Follow Your Customers' Path to Success. Here’s a simple question for everyone today. Do you know what people are doing on your brand website? You probably know how many visits you are getting and how many page views. You might even know the time people spent on the site and, if you’re really digging in, your bounce rate (including the specific pages people left from). Simple, right? If you’re not doing this, stop reading and go find this out. If you don’t know these basics or where to find them, then you’re not ready for the next suggestion I’ve got. Great. Here’s a simple test to see if you do. Do you know… the specific landing pages where people enter your site? So, how’d you do? If you answered “yes” to the majority of these, but answered “no” or “I don’t know” to number eight, then all bets are off.
A few times in recent posts, I’ve suggested that you can simply get rid of your brand website. Your answer to that question is the goal of your website. I almost never hear “To sell more product.” Google Translator Toolkit. Google Translator ToolkitBy Tony Ruscoe Google Translator Toolkit is a new tool being launched today to help translators organize their work and benefit from shared translations, glossaries and translation memories, the Google China Blog reports (English translation by Google). Evidence that Google was working on a service like this originally surfaced in August 2008 when references to Google Translation Center appeared in Google’s robots.txt file. At the time, the service was only available to Trusted Testers and most of the pages and screenshots were quickly taken offline. Since those screenshots were produced, it's clear that a lot of changes have been made to the tool. The Translation Process The Google Translator Toolkit Workbench, showing side-by-side editing of Wikipedia's Google article.
Google Translator Toolkit currently only allows users to upload HTML, Microsoft Word, OpenDocument Text, Rich Text and Plain Text documents up to 1MB for translation. Translation Memories Glossaries. The Digital Magazine: Has its Time Come? We all love to flip through a glossy, interesting magazine on the plane, in the dentist's waiting room, or stretched out on the sofa in the evening. However magazines have not been isolated from the troubles that print media are having due to the online world. Many magazines are struggling to survive and some of them are moving completely online in order to stick around. In November we reported that leading tech magazine PC Magazine would go 100% online from February 2009, after 27 years of existing in print form.
Let's look at how PC Magazine is doing, along with another digital magazine that we like called Avantoure. Our writer Frederic Lardinois raised a very good question when PC Magazine went digital: why is PC Magazine putting time and effort into producing a digital edition of its magazine, instead of just focusing on improving its website? The answer probably comes down to one word: design. R.U. Social media and risk management | Blog. Last week, our US Editor, Meghan Keane, wrote about Andrew Hyde.
Hyde is a blogger and self-described "startup enthusiast". A bad experience with Frontier Airlines has apparently turned him into the internet's most vocal critic of the company. He set up @frontierair on Twitter and has even created a dedicated website to aggregate complaints about the airline. According to Hyde, Frontier Airlines is ignoring social media, and that's a bad thing. Whether you believe that Hyde's complaints are valid or that he's creating a lot of drama for no good reason, such a case study is worthy of discussion and debate.
In this case, I made a few interesting observations: What does this mean? From a pure customer service and PR perspective, Hyde looks like a problem that needs to be addressed. Yet from a risk management standpoint, Hyde is clearly no threat to the Frontier Airlines brand. How much reach is the criticism receiving? Photo credit: octoberdog via Flickr. What Is Your "Rate of Interest"? | The Relationship Ec. The economic shifts continue to disrupt old advertising models as people lose interest in editorialized media.
Newspapers and other print media are struggling. Advertisers are looking for innovative ways to reach their audience. As such, the advertising model is shifting sending waves of changes rippling across every form of media. Much of these changes are being fueled by advancement of social media and the disruptive nature of innovation. What is the Rate of Interest on Your Ad Campaign? The cost of advertising has been historically justified by “small rates of return and engagement”. Social media has now installed a new dynamic to this old model of interest. Are Conversations Ads? Brands are news and news are brands. Everything is Connected in the Universe: Bankers don’t care about money; they care about the rate of change of money. This is a Conversation. The objective of the advertiser is therefore not where people are, but where they are going.
Can the Canned Message What say you? Why Facebook needs DST in Russia | Webware. Updated at 8:30 p.m.: to correct that DST has no funding from the Russian government. As reported earlier, Facebook is taking a $200 million round of funding from Digital Sky Technologies, a Russian investment company. While Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a conference call Tuesday morning that Facebook revenue numbers were up, that the company was growing, and that Facebook was, "on track to creating a nice, self-sustaining business," he explained that at Facebook, "we're open to interesting offers.
