Global Citizen Festival: Social Media and Philanthropy

Source: http://www.examiner.com/article/global-citizen-festival-nyc-calls-for-social-media-support

On Saturday, Central Park hosted the Global Citizen Festival, a 60k person free concert to promote various philanthropic causes (including ending extreme proverty) that emphasized participation in the event and the causes through various social media platforms.

Concertgoers received free tickets by enrolling an e-mail address with Global Citizen and then performing certain actions through the Web site, including watching videos, spreading information via social media and doing something for a partner organization.

From the article:

"Between each musical act different organizations and advocates made presentations, and awards were given to global citizens who are working to make a positive difference in the world. Additionally, most of the support that these organizations were asking for was in the form of online social media contributions. By signing petitions, tweeting to our potential presidential candidates and taking part in other social media acts." 

"Additionally, the festival was rooted in social media and online use. Not only did the presenters call the audience members to action by posting or pledging through social media. They also designed the experience to work as a virtual one. The concert was streamed live online, the website hosted live photo uploads from people in the crowd posting images, and the screens at the show gave several prompts for audience members to tweet or post online to make a difference."

Alex Elawadi

Tips For Boosting SEO Of Your Facebook Page

This is an interesting article I read from the following URL: http://searchengineland.com/7-tips-for-boosting-seo-of-your-facebook-page-91961

This article provided interesting tips on how you can leverage SEO of your facebook page.

Brands and businesses are moving away from traditional websites, and placing more and more emphasis on their Facebook pages. This is great from a customer service and interaction standpoint, but certainly muddies the waters from an SEO perspective.
It used to be that with the right mix of keyword-laden text, reciprocal links, and clever use of heading text, a crafty SEO expert could push a website up in the rankings. But now the focus is on your Facebook page, and you still need to get your brand or business in the top of the rankings. Here’s seven tips to help you do just that.

1.  Push Your Brand Or Business Name

The names of your Facebook page, custom URL, and custom tabs are of utmost importance. Search engines see these titles in Heading 1, which means they’re heavily ranked by search engines. Craft the title of your page, tabs, and URL carefully, making sure they contain the name of your brand or business.
If you’re the proud owner of Joe’s Garage, but instead opt for “Mechanics You Can Trust,” Joe’s Garage isn’t going to rank highly on the SERPs. Your brand or business name is how you’re known and how you’re found, so be consistent when labeling your page, URL, and tabs. And once you’ve named your page or picked your vanity URL, commit to it.

2.  Get Links From Multiple Sources

As is the case with traditional SEO, getting links to your Facebook page and custom tabs is extremely beneficial. Links are like recommendations. If one friend recommends you eat at a certain restaurant, you’ll consider it. If a number of your friends echo that recommendation, you’ll be convinced.
If Google sees that your tabs and pages are being linked to by numerous sources, both on and off of Facebook, then your page and tabs must be important. But search engines also take into consideration where the links are coming from. A link to a custom tab on your business page will be weighted much more heavily if it’s from a popular, recognized source.

3.  Get The Most Out Of Wall & Custom Tab Content

More of your Facebook page is indexed by search engines than you may realize. For instance, your wall posts are indexed. But since wall posts lose their relevancy in time, they aren’t given much weight. Still, using your target words and phrases in your wall posts isn’t a bad idea.
Your new custom tabs you painstakingly created? Relax, those are indexed too. And given quite a bit more weight than wall posts. Remember, well-earned Likes are a significant ranking factor in Bing, and building Likes is one of the easiest and strongest things you can do for ranking Facebook content on Bing.
So if you haven’t already, build some custom tabs and name them appropriately. Use Heading 1 text, emphasize titles, and add bold text. Custom tabs have staying power, you and your friends can create links to your custom tabs, and you can even provide links to your custom tabs from external sites, so aptly named tabs with multiple links to them will be will be very beneficial in your SEO efforts.
Here’s where it gets tricky, though. If you use third-party applications to build tabs, make sure they’re configured so they’re indexed on Facebook and not on the third-party’s servers.

