can you curate content from other industry leaders and still be relevant to your audience? Where do you draw the line of endorsing other people's content vs supporting their brand more than your own? What are the negatives of content regurgitation?
If these are some of the questions you have then take a listen to the 105th episode of the Social Zoom Factor podcast to learn the difference between creation, curation and regurgitation of content. I also include tips and strategies to develop your own curation platform and ensure you are not simply regurgitating content that will hurt you more than help.
The efficacy of using videos in online marketing has long been known to digital marketers. Video content has come to dominate the web and, with it, the nature and focus of many a big brand’s marketing strategy. The power of video to increase the reach of businesses, build brand identity, boost social followings and secure valuable new leads is becoming plain to all and sundry.
Yet, despite this universal acclaim for video (something that can be seen through rising budget spend on video), there is still a huge amount of confusion as to exactly how it is helping businesses achieve their aims. Perhaps a lot of the confusion comes down to the slippery and often misleading nature of video marketing data and with it a difficulty in pinning down a reliable idea of ROI.
In this article for Search Engine People, I want to look at ten video marketing metrics and how they can be used to establish ROI. First though, let’s take a look at the importance of goal setting.
Brandless, a company which can best be described as an online hybrid of Trader Joe’s and Ikea’s kitchen section, just raised a $35m Series B to be the “Procter & Gamble for millennials.”
Their site launched yesterday, and is already selling everything from colanders to quinoa puffs — all for a flat fee of $3 per item.
And they’re doing it all without a “brand”…or are they?
Fighting the “false narrative” of consumption Created in 2016 by entrepreneur Ido Leffler and Sherpa Capital partner, Tina Sharkey, Brandless has raised almost $50m thus far on the bet that younger consumers don’t care as much about brands as big CPG companies would like investors to believe....
As a busy blogger, you’re probably juggling a multitude of different tasks, many of which are repetitive and frankly, quite boring. For your blog to take off and scale into something greater than a company of one employee, you must use your time efficiently and learn to automate and delegate.
Read on to learn about the practical tools of automation and how to use them to grow your business.
Color theory is the art and science of colors, our understanding of how colors mix, how people perceive colors, and the message the colors communicate. Are you aware that colors impact how one thinks and behaves? In fact, color ads attract 42 percent more attention than those in black and white. This holds true even outside the realm of social media and into print marketing. Prospects hold on to colored business cards 10 times longer than standard white cards.
Why Is Color Theory Important to Content and Social Media Campaigns? When a prospect’s eyes meet a particular color, they immediately send a message to the brain. After a nanosecond of processing the information, the individual makes a judgment about what they see. They may be interested, bored, or repulsed.
Great marketers wind up testing multiple visuals to find the best option. However, this can’t begin without an understanding of the benefits of color theory in marketing.
As part of our previous social media strategy, our posts were connected to lead generation goals -- and most had a strong tie to our brand and promoting our content. Now, our content is all about our audience -- and not all about us. We needed to refocus and remember that our audience members are people, just like us. If we wouldn’t want to see a piece of content in our Facebook News Feeds, why would our audience? We wanted to test the effect of focusing our content on our audience -- what they want to learn about, what their goals are, and even what struggles they face.
In short, we wanted to be more social, and less promotional.
This doesn't mean we recommend doing away with sharing blog content or ebooks on social media entirely. After all, it's hard to come up with new ideas for creating social media videos to share every day of the week. We're just saying you shouldn't post a link to a blog post or ebook on Facebook and call it a day. Instead, get inspired by the ideas and salient points, and repurpose your content into Facebook videos, Instagram albums, or Snapchat Stories. You can still use the good ideas -- but use them to create native social media content that performs better for the medium.
If your current social media strategy sounds like our previous, all-about-us approach, don't worry -- read on to learn how we've changed things up.
The Whole Foods acquisition by Amazon weeks ago was only the latest milepost in the latter’s inexorable march to the top of retail. The company sold $136 billion worth of products in 2016 – more than any other online retailer (and just over a third of what Wal-Mart did).
And we find that Amazon is big and gaining on Google for product-related searches (be they early or late in the purchase journey). This means that more and more purchase journeys will start on Amazon’s home page, and proceed via search to a variety of product pages all the way to a sale.
