Facebook saw a decline in usage for the first time in its history, undoubtedly brought about by certain changes made to its News Feed. Despite that, the social media company’s digital ads remained profitable, stemming any concerns investors might have.
Facebook recently released its earnings report for the last quarter of 2017. The report underlined the effects of Mark Zuckerberg’s campaign to improve his company while also emphasizing the social media giant is still aforce to be reckoned with in the business sector.
Facebook’s founder mentioned in the report how the company made changes so that fewer viral videos were shown. The changes “reduced time spent on Facebook by roughly 50 million hours every day.” Those hours showed up as a decrease from 185 million daily active users (DAU) in the US and Canada to 184 million users.
It’s the first time that the company has reported a reduction of users in any of its market. Some sectors could evenhave been alarmed by the fact that this decline happened in the region where Facebook earns the most from advertisements. The company makes an average profit of $26.76 per user in the region, as opposed to the worldwide average of $6.18.
However, the reported dip in users and time spent on the social media platform didn’t seem to hurt Facebook’s bottom line. According to the company’s earnings report, revenue in the last quarter of 2017 hit $12.97 billion, up from the $8.81 billion it garnered during the same period in 2016. This was an increase of 47% and it topped the $12.55 billion average projected by the analysts over at Yahoo Finance.
The boost was apparently due to Facebook’s mobile ad sales, which included that from its sister company Instagram. The increase was also aided by the company’s marketing tools, which are steadily becoming more precise.
Revenue from its mobile ad sales represented around 89% of the last quarter’s total ad sales and is up to 84% compared to the year before. It has been estimated that Facebook’s profits from its global ads this year would reach $53.84 billion, placing it behind Google as the biggest ad seller in the world.
More changes are expected to come to Facebook, as Zuckerberg wants it to be more than just a fun platform. In his statement, he said he wanted his brainchild to also be “good for people’s well-being and for society” and plans to do so via more meaningful connections.
He parlayed any concerns investors might have by saying that theuser drop was just temporary and was needed to make a stronger product. Zuckerberg also emphasized that worthwhile interactions would lead to a stronger community and that the care users would have for this group would make them more amenable to seeing ads.
Facebook is now trying out a new strategy to combat fake news. In a surprising move, the social media giant feels that the best way to handle the issue is by surveying theusers themselves on which news sources they think are trustworthy.
Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressed the issue on his Page.
“We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that’s not something we’re comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you—the community—and have your feedback determine the ranking.”
To rank the trustworthiness of news sources, Facebook plans to implement an ongoing online survey where it would ask users whether they trust a particular online news report. In effect, the readers would determine what’s fake and what’s not.
Facebook to fight ‘fake news’ by asking users to rank trust in media outlets https://t.co/Pce3KQxsft
Of course, Facebook’s solution to fake news is not without its critics. Despite its claims that user surveys will offer the most objective outcome, some say that the company is just taking the path of the least responsibility.
Meanwhile, others fear that Facebook’s new strategy might not help combat fake news at all. In fact, there are concerns that the move could “wind up exacerbating Facebook’s fake news problem,” according to Salon.com.
For instance, technology analyst Larry Magid expressed the fears that such a strategy could end up giving more weight to “opinions formed from prejudices against, or preference, for certain outlets instead of whether they were trustworthy or accurate.”
“Simply because something is well liked by a percentage of the public, doesn’t mean it’s reliable,” Magid explained. “There are people who love news sites that are objectively untrue—that doesn’t require an opinion, that’s something you can establish by fact.”
Microsoft’s Azure is finally gaining a foothold in the cloud computing niche with its market share jumping from 16 to 20 percent in the 4th quarter of 2017. The jump amounts to around $3.7 billion of its total revenue for the year. In contrast, Amazon Web Services (AWS) saw its market share drop from 68 to 62 percent in the same time frame.
The latest industry figures were provided by analysts from KeyBanc, a Cleveland-based boutique investment bank specializing in mergers and acquisitions.
With the cloud computing market still in its infancy, tech companies are busy positioning themselves to gain the upper hand in the lucrative niche. At the moment AWS is the dominant player, but this year will likely see many companies significantly expand their respective cloud computing divisions so as not to get left out of the emerging market.
Microsoft, for one, has already made sizable investments in Azure, gearing up for the inevitable competition. The company recently added a number of data centers in the UK and other parts of the globe. Factoring in Microsoft’s efforts, KeyBanc expects the Azure platform to grow rapidly, projecting a massive 88 percent increase by the end of 2018.
It’s fair to say Microsoft is on a buying spree in an effort to boost its market presence and clout. Recently, it acquired Avere Systems, a startup specializing in data storage solutions.
But as expected, AWS will not take the challenge sitting down. Last November, it announced a new partnership with Cerner, a firm specializing in offering technology solutions for the healthcare industry.
The digital advertising scene is about to get very interesting in 2018. After experimenting with various advertising products in the past, Amazon is now ready to make its presence felt and is seriously planning to challenge heavyweights Google and Facebook.
At the moment, digital advertising revenue is virtually a duopoly between ‘The Big Two’—Facebook and Google. This is not surprising since advertisers have long been flocking to them in droves because of the potential that their ads might reach the billions of users of the two platforms.
However, reports are now saying that Amazon is now ready to make waves and shake up the current power structure of the digital advertising arena.
According to a CNBC report, Amazon aims to bolster its market share by looking for additional ad revenues within its e-commerce search feature and video products. Also, there are talks that the company is mulling over the possibility of selling beyond Amazon sites and products. Citing unnamed sources, the report added that Amazon is working out a partnership deal with third-party mobile advertising companies such as Kargo for an advertising product that covers both TV and mobile platforms.
