Erik Qualman's Blog, page 517

What to say when your Prom date picks you up in an Apple…

What to say when your Prom date picks you up in an Apple…

What kind of juice does this run on? Big news folks. You may not have to wait long for an Apple Automobile as you may think. (Say that five times fast). Apple is speeding up plans for their electric cars. The big date? 2019. The cars will not be autonomous, nonetheless it’s hard to hide our excitement. The current 600 person Apple team will soon triple to 1800 (yep, we are good at math too) To meet the forecasted launch. Evidence supporting the expedited release date is the large increase of Apple engineers with automobile backgrounds. Some from the successful electric car company Tesla. Some speculate that Apple will try purchasing Elon Musk’s car company in order to accelerate into the automobile industry. Hmmm very interesting. We can only hope that Apple’s long term vision includes building flying cars. Vroom.

A little bit more…

As you all may know Apple is known for disrupting existing markets. You may have heard of some of their products. What they’re DEFINITELY not known for is co-branding or partnerships. When questioned about Apple’s future engagements in the automobile industry, CEO Tim Cook answered “We look at a number of things along the way, and we decide to really put our energies in a few of them.” Hopefully their automobiles don’t include Apple Maps as standard…oh burn.

STATS of the day..

The United Nations’ Broadband Commission recently dropped some jaw-dropping stats on us. About what you ask? Internet Connection. The 2015 report estimates that 57% of the human population, 4.2 billion people will not have regular internet connection by the end of the year. Less Candy Crush for all this Halloween season. Sugar high officially crashed  (pun fun).

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5 Tools for Social Content Retargeting

It’s a common issue that webmasters fear losing website dropoffs, and that dropoffs represent potentially lost clients. Content retargeting swiftly became the means to stay in front of these clients even after they leave: and these primarily involve ads and email drip campaigns.

In recent months, analytics on these activities have been so broadly positive across all industries that many companies have begun releasing fantastic tools to assist webmasters and business owners in their retargeting, allowing them to send tailored messages to specific client groups. Of all the retargeting tools on the market, these are some of the best, with the largest payout.

 

  “Social networking services” by Wilgengebroed on Flickr

Twitter Tailored Audiences

Twitter’s tailored audience tool allows anyone who engages in Twitter advertising to define groups based on existing or potential clients with your brand. For example, you can highlight users who have searched or interacted with specific subjects or brands even away from twitter. You can also utilize browser cookies through ads partners to match information on existing Twitter accounts so that you can easily match selected user types to the ads you engage.

WixShoutOut

Wix is a popular website builder that helps individuals build clean, easy-to-use, and easy-to-manage websites without needing to know code. But now they have a great retargeting tool too; it’s called WixShoutOut.

ShoutOut is a fabulous email newsletter service that integrates neatly with many of the website builder’s other features. And best of all you can retarget directly into Facebook. This is turning out to be a solid tool for socially based retargeting.You can also easily import contacts and take advantage of their beautiful, responsive email templates. Best of all, you never need to touch a stitch of code. It is a leading platform and one of the few to offer comprehensive analytics on everything including views, open rates, and click rates.

AdRoll

If you want to consolidate a good portion of your retargeting, Adroll can help you do that. Their proprietary platform not only helps you set up campaigns in many social media outlets, but their biggest pitch is the ROI on every dollar spent on campaigns through their service: the firm lauds $10 for every $1 on average. Adroll helps novice remarketers use advanced techniques and avoid common remarketing pitfalls: everything from geo targeting to customer segmentation. You can even target groups of clients based on their actions, such as whether or not they placed an item in a shopping cart or how many pages they visited.

Facebook Custom Audiences

Facebook custom audiences function very similarly to Twitter’s options, only they allow you to potentially reach wider audiences. You can also retarget ads by specific page visits. However, it is limited by the fact that you must already have a custom audience in place. This means an offsite pixel generated by the Facebook developer platform embedded into the page. Once they visit, this adds them to your custom audience list without you needing to lift a finger.

