Interviewing is a pain, as is leaving your desk to go ask questions of someone to ensure a personable real-life reply.
Interactly offers the ability to pose questions and harvest video answers recorded by your interlocutors on their webcams.
We spoke to CEO and founder, Rogier Trimpe, to ask him about this time-saving product.
Facebook announced the latest in its never-ending series of updates last night, with some significant changes to competition and promotion rules.
While these announcements are ten-a-penny, this latest tweak could have a fundamental effect on the way many pages are run.
Hashtags in social media marketing are overused and under-appreciated, but it also can be hard to measure the success of hashtag campaigns.
Marketers need to do more than count likes and followers. They need to truly understand sentiment, language, tone of voice, and the trends of how conversations unfold, and campaigns are re-appropriated, around their chosen hashtag.
You’ve most likely heard or even uttered the latest ‘it’ term out there for marketers: Gamification. But what does it truly mean? Is it a fad or is it here to stay?
Defined as the “process of using game concepts and mechanics to engage users and change behavior,” gamification is, at its core, a simple concept with huge potential for business.
In fact according to Gartner, 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application by 2014.
For over 65 years, the $70bn TV industry has been traded on one currency…now all that is about to change.
Twitter’s Vice President Joel Lunenfeld recently appeared on a Bloomberg TV segment to discuss the findings of a study linking tweets to live TV, and more importantly for his shareholders, to announce a new partnership and ranking method devised with Nielsen.
The two behemoths want to make watching TV with Twitter (see:second screen experience) ‘even better for you, the TV fan,’ according to Twitter’s blog post on the announcement.
What does this coming new age of measurement mean for marketers and what can you do now to prepare? Read on to find out.
Google yesterday released a new paid and organic report in AdWords to ’help you better understand how people searching on Google are connecting with your business’.
According to the Big G, the new report is ‘the first to let you see and compare your performance for a query when you have either an ad, an organic listing, or both appearing on the search results page’.
Here’s a pic of what the report looks like..
My last blog for Econsultancy aimed to dispel the myth that accessible websites must compromise on aesthetics.
It elicited quite a response with many readers agreeing and a number asking for examples of sites that combine both elements.
Before I point you in the direction of two websites that are both highly accessible and attractively designed, it’s important to remember that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Furthermore, the aesthetics is the result of the final product. When broken down into its components the beauty is difficult to see. It’s only when those parts all come together that the beauty is evident.
Drinks brand Sprite managed to outperform its rivals and achieve the greatest exposure on Tumblr in July.
This is despite the fact that it only blogged three updates, while second-placed MTV posted a massive 114 times.
The findings, which come from a report by Simply Measured, show the high potential for long-term amplification on Tumblr compared to other social networks, as nearly all of Sprite’s 85,000 reblogs were owed to a single post made prior to the study period.
The Sprite post in question is an animated GIF of a game of spin the bottle. Not very complex, but it captured the imagination of Sprite’s audience and isn’t something that can necessarily be replicated on other networks.
Is there anybody on the planet who actually enjoys pre-roll video advertising? Research has shown that 94% of people skip pre-roll ads, though I can’t believe the number is that low (presumably the other 6% are masochists).
Pre-roll ads are as loathed as pop-ups, which studies found to be damaging to both advertiser and publisher. I imagine that the same applies to pre-rolls. Have you ever watched one and wanted to buy the product or service that’s being (badly) pitched to you?
You have to wonder why they’re so popular. Certainly the YouTube experience has considerably worsened since it started putting pre-rolls on a far wider range of ads, and I for one would pay a small fee to have them permanently removed.
Why do pre-roll ads suck so badly? Partly it’s the interruption, which is often a lot longer than five seconds, and partly it’s because the creative tends to be beyond stupid, but there are plenty of other reasons.
The following quotes and videos reflect all that is wrong with the pre-roll format. If you’re the kind of person who likes to snuggle up to Satan by commissioning pre-rolls then you might want to take some notes.
During YouTube’s Geek Week, I saw this article announcing Batman as the superhero most popular on YouTube.
This appealed to me. I like lists and graphs, I like Batman, and I like YouTube. So I thought I’d write a throw away post and try to delight you with some other YouTube rankings and trends.
You’re welcome.
Delivery has come a long way since the early days of ecommerce, but some online retailers are still failing to offer a range of delivery options to suit their customers’ needs.
As stats from a new Econsultancy Multichannel Retail Survey show, customers are demanding more flexibility in delivery options, and retailers need to offer this to increase conversions.
The survey, conducted using the Toluna survey tool, found that 50% of respondents had abandoned a purchase online due to unsatisfactory delivery options.
So which options are customers looking for, and who is offering them?
Staying ahead of the Google curve can be a feat in itself if you spend all day analysing keyword saturation rates and anchor text diversity. All SEOs need to remember it’s important sometimes to go back to basics to see the bigger picture.
Are we sculpting keywords and orchestrating anchor text to give Google-bot an easier job? No! We’re trying to make the internet a more productive and valued place, where users are able to locate worthy content easily and intuitively, and the same principle should be applied to all facets of our businesses, be it in store or online.
So instead of relying on SEO/PR practices, we should be thinking about how we can add value, and improve the customer engagement through other methods. What about Conversion Rate Optimisation?
A conversion health pack would certainly improve overall performance and budgets, but will enhancing usability improve SEO?
It could take a manual review to fully interpret all usability improvements, but even if this doesn’t occur, the algorithm still pays attention to drop rates, engagement (time spent on page), page-views, and this group of metrics all count towards overall visibility.
So the bottom line is, as long as your developments actually enhance the user journey, you’ll see ranking gains and a higher domain authority accruing.