While Amazon has yet to respond to queries regarding its advertising business plans, industry watchers noted that the company is revving up hiring for its advertising division. This observation supports CFO Brian Olsavsky previous disclosure during the Q2 earnings call last July where he mentioned that Amazon was hiring more ad sales staff.
At the heart of all the corporate warfare is a gargantuan market that has not shown any signs of slowing down. The size of the global digital advertising business in 2017 alone is estimated at $209 billion. By 2018, analysts project that the industry will experience a 13 percent growth to balloon to $237 billion.
Six largest digital advertising platforms by US rev, per @eMarketer:
But if Amazon were to fulfill its grand ambitions in becoming the third member of a triumvirate, it will have some serious catching up to do. At the moment, it only accounts for 2 percent of the $80 billion U.S. digital advertising market while the Big Two (Facebook & Google) combined, account for more than 70 percent of the total market.
There’s no denying that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has changed a lot since the 1990s. These days, CRM software is the go-to tool for managing business relationships and closely studying customer data and interactions.
CRM systems are continuously evolving, but what can it offer businesses next year? Here are four CRM trends to watch out for:
Artificial Intelligence to Become More Intelligent
AI is here and from the looks of things, it’s not going anywhere. It will even be making serious strides in terms of how companies will be doing business. From deep learning to machine learning, AI is expected to have a greater hand in evaluating and changing business systems so companies can get their expected results.
AI assistants are already being utilized in the consumer environment, but analysts are predicting that businesses will benefit from this program by automating the repetitive and mundane parts of the marketing or sales cycle. So expect to see more companies taking advantage of AI chatbots as more businesses begin to see the benefits of using them as the first point of interaction with their customers.
Intelligent Security to Become Even More Vital
Researchers believe that more securityapplications enhanced with AI will appear in 2018, especially with the upcoming implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union.
The passing of the GDPR is expected to strengthen data protection for citizens, and AI-enhanced security apps can help marketers ensure that their clients are complying. AI can help by alerting companies of expiring consent that they need to take action on. Or they can warn of possible exposure due to customers moving to another country with a different set of regulations.
Intelligent security is also essential to fight data breaches and other malicious hacking, especially now that hackers are getting smarter and bolder.
Augmented Reality Will Make Its Presence Felt
A more sophisticated augmented reality technology is expected to be seen in 2018, and with it are more instances for its use.
Market analysts agree that there was a lot of studying and experimentation with AR in 2017. Because of this, there were a lot of use cases developed in marketing, sales, and service for AR. It’s inevitable that companies would use AR more and 2018 might just be the year this technology breaks through in the sales and marketing business.
Companies can utilize AR to showcase in greater detail large products, like furniture and automobiles. Architects and designers can also use it to preview layouts or designs. Meanwhile, marketers can even use AR to develop interactive campaigns and complement advertisements with virtual reality.
Digital Market Will be Reinforced and Transformed
Data enhancement tools, email syncing, and VOIP connections used to be features that companies wouldlike to see in CRM systems they’re eyeing, but things are different now and 2018 is expected to bring even better enhancements.
On top of that, industry leaders will continue to try and exert their dominance on the market. Niche vendors will attempt to fill vertical-specific systems while third-party applications try to integrate with CRMs to supply more capabilities. Experts believe that the market will see a growth of third-party vendor space as more businesses develop applications and products that would be offered in exchange stores.
Companies like Sugar CRM and TenFold have already started on this trend. The former has rolled out HINT, a software that automatically searches the internet for company and personal information while the latter is developing a VOIP/CRM/ marketing connector with features like smart agent AI and Zoom meeting integrations.
It’s still too early to determine what CRM trends will really shake up 2018, but users and businesses can expect to see more focused AI capacities, new uses for AR, and more offerings from vendors as they compete to set themselves apart from their competitors.
Most Corporations have the advantage of unlimited access to all the features a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform offers. Now small businesses can also enjoy this perk as well.
During Salesforce’s yearly Dreamforce conference, the company announced that one of their best performing CRM platforms – the Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials – will be available to all. With this, small businesses will enjoy the same access to features that large enterprises use to grow rapidly and work quicker and smarter. Small companies will also have access to Salesforce’s newest innovations, like Einstein AI, Lightning, and Trailhead.
Salesforce knows that to be able to cope with the demands of today’s competitive marketplaces, businesses should be able to easily integrate new technology into their day-to-day operations. This need is underlined by the revelation that 66% of small company heads are handling two or more departments. Meanwhile, only 26% of small businesses have an in-house IT department while the rest either deal with contractors or try to work out IT problems on their own.
Salesforce Essentials can go a long way in easing this burden, as the platform was designed for simplicity and functionality. Small business analyst, Brent Leary, explained that small companies need guidance and a user-friendly platform, especially if they’re new to CRM. Essentials’ simple interface does meet that requirement, with the Trailhead feature providing the necessary assistance needed to develop leads faster and see results more quickly.
New AI Features Great for Small Business
The three key features added to the Sales Cloud Lightning Essentials will definitely make a difference to small businesses.
Trailhead is an interactive, online learning platform that assists users in its implementation. It also gives guidance on topics like how to implement innovation and raise business knowledge.
Meanwhile, Einstein is showing small businesses the practical aspects of artificial intelligence. In an interview, Salesforce’s Senior Product Director of Marketing, Eric Bernsley, explained that while most have a lot of questions about AI, they don’t want big, vague concepts. They want to see how AI can help businesses get more done.