This changes a lot of things, but the upshot – to my mind – will be a massive outlay in product content and product-related experiences by manufacturers.
At Instapage, we have an entire blog category dedicated to landing page examples. We research and write on this topic frequently to provide our audience with inspiration from some of the world’s biggest brands including Microsoft, Lyft, Marketo, Constant Contact, Oracle, Facebook, MailChimp, and HubSpot.
In this article, we’re going to showcase some landing pages, highlighting several different design techniques, to provide you with inspiration when creating your pages. For each example, we’ll discuss what the page does well, and what could be A/B tested to produce better results.
The world's worst press release landed in my inbox the other day.
Competition is stiff for that title but this release, which came with the subject line, "Lifesaving information for Chicago citizens," ran away with the crown.
After a cheery, "Hi Mary," it began:
"We are only a little over a halfway through with 2017 and Chicago's violence shows no signs of stopping."
No argument there. Violence is the curse, the tragic flaw, the interminable disease of this great city — a psychological undercurrent even in the many neighborhoods that rarely witness it; and this wasn't the first press release I've ever gotten that takes note of that fact. I routinely get pitches involving violence, some with ideas that sound productive, like programs that work with kids in struggling parts of town.
The world's worst press release wasn't one of those.
The truth about business is that no matter how great your products are, you won’t be able to sell anything if no one knows you exist.
Your business relies on marketing to guide consumers to your products.
And that’s why today, I’m going to show you what makes Facebook such a powerful tool for targeting on social media.
If you’re new to the world of social media marketing, don’t worry. I’m going to show you the step-by-step process to building and managing a Facebook Business page that will convert....
For small businesses looking to keep up with bigger players in their industries, tools have emerged to level the playing field, allowing those of us looking to make our voices heard of expanding our reach.
From ideation and promotion to tools that help your content truly stand out from the noise, consider how the following platforms can serve to help you reach your content marketing goals – whatever they may be....
This short video was produced to show how quick and easy it is to produce a video from an existing blog post using the free Lumen 5 video tool.
Lumen 5 is an AI-powered video creation platform that turns blog posts into engaging videos. Using the tool is easy, intuitive and surprisingly fast. After producing a few Lumen 5 videos, I expect you could create one in as little as 10 minutes from existing content like a blog post. You can see my original blog post here http://bit.ly/LaoTzu8 to compare it with the video produced so effortlessly.
The creative and marketing possibilities are very intriguing and so far Lumen 5 is free although it may offer more features for a price in the future. For now, it's an interesting tool to explore.
Businesses, bloggers, trainers, authors and really anyone can use it to produce social content to drive audience engagement online. Great thing is you can focus on your message, visuals and creativity without having to touch the technology.
You can get more info and demos for the app at www.lumen5.com.
With Lumen 5, producing video content for social media is simple, easy, intuitive and fast. My demo was taken from an older blog post about writing for the internet. Lots of potential for this tool.
With Lumen 5, producing video content for social media is simple, easy intuitive and fast. My demo was taken from an older blog post about writing for the internet. Lots of potential for this tool.
All over the world, brands are united by the same goal: to generate unique content that their customers can relate to, and thus, help them earn better business outcomes. They spend infinite time, money and resources on this objective, and develop complex buyer personas to help them achieve optimal results.
However, intangible questions remain, including what are the basic pillars of content marketing? How do brands create compelling content that can be used to attract customers and ultimately boost sales? What is the secret to a truly successful content marketing strategy?
These questions may be intangible but they are still ones that every content marketer today should ask and strive to find answers to.
Strap yourself in to learn my 12 simple rules for successful content marketing.
Content curation is all about mining the internet for material that can be shared on your social networks. It’s about finding great content and presenting it to your social media followers in a way that’s organized and meaningful.
The thing is, you’re probably not thinking strategically when you’re scrolling through your phone and posting from bed in the morning. Content curation strategy is what makes the difference between mediocre and exceptional content curation in business.
Strategy is a must when it comes to content marketing, which includes content curation....
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There will be a new tweet every 30 minutes on July 17, World Emoji Day.