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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 22, 2017 10:57 AM
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Now, you might be thinking “Author brand? What in the heck is an author brand? I’m not Coca-Cola. I’m a writer. What does branding have to do with me?” You don’t have to be a big company like Coke or Pepsi for branding to have a positive impact on your success. Having a strong author brand helps your audience understand who you are, what you stand for and what they can expect from you. It sets you apart from the millions of other authors out there trying to make it big, and it shows what makes your writing unique, which will help you build a readership that’s going to go bananas over your stuff....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 11:15 PM
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Thanks in part to a “60 Minutes” segment in October, influencer marketing has crossed over. It’s no longer just a topic of interest to advertisers. It’s a subject of public interest.
As the segment illustrated, influencer marketing is a big business. Teens with millions of followers can pull in hundreds of thousands of dollars for a shout-out on YouTube or Instagram.
It’s easy to imagine viewers all over the country yelling at their screens about the unfairness of it all, but from a marketer’s point of view, there’s another big problem: This type of “influencer marketing” isn’t actually marketing. It’s really “influencer advertising” and should be viewed as a less effective, pricier variation that has a corrosive effect on influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing transfers the implicit trust that consumers have in people they follow online and transfers it to a brand. Influencer advertising betrays that trust both for the influencer and for the brand....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 10:47 PM
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A common myth is that the development of creative marketing content happens in a smooth linear fashion, thanks to the toil and ingenuity of an inspired designer, writer, illustrator, or other such right-brain maker. That idea is especially appealing to project managers and heads of marketing who'd like to oversee that ostensibly straightforward process with their spreadsheets and GANTT charts.
But the reality is less GANTT chart and more goat rodeo.
Ideas, drafts, and iterations are tossed around almost at random. Feedback and approvals go back and forth—and sometimes sideways. Unanticipated obstacles knock progress off course, and too often great ideas are thrown onto the dirt and trampled into dust. Inevitably, the goat wins.
It isn't easy to find a balance between the two extremes of super-efficiency and chaos....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 11:13 AM
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Now that we're well into 2017, are you checking items off your marketing to-do list? Or, like many of us procrastinators, do you have a to-do list that consists of just one item: "Make 2017 marketing to-do list"? If the latter is the case, IBM has you covered. The software company has put together an infographic guide to help marketers prioritize their efforts this year, and it also explains the benefits that each idea can have on your program. For example, stories are up to 22 times more memorable than facts or figures alone, the infographic claims, and it gives tips on how to captivate your audience with better stories this year....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 10:42 AM
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If you're the type of guy who drives your friends nuts by compulsively obsessing over minor details at lunch, then McDonald's has a deep existential dilemma for you. In Canada, the fast-food chain is temporarily adding the Big Mac Bacon—a Big Mac, with bacon on it—to its menu, the first change to the sandwich in that country in 50 years. An ad from Cosette puts the new product to the pedant test, which by its very nature requires that anything that can be argued, must be argued. Two men sit in a McD's. One takes a bit of his Big Mac Bacon, and declares "Mmmm, now that's a Big Mac." Naturally, his tight-ass buddy takes umbrage, and an absurd debate ensues over whether a few bits of crispy cured pig fat render the sandwich a completely different entity. It's clearly a dilemma that would be best solved by spending less time talking, and more time shutting up and eating....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 10:07 AM
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To better accommodate more than three million customers and 115,000 associates each week across 780 store locations, Ahold USA’s retail divisions, Stop & Shop New England, Stop & Shop New York Metro, Giant Landover, and Giant Carlisle, embarked on a technology overhaul in collaboration with Verizon Enterprise Solutions to create a ‘smarter store’ for today’s always-connected consumer. With consumers increasingly relying on smartphones and public Wi-Fi when shopping, retailers are recognizing the imperative to offer strong and reliable networks for delivering the digitally rich in-store experience that is now an expectation. Underscoring the growing popularity of the Wi-Fi feature, in December 2016 alone Ahold USA’s divisions saw an overall 23% spike in the number of users over the previous month. On top of improving the customer experience, the technology upgrade includes operational enhancements across all Ahold USA division stores. All locations are now equipped with Verizon’s business-grade voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone solution which streamlines network management and cost efficiencies while extending the capabilities of the company’s existing phone system. Further, the addition of Verizon’s industry leading wireless network capabilities in each location will provide backup connectivity to help maintain business continuity in the event of outages which can be harmful to business and a company’s brand.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 19, 2017 10:59 AM
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What does the public relations industry have to look forward to in 2017? What’s in store for practitioners, agencies and companies seeking to build awareness, reputation and trust? Three mega-trends are on their way and will arrive on our industry’s shores this year. Let’s see if we’re ready for them:...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 19, 2017 12:54 AM
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If you’re feeling overwhelmed when attempting to select a theme for a WordPress site that will work for you, you’re not alone. There are so many to choose from, that after a while, all the good candidates begin to look alike. The real problem could be that you’re unsure of what theme characteristics to look for. After all, you want to build more than just websites; you want to build web experiences.Here’s what to look for....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 18, 2017 11:47 PM
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You’re trying to imagine what the agency of the future looks like. You’re thinking about bringing video production in-house. Or merging a tech company with a consulting practice. Or freelancing media and emphasizing content marketing.
