Sunday, December 27, 2015

Why You Should Forget Facebook

Has Facebook got you fooled?
Are you chasing likes for your brand page? Paying for fans? Maybe it’s time to stop.
In 2008 I joined Facebook. It was the first social media network I decided to place a stake in as my online social media home. It was fun, frivolous and free. Everyone was discovering the power of multimedia sharing of their life with friends and family. Facebook obsession was apparent and addictive. It was the new digital drug of choice and 6 years later it is the world’s largest social media playground.
What made Facebook cool was that you saw “all” your friends updates. It was hard to miss a “what I had for breakfast” share and see the latest drama and joy in a friends life.
What you shared appeared.

THE FACEBOOK “LIKING” FRENZY

The success of personal Facebook profiles opened up the idea of Facebook for brands. So Facebook “pages” were launched! It was the start of Facebook becoming serious about monetising its business. Brands piled in and started to build their profiles on the big social network. Chasing fan “likes” became the new shiny marketing toy and tactic.
A big list of fans drove traffic and brand awareness for free. It is called “earned” marketing. For this blog it became the second biggest social media traffic source behind Twitter.
Then something changed.

FACEBOOK DECIDED TO FILTER YOUR UPDATES

In 2013 Facebook floated. It became a public company and the shareholders demanded a return. The pressure was on. It had to make money from its advertising. It started to become pay to play. Facebook is deciding what updates you see and don’t see. It’s called a “News Feed algorithm”. It extends to Facebook pages and personal profiles.
Facebook is pushing you to advertise. To promote your post is now just a couple of clicks. Easy but it costs. One of the motivators to use Facebook as a page is now almost zero.Is there any point to chasing likes except for “social proof”. Some research is showing that only 4% or less of people are seeing your page updates in their newsfeeds when you post on Facebook. Here is some research from the 4129 agency on ZDnet.com showing the decline in just 12 months from 2012 to 2013.
It appears that in 2014 that organic reach is still in freefall. Zero is maybe not an unrealistic expectation. Is that possible? Jason Loehr, director of global media and digital marketing at Brown-Forman which owns the brands Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort thinks so.
The Ignite Social Media agency did an analysis in December 2013 and saw a 44% drop in brands organic reach in just 12 days.

ARE BIG BRANDS IGNORING FACEBOOK?

Beyonce announced her new album launch on Instagram not Facebook. This is despite having over 60 million fans on Facebook and only 8 million Instagram followers on Instagram. Maybe the advice by her digital agency was that it would receive more organic reach and visibility than Facebook.
This big drop in organic reach is making brands such as Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort Concentrating more on their “owned” channels such as websites, blogs and email.
Some companies such as Charity Engine are quitting Facebook. Is the age of free social media traffic from building fans and followers over?
Facebook is a leased digital property. You’re at their mercy and their aggressively tweaked news feed algorithm.

SO WHAT CAN YOU DO?

There are two key strategies that you can pursue.
  1. Roll with the Facebook changes and adapt. This means tactics such as running more Facebook competitions and posting more news updates. The Steam feed blog has a good list of tactics worth checking out.
  2. Shift your focus from Facebook marketing reliance. Invest in building your owned online assets such as websites, blogs and email lists. Pursue an integrated digital marketing strategy!
So if you are a blogger or marketer that doesn't have a big brand budget and you want to earn your traffic by persistent effort, engagement and creating content then you do have some other options. So you may have to forget Facebook if you don't want to spend advertising dollars to reach the fans you have spent time and effort to acquire.

HOW TO EARN FREE EARNED AND ORGANIC TRAFFIC

Here are some specific tactics to create online traffic and brand awareness without paying the new gatekeepers such as Facebook to reach your own fans.

1. Search engines

Before hitting publish on your blog make sure that you have optimized your post for search engines so you will be building your SEO. Make sure you know what your key words and phrases are that customers will be using to find you. Then create content that includes them in the headline, content and meta description. Plugins such as Yoast can provide easy guidance on those tasks.
Then continue to create and market content that covers the range of 20-50 keywords and phrases that you want to be found on Google for when potential customers start looking for answers to their questions and performing research.