Entrepreneurs and small business owners know that manually inputting data is time-consuming and leaves little time for a company to identify or pursue new opportunities. But with Einstein, basic sales activities can be automated or records kept up-to-date. It can also help with predictive lead scoring or look at areas connected to possible leads.
Since Essentials is built on Salesforce’s Lightning framework, small businesses will be able to enjoy a smooth transition of their workflow on any device due to the system’s intuitive design. And when Essentials is combined with other Salesforce Apps, small businesses can eventually manage their whole sales conversation – accounts, leads to contacts – on any device, whether from the office or out in the field.
More importantly, all of Essentials’ features are scalable, meaning they’re flexible and can meet the CRM needs of any company, regardless of the size. And since Essentials is also built on a global platform, upgrading can be done anytime, something that will be beneficial to small companies.
The country’s biggest tech companies might be battling criticism in Washington, but Super Thursday’s results clearly show that the public still loves them.
Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft’s earnings went beyond what investors expected, as shares of these companies received a major boost and helped inject new momentum in the industry.
Final hour of the week: Big tech is the big story today, driving the Nasdaq to new highs! pic.twitter.com/UyzrvKXue7
It comes as no surprise that Amazon was the biggest winner of the day, with shares leaping almost 8 percent to trade at more than $1,000 in after-hours trading on Thursday. The company’s total revenue was pegged at $43.8 billion and its pioneering cloud system, Amazon Web Services (AWS), pushed past a $4 billion quarterly revenue.
Alphabet was not far behind as its shares jumped 3 percent in aftermarket trading. The company broke through the $1,000 mark after parent company Google revealed a 24 percent increase in sales to $27.8 billion. Alphabet received a major boost from Google ads, especially in the Asian region.
Microsoft also broke records with its $82.18 shares, which rose 3.6 percent. The company also went beyond the earnings estimates pegged by investors, giving it almost $630 billion in market capitalization. Aside from profiting from its Office products, Microsoft also got a shot in the arm from its cloud service, Azure, which grew 90 percent in revenue from 2016.
Theearnings from these tech companies have been dubbed “Super Thursday” by analysts from Wall Street due to how massive these companies are and because tech stocks have been a major influence in the stock market this year.
Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos said his company’s earnings increase was partly due to the rising demand for its smart home products, which are powered by AI assistant, Alexa. To underline his point, Bezos said the past month alone saw the launch of five Alexa-enabled devices, the AI’s integration with BMW and Sonos speakers and Alexa being introduced in India.
There’s also no denying thatcloud computing also contributed to the impressive growth experienced by big tech. Azure has almost doubled its business this year, securing customers like Costco and generating an estimated $2 billion for Microsoft.
Amazon Web Services and the Google Cloud Platform have also landed some key accounts this year. The former has already closed deals with Hulu and General Electric while the latter will be doing business with Kohl’s and PayPal.
Research firm Canalys has estimated the cloud computing market was worth $14.4 billion in the third quarter of 2017, rising 43 percent from the previous year. Canalys also concluded that as the cloud market is still in the developing stage, it will continue to grow faster than the majority of the traditional information technology sector.
The U.S. telecommunications landscape is about to drastically change once more. If rumors are correct, Sprint and T-Mobile, two of the country’s largest telecommunications players could merge by October this year.
Of course, talks of T-Mobile merging with Sprint have been around for years. This time, however, it looks like there’s more meat to it than mere idle speculation. According to Reuters, T-Mobile, the U.S.’ third largest carrier, is on the brink of agreeing to a merger with the country’s fourth-largest carrier, Sprint, citing unnamed sources familiar with the deal.
Timing is important in mega-merger deals. Previously, plans of a merger between the two telecom giants fell through when it became apparent that the Obama administration’s anti-trust stance would object to the deal. With the Trump administration, however, a T-Mobile-Sprint merger could push through and deal makers are not likely to let this window of opportunity pass by, according to Engadget.
At the moment, neither Sprint nor T-Mobile has officially commented on the leaked merger plans. However, company officials from both camps have already given previous hints of such agreement.
For instance, T-Mobile CEO John Legere gave indications last January that the company is open to a possible merger in the near future saying, “It may make sense from a scale standpoint.” On the other hand, Sprint CEO and President Marcelo Claure hinted that it would make announcements about merger discussions in the near future.
Should the transaction push through, Japan’s SoftBank Group will end up controlling between 40 to 50 percent of the merged entity while German firm Deutsche Telekom and the rest of T-Mobile shareholder will own the majority of shares. SoftBank controls Sprint while Deutsche Telekom owns a majority of T-Mobile.
The combined entity will likewise become the second biggest telecom player on the block. Combining T-Mobile’s 69.6 million subscribers with Sprint’s 53.7 million will create a telecom titan with 123.3 million subscribers, enough to overshadow Verizon’s 114.5 million (the current number 2) and placing it firmly behind AT&T’s 135.7 million.
Aside from the advantage of scale, a merger between T-Mobile and Sprint could also improve the combined entity’s bottom line. According to research firm MoffetNathanson partner and senior analyst Craig Moffett, a merger could mean as much as $4 billion in savings due to cost-cutting opportunities. The combined entity could then invest those savings in areas like 5G which is critical if it wants to maintain an edge over rivals in technology.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” said marketing pioneer John Wanamaker in the early 1900’s. That is why CRM software was invented and why it is used by every serious marketer. In today’s “Big Data” World, enterprises are making not just marketing decisions, but almost ALL decisions based on data analytics.