I would advise you to stop doing this, because you’ll just go crazy and end up right where you started: focusing on what the agency of the future looks like. As marketing leaders continue to shake their magic eight-ball and arbitrarily guess what the future holds for communications, most of us make the same, frustrating mistake: We focus on the “what.”
The truth is that what the agency of the future looks like doesn’t matter. What you do, regardless of your level of expertise, has completely and forever transformed into a commodity. Don’t believe me? Look around. Consulting firms are building content development powerhouses. Algorithms are writing articles. Enormous freelance communities are a click away. And brands are increasingly looking inward for solutions.
As a partner and strategy director of my own agency, I can tell you this much: What you do is a commodity....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 18, 2017 11:29 PM
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So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the "About Us" page.
For a remarkable about page, all you need to do is figure out your company's unique identity, and then share it with the world. Easy, right? Of course it's not easy. That said, the "About Us" page is one of the most important pages on your website, and it can't go neglected. It also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages, which is why you should make it stand out.
But it can be accomplished. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable "About Us" pages, and there are elements of them that you can emulate on your own website. By the end of this post, showing off how your company's greatness won't seem like such a challenging feat....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 18, 2017 11:06 PM
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Using NewsWhip Analytics, we can rank the performance of all sites, based on how many Facebook engagements they achieved with links to their website, published in Dec 2016 only.
It’s important to remember what we’re measuring here in this analysis. We aren’t looking at the impact of native videos or images on Facebook, but rather how links to owned websites, as well as Instant Articles, performed in terms of social engagement on the platform.
Here are some of the key points this time round:
– IndiaTimes.com comes out as the most engaged English language sites on Facebook in December 2016, with over 25 million engagements on content published that month.
– NBC, Fox and CNN make significant gains to finish in the top five sites on the platform.
– There has been a general narrowing of the field for top publishers, with a difference of just seven million engagements between the first and tenth sites....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 17, 2017 11:51 AM
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Vidrovr is new technology that can comb through video files and identify what’s happening in a video. As a result, video content can be easily searched or automatically linked to other related material.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 17, 2017 11:27 AM
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What can this small chapter tell us about what’s to come? That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls “the gaslighter in chief” — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (“Gaslighting” is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.) “The techniques,” Ghitis wrote, “include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.”...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 11:25 PM
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At AdExchanger’s Industry Preview on Wednesday, Vaynerchuk shared his provocative views with an audience of digital industry professionals who he clearly wanted to shake up: “I believe this entire space is broken not in a bad way, but from the way I see the world.” And what is that? He believes that brand marketers, agencies, and tech suppliers, see everything based on a short-term vision. “Everyone talks about return on ad spend, click-throughs… everything is math and metrics but meanwhile, the business is in the tank,” he said. “There’s a disconnect,” he says -- and he blames short-term thinking, and the industry’s obsession with “math” and metrics.
“Common sense needs to enter ad tech,” he said, rating the common-sense element at “zero.” He also blamed much of the existing dysfunction on programmatic and “behavior that is so predicated in the moment or in the machine.” And he boldly stated to the audience: “You don’t believe in what you’re selling.” He said everyone in the room is concerned about short-term returns, and brand managers worry about making the numbers quarter by quarter, instead of taking a longer view.