" With many companies wanting to invest in Facebook, what made the DST offer so interesting? Regional knowledge Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told me that Facebook was "not actively seeking investments. " But a source familiar with DST laid it out for me a bit differently: if Facebook wants to be successful in Russia, DST can bring a lot to the table besides knowledge. For example, should Facebook want to hire Russians, a connected investor like DST could help. DST: Let them compete. When Social Networking Is Not Working - Forbes.com. OMD - If You Leave. Interesting Quotes from Facebook/DST Investment Conference Call. As reported this morning, Facebook announced that it has just closed a $200 million investment from Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies.
We just got off the conference call discussing the investment with Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Yuri Milner, CEO of DST, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, and Alexander Tamas, Partner at DST. Here are some interesting quotes from the call. (Note: these may not all be verbatim because I was transcribing them in real time.) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg - On Facebook’s financials and whether or not Facebook “needed” the investment: “We’re open to interesting offers that are aligned with our mission and support what we’re trying to do. The financing will serve as a cash buffer to support our continued growth… We have had positive EBITDA for five quarters now, going on six. . - On Facebook revenue models: - On microtransactions: “We’ve tested and are continuing to test a number of things with user payments.
. - On working with DST: - On the deal: Social Media Doesn. Israeli Diamond Institute Blog | Why Should Diamantaires Partici. A guest post by Iris Hortman, IDI's information officer. During an ordinary evening this week, just as my family and I were set to start our dinner, my 14 year-old son stormed into the house, and as he normally does, flew straight to the computer. He was holding a new computer game he had jus bought and refused to join us at the dinner table until he read what people said about the game. I didn't understand and asked him what he looked for on the computer. Of course, after the usual shrug I got from him, he told me he was reading in a gaming website what other people thought about the game he had just bought. He told me that "many people said the game was 'rad' and he is relaxed and could now eat his dinner at peace. What is a social network? A social network is a group of people who maintain contact between them bound by a common interest.
How do you join a social network? Most social networking websites are divided into two categories: community networks and business networks. Google Testing More Inline Images In Web Search Results. Blogstorm has noticed that Google is showing several images within the UK search results for a search on personal development books. This is unique in that there are 9 images under a search result’s title and above the description. Here is a screen capture, furnished by Blogstorm: In addition, it shows “17 images” in the snippet information, which indicates that Google understands that there are indeed a total of 17 images. The images on that landing page do seem significant to the rest of the page. I imagine that Google is thinking this page is more about image search than web search. I also do not think this has anything to do with the new rich snippet support because I don’t see the microformat code on the page and rich snippets currently only work in the US, not in Google UK. Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Google: Images | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search.
Where are my people? You’ve seen those nonprofit fundraising challenges, haven’t you? A funder or corporation puts up some funds—donation or matching grant money—and asks nonprofits and their supporters to compete for it. Maybe it’s a race of donations or votes, or perhaps memberships to a group on FaceBook. Our own Giving Challenge was an early example. Target is running one now, and there have been many in between. If you’re connected with a nonprofit, I suspect your first thought on hearing news of one of these is “Wow, there’s money on the table. We could use some of that.” Can we stop right there and engage in a bit of longer-term thinking? Make fans, not spam. John Haydon’s post Dogs are cute when they beg – you’re not is a terrific on the opportunities and pitfalls of going after challenges with your email guns blazing. Focus on getting your cultists to vote – No. What’s a platform? So how do you “Create platforms” for your most committed supporters?
So why not start small and start cheap. Breaking: Facebook Closes $200 Million Investment from Russian I. On the heels of rumors of a possible investment this weekend, Facebook has just announced this morning that it has indeed raised a $200 million round of financing from Russian Internet investment firm Digital Sky Technologies. DST will receive 1.96% equity stake in the company in the form of preferred stock at a valuation of $10 billion. In addition, DST plans to purchase “at least” $100 million of Facebook common stock from existing stockholders that would give current and former employees a chance to cash out some of their vested shares. DST will not get a seat on the Facebook board of directors. “This investment demonstrates Facebook’s ongoing success at creating a global network for people to share and connect,” says Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“We’ve worked hard to bring more than 200 million people – 70 percent outside of the U.S. – onto Facebook to share with friends, family and co-workers. DST is a large Internet holding company in Russia and eastern Europe. New York Times Hiring 'Social Media Editor' To...Do S. The Golden Rule of Online Marketing — Copyblogger. The Era of Short URLs - ClickZ. Gary Stein | May 26, 2009 | 14 Comments inShare0 If you're using social networks for marketing, begin using a URL shortener now. The name Friedhelm Hillebrand should be forever etched into the annals of communications history. Hillebrand was working with a team of engineers to lay the groundwork for mobile devices to send and receive short text messages to one another back in 1985.