“Big Data holds the potential to describe target customers with an accuracy and level of detail unfathomable only a decade ago,” said Jean Spencer on the SalesForce blog, who is a Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft and was previously the content marketing manager at Kapost. “While old-school marketing efforts were limited to things like tracking returns on direct mail campaigns, or number of subscribers to newsletters, modern marketers can have data on people’s exercise habits, digital clicking behavior, time spent on various sites, purchasing history, personal preferences based on social media postings, time awake, time spent in the car, caloric intake, and almost anything else you can imagine.”
SalesForce is at the epicenter of data, marketing and sales. They offer this overview of the concept:
Using Data To Make Better Marketing Decisions
A report by the Aberdeen Group says that 44 percent of executives are dissatisfied with the analytic capabilities available to them and that they often make critical decisions based on inaccurate or inadequate data. That was in 2014 and fortunately CRM has improved dramatically since then and executives are now typically integrating CRM solutions into their marketing platforms.
“No longer do we rely on conclusions based on vague and imprecise relationships such as “we advertised last week and sales increased so it must have worked” or the common one that I’ve heard many times, “the objective was awareness and clearly many people are now aware of us”, said Gerald Chait who is Director/CEO of Marketing By Objectives. “In today’s world, this just does not cut it anymore.”
Chait added in a blog post, “Gone are the days when we would define roughly segmented target audiences and place an ad hoping someone would purchase something. Today’s marketing enables us to identify who to work with to make a sale, right down to the individual level. What’s more, we can personalize and customize our advertising and messaging to each specific person, no matter how many people there are. We can even customise and personalize website pages depending on who’s viewing them.”
It’s often referred to as predictive marketing, gathering data to learn what is working and what isn’t using precise analytical strategies and technologies in order to finely tune your marketing.
“Predictive marketing is the application of predictive technology to the entire marketing process, across the entire buyer’s journey, and across every channel of communication,” says Eli Snyder, Associate Technology Director of Strategy at Intelligent Demand. “It means not only having predictive insight into the future through predictive analytics, but also using that insight to make better decisions about who and how to engage, and then build better content, campaigns and programs.”
“In order to execute your marketing strategy in the most effective way, you’ll need your business management platform (or CRM) and marketing automation tools to work together seamlessly; using one to generate leads, and the other to maintain them, so you can get a complete picture of your business,” said Mark Sokol who is the VP of Product Marketing and Branding at ConnectWise.
The Intersection of Marketing & CRM is Leads
CRM and marketing are now tightly integrated in order to make marketing more efficient and and successful. “In the past, the marketing campaign stops here in the CRM software system and the rest is carried out externally,” said Denise Holland, VP & Senior Analyst of Genesys Advisory in the CRMsearch blog. “In today’s world, the right customer relationship management system can create the message, compile your target list, distribute your messaging pursuant to an automated schedule, capture the replies and inquiries from these marketing placements, route them to the right sales person or department, track the sale opportunity progress, record the successful sale event and calculate the campaign ROI.”
“This CRM system can also advise the best time to call or email your customers, what type of messaging will illicit the best response, if your customer is really serious or just shopping around, how you can improve your products and services, and what new products and services your R&D department should focus on next,” he says.
“CRM has one common component to help you make marketing decisions, Leads, says Joe CRM on the PowerObjects blog. “Lead data allows you to gauge how healthy your marketing is, what works and what doesn’t, and lets you understand lead quality. In today’s post, we’ll provide some lead data sources from CRM you can use to help make marketing decisions.”
Joe at PowerObjects says you need to know where your leads are coming from. “Some examples of lead sources include outbound cold calls, email, chat, website form submission, and events,” he said. “Keeping the lead source simple lets you use a different field, source campaign, to describe the lead source in more detail as needed.”
He says that knowing where leads come from drives marketing decisions such as:
Number of employees needed for the inside sales team
Budget disbursement for paid advertising
Landing page success
P&L for events attended
Create a Data-Driven Culture
“To cultivate a data-driven culture within your organization, it’s important to remember that without data, you’re simply another person with an opinion,” commented MeetMe CTO Jonah Harris on the NGDATA blog. “All too often, with valuable data and insights in hand, people remain invested in their own hunches and intuition.”
“Transitioning to a genuine data-driven culture is a challenge for many organizations, but one of the ideal first steps is to start leveraging the data your business has to guide evidence-based decision making,” added Vaclav Shatillo of Business Intelligence at Clutch. “When data reinforces or, better yet, contradicts the gut feeling, the conversation around the importance of a data-driven approach is bound to begin.”
At what frequency the data is needed to make actionable decision, and
How to package the data so it can be easily digested, analyzed and reacted to.
Find other great advice from a variety of experts quoted about how to create a data-driven culture here.
Darren Catalano, the CEO of HelioCampus offers some great tips on building a data-driven culture that can be applied to any business:
Data is Marketing Gold
“Data isn’t an overwhelming set of facts and figures,” said Megan Totka is the Marketing Director for ChamberofCommerce.com. “It’s marketing gold. It shows you what your customers want and how to get your customers to buy from you.”
Joe CRM says that the “data you receive from leads that turn into opportunities and then end up as customers is a goldmine.” He says, “This data alone can give your company direction and help you find your niche. That’s why when you use your closed as won accounts it should be for a macro view of your marketing processes. This is the data executives want to see from marketing because it helps prove ROI or that the money spent was worthwhile.”
Data that can power your successful marketing strategy is sometimes found in places that you don’t expect. “New marketing technology, measurement platforms and other advances have greatly expanded the sources that marketers can sift through for nuggets of information,” said Eva Rohrmann, the director of solutions and customer lifecycle marketing for PR Newswire. ”
Rohrmann says that the “most useful data that will turn strategic, positioning and tactical efforts into gold oftentimes is hiding right under your nose: with other teams within your organization.” She believes that ideas and data are “streaming” from many directions, “from sales to product to customer support.”
