 Your new post is loading...
Your new post is loading...
Microsoft rebranded Xbox Music to Groove Music two years ago, in a bid to make its music streaming service more relevant to consumers. Despite the name change, Groove always felt like a vestige of the Zune era at Microsoft and something that consumers were unaware of. Microsoft is now giving up on Groove Music today, and partnering with Spotify instead. Microsoft will stop selling Groove Music passes soon (to stream music), and any customers subscribed to the service will be refunded pro-rata once Groove Music Pass is discontinued on December 31st. After December 31st, Microsoft’s Groove Music app will no longer support streaming music or the ability to purchase and download songs....
In June 2015, a new, hyperspecific website named Van Winkle’s went live. It was billed as an online destination for “all aspects of sleep and various nocturnal adventures” by its editorial director, Elizabeth Spiers, formerly an editor at Gawker and the Observer. In its first week, the site’s pieces included a listicle about dream sequence clichés and a 2,800-word feature on the rise of benzodiazepine prescriptions. Its editor-in-chief, Jeff Koyen, heralded it as “the first editorial venture of its kind.” What he meant by that had as much to do with its niche subject matter as it did its funding source: Van Winkle’s was not a traditionally independent journalistic venture, but the latest product of mattress startup Casper.
“We have a long-term vision for Casper to become the dedicated brand for all things sleep, and part of owning that category is owning the best content related to it,” Casper CEO Philip Krim told The Wall Street Journal at the time, speaking pure startup. He later added: “The mandate is to create awesome content and that’s it.”
In terms of design, the minimalist aesthetic is the visual representation of this concept. Even if in the early days of this style it was very difficult for the designers to achieve its simplicity and clean lines, they have learned to “declutter” the visual to the point of it being the second nature. However, some of the designers take it a step further and cut out almost everything from the design.
Indeed, even if the latest web designs with loud color, trendy headers, and stunning imagery are really attractive, sometimes, it’s nice to see and admire the everlasting minimalist style. The ultra-minimalist websites in this list focus on composition and typography to create clean and simple visuals, and the naked designs are as beautiful as those full of glamour.
We may already be living in a truthless dystopia.
It’s no secret that the professional media is in crisis. But what if the situation is even worse than those of us in the industry thought?
What if vast swaths of the public no longer believe the news on controversial political stories, even when it comes from established media outlets?
What if the public ascribes no value to professional news organizations?
That situation may sound terrifying to journalists and media owners, but we may be heading there quickly.
Researchers at Yale University have found that 40% of the public are now willing to dismiss perfectly accurate stories, regardless of the source. What may be even more disturbing is that articles sourced to a top news brand are perceived to have no more credibility than articles sourced to a joke brand, or none at all.
Reliably driving sales from social platforms like Instagram is one of the biggest challenges that digital marketers face.
And it makes sense. It’s tough to drive fleeting, generally low-intent Instagram followers all the way through your marketing or sales funnel to generate revenue.
That being said, there’s a few strategies you can employ to maximize your sales from social media. With that in mind, I present to you 15 awesome examples of Instagram posts that drive sales, featuring content from huge brands like McDonald’s, Spotify, and H&M.
The days of Twitter limiting messages to 140 characters — a signature of the social network since its launch in 2006 — may be numbered.
Twitter said on Tuesday that it would begin a test with a random sample of users allowing them to send tweets that are as long as 280 characters, double the existing cap, in most languages around the world.
The San Francisco-based company has stood by its short messages as a defining characteristic — like chirps from a bird, which is the company logo — even as users found ways around the limit, such as posting photos of text.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter said its emphasis on brevity would never change but that the company wondered whether people could express themselves easily enough on the service, and wondered whether that was hurting its popularity.
When it comes to finding your ideal connections on LinkedIn, one of the fastest and easiest ways to do it is by looking at who’s already paying attention to you on the platform. With LinkedIn’s “Follow” feature, you have a ready-made list of individuals all over the world who have essentially “opted in” to follow all your status updates and articles on the platform. LinkedIn Followers = Warm Leads Now, to be clear, I’m not talking about people you’re already connected to (1st Level Connections).Rather, I’m talking about people you are not connected to, but who found you one way or another on LinkedIn, and were so impressed they decided to follow everything you post and do on the platform. I don’t know about you, but those are people I want to be talking to!...
In case you haven't already heard, bots are the new black. Seriously. The new strategy of providing 1:1, instantaneous assistance to users and customers is proving successful for brands across industries. And although we've rounded up AI and bot use cases for you as they relate to productivity and marketing, we wanted to round up other cool ones, too -- that anyone can use, even for fun. So read on to learn about a few neat bots we've enjoyed using so far this year...
You built a website, but nobody’s visiting. It happens to the best of us. Just building a website isn’t enough. You need to get it listed with search engines and attract organic search traffic. Regarding traffic, more specifically, you need Google search traffic. Google accounts for nearly 78% of all organic search traffic according to Smart Insights....