There was a clear need for efficiency in this system. One day, Hillebrand sat alone typing out personal messages, trying to find an equilibrium point where a person could express himself and keep network load at a minimum. After trying out several sentences and counting each letter, space, and punctuation mark, Hillebrand decided the correct number was 160 characters. Enter the Twitter When Twitter was launched on an unsuspecting world, the engineers adopted this 160-character limit, simply because they wanted to ensure that tweets could be both sent and received via SMS.
OK, you got it. 10 Things You Don. Sometimes a breakthrough paradigm shift eliminates the need for all kinds of things. Word processors and laser printers killed a lot of other things that were once thriving including typewriters, liquid paper, and Linotype machines. So it is with the Cloud. When I chat with my Director of Operations at Helpstream, we’re always chuckling about how much better life is in the Amazon Cloud for our company. As I read through unread blog posts with Google Reader, I’m going to note 10 things we don’t need to worry about since we’re in the Cloud: 1.
NetApp’s new DataDomain data de-duping product. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) embodies much of what makes infrastructure as a service such a powerful technology; it enables our customers to build secure, fault-tolerant applications that can scale up and down with demand, at low cost. Elastic availability of compute resources in multiple different Availability Zones (e.g. datacenters) in a matter of minutes?
9. Useful Wolfram Alpha tips for webmasters and sysadmins | Royal P. The newly released Wolfram Alpha is a great tool for doing calculations and data conversions, and it also has a significant amount of data that you can play around with. This post is about how webmasters and sysadmins can benefit from this new service. So if you’re a webmaster or sysadmin (or just an Internet geek), let Wolfram Alpha’s two supercomputers do some work for you and make your life a bit easier. Let’s get started with the tips: (To save some typing, we’ll often refer to Wolfram Alpha as “WA” in this article. Also note that while we enter the queries within quotes, that is just done to separate the query text. In other words, leave the quotes out when you use WA.) Calculate data transfer time Are you about to transfer a large file over a network but are unsure about how long it might take?
For example, say you’re about to move a 5 GB file to another computer on your 100 mbit/s network. Get data transfer rate for a network connection Convert between uptime and downtime. Memorial Day, 2009. Today is observed as Memorial Day in the United States, a day for remembering the men and women of our armed services who died while at war. Memorial Day weekend has also become the unofficial kickoff to Summer, complete with backyard barbecues, parades and family getaways. Collected here are a handful of photographs for remembrance, acknowledging some of the men and women who have passed in conflicts from the U.S. Civil War through Iraq and Afghanistan today. (22 photos total) Soliders from the U.S. Army Old Guard place flags at grave stones at Arlington National Cemetery May 21, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia.
It took 1,300 soldiers, sailors and Marines about three hours to place a flag at each of the more than 300,000 gravestones at Arlington ahead of the Memorial Day weekend. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Ning: The future of online social networking? Crazy but true: Twitter to get its own TV Show (updated) - The N. 29 Warning Signs of Twitter Addiction. Very first REAL (tiny) images of the NEW iPhone 3.0 - The Next W. Mind Hacks: On the information alarmageddon. Why Washington doesn’t get new media? Seth's Blog: When the writer becomes the publisher. What Is Strategy 2.0? | The Relationship Economy...... Rodrigo A. Sepúlveda Schulz: Mac OS X software I use all the tim. The Next Media Company | chrisbrogan.com. Digital Influence Mapping Project: 3 Priorities to Understand th. Microsoft to spend millions to tout new search engine - TechFlas. Watch the Google anthill move toward social and real time. Goldbase.be is a Facebook Scam: DO NOT Visit [WARNING] Aerial Virtual tour of New York.
Microsoft blocks Messenger in US-embargoed countries - Ars Techn. Social Media - What Needs To Be In The Cloud? Seth's Blog: On becoming a household name. Twitter's Real-Time Search Hits Pause. Six Hours And Counti.