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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2017 10:46 AM
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“Content needs to be highly entertaining or informative to break through the clutter in today’s media environment,” says Stacy Taffet, Senior Brand Director at PepsiCo. That’s why the old View-Master toy now has 360-degree imagery and virtual reality capabilities. Automaker Lincoln put itself back on the map with stylish ads featuring an alluring new identity with Matthew McConaughey. And they’re not the only ones. The following old-school brands have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2017 10:30 AM
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Earlier this year, Hack PR had a problem. The unorthodox public relations firm had snapped up a new client, a deep-pocketed entrepreneur with political ambitions. Unfortunately, nobody really knew who he was, and the campaign it launched for him failed to convert into any real coverage save for a couple of pieces in the Huffington Post and The Washington Times. They needed another idea. So, in their words, they hustled.There’s an old Internet joke that says politicians should wear the logos of their donors, much like Nascar drivers wear the logos of their sponsors. Taking inspiration from that, Hack PR pitched the idea to its client that it try and make it law through a California ballot initiative. But unfortunately, this didn’t pan out either. It wasn’t for lack of trying. The firm took the provocative step of printing a full-sized cutout of everyone in the California Legislature, adorned with the logos of Chevron and AT&T, and other prolific donors. These were left at the steps of the Sacramento State Capital building for all to see. But as before, nada. Then....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2017 11:21 PM
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Fresco is a lot like Uber. But unlike similar apps where you request a car, takeout, or a even a dog walker, Fresco puts a call out for a photojournalist. A newsroom posts a request for video of, say, a crime scene, and a Fresco user in the area can accept, take a video of it, and upload it to Fresco. If the news outlet uses it, the Fresco user gets paid $50.
TV news stations across the country are using the app, but Fresco is particularly appealing to KTBY, a station in Anchorage, Alaska. Alaska is a big state, and many of KTBY’s viewers live in remote villages that are hours away by plane. It’s hard to cover those communities without spending a ton of money and time. In a Fresco promotional video, Scott Centers, COO of Coastal Television Broadcasting Company, which owns KTBY, marvels that Fresco offers an affordable alternative.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2017 1:02 AM
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Have something you want to broadcast to the world? You’re in luck — there are now more streaming services than you can shake a microphone stand at, and more ways than ever to find an audience.If the idea of getting started is daunting (I know the feeling, trust me), don’t worry — as long as you know what’s out there and what tools you need, you can get into it in no time. Here are the basics for getting started on a livestreaming platform....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 8, 2017 10:50 AM
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With trust being such an integral part of marketing, video is almost a necessity and should be a part of any well-rounded campaign.This leads us to a very important question. How do you create a trust-boosting YouTube profile page?In this post, I’ll cover some essential elements your YouTube page should have as well as some practical tips for engaging your viewers....
A study from Harvard’s Decision Science Laboratory uses brain science to explain why we prefer certain types of presentations over others.
Via Ana Cristina Pratas
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 8, 2017 9:24 AM
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Most of us try to find the Google answers to at least 3 – 4 questions on a daily basis. Considering this, the apps or websites which host content about which people ask questions are bound to have huge traffic rates. Wouldn’t you want your website or app to be one of the most talked-about ones? Wouldn’t you want to put up content which prompts user discussions and helps keep you in the news? Finding content ideas that trigger user interaction to bring about a real change in your field of work is a very challenging task. All the more if you need to put up such content on a regular basis. What would help would be a way in which you could find what makes users tick every now and then. What are things people like talking or asking questions about? Bloomberry is a unique online tool that lets you find out just that....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 7, 2017 9:58 AM
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SEO is not always the best answer for every business. There are thriving businesses that don’t rely on SEO at all – think about that tiny local bakery, bookshop, or hairdresser (there are plenty in my Italian town) who might have put up a Facebook page but not a website. If they have one, they only use basic on-page SEO and they don’t use it for customer acquisition anyway, because they get most of their clientele by word of mouth. So you might be wondering: When is it better to focus budget and resources on SEO? And when is that not a good idea? The short answer is: it depends on your business goals and on the psychology of your customer. For the long answer… this article is the answer....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 7, 2017 9:38 AM