The logo is the most essential part of making any brand recognizable. Hiring a professional designer to create a custom logo can definitely be expensive, especially for most small business owners and individuals who don’t have the budget. Fortunately, there is a seemingly endless supply of Web-based solutions to help you create logos with relative ease - and these are some of our favorites. Once you're done, head on over to Logo Rank, an AI tool that critiques your new logo design. ...
Everyone’s on Facebook. Your business is even on Facebook and you probably have a fan page. Let me show you 5 simple steps to driving traffic from it! Tip #1: Use high-quality images – From your header image to your profile image, it has to be high quality. The image also needs to represent who you are, what you’re doing, whether you’re a brand or an individual, that’s fine but it still needs to represent who you are or what you’re doing. If it’s an individual, use your own photo. If it’s a brand, then use your company logo. This will help you ultimate drive more traffic and sales from the fan page....
Engagement on Facebook Pages has fallen by 70 percent since the start of 2017, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed over 880 million Facebook posts by brands and publishers. As a social media marketer, it is worrying to see these trends. But we feel there are ways we can combat this organic reach decline on Facebook and we’d love to share some strategies with you. In this post, we’ll share 14 straightforward ways to increase your Facebook Page engagement — many of which are proven and have worked for us....
If everyone’s doing the same things, you’ll need to take things a step further to climb ahead of the competition.One of the biggest myths of online marketing is thinking you can stick to what everyone else is doing.It’s not always true.Here’s a list of somewhat unique SEO hacks to really jumpstart your organic search traffic....
|
Let's not overlook one splashy announcement at NYC Advertising Week last week, which might be highly significant or the adtech space -- or might not. The Weather Company's back story is intriguing, and in many ways emblematic of the data-driven marketing and advertising environment which surrounds us. Offering personalized meteorological updates, especially via a popular mobile app, put TWC in a position to aggregate an enormous set of first-party data, and — of course — location data. Swifty, a weather company became an adtech company, and a powerful one.In partnership with IBM, it launched a series of initiatives — for example, JOURNEYfx, a platform for first-party data-based location targeting. Last week, IBM Watson entered the picture with the re-branding of TWC as IBM Watson Advertising. This not only acknowledges TWC's central mission — using data to power campaigns — but also signals the use of AI to analyse and optimize these vast tracts of customer information: some 25 billion data transactions per day....
As ad dollars that used to fund journalism pour into the coffers of Facebook and Google, the information business is experiencing a trend familiar to other American industries: The product they produce is now competing with cheaper versions coming from overseas.
Content farmers in the Philippines, Pakistan, Macedonia (of course), and beyond are launching websites and Facebook pages aimed at Americans in niches such as politics, mental health, marijuana, American muscle cars, and more.
Based on Facebook engagement and other metrics, some of these overseas publishers are now beating their American counterparts. In the process they’re building an industry centered on producing and exporting cheap (and sometimes false) information targeted at the US.
“This is like all of the basic stuff happening in economics and politics today,” said Tyson Barker, a political economist with the Aspen Institute Germany who specializes in international economic policy. “It's a globalization trend and you've seen it also in manufacturing and other industries.”
Thankfully, the design world has advanced to the point where fonts are not nearly as limited as they once were. Starting with 2010 the Google Fonts were released, making the process of choosing and pairing fonts easier and quicker.
However, you should be aware that not every font combination in Google’s library is a recipe for typographical success. With the right font pairings and usage considerations, your brand will convey the right message to your audience, professionalism, and reader friendliness without the need for expensive customized fonts.
In this article, I’ll show you 15 great Google Font combinations that will help you to accomplish all this.
You will find below 15 spectacular Google Font combinations that together with images and graphics, will help you define your brand’s personality.
In the past decade, Marketing has gained access to a host of SaaS tools that optimize, simplify, and generally improve marketing efforts. Some, like Google's suite of tools, or Facebook's advertising options, have been around for a few years now—an eternity in Internet time—and you're probably already using them. Others are much newer, often with abstract names that don't necessarily reveal how powerful they really are.
What marketing tools should your company be using right now?
Here are 17 for 2017: some new, some tried and true, all totally useful.
Two weeks ago, development studies journal Third World Quarterly published an article that, by many common metrics used in academia today, will be the most successful in its 38-year history. The paper, in a few days, achieved a higher Altmetric Attention Score than any other TWQ paper. By the rules of modern academia, this is a triumph. The problem is, the paper is not.
Academic articles are now evaluated according to essentially the same metrics as Buzzfeed posts and Instagram selfies.
The article, “The case for colonialism,” is a travesty, the academic equivalent of a Trump tweet, clickbait with footnotes. Its author, Bruce Gilley, a professor at the Department of Political Science at Portland State University, sets out to question the “orthodoxy” of the last 100 years that has given colonialism a bad name.
He argues that western colonialism was “as a general rule, both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate,” and goes on to say that instead of taking a critical view of colonial and imperial history, we should be “recolonising some areas” and “creating new Western colonies from scratch”.