All of this is taking place within the context of extreme channel conflict, where marketers are increasingly going direct consumer....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 11:08 PM
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Donald Trump doesn’t always speak with proper grammar. And he doesn’t always speak with facts. But he does speak with two other powerful tools: anger, and even more so, volatility.
The data visualization firm Periscopic lays it out in a new data visualization called On The Trump Emoto-Coaster. "If it felt like you were on an emotional roller coaster during this past Presidential election, just look at what was happening to Donald Trump," the team writes. "As shown in 10 of the major speeches he gave from July through December, there’s a rise and fall of intense emotion." As Trevor Noah so cuttingly put it last year, Trump has the unmodulated mentality of a toddler....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 11:24 AM
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When Google launched its Knowledge Graph back in 2012, it was hailed by users and marketers alike as a breakthrough in search. Instead of sifting through page after page of results. At the moment, Google Knowledge Graph is more like a toaster oven than a Terminator. There’s a lot it can do, but also a lot it can’t do. One thing is for certain — you can’t hope that the Knowledge Graph is going away, or that it won’t affect you. Eventually it will, and it’s only going to get smarter. So there are now two ways you can approach this:...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 10:55 AM
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If you work in the world of web design, whether that be in a studio or working from home, it's vital to keep up-to-date with the latest industry tools and standards. This month, we've found a number of interesting resources that should help you do just that. So, whether you’re looking to delve into the world of artificial intelligence, learn some new skills or launch an app, you’ll find something interesting on this list.
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 10:15 AM
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We asked our partners to reflect on the trends they see gathering momentum in 2017. Notable areas of concensus include accelerating merchant interest in B2B ecommerce, a continued focus on optimizing shoppers experiences on mobile, international expansion, and retailers rethinking the role of physical stores. Here’s a roundup of their thoughts: Integrated B2B & B2C“More and more mid-market customers want to see both customer paths in one instance, which makes their overall process more efficient.” (Martina England,Corra) "[We] see B2B online retailing as an on-going trend that will be gaining a lot more steam in the coming year. With the B2B eCommerce market approaching $1 trillion dollars according to Forbes, even mid-market retailers are looking for an agile way to break into this space." (Karah Finan, Web Solutions NYC)...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 20, 2017 1:03 AM
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We're not even a month into 2017 and automakers have already shown off several wild concepts for the future of driving. Concept cars are only getting crazier. Automakers use concept cars as a way to showcase their vision for future production models. Sometimes, the cars are tame, though innovative, offering a realistic example of features to come. But more often than not, car makers pack concept cars with features you'll probably never see — at least not within the next decade. Either way, concept cars offer a fun way to look at automakers' more creative side. Scroll down for the ones we've seen so far: 1. Fiat Chrysler unveiled a concept car geared for high-tech millennials at CES this year. The car isn't all that eye-catching purely from an aesthetic perspective. It's large, boxy, and heavy looking......But the car is really meant to showcase the tech millennials are looking for inside a car, FCA said. It's electric with 250 miles of range and gets just over 50% of its charge back in under 20 minutes with a DC Fast Charger. It also comes with lidar and sensors to handle Level 3 autonomous driving, meaning it can handle urban environments, but still requires human oversight. 2. As for an even crazier concept car, Rinspeed showed off its Oasis car at CES. The vehicle has an actual garden, complete with Bonsai trees and radishes....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 19, 2017 1:26 AM
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If one of the main goals of the future of work is to increase productivity and collaboration, there’s a great place to start: digital transformation. Many companies are embarking on a digital transformation in an effort to connect employees and customers around the world digitally. The future of work and digital transformation are both vital to each other’s success, and they can work together to help organizations prepare for a new wave in the workforce. A digital transformation can provide employees the tools they need to create the best work environment for the future. Digital transformation builds on the current state of global connectivity and can include a wide variety of features. However, according to Adam Warby, CEO of global technology solutions firm Avanade, there are four main trends being seen in digital transformations across industries:...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 18, 2017 11:55 PM
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From virtual reality to live video, business owners shouldn't chase every new marketing trend that comes along. In fact, often reexamining what has worked in the past and thinking about how to apply those successes on new platforms is the first place to start.