2. Email marketing

Brands both big and small are growing their email lists. You should do this from day one. An email list is something you have control over. The simplest tactic is to offer something for free such as an ebook, an online video tutorial or some form of premium content.

3. Switch your social media focus

There are many other social media networks that will drive traffic to your blog and website that you don’t have to pay for. These include Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ and Pinterest to name a few. There are a couple of channels that have surprised me over the last 6 months. They are Flipboard (is starting to drive more traffic than Facebook) and even the often forgotten Stumbleupon.
Twitter is not filtered and its focus as a place for breaking news means that it is very unlikely that it will ever suffer the same fate as Facebook. Twitter for me has been my biggest social media traffic source and that came from focusing on building and engaging with my followers from the day I launched this blog.
If Facebook push this too far there is a real possibility they will push brands advertising into the arms of Twitter, Google+ and other social media and digital channels.
Maybe its time to forget Facebook for your free earned traffic?

WHAT ABOUT YOU?

How are you reacting to Facebook’s filtering? Have your tactics changed? Are you focusing on other social media networks, email and content more?
Look forward to your feedback and insights in the comments below.
Source:  Jeff Bullas

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How to Build a Culture of Purpose


Aaron Hurst :CEO of Imperative. Author of The Purpose Economy. Founder of Taproot Foundation.


Last Friday morning I visited Cornerstone Capital to meet with Erika Karp, its founder and CEO. Erika is a former UBS executive who created her new firm to accelerate the velocity of capital by embracing sustainability. She is the first major Wall Street executive to get behind sustainability in a big way.
I arrived at 7:55 for the 8:00 morning meeting (I try to always be early). In those five minutes no fewer than five members of her team reached out warmly and asked if they could help me. It wasn't the usual formality but felt genuine and very human. They weren't going through a routine, they seemed to actually care.
When Erika and I sat down at 8:02, I complimented her on her team and asked her how she built what appeared to be an amazing culture.
What Erika does is very simple. She asks people if they had a good day. If they say yes, she ask them to identify the moment that made it good. She is basically asking them to name the purpose moment they experienced that made their day positive. That was the first step.
Then over the coming weeks and months she works with them to refine their job to maximize the number of these purpose moments they experience. She customizes the job to meet their purpose profile.
This is a process that positive psychologists call job crafting. It is a process of helping someone taking ownership of their job to maximize purpose while still getting the core work done. For example, if relationships and conversations are really important, you might modify your job a little and rather than always emailing people you should pick up the phone and try to talk to them every once in a while.
Erika knows that her team can gain purpose every hour of every day at work if they practice enjoying the little moments that give them purpose from relationships, growing and doing things that feel greater than themselves. These are the things that matter most and she makes it a priority that they experience them all the time.
We built Imperative platform, so that leaders like Erika can support this process by having their teams take a short diagnostic and determine their purpose drivers. It helps accelerate the process of building a culture of purpose at any office.

Do you agree with this marriage? send in your comments and share ( also G+ it if you like it)  with your friends and family members.

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Lower oil prices are definitely good











I've been around for a while, and I've seldom heard such gibberish.
The latest stock-market scare stems from a bunch of fears, like the possible spread of Ebola, economic slowdowns in Europe and Asia, and deflation worries. And when the stock market decides to correct, any reason will do. We must respect the wisdom of the market.
But the recent $20 drop in crude oil is an unambiguously good thing for the American and world economies. Unambiguous.
As I understand the lower-oil-prices-are-bad argument, the shift to around $80 a barrel from $100 a barrel will somehow close down the American energy revolution and destroy all the new jobs and related infrastructure services that have fueled our recovery.
Nonsense. I spoke with a CEO who is literally at the cutting edge of the horizontal-drilling and hydraulic-fracturing revolution about the so-called "profit break-even point," or the marginal cost of producing the next barrel of oil. He told me it averages between $50 and $60 a barrel. And a new report from Citigroup energy analyst Edwin Morse argues that oil has to fall to $50 or less to fully halt shale-production growth. 
But $80 is not $50. The economy won't be destroyed. Plus, even $80 per barrel does great economic harm to our enemies Russia and Iran. A good thing. 
Of course, the fracking revolution has created new jobs. But not nearly as many as some think. Delving into data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), during the jobs recovery of the last four years, employment growth in "oil and gas extraction" and "support activities for oil and gas operations" has increased by something around 200,000. That's a good number, but it's only a small fraction of the roughly 9 million new jobs created since the middle of 2010.

