| TRENDING STORIES IN BUSINESS & MARKETING | | | | | | | ALL STORIES IN BUSINESS & MARKETING | | |
| Today's Top Stories: Facebook Adds Organ Donor Status, Samsung Ships 93.8 Million Phones in Q1 | |  Welcome to this morning's edition of "First To Know," a series in which we keep you in the know on what's happening in the digital world. Today, we're looking at three particularly interesting stories. IDC: Samsung Is the Biggest Phone Maker by Shipments According to the latest data from IDC, Samsung was the biggest phone maker by shipments in Q1 2012, followed by Nokia and Apple. Samsung shipped 93.8 million units, compared to Nokia's 82.7 million, and Apple's 35.1 million. Facebook Adds Organ Donor Status to Timeline Facebook has added the possibility to share your organ donor status on your timeline. You can also share your story about when, where or why you decided to become a donor. UK Court Orders ISPs to Block The Pirate Bay UK internet service providers must block the torrent search engine The Pirate Bay, the High Court has ruled. Five major ISPs have complied with the request, while a sixth ISP - BT - requested "a few more weeks" to consider their position on the matter. "As a responsible ISP, Virgin Media complies with court orders addressed to the company but strongly believes that changing consumer behaviour to tackle copyright infringement also needs compelling legal alternatives, such as our agreement with Spotify, to give consumers access to great content at the right price," Virgin Media told the BBC. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock |
| Social Surfing: Mon.ki Applies Twitter Conversations to Web Browsing | |  The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Mon.ki Quick Pitch: Mon.ki is a Chrome web extension that integrates Twitter content with what's open in your browser. Users can quickly find out what people are saying about products or news. Genius Idea: Mon.ki sweeps webpages and gives users the lowdown about given topics in real time on Twitter. It automatically shows related tweets and user profiles. Sure, you value credible website searches, but it can also be helpful to know what people are said about said topic on Twitter. Mon.ki is a Chrome web extension available for download that aims to help individuals consume information one webpage at a time -- and optimizes social discovery in web browsing. Mon.ki shines light on the organic conversation surrounding topics on a single webpage. Mon.ki is a product built to be used as a "social compass," Mon.ki CEO Tim Delhaes tells Mashable. Users can immediately find out what people are saying about a breaking news article or product for sale. "If I am reading about a product or new service or something interesting that's going on, instead of switching over to Twitter to see what people are saying about this, I can go to Mon.ki," Delhaes says. After downloading the Mon.ki web extension, the tool shows up as an icon next to the URL window. The application only opens when clicked. Mon.ki automatically searches Twitter for what topics you're currently looking with the Chrome browser. Mon.ki currently only integrates Twitter, but will open up to Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, Meetup and other social network integrations. It automatically extracts topics and names from the web page that is open in the browser. Then searches your social networks to turn up related tweets, users and feeds all in one browser. Mon.ki also lets you tweet and search Twitter directly from the browser sidebar without opening another tab. There's a saturation of information on the Internet that makes it impossible to digest, says Delhaes. "We're moving through a moment of explosion of information," he says. "Every day, we get more information and we get it in different formats." The startup team says this is only the "beginning of a long road" to creating an alternative to reading hundreds of tweets and looking through dozens of user profiles before finding something relevant. The team behind Mon.ki adamantly wanted to steer clear of building another application or social network. Rather, it's a "social compass" putting information people want into their view. "It's a solution to a problem that's fundamental for people using the Internet on any device. We call this providing social context," Delhaes said. "When you look at information, it changes in meaning and relevance when you can associate it to people." The team is working to bring Mon.ki to mobile and other web browsers in the next few weeks. Since the company hopes the personal search engine will have an impact of decision making and product purchases, Delhaes hopes to base the business model around this idea. The week-old startup is now in its private beta stage. The first 500 Mashable readers can access the browser tool by signing up at Mon.ki and emailing their Twitter handle to mashable@mon.ki. Image courtesy of Flickr, Jeremy Levine Design Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today. |
| Why Pay-Per-Click Ads Are Wasting Your Money | | Monday, April 30, 2012 9:38 PM | Raj De Datta |