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Last summer, we looked at the characteristics of successful headlines on Facebook, parsing the numbers in the NewsWhip database to pick commonalities in the titles of stories that attracted a lot of engagement on the platform. Our findings at the time pointed to great headlines: – Being conversational and descriptive, – Speaking to a personal experience – Being vivid and interesting, – Not tricking or misleading the readers. All of these principles remain the same, especially the last factor, which is now generally de rigueur for any sites looking to seriously develop an engaged and loyal readership through social media. Then at the start of this year, we took another look at headlines that were seeing engagement to see if there were any other obvious trends. Now we’ve identified a few new factors of note for successful headlines on social media, based on the data we’ve seen in NewsWhip Analytics. As well as the advice we’ve already dispensed around headline etiquette on this blog, here are three more factors to consider when looking to pitch the most effective story description to social readers....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 7, 2017 9:22 AM
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As CEO of a creative marketing and public relations firm, I’ve seen how unique marketing strategies can elevate a company’s brand awareness and drive ROI more than the traditional approaches. Executing a successful marketing campaign doesn’t require millions of dollars in funding: Small businesses and startups can market themselves on a small budget by thinking outside the box. Here are some tips to maximize your campaign efforts...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 6, 2017 11:23 AM
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I once spent a week speaking at three different conferences that focused on one of the favorite themes of events around the world: how to have great ideas. Often it seems that there are only two things the world tells you about ideas: you should have more of them and they should be more creative. We dedicate entire conferences to better ideas and read best-selling books to inspire more of them. Yet over time, the sad truth is that the only thing most of us do better than coming up with ideas is routinely squandering them, with bad or no execution. Why do we fail to execute well on our best ideas so often? More importantly, what would it take to change that pattern?...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 6, 2017 10:59 AM
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There is so much that goes on behind the scenes of a website. For instance, content creation, security and backup measures, constant updates, design overhauls, and even running an online business. However, your site visitors do not care how much is on your plate at any given time. That’s why many website owners have given in to the increasingly popular method of autoblogging. In the past, we have shared with you how to automatically post content from one website to another, some of the best autoblogging plugins on the market today, and even how to build a complete autoblogging website from the ground up. However today, we are not going to go into the technical or step-by-step details of autoblogging. Instead, we are going to develop a better understanding of how you can curate and aggregate quality web content for your website using the popular WordPress autoblogging plugin WP RSS Aggregator.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 6, 2017 10:38 AM
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Since my last piece on turbo-boosting content curation, I’ve fielded plenty of questions on my curation workflow. I’ve also seen more brand examples of content curation – some of which I like, some of which irritate me. I’ll show you a few. Curation can work well for brands, but it really starts with individuals. I define content curation as: The systematic process of sharing content from our expertise with our online networks. The “systematic” part is there for a reason – if we just compulsively retweet/share things we like, that’s not curation. That’s seat-of-pants....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2017 10:39 AM
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There are several nifty ways to go about pairing fonts for your design projects, including this machine learning-based tool and this Tinder-style app. But if you just want to see some great combinations, you’ll want to check out this excellent guide by designer Lou Levit. It features 50 top-notch pairings that draw from Google’s extensive web font collection – so you can grab all the typefaces you like for free, and use them on web design projects – and they’re matched with beautiful classic art. The pairings are organized and navigable by font style and mood (choose from Modern, Striking, Eccentric, Classic, Minimal, Neutral, and Warm). That’s handy for quickly finding a combination that suits your needs, whether it’s to professionally present information or announce an event. Plus, you can download the entire guide as a PDF. Find the guide, as well as tips on pairing fonts and the handy PDF, over at ReliablePSD.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 12, 2017 3:41 AM
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So how can you keep up-to-date with all the latest and breaking social media news without sacrificing too much of your time? In this post, we’ll share some tools, tips, and tricks to help you stay up to date with social media news in just 10 minutes a day.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 11, 2017 1:08 AM
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The prevailing view of artificial intelligence is that some day machines will help us reach better decisions than we can make on our own, improving our lives. This view presumes that we trust the organizations that use AI to provide us with products and services. But that is a faulty assumption, because most will not have our best interests in mind. Some scientists, many science fiction buffs, and a lot of the public believe perfect forms of AI — machines in likeness of humans that can actually understand the world, reason about it, and make perfect decisions — are just around the corner. Others, including me, believe it will take decades to achieve. And some scientists believe we will never achieve strong AI....