Lower oil prices are definitely good

There are energy-related spillover jobs, though they're tough to calculate. A recent Marcellus shale study suggests the creation of over 45,000 construction jobs. And in places like North Dakota, Texas, and Pennsylvania, the fracking revolution has created high-pay jobs — say $80,000 for the roustabouts who previously were unemployed. A BLS study shows North Dakota waitresses averaging $37,000 a year.

That's good news. But my point is, if production slowed in the event prices fall below $50, the American economy won't collapse.
More important: Virtually all consumers and producers will benefit from lower energy costs. Households could save as much as $100 billion because of today's lower fuel costs. Business fuel savings will also be substantial. The result is a much more competitive U.S. (despite our high tax rates).
Retail gasoline at the pump is down around $3.15 a gallon from nearly $4 a little while back. Don't you agree that's a good thing?
All these factors will increase U.S. economic growth, not reduce it. Basically, the fracking revolution has delivered a powerful and positive supply shock to the economy. It means that more output increases real growth and reduces inflation for any given increase in nominal GDP — the exact opposite of what we saw in the 1970s. 
As a percentage of energy consumption, U.S. energy production has increased from 69 percent in 2005 to 85 percent currently. We're almost self-sufficient right now. So a related knock-on effect is the significant reduction in energy imports, which is lowering our trade gap, strengthening King Dollar, and increasing our economic growth.
Let me help all those analysts who have lost their minds in this stock correction. We're witnessing a big outward move of the energy supply curve. By nearly doubling our oil output in recent years, it's surprising the oil-price break hasn't come sooner. It has very little to do with falling demand. In fact, the International Energy Agency predicts world energy consumption may only drop two-tenths of 1 percent — hardly measurable.
Finally, a political message: Falling energy prices are so good for the economy that a new Republican Congress, in its first 90 days, should put a bill on President Obama's desk authorizing the Keystone Pipeline, opening federal lands to energy development, and ending oil export restrictions. Totally pro-growth. 
Let the GOP dare the president to veto it. 
Source: Larry Kudlow  CNBC   ., Myazpiration 

Do you agree with this marriage? send in your comments and share ( also G+ it if you like it)  with your friends and family members.

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Wednesday, December 16, 2015

A New Gold Rush Is On. Who Will Strike It Rich?



Source: Michael Dell CEO at Dell

A New Gold Rush Is On. Who Will Strike It Rich?

Data is aguably the most important natural resource of this century. Top thinkers are no longer the people who can tell you what happened in the past, but those who can predict the future. Welcome to the Data Economy, which holds the promise for significantly advancing society and economic growth on a global scale.
Big data is big news just about everywhere you go these days. Here in Texas, everything’s big, so we just call it data. But we’re all talking about the same thing—the universe of structured data, like transactional information in databases, and also the unstructured data, like social media, that exists in its natural form in the real world.
Organizations of all sizes are trying to figure out how to use all of this data to deliver a better customer experience and build new business models. Consumers are struggling to balance a desire for automated, personalized services with the need for safety. Governments are pressured to use all available data in support of national security, but not at the expense of citizens’ right to privacy. And underlying it all is the realization that data, if managed, secured and leveraged properly, is the pathway to progress and economic success.
So who will strike it rich in this new, data-driven gold rush? It will invariably be those who are willing to accept the new realities of the Data Economy. Business instincts and intuition are being augmented and increasingly replaced by data analysis as the drivers of success. We’ve seen it at Dell. Our marketing team uncovered more than $310 million in additional revenue last year through the use of advanced analytics. This year, we expect that number to exceed half-a-billion.
We believe that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and we’re accelerating our strategy. Recently we announced the acquisition of StatSoft, a leading provider of data mining, predictive analytics and data visualization solutions. It is yet another investment in our enterprise solutions, software and services portfolio specifically designed to help our customers turn data into action.
But contrary to popular opinion, the data economy isn’t just for global enterprises like Dell. A Dell-commissioned study that we will announce later this month found that mid-market companies are increasingly investing in data projects to drive better decision making and better business results. We have also found that startups that use technology more effectively create twice as many jobs on average and are more productive and profitable than companies that don’t.
At their core, entrepreneurs are all about solving problems, and nothing provides a better window into problems than data. Consider the popularity of Global Positioning System (GPS) technologies. The simple act of connecting to and delivering data paved the way for many successful businesses that in turn created an entirely new segment of the economy.
The day is near when the use of data analytics will simply become the price of remaining viable and competitive in the global marketplace. There is still a lot of uncertainty about the Data Economy, but this much is clear: the opportunity for data-driven organizations is golden.
Photo: Dell 

