This Week in Digital Marketing – July 15, 2014

 

I cannot believe it is more than halfway through 2014! Just before you know it, it will be Holiday Season and everyone and their grandmother has an opinion on the best ways to market to your audience this holiday season. While I am sitting on some ideas, my only advice at the moment is just to start thinking and start planning. While you may not execute what you plan now, it is certainly a good time to start thinking about Halloween through New Years.

 With that, here is the second installment of This Week in Marketing, or my favorite links I have shared…

This Facebook ‘Manipulation’ Scandal Is Ridiculous — Companies Test Products (And You) All The Time

http://snip.ly/81E

Rather than being depressed that their lives didn’t measure up to those of the happy people on Facebook, the users who saw slightly more positive content actually posted slightly more positive status updates. The users who saw slightly more negative content, meanwhile, posted slightly more negative updates. 

RELATED: http://snip.ly/MxX

When’s the Best Day and Time to Post on Social Media?

http://snip.ly/Kdx

We took a look at our proprietary data based on 14 million sites using our tools worldwide (that’s about 3 billion pageviews a day), to help you optimize when you should post your content, including the day, time, and social network. Here’s what we found for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Custom Link Tracking: Capturing User Actions

http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/analytics/custom-link-tracking-capturing-user-actions/

From time to time, I receive ques­tions from clients ask­ing how to track some­thing that doesn’t fall under the gen­eral cat­e­gory of “page view”—a link, a but­ton, an image, a form interaction—something that can’t eas­ily be cap­tured sim­ply by tag­ging a page with Site­Cat­a­lyst code, even using cus­tom vari­ables. After all, when the page loads, you don’t know what link users will click, what but­tons they will press, or what val­ues they will enter into forms.

Buzzfeed editor-in-chief: ‘Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more – it’s the culture’

http://snip.ly/pT2

They’re more interested in this moment of crazy opportunity, with the massive economic and cultural transformation driven by Silicon Valley. And kids feel capable of seizing it. Technology isn’t a section in the newspaper any more. It’s the culture.”

And finally, in honor of my favorite sporting event on the planet…

How and When The FIFA World Cup Brasil 2014 Logo Was Conceived

For more good reading from around the web, Follow me on Twitter @whybegee.

 

 

This Week in Digital Marketing – June 17, 2014

Hopefully this will turn into somewhat of a regular column, but what the point of it is to provide one place where I will feature some of the best articles I have read recently. Most of these I have tweeted recently, but since I tweet so much content, these are the cream of the crop…for this week. I also included in italics a favorite excerpt from the piece. I got this idea from Albion Almanac, whose weekly email often gives me fascinating articles to read, so check them out too!

Big Data Job Hunting: Unconventional Advice

http://ubm.io/1ludHnG

But how can you do that? First, don’t go into the interview trying to act like you have all the answers, Morris said. Second, he and his panelists proposed another tactic: Show you like to track numbers — even if it’s just the Google analytics on your blog.

That fantasy baseball habit of yours? It might just come in useful as a point of discussion. That work you did for an election campaign or fundraising drive? Now you’ve got the idea.

Digital Design & User Experience Best Practices: Happiness + Profits!

http://bit.ly/1pb4nVT

For example, I type in for “trip to Hawaii” (not an esoteric destination) into Google. I click on an organic listing for Travelocity. I end up on the site below on the left. In 2014. How crazy is that? Is it possible to make it any harder for me to give you money?

By the end of this year 1 in 4 people around the world will own a smartphone (study)

http://bit.ly/1kZeo7q

As many as 1.76 billion people will own and use a smartphone by the end of 2014, according to the latest study by marketing research firm eMarketer.

Those 1.76 billion people make up approximately 25 percent of the total world population, and also represent a 25% jump in growth when compared to 2013 smartphone adoption stats, eMarketer claims.

Google Analytics Currency setting

http://bit.ly/1q6yxcv

Google Analytics performs currency conversion if the currency code set in these two places is different. No conversion is made if there’s no currency specified in the tracking code.

11 Ideas to Grow Brand Awareness at Lightning Speed

http://bit.ly/1skfGyD

Uber provided free rides to well-connected attendees of local tech and venture capital events. They knew that these people would be very likely to share the experience with tech press and social media audiences, getting Uber’s name in front of their target audience.

For more good reading from around the web, Follow me on Twitter @whybegee.

The Problem With Smartphones and All Knowledge from All of Time

A couple of nights ago, I ventured into a kosher hot dog and craft beer establishment on Miami Beach with some friends for a nightcap. While the place had a very cool vibe for a kosher hot dog place, something caught my eye that perfectly captured the ongoing plague those of us living in the modern world face.

Those that know me will not be surprised to read that I am talking about complete addiction to our smartphones. While these tools are (perhaps) the most useful and knowledgeable tools in the history of human history, I believe that because they are still so culturally new and we are still relatively so enamored with them, we have not discovered social rules for appropriate and moderate use. What caught my eye a couple nights ago were a young man and woman, seemingly on a date, staring into their phones, presumably Facebook. Putting aside the mind control aspects of the phone on you, the owner (who really owns whom?), part of what makes this scene so sad is that these people are always seeking out something better, something more entertaining, something that is more fulfilling than the presence of each other. Sure, it could have been a bad date, but this scene is by no means an isolated incident.

Friends and family know I crusade on this. For me, meal times with friends and family should be phone free. This, again, needs to be a rejection of constantly seeking a more exciting high. Our lives are made up of the people we interact with and there is a time and place to stare at and engage with people through a screen and a time and a place to relate to people eye to eye, free from the magnetism of the smartphone.

Furthermore, I find more often than not, when in conversation with friends and we stumble upon an issue to which no one knows the answer, we reach immediately for our smartphones. At times, this is incredibly fun and useful. I mean don’t we need to know that Bron from Game of Thrones was in a brit-pop duo?

But other times, I wonder what we are sacrificing with instant gratification and knowledge. Are we losing some element of brainpower? Could we be losing the journey that is “wondering”, or dare I say “the wander of the wonder”? And if we are losing these things, what is the effect on our creative spirit and thought?

While I do not know the answers to these things (while absolutely acknowledging the incredible gift that is a smartphone), I do believe there is an underlying principle or lesson that we still need to work on – when it is appropriate and inappropriate to use the technology at our hands. While we now know we do not always have to answer a phone when someone calls us just because we can, we may not be at that point with using our smartphones just because we can. I would like to think in the near future, social norms will be created and tolerated, but until that is set in stone, take your phone off the table while we are eating, please.

Take your phone off the damn table!