“Every team within your organization has a treasure trove of actionable marketing intelligence waiting to be discovered,” she says.
The marketing landscape is changing and that should make every CMO’s job easier because they are using justifiable logic instead of just gut intuition. In order for a company to reach their maximum sales potential they must utilize data-driven CRM strategies.
“Marketing is currently undergoing a metamorphosis from a once qualitatively measured art towards a quantitatively driven science,” said Eamonn O’Raghallaigh, the Managing Director of Digital Strategy. on the company’s blog. “This paradigm shift will indeed lead to significant impacts on the competitive landscape; with the bias towards companies who adopt and embrace a data-centric culture within their organization.”
Google announced JSON-LD support for Reviews and Products structured data markup.
Webmaster trends analyst John Mueller wrote in a Google+ post (via Search Engine Roundtable) that along with the launch of support for JSON-LD for Reviews and Products structured data markup, they’ve also “cleaned up” some of their application logic.
Mueller notes that more info about how to format Reviews and Products markup to comply with Google’s validation rules is available here.
“We hope these changes make it easier to use structured data on your side!” he says.
Google released the structured data tool to help webmasters author and publish markup on their sites. It provides validation for all Google features powered by structured data, support for markup in JSON-LD (including dynamic HTML pages).
When it comes to your Facebook posts, shares appear to be significantly more important than either likes or comments when it comes to increasing your reach and audience.
Have you found shares to be more effective at increasing your posts’ reach than likes? Let us know in the comments.
That is the key finding from some recently released research by Socialbakers, which says it is now able to demonstrate that shares directly correlate with viral reach more than any other kind of interaction.
Here are a couple of graphs that do just that, looking at both media and brand posts:
Viral reach, by the way, refers to those who saw a story in their News Feed or Ticker only because of one or more of their friends interacted with it.
According to the findings, there’s a 72% chance that if a Facebook user sees a Media post referred from a Facebook friend interacting with it, the interaction was a comment, but if that person shared it, the percentage goes up to 99.8%. The numbers for brand pages are 28% for comments and 94% for shares.
“Another major finding from our research is that most unique Media impressions come from viral reach – and from their posts being shared,” says Socialbakers social media analyst Phillip Ross. “This fits the general pattern we see in our Promoted Post Detection tool (an exclusive component of our social media analytics tool), that almost all Media engagement is organic. Now, we know that this organic engagement almost certainly comes from content being shared. But for Brands, it’s not the same story. Shares only correlate 55% with unique impressions for Brand posts.”
“Strangely enough, Likes correlate most strongly with overall Brand post impressions,” he adds. “This phenomenon happens for a more obvious reason than it may seem: there are simply more Likes happening to the average Brand post than there are Shares. Keep in mind there’s still a very high correlation between Shares and unique viral impressions – but because viral impressions only make up 6% of all Brand impressions, most Brand post impressions that come from social referrals will come from Likes. The lesson here is clear: To get friends of your target audience to see your branded content – and to get the broadest reach possible on Facebook – your content must be shareable.”
Socialbakers also shared this video of its executive chairman talking about engagement data of publishers, which the firm says brands should be looking to for inspiration when it comes to shareable content.
The advice here essentially amounts to following BuzzFeed and Business Insider to see how to do content for social media.
A Facebook spokesperson was recently quoted as saying, “Over the past two years, we’ve seen referral traffic to publishers from Facebook grow significantly, nearly across the board. As the number of posts to Facebook has increased substantially over the past few months, there has been a corresponding increase in the amount of potential posts to show any one person, which impacts reach. In this newly competitive landscape, we’re seeing results vary by publisher: some are experiencing continued growth in referral traffic while others have seen declines. On the whole, referrals to the top 1,000 publishers are at the same level today as they were in January.”
Clearly, businesses need to be creating content that people want to share with others, and should be going out of their way to encourage people to do just that. Does your content only display Facebook’s like button and not the share button? That’s a good place to start.
We recently looked at some findings indicating that short and sweet Facebook posts tend to drive more traffic to websites. More on that here.
Do you focus on getting shares over likes? Do you post content that emulates that of the media? Discuss.
Can the police compel you to give up your iPhone passcode?
Not according to one federal court’s ruling. Doing so would be a violation of your Fifth Amendment rights.
The case in question involved two insider trading suspects and the Securities and Exchange Commission’s desire to get at evidence it believed was present on the defendants’ work-issued iPhones.
Unfortunately for the SEC, the phones were protected with passcodes.
“The SEC argues Defendants, as former Bank data analysts, are corporate custodians in possession of corporate records, and as such cannot assert their Fifth Amendment privilege in refusing to disclose their passcodes. Defendants disagree they are corporate custodians and argue providing the passcodes to their phones is ‘testimonial’ in nature and violates the Fifth Amendment,” says the ruling.
So, who’s right?
According to the court, it’s the defendants.
“Since the passcodes to Defendants’ work-issued smartphones are not corporate records, the act of producing their personal passcodes is testimonial in nature and Defendants properly invoke their fifth Amendment privilege.”
Your passcode is testimonial, and thus forcing you to reveal it would violate your right against self-incrimination.
But according to one constitutional scholar, it wouldn’t be wise to think that there’s no feasible way for the government to get around said Fifth Amendment protections.