So how did this article rise to such prominence and apparent success? Arguments for colonialism have been made in academia before; however, Gilley’s article contributes no new evidence or datasets, and discussing its empirical shortfalls and blindness to vast sections of colonial history would go far beyond the scope of this post.
Similar to the other marketing endeavors, to create a plan for Facebook, you’d have to establish your goals, research your target audience and competitors, create your own content strategy based on the analysis and continuously review and adapt at regular intervals. To help you get a better grasp on how to plan your Facebook content, here is a short, but detailed 4-step guide that covers the topic. Let’s discuss!...
As a result of such “programmatic” buying, advertisers often are in the dark about where their ads end up. Advertisers can opt out of certain sites, of course, but only if they affirmatively place them on a blacklist of sites. So when an ad appears on Breitbart, Sleeping Giants or one of its 109,000 Twitter followers and 35,000 Facebook followers flag the advertiser, often accompanied by an image of the sponsors’ ad next to a Breitbart story. The other day, for example, a Sleeping Giants follower tweeted at Country Inns, informing the hotel chain that it was advertising on “the racist Breitbart site.” Within a day, the company tweeted back: “Thank you for your concern. . . . We have added Breitbart to our blacklist of ads.” This apparently happens a lot. Sleeping Giants’ database lists nearly 2,900 companies that have declared Breitbart off limits since November — an astonishing figure, though one hard to confirm because some ad buys recur. Nevertheless, it’s not an implausible number. During one 24-hour period, advertisers such as the air-conditioning manufacturer Rheem, transport operator Caltrain, Sutter Health Plus and Rose Medical Center of Denver all publicly acknowledged that they had blacklisted Breitbart in response to a Sleeping Giants tweet....
Maggie Haberman started working at the New York Times in 2015 — with just one little problem. She didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing there.“ I was looking for a lane, so I picked up Trump because nobody seemed very interested in Trump,” Haberman said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “I knew him and I knew his people.” Just two years later, she’s one of the NYT’s best-known reporters thanks to her coverage of Trump’s campaign and, now, his presidency. But for most of her career, Haberman had dreamed of one day being the Times’ chief New York correspondent, covering the city’s “broken” political system. Speaking with Swisher at the 2017 Texas Tribune Festival, along with Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold, Haberman said she learned “the number one rule” about Donald Trump while working at the New York Post, which he would call frequently as a “source” of gossip about himself. “In his brain, two things are true,” she said. “No one speaks for him except him, even if he actually has a spokesman, and he believes that facts can be changed so that they can be something other than what you thought they were a day ago.”
Instagram is a rapidly evolving powerhouse for content creators. We look at how to make the most of the platform in our latest infographic & trends report. With more than 700 million active monthly users, Instagram has emerged as a platform that publishers and brands alike can’t ignore. New reports suggest that the sought-after Generation Z is flocking to the platform, some of them even skipping Facebook entirely. To stay ahead of the need-to-know trends on Instagram, we rolled up our newest research and insights into our “What You Need to Know for Instagram” report. Read the report for: - The top publishers on Instagram and their strategies - How Instagram stacks up against Facebook for brands - Why influencer posts are making a big difference for brands - How top creators are using photo vs. video posts. The growth of Instagram video and the perfect video length And for a quick look at what’s winning the day on Instagram, check out our handy infographic below...
Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winning author of “Thinking Fast and Slow” uses the terms “system 1” and “system 2” to describe how we process and understand information. System 1 is intuitive, non-thinking. System 2 kicks in when the brain must work on the problem.If I ask you what is 2+2, your system 1 brain immediately answers 4. Now, if I ask you what is 2,531 + 9,518? without using a calculator, then your system 2 brain kicks in. You focus, and your cognitive load increases as your brain works towards the answer; 12,049.And it is the same for language. If a Web visitor arrives at a Web page with a complex message, they must spend mental energy working to understand. And since people scan web pages and spend 15 seconds on average on each page, they will most likely churn....
With the rise of Internet sales and the eventual explosion of online reviews, a strong correlation has been formed between online restaurant ratings and business revenue. For many restaurateurs, favorable reviews translate to better revenue and a stronger bottom line. However, the seedy side of the Web has also led to fake reviews of everything from bullion to bison. Now comes word that researchers at the University of Chicago have successfully taught a neural network to write realistic fake restaurant reviews. The idea was to see if a machine could learn to create malicious negative (or glowing) reviews to either kill or inflate online ratings. The results were startling. Humans were unable to differentiate between the machine generated and human-generated reviews. With these new-age "ghost writers" now pushing commerce, one has to wonder if good taste is a thing of the past. Literally. Cartoon by Ed Hall.
Curating top content from around the web is a great strategy to increase your social media reach. For example, we grew our Facebook reach tremendously with high-quality content from third-party sources. But where do you start with curation? There are many great websites on all sorts of topics. With our community’s help, we put together an ultimate list of content curation sources across multiple industries. From design to education, marketing to remote work, and beyond. I hope you’ll find some great websites for your content curation strategy....
|
Microsoft rebranded Xbox Music to Groove Music but will shelve it and partner with Spotify.