Those visitors are separated into different custom audience lists per your specification, and show up as a targeted audience in your Facebook ad retargeting campaign. You can segment those groups down based on almost infinitesimal variables. As a matter of fact, it takes only a few very specific steps: you can set up an entire retargeting campaign in under ten minutes from start to finish with the refining abilities of the custom audiences tool.

Mailchimp Facebook Retargeting

Facebook and Mailchimp have been integrating services for some time, but now they’ve taken that partnership up a notch for those wanting to be able to remarket to advanced categories of established visitors. You can take your Mailchip customer list and then upload it to Facebook to target many of the same clients. Mailchimp even helps by providing great examples of way to optimize your lists, and even ways to target: such as exposing existing clients to the variety of new, upcoming, or ongoing promotions. If you save multiple categories of Mailchimp customers, you can upload more than one category with ease into the Facebook retargeting system, or modify lists beforehand as you see fit.

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Components for a Productive Homepage in 2015

 

The most intimidating factor in homepage creation is that the first impression about your website is formed within the very first second. Moreover, it is impossible to argue with. Nevertheless, don’t be in despair, the following principles will allow you to become King of the 1st second. So, pay attention.

Internal features of a Homepage:

The internal characteristics of a successful home page include all the factors that help it to function, ie:

 

Functionality

It is of critical importance in the process of conversion to turn your visitors into buyers. Use the search engine within your website for calculating engine for goods and services; compare characteristics of goods, add online payment services, and online consulting.

 

Usability

It assumes the correct display of the site on various gadgets in different browsers, easy navigation and relevance of information. If your website is difficult to operate, your users will leave forever.

 

Download speed

It depends on the quality of a webhosting provider. When choosing a company it is better to monitor the market on a daily webhosting review basis.

 

External features of a Homepage

Among external features of a homepage there will definitely be design, contacts, content and even content placement ala digital Feng Shui.

 

Design

Design is the first thing that catches the eye. However, the best design for you will be the one that fits your website concept perfectly. Before deciding what design to choose, think about your target market and what problem needs to solve. Use trendy colors for youth-oriented websites, and moderate tones to not distract users on websites related to the business sphere. In addition, never-ever do the opposite. It is good to stand out among others, but it is bad to be a laughingstock. Remember: users are attracted to graphic objects, informative visual elements, as well as elements that encourage them to press buttons or move to other pages, like banners, buttons, markers.

 

Contacts

It is important to place information about contacts on a homepage. Visitors should not be confused by absent ability to contact you. Open communication shows the visitor that you are one to be trusted. It is also helpful to specify who you are, and what you do in a brief overview.

 

Content

Many people want to place as much information to a homepage as possible. However, it is extremely not productive. Only 28% of users read all the information from a homepage. When placing content, remember that the priority of users’ attention accesses to the left upper corner of the page, and the text is read by a “letter F” pattern: firstly, the two horizontal lines are read, and then one vertical line.

 

Content placement

Try to focus on the left side of the page, visually increase opening words. Main content is better to be placed within the first screen of the page and not below. The right side of the screen is the place for various buttons and calls to action. After all, we read from left to right, and after finishing reading, we form certain opinions and are ready for decision-making.

 

Your website’s homepage is a factor that creates good or bad impression about you. If your homepage is composed correctly and takes into account all featured preferences of websites’ visitors in 2015, it will significantly increase conversion for your website.

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Volkswagen Cheats On Emission Test

THE STORY: VOLKSWAGEN CHEATS ON EMISSIONS TEST

Last week, someone was a little angry with Volkswagen and gave a tip to the U.S Environmental Protection Agency that the car manufacturer might have done a bit of cheating on their tests. (Source: CNN).