|  Raj De Datta is CEO and co-founder of BloomReach. Most recently, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Mohr-Davidow Ventures. Follow the company at @bloomreachinc. Paid click campaigns are valuable traffic drivers, but they could be doing a lot more considering that half the time they don't work. Research my company conducted indicates that non-branded paid clicks have a 55% bounce rate from their landing pages. Google Analytics and KISSmetrics reports put the range from 10% to 90% with new visitors bouncing 62.9% of the time from paid search clicks. SEE ALSO: Growing Up Google: How Cloud Computing Is Changing a Generation What these numbers indicate is that only about half of paid clicks actually drive conversion from new visitors they attract. That is the equivalent of throwing away $.55 of every marketing dollar. That's not to say paid clicks aren't a good idea, but rather that they can and should be more effective and efficient. According to Conductor, an SEO platform, there's an average online conversion rate of just 2.5% for visitors across all channels. Marketers need to invest in resources that maximize conversion from paid search traffic, often their largest digital line item. In paid search, there are two ways to bid: exact match or broad match. The choice means most paid search marketers are forced to choose between scale and profitability, depending on how they bid. Exact match can offer profitability but lacks scale and it only wins if the query matches the exact keywords you chose. Broad match includes other content too, which is why it offers great scale, but it's less profitable because it's not as accurate. For example, "gold link earrings" as a keyword is an exact match that, if associated with a landing page displaying a collection of gold link earrings, is likely to motivate customer conversion. But if you bought the terms "gold earrings" on a broad match, searches for "gold link earrings," "gold hoop earrings" and "gold and silver earrings" might lead to a generic gold earrings landing page that might or might not have link, hoop, or gold and silver featured. The customers likely do not find the gold link earrings they were specifically looking for, and they leave your page. To add insult to injury, you might actually have gold link earrings available on your site but because it's not part of your landing page, the opportunity is wasted. Ultimately a relevant landing page makes the difference when completing the marketing process that began with a paid click. A relevant landing page is created by selecting keywords, bidding strategically on those keywords, and writing compelling ad copy. Once those items are addressed, it's important to maximize landing page relevance by adapting to search intent and product catalogs, which requires rigorous Big Data science. This science refers to the algorithms and data management techniques for handling very large, distributed, and unstructured data sets. Hadoop, IBM, and MarkLogic are companies that have built Big Data infrastructures that find patterns in data sets that otherwise feel disparate. The disparate quality of data lies in the fact that 90% of Web content was created in the past two years. There is a tremendous amount of content that is never found by people because the volume is growing rapidly, changing frequently (about 40% of product information changes per month), and is structured in a browsing hierarchy that leaves many content-rich pages undiscovered. Pages are basically buried deep in a site without many links in and out to guide consumers and crawlers who don't land on the right page. On the paid side, even fewer pages get found because it's not cost efficient to manually create relevant landing pages for every product and ad group needed. Big Data technology bridges the gap because it understands consumer intent, and ultimately offers the most relevant results. As a result, Big Data applications are changing the landscape of data-driven online marketing and making search - both paid and natural - more effective than ever. In essence, Big Data applications turn data into something more useful -- beyond analytics and into actions. Analytics are useful and should guide strategy, but often, by the time a business acts on the analytics, the trends have shifted. Big Data apps react when the trend is happening so that users of those apps realize the benefits immediately. Nowhere is that more important than in maximizing the conversion of qualified, interested consumers who click on a paid search ad to answer their query. As Big Data apps help companies connect customers with products more efficiently, companies will see their ad dollars and content go further than they do with paid search alone. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, kizilkayaphotos |
| Bear Down: AP Pulls Falling Bear Image, School Acknowledges Copyright Dispute | | Monday, April 30, 2012 9:02 PM | Stephanie Haberman |