“Having the defendant enter in his passcode would minimize the Fifth Amendment implications of the compelled compliance, as it would not involve disclosing the potentially incriminating evidence of the passcode itself. The passcode itself could be independently incriminating, at least in some cases. Imagine a conspiracy case in which members of the conspiracy use a common passcode. Proof that a suspect used that exact passcode on his own phone would be incriminating evidence, as it could help to show membership in the conspiracy,” writes Orin Kerr for the Washington Post.
“Because the passcode itself could be incriminating, the smart way to limit the Fifth Amendment problem is for the government to ask for an order compelling the target to enter in the passcode rather than to divulge it to the police.”
And we’re just talking about passcodes. If you use Apple’s Touch ID or any other sort of biometrics to lock your devices, you may be shit out of luck.
Google announced the open sourcing of its Cloud Dataflow SDK for Java in a move it says will make it easier for developers to integrate its managed service while forming the basis for porting Cloud Dataflow to other languages and execution environments.
Google first unveiled Cloud Dataflow back in June.
“We created Cloud Dataflow, which is now currently an alpha release, as a platform to democratize large scale data processing by enabling easier and more scalable access to data for data scientists, data analysts and data-centric developers,” says Google software engineer Sam McVeety. “Regardless of role or goal – users can discover meaningful results from their data via simple and intuitive programing concepts, without the extra noise from managing distributed systems.”
“We’ve learned a lot about how to turn data into intelligence as the original FlumeJava programming models (basis for Cloud Dataflow) have continued to evolve internally at Google,” McVeety says.
Google says it’s open sourcing it so developers can “spur innovation in combining stream and batch based processing models,” adapt the Dataflow programming model to other languages, and execute Dataflow on other service environments.
Google is not using data from its Disavow Links tool to hurt sites that are being disavowed in search results. That is according to Google’s John Mueller.
Do you think data from the Disavow Links tool should be used as a ranking signal? Let us know in the comments.
The topic came up in the Google Webmaster Central product forum (via Search Engine Roundtable). One webmaster started the thread, saying that they received an email from a site with the subject line of “Link Removal Request” which said:
Dear Web master,
We recently received a notice from Google stating that they have levied a penalty on our website as they “detected unnatural links” redirecting to our website.
The only way we can remove this penalty and help Google reconsider putting our website back in their index is by removing these links and we need your help for the same. We request you to consider this request on high priority.
Following are the details of the links:
they have given me list of Links of my website with majority comments links .
We would like to bring your notice that failure to remove these links would require us to file a “Disavow Links” report with Google. Once we submit this report to Google, they may “flag” your site as”spammy” or otherwise if anything is not in compliance with their guidelines. The last thing we want is to have another web master go through this grief!
Your cooperation in this process would be deeply appreciated. We kindly request you to send us an acknowledgement of this mail along with a confirmation that these links have been removed.
Thanks a lot for your help.
If you want to reach out to us mail us on ‘webmaster’s copany email id’
Regards,
name of person
website name
So no, Google will not “flag your site as spammy” if it’s disavowed.
Mueller says flat out, “They are wrong. Having URLs from your website submitted in their disavow file will not cause any problems for your website. One might assume that they are just trying to pressure you. If the comment links they pointed to you are comment-spam that was left by them (or by someone working in their name) on your website, perhaps they are willing to help cover the work involved in cleaning their spam up?”
Maybe they are “pressuring the webmaster,” but still, Google has actually hinted in the past that data from the tool could become a ranking signal.
In a discussion with Google’s head of web spam Matt Cutts back in 2012, Danny Sullivan asked if “someone decides to disavow links from good sites in perhaps an attempt to send signals to Google these are bad,” if Google is mining the data to better understand what the bad sites are.
Cutts responded (emphasis mine), “Right now, we’re using this data in the normal straightforward way, e.g. for reconsideration requests. We haven’t decided whether we’ll look at this data more broadly. Even if we did, we have plenty of other ways of determining bad sites, and we have plenty of other ways of assessing that sites are actually good.”
Like I said at the time, Google does have over 200 signals, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for the data to play some role in the algorithm, even if it’s not the weightiest signal. I don’t know how we’ll ever know if Google does decide to start using it. It’s not like Google is listing its algorithm changes every month or anything.
Cutts added in that conversation, “If a webmaster wants to shoot themselves in the foot and disavow high-quality links, that’s sort of like an IQ test and indicates that we wouldn’t want to give that webmaster’s disavowed links much weight anyway. It’s certainly not a scalable way to hurt another site, since you’d have to build a good site, then build up good links, then disavow those good links. Blackhats are normally lazy and don’t even get to the ‘build a good site’ stage.”
It does sound like a pretty dumb strategy, and probably not the most effective way to hurt another site. On the other hand, people do dumb stuff all the time.
But in a more natural sense, mightn’t this data say something about a site? If a lot of people are disavowing links from the same sites, doesn’t that say something?
But if it were to become a signal it could be misleading at times when Google’s unnatural link warnings have so many people scrambling to get all kinds of links (including legitimate ones) removed. It certainly shouldn’t carry too much weight if it ever does make it into the algorithm.
SEO analyst Jennifer Slegg said it well: “People who have been affected with bad links will very likely take a very heavy-handed approach to the links they disavow in their panic of seeing their traffic drop off a cliff. There is no doubt that some of those good links that are actually helping the site will end up in the list along with poor quality ones because the webmaster is either unclear about whether a link is a bad influence, or just think the starting fresh approach is the best one to go with.”
In the comments section of the Search Engine Roundtable post, Durant Imboden makes an interesting point: “Isn’t it possible that an unusually high number of disavowals might trigger a manual review of the frequently-disavowed site? In such a case, the disavow tool itself wouldn’t trigger a penalty or other ‘problems for your website,’ but the resulting review might (depending on what was found).”