No cheating will be permitted…

Volkswagen and Audi included software in their diesel cars that made the cars look cleaner than they actually were. The software programmed the cars to turn on the emission controls only when the car was being tested. So, consider Volkswagen to be that kid who copied all your tests back in high school.  (Source: CNN).

DA SKIM

About 500,00 cars had this software installed. The EPA required that all cars affected be recalled. While no health issues will affect the drivers, the EPA wants Volkswagen to fix the violation and be able to pass the test on their own. In the meantime, Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkon said he was, “deeply sorry that we have broken the trust of our customers and the public.” (Source: CNN).

Quote of the Day: “Keep building.”

Last week, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school because his teachers thought it was a bomb. Since then his arrest has gone viral with people like Google Science Fair, 3M and even President Obama tweeting about how they would love for him to visit their offices. The latest public figure wanting to meet Mohamed is Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook CEO said in a post, “Having the skill and ambition to build something cool should lead to applause, not arrest. The future belongs to people like Ahmed. Ahmed, if you ever want to come by Facebook, I’d love to meet you. Keep building.” As Zuckerberg said, keep building Ahmed.

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Hire Social Media to Help You Find the Best Employees

As a hiring manager, you’ve got to use everything accessible to you find the best people for your company.

Have you thought about social media?

More and more job seekers are using social media; it’s a great place for hiring managers as well.

The job hunt goes both ways – you want to seek out the best possible candidates, but they are seeking you as well. Social media is a great place for this.

As the following article looks at, there are at least 7 ways for hiring managers to get the most out of social media.

They include:

Post job openings – When your company has a job opening, social media is one of the most important places to post it. Those seriously interested in working for you may very well be following your social media. They are the ones who may know your company and have been researching it. They may be the very ones you want working for you. By posting on social media, you’ll let them know when something becomes available. Tweet it with the right hashtag and post it on your Facebook page;
Twitter – Speaking of tweeting with the right hashtag, Twitter is an excellent venue for finding good candidates. By using smart hashtags, you’ll reach out to a lot of potential employees, and it’s a great way to begin engagement;
Learn about potential candidates – Just as these candidates are looking at your company’s social media, check out any potential hire’s social media. You can learn a lot from perusing their social media pages, sometimes a little too much. But it’s important to see how someone presents him or herself to the public eye;
LinkedIn – This is one of the obvious ones, but it’s a good one. You can use LinkedIn for not only finding candidates, but also engaging with them, even seeking referrals or references. It’s a place to do a little research before an interview as well, in both directions for you and the candidates;
Facebook – This is where a lot of people go first, so it’s smart to not only promote your brand and company here, but also to post information about hiring and open positions. Those that follow your page will be some of the first to know, and they may be the most interested and qualified;
Communicate and engage – Social media is a place where you can direct those in the hiring process to find more information or where you can engage a bit outside of the interview room;
Use niche social media – When you have specific social media related to your business, scour that for potential candidates. For one, they are savvy enough to be there, so they are a step ahead of the others already. Also, like other sites, it’s a good place to do a little pre-assessment.

Social media is a smart place to look for potential employees.

You may find just the right person for the job from a smart and savvy social networking encounter.

Photo credit: BigStockPhoto.com

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7 Mobile Apps to Manage Social Media On the Go

The task of balancing multiple social media accounts can often be intimidating and nerve wrecking. Maintaining your social media accounts, and keeping them up-to-date is a vital part of your social media marketing strategy. However, it can look like an impossible task especially when your job or business requires you to be on the move most of the time. But there is no need to worry. You don’t have to be glued to your desktop in order to keep track of your social media accounts.

Luckily, there are plenty of mobile social media management apps which allow the user to stay updated on their social media activities throughout the day without any hassle. These mobile apps offer a variety options when it comes to having complete control of your social media pages even when you are on the go. They help boost efficiency by reducing the amount of time spent in managing your social media pages and also help you increase exposure for your brand on social media. Here are a few mobile apps that are great for on-the-go social media management.