|  Mats for bear falling from Will Vill tree provided by CU Rec Center twitter.com/cuindependent/.— CU Independent (@cuindependent) April 26, 2012 Andy Duann, a student at the University of Colorado Boulder, took a picture for the CU Independent of a tranquilized bear falling out of a tree. The photo was distributed by the school paper without Duann's permission, and he is considering taking legal action against the paper. The photo, which was placed on the Associated Press wire and was purchased by several news organizations, has since gone viral. Paul Colford, an Associated Press spokesman, told Poynter that the CU Independent made the photos available to the AP. But over the weekend, the AP issued a "photo elimination" for Andy Duann's shot. That's an official call for organizations who used the photo to remove it. "A copyright dispute has arisen between the photographer and the publication that made the photos available to the Associated Press," the notice read. All four photos of Duann's that AP had been distributing were pulled. In a conversation with Matthew Keys of Reuters, Duann stated that the Independent has acknowledged he has the copyright to the photo. If true, that would be an unusual change for the paper. Gil Asakawa, who advises the Independent, has maintained that the paper owns the copyright to the photo as recently as this afternoon. Asakawa did not reply to a request for comment. Duann told Keys he was thankful for the exposure, but he that he "just want them to respect me and give me the copyright." How should photographers be compensated when their pictures go viral? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. |
| How To Explain Facebook (and Its IPO) in 150 Seconds [VIDEO] | | Monday, April 30, 2012 7:38 PM | Chris Taylor |
|  Got friends returning from a four-year stint on Mars, or elderly relatives who still don't get why Facebook is such a big deal? Want to spark a discussion about whether the site is worth its $100 billion valuation? Then you could do a lot worse than simply screening this video. Made by online investment platform Kapitall, the 150-second vid takes some of the most eye-popping stats about the social network and delivers them in a pleasing animated infographic-style format (not to mention a thumping proto-80's style synth soundtrack). The video is a little disingenuous in one way: it suggests that "the rest of us" can easily get in on the action whenever Facebook has its IPO (likely coming this summer, though the much-anticipated launch seems to have been delayed by Facebook's billion-dollar acquisition of Instagram). In fact, as we pointed out back in February, you're unlikely to get in on the initial frenzy unless you're an employee, a celebrity, a business mogul or one of the deal's underwriters. Investing in the secondary market for Facebook stock is also fraught with regulations and complications; you're better off waiting on the sidelines. But plugs for Kapitall's business model aside, this is one of the better summaries of the social media frenzy that we've seen. If YouTube wanted to build a time capsule of videos that capture our connected age, this would be a worthy entrant. Not least because everything we know about the way the world is going suggests the viewers of the future will have an extremely limited attention span. If you have another 90 seconds to spare, check out our Mashable guide to the Facebook IPO below: |
| Facebook Timeline Changed the Way We See Brand Pages; Here's How | | Monday, April 30, 2012 3:06 PM | Sarah Kessler |
|  When Facebook launched Timeline for brands last month, it wasn't just marketers' social media strategies that got turned upside down. The new format also changed the way consumers experience brands on Facebook. In a webcam eye-tracking study for Mashable by EyeTrackShop, participants spent less time looking at Wall posts and ads and more time looking at the cover photo on brands' timelines than they did on their old Facebook Walls. "The new Facebook Timeline limits the effective branding space, and the top portion of the page must be effectively utilized," suggest the study's authors. SEE ALSO: Here's How People Look at Your Facebook Profile -- Literally EyeTrackShop recorded eye movements of 30 participants as they were shown brand profiles -- before and after being converted to timeline -- from the Dallas Cowboys, Good Morning America, "The Muppets" and Pepsi in 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each webpage, for how long and in what order is recorded in the images below. Results suggests a few ways our perception of Brands on Facebook has changed: Ads on Facebook Timeline are less visible than ads on Facebook Brand Pages. While 30%-40% of study participants looked at ads on brand Timeline pages, 80% looked at them on Brand Pages. In both cases, ads placed higher up on the page fared better than those below them. Cover photos are the new Facebook Wall (at least as far as attention goes). On brand pages, Wall posts were the star attraction. Viewers on average looked at them first and for the longest amount of time. On the brand Timelines, however, viewers always looked at the cover photo first. In all but one case, they spent a longer time looking at it than at Timeline content. Everyone will notice your cover photo. It's larger than