Look, for example, at Mastercard. The payments technology company has been globally recognized brand for a very long time. Mastercard's chief marketing and communications officer, Raja Rajamannar, says that his biggest task when hired in 2013 was to optimize a pre-digital brand for the present-day.
Rather than ditch a mature campaign to make his mark, he looked at the long game. Here are four lessons we can learn from it about optimizing your marketing in the digital age...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 18, 2017 11:35 PM
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As brand apps lose their luster, marketers need to reassess how they connect with consumers in a mobile-first world. Chatbots are one way they can speak with consumers one-on-one in a place where they are already spending the bulk of their time.
“Chatbots will replace the search window,” said Will Wiseman, chief strategy officer, PHD U.S. “There will be a rapid decline in app usage. The last three years, we have gone from brands’ desire to have mobile-friendly websites, then apps, and [we] now expect to see app activity get cannibalized by bots.”
But before you get chatty, here are some basics on bots....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 18, 2017 11:13 PM
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Fast-forward to the waning months of 2016, and the magic is a little harder to feel. Certain corners of the social world have become uglier places, with some in the business world calling for a draw-down. But the pitfalls of political partisanship weren't the only things companies struggled to circumnavigate last year. From a more practical standpoint, it turned out that just having an audience on social media doesn’t mean you actually get to reach it.
And as we head into 2017, the fact that social media is paying ever fewer dividends to many brands and their marketers is becoming more apparent. So what comes next?...
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 17, 2017 2:34 AM
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We are living in an era of backlash against authority. So far, government and the media have borne the brunt of populist anger, while businesses have remained above the fray. Past protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street notwithstanding, mass outrage has yet to be directed squarely at the business elite. But there are signs that this is changing. For 17 years the Edelman Trust Barometer has surveyed tens of thousands of people across dozens of countries about their level of trust in business, media, government, and NGOs. This year was the first time the study found a decline in trust across all four of these institutions. In almost two-thirds of the 28 countries we surveyed, the general population did not trust the four institutions to “do what is right” — the average level of trust in all four institutions combined was below 50%. We also discovered a staggering lack of confidence in leadership: 71% of survey respondents said government officials are not at all or somewhat credible, and 63% said the same about CEOs. The credibility of CEOs fell by 12 points this year, to 37% globally. By comparison, 60% of respondents trusted “a person like yourself” — on a par with trust in a technical expert or an academic....
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Scooped by
Jeff Domansky
January 17, 2017 11:38 AM
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Donald Trump and his forthcoming presidency may be the greatest gift to Washington journalism since the invention of the expense account. His unorthodox approach to politics and governance has vaporized the standard, useful, yet boring script for reporting on a new administration’s doings. At his news conference last week, Trump began the process of washing the press completely out of his fake hair as he castigated CNN and BuzzFeed for reporting on the oppo-research dossier compiled on him. “Fake news,” said the man who has appeared on InfoWars and commended the outlet’s efforts. Trump’s surrogate Newt Gingrich took to Sean Hannity’s program on Fox to assist in the maiming of the media. Trump and his team “need to go out there and understand they have it in their power to set the terms of this dialogue,” Gingrich said on the Jan. 11 episode. “They can close down the elite press.” Next up came Reince Priebus’announcement that Trump might evict the presidential press corps from the White House for lesser lodging in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building, and Sean Spicer’s admonition that reporters “adhere to a high level of decorum at press briefings and press conferences,” according to a readout of his two-hour summit with the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association. (Or else what, one wonders?) Now, before the Committee to Protect Journalists throws up the batsign and the rest of us bemoan Trump’s actions as anti-press—which they are—let’s thank the incoming president for simplifying our mission. If Trump’s idea of a news conference is to spank the press, if his lieutenants believe the press needs shutting down, if his chief of staff wants to speculate about moving the White House press scrum off the premises, perhaps reporters ought to take the hint and prepare to cover his administration on their own terms. Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting, the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a matter of life or death....
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Having a strong author brand helps your audience understand who you are, what you stand for and what they can expect from you. Learn how to build your writer's brand.