IFTTT – Gain control of your mobile apps

Based on simple conditional statements known as recipes IFTTT stands for ‘If That, Then This’. These recipes can help you do anything – from sending email messages each time the IFTTT user tweets with a certain hashtag, to adding Facebook photos, that an IFTTT user is tagged in, to Dropbox.

Launched in September 2011, IFTTT recipes are commonly used and shared by its many users. The iOS version contains three channels in addition – iOS photos, reminders and contacts. Earlier this February, IFTTT announced that their users were cooking up around 20 million recipes daily. IFTTT is available on both Android and iOS devices.

DrumUp – free social media management tool

[Disclosure: I write for the DrumUp blog] DrumUp is a great app for content curation for social networking pages. It is your personal social media manager assisting with growth in your user interaction on your social media pages. The app uses Natural Language Processing and machine learning algorithms to bring fresh content recommendations for your niche audience based on keywords that you can input.

DrumUp helps you out by cutting your Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin management time in half through a smart workflow giving you the ability to juggle multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. Users can also schedule the content at a desired time, or at an optimal time that DrumUp suggests.

The tool is currently available for free and can be easily downloaded to your Android devices.

Plume – easy Twitter management

Designed exclusively for Twitter and Tweet maniacs, Plume – the app was formerly known as Touiteur – is a complete package. It categorizes people by assigning them a specific color, and then displays their tweets in their corresponding colors, helping you easily identify interesting tweets on your timeline.

Plume also helps you track Twitter conversations simply by including a smart discussion reader. The app is completely customizable with alignments and colors. Plume also gives you trending topics, old and native retweeets, and offers easy forwarding and swipe scrolling to enhance the user’s experience. Plume is available on Android devices for download.

Over – create images that tell stories

One of the coolest apps out there, Over works to give the user complete customizing freedom by allowing them to add text and artwork to their photos. Designed keeping mobile creatives in mind Over allows for custom made as well as standard fonts and great artwork to combine with sleek designs, immediate shareability, and user friendly functionality.

Over’s user interface is fast and really simple to work with. Once you have edited an image as per your liking, Over lets you share the image on your social media networks including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Over is a paid app and can be downloaded on Android and iOS devices.

Feedly – get news stories right on your smartphone

Avid news readers need not look further than the personal newsreader app – Feedly. Feedly’s mobile app works towards letting iOS users read blogs, magazines and publications along with organizing all YouTube channels in one place allowing for higher shareability. Using the mobile app gives you faster access to various sources of information so you can stay ahead of industry happenings.

While Feedly is connected to millions of feeds at any given time, the user is able to go deep to find that niche content that is specific to their work and passion. Feedly is not shallow or random in its delivery and accessibility of content making it a popular choice amongst millions of professionals. Download the Feedly app on your iOS and Android devices.

Facebook Pages Manager – track your page’s performance

When you’re a social media manager with multiple pages to take care of, the Facebook Pages Manager comes in handy. Allowing you to connect with all your pages under one UI makes it easier to reply to comments, post and share content and keep track of the activities on your Facebook pages. The Pages Manager helps you view your latest Page insights as well as receive all your pages’ notifications under the same tab while letting you view, read and reply to the pages’ privates messages via the Pages app.

A fast and smooth UI makes for a great user experience which has made Pages a highly downloaded app. You can download the Facebook Pages Manager app on both Android and iOS devices.

Mention – monitor your brand with ease

Along with content curation and image editing apps, you will also require a few analytics tools or brand monitoring tools from time to time. These apps help you understand how your brands are performing on social media.

Working as a tracking service along the lines of Google Alerts, Mention monitors billions of sources in over 40 languages to ensure you do not miss anything published about your specialty on social networks, news sites, forums or any web page. Mention also boosts your connectivity by letting you connect your social accounts and react through the app. Whether it be a retweet, a like or a mention, all can be done via the Mention app.