Either way, don’t worry about the tool sending any signals about your site for the time being.
In related news, Cutts spoke about the tool at SMX West last week, where he said that if you’re aware of bad links to your site, you should probably go ahead and disavow them anyway, even if you’re not already penalized. He added on Twitter (when Rae Hoffman tweeted about it), that if it’s one or two links, it may not be a big deal, but the closer it gets to “lots,” the more worthwhile it may be.
Something to think about.
Do you think Google should ever include data from the tool in its ranking algorithm? Share your thoughts.
Some are saying that the “unlimited data” selling point that has long been a part of mobile data plans among top wireless carriers is in its death throes.
It’s been pointed out that both Verizon Wireless and AT&T have switched to a “tiered system”. Instead of giving customers as much data as they want, they are now hit with higher bills if they use more than the amount data they agreed to pay for.
Though Sprint and T-Mobile both have unlimited data, industry analysts suspect it won’t be long before these companies follow suit.
What’s most startling is that customers don’t seem all that concerned. Despite Sprint marketing its unlimited data plan aggressively, especially since Verizon and AT&T have dropped the option, the carrier is reportedly hemorrhaging customers. As for T-Mobile, they still offer unlimited data, but it’s not at the forefront of their advertising campaigns.
Could it be that customers simply don’t care how much data they’re given? Perhaps. Or it could be that consumers have concerns that have nothing to do with how much data they’re allotted.
are you prepared to take the red pill and wake up from the myth of unlimited mobile data plans? http://t.co/ZzdfCWa5R9 (@BGR)
Leading wireless carrier Verizon, while at the pricier end of service, has long marketed to potential customers based on their extensive coverage maps. No matter where you are in the United States, you would be able to get their service and it it would be quality service. Quality itself is the second aspect.
Even though data is unlimited and cheap…what difference does it make if the service is largely unreliable and unavailable? The image of lower quality service and limited availability is what certain wireless carriers are fighting.
T-Mobile has seen a drastic increase in subscribers due to marketing directly to consumer concerns and designing plans that address “pain points”.
In the end, the most popular mobile plan service will likely have nothing to do with unlimited data. As T-Mobile is demonstrating with their “Uncarrier” approach, it may be about which plan does more to specifically address customer concerns.
Earlier this month, high-end retailer Neiman Marcus confirmed that they had been the target of a widespread data breach that saw hackers gain access to customer credit cards via a sophisticated malware attack. At that time, the company launched an investigation into the breach.
Now, Neiman Marcus is sharing some of the preliminary findings and have admitted that the breach may have affected 1.1 million customers.
The security of our customers' information is always a priority and we sincerely regret any inconvenience.
“Neiman Marcus was informed by our merchant processor in mid-December of potentially unauthorized payment card activity that occurred following customer purchases at our Neiman Marcus Group stores. We informed federal law enforcement agencies and began working actively with the U.S. Secret Service, the payment brands, our merchant processor, a leading investigations, intelligence and risk management firm, and a leading payment brand-approved forensics firm to investigate the situation. On January 1st, the forensics firm discovered evidence that the company was the victim of a criminal cyber-security intrusion and that some customers’ cards were possibly compromised as a result. At this time, the malicious software we have found has been disabled,” said Neiman last week.
In a new statement posted on their site, Neiman says they “deeply regret and are very sorry that some of our customers’ payment cards were used fraudulently after making purchases at our stores.”
Out of the 1.1 million payment cards exposed, only a handful have been confirmed to have been used to make fraudulent purchases. Visa, MasterCard, and Discover have notified the company of 2,400 such instances.
The malware responsible for snatching the information was reportedly active for many months, spanning from mid-July to the end of October, 2013.
As you probably know, Neiman Marcus isn’t the only high-profile retailer to suffer a massive data breach. Target is dealing with its own attack, which exposed approximately 70 million accounts (they originally said 40 million, but later upped the count).
Some blame the rash of high-profile payment system breaches to the United States’ outdated card technology. While the U.S. still uses magnetic strips on their credit and debit cards, many other countries (and the majority of Europe) have moved on to EMV technology, which uses a small computer chip to handle transactions.
Still, analysts say that a switch to such technology would be costly – plus they’re unsure if EMV tech would have actually prevented the Target and Neiman hacks, or simply lessened their scope.
The recent slew of data breaches has garnered the attention of Congress, who is set to hold hearings during the first week of February to “examine data breaches and their effect on consumers.” Target is their guest of honor.
Though it may not mean the end of the world’s most popular social network, the demographic shift in Facebook members is leaving some analysts worried. Already reports are showing that Facebook is dead to teens, who are switching to more private platforms such as Twitter and messaging apps. Now new data is showing that, yes, Facebook has failed to keep up its teen member numbers over the past few years.
Market research firm iStrategyLabs this week released a new report on Facebook demographic that shows the social network has lost over 11 million addressable high school and college-age members over the past three years. High school Facebook membership has dropped a whopping 58.9% since 2011, while college Facebook membership has dropped a similar 59.1%. While the huge growth of college alumni (up nearly 65%) in the past three years shows that many of the first Facebookers are sticking with the service, the loss of so many college students shows that even some high schoolers who began their social media experiences on Facebook are moving on to newer platforms.
As seen in the chart above, the age groups most quickly abandoning Facebook seem to be the youngest. The number of children aged 13 to 17 on Facebook dropped over 25% during the past three years while the highest growth was seen in the 55 and over age group. Facebook now boasts around 56 million addressable members between the ages of 35 and 54.