Free images for blogs and marketers. I have collected a bunch of sites that give you free images for commercial use. Check it out regularly as we add sites
Via TechinBiz
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 8, 2017 10:33 AM
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Whenever I open Instagram these days, it feels like I’m being watched. The minute I follow a new person or double tap a landscape or cat pic, the photo-sharing app—to which I’ve long been addicted—picks up on it and starts showing me remarkably similar images. It’s almost creepy. As it turns out, Instagram’s algorithms are indeed keeping an eye on me, busily drawing a complex map of my likes, follows, and other in-app behavior, and that of the people I follow as well. As the app learns, its Explore tab gets better at recommending photos and videos to me. I can’t help but take the bait. Next thing you know, I’m barreling down some new visual rabbit hole and following six more people. The Explore tab is essentially one giant recommendation engine. But the ever-evolving methodology Instagram uses to sort through one of the world’s largest networks of photographs, comments, and likes is far more complex than your standard, “If you like that, you’ll like this” logic. And, surprisingly, Instagram says that despite the image recognition capabilities of parent company Facebook, there’s no machine vision involved....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 8, 2017 9:53 AM
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Does this sound familiar to you at all? I used to log in to each and every individual social platform to compose new posts, check what’s happening in my streams, follow up on conversations and follower requests, and attempt to manually perform all other bits of social media management that was on my plate.Then, I switched to using tools, and my productivity has soared. Maximizing your time as a social media manager or business owner is crucial for social media growth and effectiveness. I’d love to share my 6 favorite tools for helping you along in that journey....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 7, 2017 10:10 AM
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We’ve managed to outrank competitors in Google that have $9+ million in outside funding with our little self-funded, 40-person content creation agency, by an immense 3 percent. We rank organically for more than 11,000 key terms, with organic search visibility worth $57,000+ monthly. And we haven’t paid a penny in ads — across six years — to gain the majority of our leads and clientele. They’ve come straight from these rankings. How well do they convert? Very well. After optimizing my strategy and increasing my content investment, we had the best sales month we’ve ever had and now my agency is on track to break our first seven figure year. 99 percent of our leads come through organic content marketing. I’ve never invested a single dollar in PPC....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 7, 2017 9:46 AM
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Dronestagram, a drone photography sharing website and community has collaborated with National Geographic to pick the best pictures out of thousands of entries. the categories – which include people, nature and urban context – showcase a selection of impressive perspectives. from the windings roads of transylvania to lily ponds in vietnam, the shortlist presents the best seen footage from way up high.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 7, 2017 9:28 AM
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I wrote a juicy ebook titled Master the Five Pillars of Power Publishing for the startup PowerPost and really want to share it with you. The publication actually cites two authors because the many ideas presented in it come from the sharp mind of Paul Shirer, the co-founder and CTO at PowerPost. Paul agreed to an interview with me to help shed light on how brands must address the new demands of publishing online at scale. Here’s that interview, followed by an edited transcript if you’re rather read....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 6, 2017 5:55 PM
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Scribes everywhere, look alive: Google is now funding a project which will use AI to write automated news stories,
The Press Association, a UK news agency, received about $807,000 from the third round of Google’s Digital News Initiative funding. Their project? Reporters and Data and Robots, or RADAR, an AI/human collaborative news site which will produce “a daily diet of compelling stories.”
RADAR is listed on the DNI site as a “large” project, with a goal towards providing a steady stream of ready-made content for smaller news sites....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 6, 2017 11:12 AM
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Imagine, if you will, a world in which Richard Seaver or Robert Gottlieb had stomped their feet and huffed and puffed every time John Leonard forgot to give them their proper "hat tip." Or rather, as I joked on Twitter over the weekend about the new "Curator's Code," if Goethe had lived long enough to chide Mann for writing about Faust and giving a "ᔥ" to Marlowe but forgetting to give a "↬" to Goethe. It's funny to think about! But only for a minute, since after that it all just becomes too depressing for words, because what we talk about when we talk about curation first of all sure ain't curation and secondly isn't even all that special. But mostly it's depressing because it's a conversation that happens at the expense of original content itself. First, let's just get clear on the terminology here: "Curation" is an act performed by people with PhDs in art history; the business in which we're all engaged when we're tossing links around on the Internet is simple "sharing." And some of us are very good at that! (At least if we accept "very good" to mean "has a large audience.") But we should not delude ourselves for a moment into bestowing any special significance on this, because when we do this thing that so many of us like to call "curation" we're not providing any sort of ontology or semantic continuity beyond that of our own whimsy or taste or desire. "Interesting things" or "smart things" are not rubrics that make the collection and dissemination of data that happens on the Internet anything closer to a curatorial act; these categories are ultimately still reducible to "things I find appealing," and regardless of how special one might feel about the highly cultivated state of his or her tastes there is no threshold of how many other people are eager to be on the receiving end of whatever it is we're sharing that somehow magically transforms this act into curation—that is, at least, unless we're also comfortable with arguing that "curation" is the act in which Buzzfeed is engaged. Or The Huffington Post. Or the top contributor on those weightlifting comment boards....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
July 6, 2017 10:44 AM
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Content curation is a great idea, but it’s really quite tedious to have to do it manually. You have to go out and find content you’d be interested in curating. Then you have to copy the link and paste it into each of your social networks. You have to schedule the post for an appropriate time, and you have to add your own spin to it, and you have to make sure it generates the right kind of preview or website card. Repeat for every link you want to share, ad nauseum, and you’re getting the idea. Thankfully, content curation is not a new idea, or a new industry. That means there are many businesses out there who have created products to help you. These content curation tools are designed specifically to curate content as smoothly as possible across your entire social media presence. Here are the best ones I recommend....
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Polaroid, Lego, and Pepsi have recently made comebacks through clever, creative, and strategic content marketing – here's a look at their tactics.