Even analysis of data and insights is made simpler using Mention with snapshots of your interactions and notifications available under a single UI. Mention also helps you generate reports and export data in comparing yourself with your competitors. The app is available for download on Android and iOS devices.

There are many great apps out there available for mobile devices. Once you know your exact requirement and functionality it becomes clear what exactly you need to use in order to have a more efficient social media marketing strategy.

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Boost the Social Reach of Your Corporate Video

You’ve Made A Corporate Video, Now what?

Creating a corporate video is just the beginning of a wider strategy for increasing customer awareness of your business. After putting what will likely be a significant amount of time and effort, not to mention expense, into creating your corporate video, you will be eager to see a tangible return on the investment you have made.

Using your video in email marketing, for instance, can significantly drive up your average click through rate. According to video production group TellyJuice, ‘the average click through rate for text only email marketing is 3.5% but with video this rises to 58%’.

Ensure you always have a clear ‘call to action’

A call to action describes the marketing practice used by many companies to encourage customers to take a specific action, such as clicking a link or calling a number.

This is just making it easier for your customers to get what they want, which at this point should be your product. In the words of KissMetrics ‘your customers want to get from point A (where they are now) to point Z (where they want to be)’, and the journey should be intuitive and not too time-consuming.

There should always be an obvious way for your customers either to learn more about your business or to make a purchase, and for online marketing this will mean providing them with a direct link to the most appropriate page on your site.

YouTube provides users with the option of creating a clickable link on the video itself, whereas Facebook will require you to insert it into the description or the wording of the video.

Optimise your video for maximum views and shares

What keywords are customers searching for in relation to your product? If you have no knowledge of SEO (search engine optimisation) then you may not know the answer to this question, which is an important one for the launch and promotion of your video.

Such is the importance of keywords for targeting customers, in their “SEO Handbook” the digital marketing agency Go Up argue that ‘businesses should not even begin to plan website architecture, design or strategy until they have decided upon a set of keyword phrases to target’.

If you are interested in carrying out some basic keyword research then you can sign up for Google Adwords Keyword Planner, which shows the volume of monthly searches for specific terms.

Consider using some of these tips to optimise your video and help it begin to rank in search engines and YouTube search.

Make the most of social media

Social media is an excellent tool, not only for initially uploading your video but also for encouraging sharing, commenting and other forms of engagement.

If customers organically share your video this ‘earned media’ can be invaluable, not only for promoting brand recognition but also for eventually increasing overall sales and business.

While it is probably best to share your video on all your business social media accounts, it can be useful to know which social media platforms are used most by your target demographic.

Giving your customers opportunities to engage with your video can also create a motivation for sharing it with friends or family. For example, making use of a question that encourages tagging on Facebook or retweets on Twitter (e.g. ‘which of your friends could use this product?’) can sometimes provoke far more interactions than a simple description.

Completing the production of a corporate video is just the first step on an important marketing journey. By making use of multiple social media platforms, SEO practices and marketing techniques, you can ensure that your video ultimately achieves the organic views that will help to increase brand recognition and conversions for your business.

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Apple and Samsung Go To Court

THE STORY

Everyone knows that Apple and Samsung do not get along – even though some iPhone parts have historically come from Samsung. Apple is always unveiling cool new things then Samsung decides that they should do the same. Well, Apple was getting a bit frustrated by this and decided to file a lawsuit. Four years of courtrooms and judges later and a decision was made. (Source: CNN)

What to do when someone just won’t stop copying you

Federal court appeals decided on Tuesday that Samsung will have to change their software so it does not replicate Apple iPhone features. Samsung had stuff like slide to unlock, autocorrect and quick link software which Apple had first. Samsung was ahead of the game and had already changed these before the court ruling, it’s like they knew that was going to happen. (Source: CNN)

DA SKIM

Apple, taking the position of benevolent big brother, said they did not want to take Samsung devices off the shelves. They just want them to be their own thing and not copy them. Sounds fair. Samsung only ended up having to pay Apple a tenth of what they asked for – a mere $120 million for violating Apple’s patents (Source: CNN). Costs a lot of apples to be a copycat.