anything else and at the top of the page for a reason, and 100% of viewers looked at it. On average, they saw it in 0.5 seconds or less. Meanwhile, only 65% to 92% of viewers noticed profile photos on Brand Pages. Viewers see Timeline content last. In every case, viewers looked at either the left or right column of Timeline content last -- after ads, navigation buttons and brand logos. Information that was invisible is now a focal point. Facebook moved the number of Likes, events and apps to prime top-and-center territory. It now gets more attention than when it was listed on the right-hand side of the page. In the case of Good Morning America, for instance, the show's 585,000 Likes went from being completely ignored on its Brand Page to being the biggest attention-getter on its Timeline. Cover photos with faces attract the most attention. Good Morning America and "The Muppets" have cover photos with faces, whereas the Dallas Cowboys and Pepsi do not. The cover photos with faces attracted more attention. Take a look at the results of the study in the gallery, and let us know your own observations in the comments. |
| Grandma Dies 6 Times in Ad, But It's For a Good Cause [VIDEO] | | Monday, April 30, 2012 1:38 PM | Todd Wasserman |
|  A grandmother dies six times -- in increasingly violent ways -- in a new ad for an Argentinan jobs site called Zonajobs. But it's all for a good cause, or rather for a good joke. The ad, from agency Draftfcb in Buenos Aires, is one where you spend the first three quarters wondering what the hell is going on. When the punchline finally lands, you may not only laugh, but think a little as well. In other words, it's pretty much everything you want in an ad. That is, unless you're sensitive about this subject -- even when it's blatantly fake. In that case, it's pretty much unwatchable. |
| This App Will Have Your Favorite Site Swarming With Cats | | Monday, April 30, 2012 11:44 AM | Todd Wasserman |
|  Need we say more? The KittyCat Hijack app from Canadian cat food brand Temptations will have your favorite websites swarming with felines within minutes. To activate the app, go to the brand's Facebook Page and then add the app to your bookmarks bar. (The creators made this simple by putting the app in the form of a cat food bag.) After that, you can let the cats loose on your favorite websites. Bonus: 25 Outstanding Kitty-Themed Tumblrs |
| Startup Accelerator Supports Minorities and Women in Tech | | Monday, April 30, 2012 11:31 AM | Stephanie Buck |
|  The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place. Name: NewME Accelerator Big Idea: NewME startup accelerator guides and mentors minorities and women -- two groups underrepresented in the tech space -- by working to lower industry's barrier to entry. Why It's Working: NewME's 12-week immersion programs nurture startup founders' ideas, foster discussion, encourage co-working and offer mentorship from some of the industry's most prominent leaders. Each program concludes with a "demo day," during which NewME participants present their ideas and products to influential tech attendees. Today's tech industry is comprised of only 25% women, and a paltry 1.5% African-Americans make up Silicon Valley's tech workforce. San Francisco-based startup NewME wasn't having it. Before launching its immersive accelerator program, the company successfully fostered a dialogue about minority participation in the tech space with events and conferences. The 2010 NewME Washington D.C. conference brought together experts, venture capitalists and minority entrepreneurs themselves to discuss the industry's high barrier to entry, specifically when it comes to African-Americans, Latinos and women. As both a woman and an African-American, NewME founder Angela Benton has managed to surpass the overwhelming odds. "Even if I think back to earlier on in my career, when I was a designer or an engineer, I was still the only black woman in meetings, on the teams that I was on and even in the department that I was in," she says. But why are there so few minorities in the tech workplace to begin with? Many believe the problem originates in the United States' education system -- today's young people don't have access to enough science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) curricula. However, Benton envisions a more "multi-pronged" solution: "We have to factor in other things, like access to mentors and role models, and even very simple things, like explaining to individuals how to even start to enter the field is huge," she says. And that's precisely what NewME's startup accelerator program aims to accomplish. The company hosts two 12-week workshops per year, during which about eight startups per session "spend 24 hours a day sleeping, eating and drinking our startups," says NewME's website. That's right -- for either the entire spring (Feb - May) or the entire fall (Aug - Nov), participants co-work and co-live in San Francisco, Calif., entirely dedicated to lifting their ideas off the ground. Accelerator participants have heard from and interacted with a variety of leaders in the tech industry, including