With these sorts of numbers it isn’t hard to see why teens might seek out a place online where their parents (and grandparents) might become a part of their immediate social world. In addition, the proliferation of smartphones in the past half-decade seems to have given more private platforms such as Twitter and Snapchat extra value to younger social media users.
Predictions are fun, especially when said predictions involve video games in some capacity. That’s why it’s no surprise that analysts are already making predictions about what the video game market will look like in 2016 – three years after the launch of the Xbox One and PS4.
In a note sent to investors today, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter provided his very own predictions of how all three consoles will fair in three years time. It’s important to note that these consoles will be nowhere near done in 2016 and we’re likely to still see games being released on the Xbox 360 and PS3 at that time. A three year timeframe does, however, give analysts enough time to factor in a potential price drop that’s likely to occur within the first three years of a product’s life.
Moving onto the predictions, Pachter says that the PS4 will lead in 2016 with 37.7 million console units sold. Microsoft will be a little behind Sony with 29 million Xbox One units sold. As for the Wii U, he doesn’t expect it to reach 20 million by 2016.
Of course, there are those console games who won’t buy into new hardware until a price drop. Pachter expects Sony and Microsoft to both drop the price of their consoles by 2016 with the PS4’s price dropping to $299 and the Xbox One’s price dropping to $349. He gives no prediction for Nintendo, but he does expect the company to continue producing the Wii U through 2016. I personally expect Nintendo to institute another price drop in 2014 to further push Wii U hardware.
As for games, he expects the price of new games to stay at $60. There’s always room for a price increase though. Some publishers may look at the rising cost of game development as an excuse to charge even more for games. While the AAA blockbusters will still sell well, the A and AA games will continue to suffer with the rising cost of game development. As they are now, indie developers will likely still be the ones propping up the lower end of the development spectrum while major publishers like EA, Activision and Ubisoft duke it out in the AAA packaged market.
Like always, it’s important to note that this is all merely speculation. While Pachter and other analysts have access to data that helps better inform their decisions, they can still be (and are often) wrong. The games industry is an especially volatile market and one little change can have major repercussions throughout the entire industry.
As the world’s information grows at breakneck pace, business are more desperate than ever to parse the overwhelming volumes of data that they now have access to. The enterprise industry surrounding “big data” has grown significantly, but analysts are now predicting that this year’s increased spending is only the beginning.
Market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) today predicted that the big data enterprise services industry will grow to take in $32.4 billion by the year 2017.
“The big data technology and services market represents a fast-growing multibillion-dollar worldwide opportunity,” said Dan Vesset, VP for Business Analytics and Big Data at IDC. “The big data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and start-ups vie for customers and market share.”
According to the firm’s other projections, the big data segment is set to grow at six times the rate of the combined IT and communication industries.
IDC also predicts that the growth of big data will be tightly tied to the growth of cloud computing and storage. The firm forecasts that cloud computing infrastructure will grow at a 49% compound annual growth rate through 2017 and that “significant” amounts of big data will be archived using cloud storage.
The firm’s report also predicts the rise of automated decision support (ADS) systems. As such systems inevitably begin to improve rapidly on the back of big data, knowledge workers could soon find themselves displaced by automated solutions.
Google announced today that it has launched a new error reporting feature for the Structured Data Dashboard in Webmaster Tools. The company began testing this earlier this year, and has used feedback from webmasters to fine-tune the feature.
Users can now see items with errors in the dashboard. Items represent top-level structured data elements tagged in the HTML code. Nested items aren’t counted. Google groups them by data type and orders them by number of errors.
“We’ve added a separate scale for the errors on the right side of the graph in the dashboard, so you can compare items and errors over time,” notes Google webmaster trends analyst Mariya Moeva. “This can be useful to spot connections between changes you may have made on your site and markup errors that are appearing (or disappearing!).”
Google says it has also updated its data pipeline, so reporting will be more comprehensive.
When you click on a specific content type, Google will show you the markup error it found for that type. You can see all at once or filter by error type. Google suggests checking to see if the markup meets the implementation guidelines, which can be found here.
You can click on the URLs in the table to see details about what markup Google has detected when it crawled the page last and what’s missing. There’s also a “test live data” button so you can the markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
After you fix issues, the changes will reflected in the dashboard.
Smartphone (or smart TV or smart watch) is a bit of a misnomer at this point. Sure, the devices are far more capable than feature phones and their wireless access to the internet can make their users seem smart, but they are still just tools. That could soon change, though, as the software running on the devices begins to predict what users will want next.
Market research firm Gartner today predicted that by 2017 smartphones will be able to reliably predict what to do next before their users interact with them. These capabilities will be based on learning the use patterns of users, as well as the wealth of data collected on smartphone owners.
Gartner believes that smartphones will eventually be able to take over all of the menial tasks associated with smartphone use. These actions include booking reservations, creating to-do lists, and even simple e-mail responses.
“Smartphones are becoming smarter, and will be smarter than you by 2017,” said Carolina Milanesi, VP of research at Gartner. “If there is heavy traffic, it will wake you up early for a meeting with your boss, or simply send an apology if it is a meeting with your colleague. The smartphone will gather contextual information from its calendar, its sensors, the user’s location and personal data.”
A preview of such software capabilities can be seen in Google Now, Google’s Android software that provides users with information they have not yet searched for.
Of course, these capabilities will be based on consumer willingness to have tons of their personal data stored in the cloud. It also relies on governments taking a hands-off approach to digital privacy regulation.
Researchers believe that more security
A more sophisticated augmented reality technology is expected to be seen in 2018, and with it are more instances for its use.
Data enhancement tools, email syncing, and VOIP connections used to be features that companies would