Quote of the Day: “Yeah, I’ll pick up a six-pack.”

Amazon is preparing for holiday shopping. Earlier this week they announced their new tablet. The 7-inch Fire tablet with a price tag that isn’t going to break the bank at $49.99. Yes, that is correct $50. And it even comes in a six-pack for just under $250 – cheers!. The tablet has a front and rear camera, quad-core processor and up to 128 gigabytes of storage. If you are interested in buying a six-pack for your holiday party, pre-order is up and they will ship September 30th. Bottoms up! (Source: USA Today)

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4 Brands That Are Really Killing It with Social Selling

Posts with images are the most heavily shared on social media, they say – so waste no time in converting your text updates into images. People love quick videos in their streams too – so try your hand at animation every now and then. And don’t you forget branding – customize all your social media pages to stand out from the crowd.

All of this is great advice, but it ignores one key aspect of social media: Sales.

As many experts have shown, this lacuna is more a problem of misattribution, than an inability of social media to bring results. Because a number of businesses have been successful at a goal that many consider impossible – extracting sales out of social media. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest success stories and figure out what they did right.

ModCloth’s Product Cards on Twitter

We’ve all seen, loved and pinned the vibrant rich pins feature that Pinterest implemented a little while ago. But did you know that good ol’ Twitter can actually do the same thing? No, you don’t have to worry about squeezing your labor of love into a 140 character tweet anymore. Twitter product cards are an easy and extremely eye-catching way to get your products into the conversation on social media without even lifting a single finger.

Still confused?

You see, nearly every ecommerce site on the planet by now has implemented social sharing buttons on their product pages. However, online apparel retailer par excellence ModCloth went one step further. They implemented Twitter’s product cards right in the source code of their product pages. This means, every time someone shares a product link on Twitter, a rich snippet of the product appears right below the tweet, like this:

It’s got nearly all the essentials right there for the fan’s entire network to see, want and buy. There’s a clear product title, pricing, availability status, a short description of the item and most importantly, a link back to the original product page to enable an immediate purchase.

Clearly, this is another step towards a happy marriage of social media and ecommerce on ModCloth. After all, ModCloth’s “Be the Buyer” social commerce feature is an industry benchmark. According to Co-Founder Susan Gregg Koger, “Historically, Be the Buyer items sell up to twice as much as others, and designs have received more than 20 million votes.”

Dell’s Dousing of “Dell Hell” Fire

Probably around the time Facebook was cutting its teeth on Ivy League campuses, Jeff Jarvis bought a lemon of a computer from Dell and consequently began “Dell Hell.” Jarvis, a popular blogger wrote a series of blog posts describing in detail his terrible experience with the Dell machine he’d bought and Dell’s callous customer care service. The conversation snowballed in the blogosphere to eventually be covered by traditional media, eventually leading to a crash in Dell’s stock prices and market share. All this while, Dell remained silent.

However, the Dell of today seems to have finally learnt a lesson or two from the Dell of 2005. For starters, they began to listen to their audience. And respond to them in real time.

With dedicated Twitter handles for different geographical regions, they took their own “Think Global, Act Local” tagline to heart. The @DellOutlet handle was set up exclusively to communicate offers and promotions for refurbished Dell merchandise on Twitter. In 2009, Dell earned $6.5 million from Twitter sales alone.

In 2007, Dell set up their Idea Storm portal, a website that invited users to share their innovative ideas with Dell and engage with the brand one on one. By 2013, Idea Storm had over 60,000 users, 18000+ new ideas generated. Of these, 520 ideas were even implemented by Dell.