Do you agree? send in your comments and share ( also G+ it if you like it)  with your friends and family members.

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Do you know that you can organize a team and walk in large groups in order to raise money for a community, charity or someone in need? see how it works .,  .

Do you wanna raise money, then read about Fundraising Ideas Click here : Myazpiration


Note: If you are an entrepreneur (create your own business) , creative (projects )or need money for an important cause (hospital bills, school fees, birthdays parties, funeral, marriage etc) you must understand how to raise funds via social network see  Crowdfunding sites 

What The Heck is... Big Data?

Big Data is THE biggest buzzwords around at the moment and I believe big data will change the world. Some say it will be even bigger than the Internet. What’s certain, big data will impact everyone's life. Having said that, I also think that the term 'big data' is not very well defined and is, in fact, not well chosen. Let me use this article to explain what's behind the massive 'big data' buzz and demystify some of the hype.
Basically, big data refers to our ability to collect and analyze the vast amounts of data we are now generating in the world. The ability to harness the ever-expanding amounts of data is completely transforming our ability to understand the world and everything within it. The advances in analyzing big data allow us to e.g. decode human DNA in minutes, find cures for cancer, accurately predict human behavior, foil terrorist attacks, pinpoint marketing efforts and prevent diseases. Take this business example: Wal-Mart is able to take data from your past buying patterns, their internal stock information, your mobile phone location data, social media as well as external weather information and analyze all of this in seconds so it can send you a voucher for a BBQ cleaner to your phone – but only if you own a barbeque, the weather is nice and you currently are within a 3 miles radius of a Wal-Mart store that has the BBQ cleaner in stock. That's scary stuff, but one step at a time, let's first look at why we have so much more data than ever before.
In my talks and training sessions on big data I talk about the 'datafication of the world'. This datafication is caused by a number of things including the adoption of social media, the digitalization of books, music and videos, the increasing use of the Internet as well as cheaper and better sensors that allow us to measure and track everything. Just think about it for a minute:
  • When you were reading a book in the past, no external data was generated. If you now use a Kindle or Nook device, they track what you are reading, when you are reading it, how often you read it, how quickly you read it, and so on.
  • When you were listening to CDs in the past no data was generated. Now we listen to Music on your iPhone or digital music player and these devices are recording data on what we are listening to, when and how often, in what order etc.
  • Today, most of us carry smart phones and they are constantly collecting and generating data by logging our location, tracking our speed, monitoring what apps we are using as well as who we are ringing or texting.
  • Sensors are increasingly used to monitor and capture everything from temperature to power consumption, from ocean movements to traffic flows, from dust bin collections to your heart rate. Your car is full of sensors and so are smart TVs, smart watches, smart fridges, etc. Take my new scales (which I - as a gadget freak - love!), they measure (and keep a record of) my weight, my % body fat, my heart rate and even the air quality in our bed room. When I step on the scales they automatically recognize me, take all the measurement and then send them via Bluetooth to my iPhone which gives me stats on how my Body Mass Index etc. is changing. This information is then also synced with the data collected by my Up band, which tracks how many calories I have consumed and burnt in a day and how well I have slept at night.
  • Finally, combine all this now with the billions of internet searches performed daily, the billions of status updates, wall posts, comments and likes generated on Facebook each day, the 400+ million tweets sent on Twitter per day and the 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.
I am sure you are getting the point. The volume of data is growing at a freighting rate. Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt brings it to a point: “From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days…and the pace is accelerating.”
Not only do we have a lot of data, we also have a lot of different and new types of data: text, video, web search logs, sensor data, financial transactions and credit card payments etc. In the world of ‘Big Data’ we talk about the 4 Vs that characterize big data:
  • Volume – the vast amounts of data generated every second
  • Velocity – the speed at which new data is generated and moves around (credit card fraud detection is a good example where millions of transactions are checked for unusual patterns in almost real time)