Opsware co-founder and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz, Lotus Development Corp. founder Mitch Kapor and the former CTO of Second Life Cory Ondrejka. In addition to brainstorming and working tirelessly, NewME's select few participants enjoy a supportive community. They share stories of workplace challenges and inspire each other with hopeful solutions. "NewME participants' stories about their experiences in the tech industry are so varied," says Benton. "I get to talk to the founders that we have in the accelerator, and I get to hear what people have experienced nationally, via the nearly 1,000 people we have in NewME community." That community only continues to grow as the traditional tech industry stereotype crumbles. "People, regardless of your background, think you have to be and look a certain why to be in the technology industry. Most think they have to have a computer science degree, be a white guy or look like a nerd," says Benton. "This is the best way to have an industry that more accurately reflects not just the U.S. ethnic and gender makeup, but the world's ethnic and gender makeup." Series presented by GE
The World at Work is powered by GE. GE Works focuses on the people who make the things that move, power, build and help to cure the world. |
| 5 Mobile Trends Brands Need to Watch | | Monday, April 30, 2012 10:27 AM | Jonathan Gardner |
|  Jonathan Gardner is director of communications at Vibrant Media. He has spent his career at the nexus of media and technology, having worked in communications around the world. Follow him @thejongardner. If you let your imagination run wild, innovations such as Google's Project Glass suggest there will come a time when we'll no longer converse with each other, but instead exchange data like a bunch of GPS-enabled cyborgs. While that may not be quite how it plays out, a highly-connected future is definitely on its way. Already, data shows that more than one third of American teens own an iPhone and the one-tablet-per-child initiative is a mainstay in South Korean and Thai schools. It's easy to see what life will look like for the next generation of consumers, but will marketers be prepared? That will largely depend on whether they've considered these five post-mobile trends. 1. Augmented Reality Look in the mirror and what do you see? Today's weather? Your day's appointments? Then you must have the latest mirror from Cybertecture, a Hong Kong firm that's making tomorrow's smart homes a reality today. We may not all have money to burn on a high-tech mirror, but brands are certainly looking at ways to capitalize on this technology and make it the norm. For example, the wizards at Corning provided an inspiring look at how touch screens made of glass might soon be seamlessly integrated into our environments. Brands such as Starbucks are already seeing strong revenue from their mobile AR program. 2. The New Biotech When I say biotech, I mean data comes from everywhere, including from within. Companies like FitBit and Nike are finding new ways to record and utilize that data. For now, they seem to be focused on helping athletes (and wannabes) build better workouts, but it's only a matter of time before brands begin to look more closely at how such data might be used to develop new customer relationships. Nike has already opened its FuelBand API to allow music platforms to experiment with incorporating personal physical data. As these technologies gain traction and developers look at new ways to leverage information, one day soon we could see insurance companies providing discounts to individuals who share their device data. This would be the equivalent of auto insurers, such as Progressive, offering savings to drivers who share their driving behavior. 3. Consumer-Controlled Media One of the most interesting trends we've seen is the fragmentation of ownership. Technology has empowered the masses, and they're leveraging that power in new ways. If brands want to remain relevant to their audiences, they're going to have to engage in these contexts and in a media landscape where the traditional publishing model no longer exists. In this not-too-distant future we will watch all of our programming online in whatever form that takes. And we will engage with media that we create (not what the media "owners" create) or remix, re-purpose, and pass along. 4. Multi-Platform Marketing 5. Innovation Without Borders Brands and products are no longer geographically confined in the way they once were, and neither are marketing campaigns. Big brands are increasingly tapping into local talent and culture, testing new approaches in one market, and re-purposing them elsewhere. Coca-Cola took the best of gamification, Shazam, and the second-screen experience and ran with it in China. Tesco is testing out interactive mobile shopping experiences in Seoul that the U.S. is not quite ready for, technologically or socially. It is clear that in the near future, brands will pitch locally but think globally. Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hocus-focus |
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