While you probably don’t have Dell’s resources and clout to warrant building a standalone website or app to marshal your users’ opinions and viewpoints, soliciting user feedback from your social followers can be as simple as setting up a Facebook contact form.

Jetsetter’s Social Referral Program

Social commerce is not just about the actions that a business takes to get more business via social media. It also includes actions that fans and followers perform on social media that lead to incremental sales. To be more specific, these actions that we speak of here are customer referrals from existing fans and followers.

Travel website Jetsetter adopted a unique method of winning over more referrals. At the end of every holiday purchased on their website, they encouraged users to share the details of their trip with friends on social media. To make the process of sharing the purchase attractive to users, Jetsetter rewarded each user with a special gift voucher.

Users got a choice of sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and email.

The results were surprising. 60% of all shared purchases led to incremental sales via the users’ social networks. “To see such a high conversion rate on shared purchases demonstrates how powerful word-of-mouth can be when it comes to travel” says Sean Murphy, Editor-in-Chief of Jetsetter.

InContact’s Experiment with LinkedIn

LinkedIn gets top marks from B2B businesses as the most relevant and productive social network. However, most sales teams use LinkedIn more as a stalking tool than a sales enablement platform.

InContact, a company that sells on-demand call center software decided to combine LinkedIn with social selling in 2013. For their maiden venture in the social selling space, they opted to go with a simple A/B test – a scientific way to check if this much touted process actually works. They split their sales team into two groups. The first group got trained in selling on social media. They were also provided with content that they could use to build a personal brand to influence potential buyers. Additionally, they were instructed to use marketing automation tools to further raise their selling potential. The second group continued to use their existing sales techniques, with no diversion into social commerce.

The results were fascinating to say the least. Within a period of just six months, the group of sales reps that used LinkedIn to reach out, connect with and eventually sell to clients, saw a 122% increase in revenue than the non-social group. Those that combined social media with marketing automation tools (Eloqua, in this case) fared even better. Their revenues soared 157% over the non-social group.

In Closing

Data from Nielsen clearly demonstrates the grip that the opinions of others has on the buying behavior of the average consumer. While 90% consumers trust recommendations from friends and family, 70% trust reviews posted by other users online. Or, in social recommendations they trust. Clearly, there could not be a better time to venture into social selling!

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A little bit of Social

Politicians be like…

An enormous amount of people are weighing in on the presidential candidates via social media. This should not be too much of a surprise for anyone, hopefully. Social media has become a metric to gauge how well candidates are doing with voters. Retweets, shares, & likes are super powerful when it comes to tracking how well the candidate is doing, as well as tracking how people are reacting to real-time events *hint* debates. Remember, social media is one of THE best ways to set your brand image and the same goes for politicians.  For instance taking selfies with young folk might help people think you’re laid back, and with the times. Say cheese. Oh, and of course we were on it early with our #1 Best Selling book Socialnomics. Oh snap.

Not to burst your bubble..

Tech is not going anywhere, I repeat tech is here to stay. Udacity is a 4-year old startup who is bridging the gap between people and prized technical skills. As one of the first MOOCs (massive open online courses) they believe that in the future everyone’s going to need to know a comfortable amount of technical skills. SOO last year they began to offer “nanodegree courses” these online classes specialize in coding, web development, data analysis, and of course mobile programming. Recently Udacity’s nanodegree program hit 10,000 students enrolled, and this is growing by a third each month. Students are charged $200 a month, but to incentivize students to follow through and complete the courses they give back half the tuition when all lessons are completed. The average time to completion is around 5 months, at the cost of $500 and some serious bragging rights.

Life Hack

When it comes to reaching your target audience knowledge is key. Facebook pairs with data brokers who know a lot about your spending habits and previous purchases. Basically anything you purchase with your credit card can be used to target you. (In a non creepy way) If you’re a advertising/marketing person this means you can target as big or as small of an audience as you like. The kicker is you can use the same technique on Twitter and it’s the perfect way to find your niche audience.

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