  • Variety – the increasingly different types of data (from financial data to social media feeds, from photos to sensor data, from video capture to voice recordings)
  • Veracity – the messiness of the data (just think of Twitter posts with hash tags, abbreviations, typos and colloquial speech)
So, we have a lot of data, in different formats, that is often fast moving and of varying quality – why would that change the world? The reason the world will change is that we now have the technology to bring all of this data together and analyze it.
In the past we had traditional database and analytics tools that couldn’t deal with extremely large, messy, unstructured and fast moving data. Without going into too much detail, we now have software like Hadoop and others which enable us to analyze large, messy and fast moving volumes of structured and unstructured data. It does it by breaking the task up between many different computers (which is a bit like how Google breaks up the computation of its search function). As a consequence of this, companies can now bring together these different and previously inaccessible data sources to generate impressive results. Let’s look at some real examples of how big data is used today to make a difference:
  • The FBI is combining data from social media, CCTV cameras, phone calls and texts to track down criminals and predict the next terrorist attack.
  • Facebook is using face recognition tools to compare the photos you have up-loaded with those of others to find potential friends of yours (see my post on how Facebook is exploiting your private information using big data tools).
  • Politicians are using social media analytics to determine where they have to campaign the hardest to win the next election.
  • Video analytics and sensor data of Baseball or Football games is used to improve performance of players and teams. For example, you can now buy a baseball with over 200 sensors in it that will give you detailed feedback on how to improve your game.
  • Artists like Lady Gaga are using data of our listening preferences and sequences to determine the most popular playlist for her live gigs.
  • Google’s self-driving car is analyzing a gigantic amount of data from sensor and cameras in real time to stay on the road safely.
  • The GPS information on where our phone is and how fast it is moving is now used to provide live traffic up-dates.
  • Companies are using sentiment analysis of Facebook and Twitter posts to determine and predict sales volume and brand equity.
  • Supermarkets are combining their loyalty card data with social media information to detect and leverage changing buying patterns. For example, it is easy for retailers to predict that a woman is pregnant simply based on the changing buying patterns. This allows them to target pregnant women with promotions for baby related goods.
  • A hospital unit that looks after premature and sick babies is generating a live steam of every heartbeat. It then analyses the data to identify patterns. Based on the analysis the system can now detect infections 24hrs before the baby would show any visible symptoms, which allows early intervention and treatment.
And these examples are just the beginning. Companies are barely starting to get to grips with the new world of big data. In conclusion then, big data will change the world. In terms of language I prefer to talk about the ‘datafication of the world’ in relation to the ever-growing amounts of data and ‘large-scale analytics’ (or simply ‘analytics’ because what is large now will be normal tomorrow) in relation to our ability to analyze and harness big data.
At the moment I am spending a lot of my time helping companies understand the massive potential as well as big threats of big data. I work with executive teams of companies spanning all sectors and sizes to help them develop strategies to harness big data and find each of these discussions and projects amazingly fascinating because they all open up new opportunities. Here, I would love to hear from you. Do you see opportunities for yourself or your business? Does this new world of big data scare you or excite you? Have you already started harnessing big data? Or have I failed to convince you and do you believe big data is just hype? Please share your views..

Do you agree? send in your comments and share ( also G+ it if you like it)  with your friends and family members.

To help someone in need  see Good Deeds ., 

To raise money for your needs see Crowdfunding websites.



Do you know that you can organize a team and walk in large groups in order to raise money for a community, charity or someone in need? see how it works .,  .

Do you wanna raise money, then read about Fundraising Ideas Click here : Myazpiration



Note: If you are an entrepreneur (create your own business) , creative (projects )or need money for an important cause (hospital bills, school fees, birthdays parties, funeral, marriage etc) you must understand how to raise funds via social network see  Crowdfunding sites