4.  Don’t Hide From The Search Engines

Google doesn’t “Like” your page. It’s a non-fan. So if you’ve got some key content on your custom tabs hidden behind a fan gate, Google can’t see it. And if Google can’t see it, it can’t be indexed.
While you may be inclined to build these gates to create a buzz about your page and drive up your fan count, carefully consider whether or not you want your content gated, because it will be hidden from search engines.

 5.  Put SEO-Rich Text In The Right Place

It may seem like common sense, but search engines can’t parse images, which means they can’t tell if there’s text inside an image. So don’t put your SEO-rich text within an image that you add to a new custom welcome tab. It can’t be indexed there. Instead, put that text on the About and Info tabs.
But remember that Facebook is a place for social connection and interaction, so don’t go overboard with SEO-rich text. Material that isn’t social won’t hold your fans’ attention, and can even cause abandonment.

6.  Optimize Your Multimedia

Videos are the easiest form of multimedia to optimize because the titles are heavily weighted. So make sure you’re giving your videos good titles, both on Facebook and on sites like YouTube and Vimeo. Similarly, the images and logos you use on Facebook can be optimized by naming the files accordingly.

7.  Nothing Beats A Well-Run Page

Being a good community manager is just as important as an SEO campaign. The popular Facebook pages have all those likes because those pages embrace the ideology of Facebook: they’re interactive, engaging, and usable pages. Facebook, at its core, is about connecting with people, so don’t sacrifice the interactivity of your page for the sake of SEO.

About The Author: Jim Belosic is a social media designer who has been building the web presences of many companies over the past 10 years. His current project is ShortStackLab.com which gives designers, developers, and code-uneducated people tools to create their own custom tabs for Facebook Pages. 

The future of IT

On 9/1/2012, Gartner, inc - the worlds largest IT Research and Advisory company NYSE: IT -   announced a controlled launch of a new service targeted for Digital Marketers.  The 1.5B dollar market leader previously only focused on the pure IT customer.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out for Gartner.  I surmize that that traditional/operational IT as we know it today is quite mature and less corporate praise is given to "keeping the lights on" therefore Gartner is looking for a new breed of customer to help.... 

It may be a great strategy considering in the digital marketing space Gartner predicts by 2015 digital strategies, such as social and mobile marketing, will influence at least 80% of consumers' discretionary spending.   

What do you think?

Airlines Look for Additional Passenger Touchpoints via Mobile

Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009335

Airlines aren’t new to the mobile arena, but they’re looking to take a step further than mobile check-ins to engage with their passengers.  Connecting with passengers via mobile seems like a natural fit for airline companies.  The article states, “As of June 2012, nearly half of all check-ins for North American airlines were conducted either online or through a mobile device, with mobile increasing from 5% of all check-ins in 2011 to 11% in 2012…As more airlines allow this expedited service, consumer check-ins on the go will increase, freeing up more time for customer service interaction at the airport.”  Given the nature of airline travel, many passengers are rushing to make flight boarding times, catch a connecting flight, or are interacting with some form of mobile or tablet device pre-, during or post-flight.  Airline communications with their passengers via mobile can not only act as a convenient way to inform passengers in a “push” manner (rather than having the passenger find out for themselves somehow at the airport, etc.), but also can act as means for advertising opportunities to generate additional revenue for the airlines.  For example, on my last mobile boarding pass from United, I received offers for discounted rental cars and hotel stays.  This is common practice across the industry.  From a consumer standpoint, mobile interactions or notifications from airlines regarding gate location, flight delays, etc. are very convenient and can greatly enhance a passenger’s travel experience.  Many airlines are looking to implement (by ~2015) increased communications with passengers regarding missing baggage or re-booking flights.  Additionally, some airline companies are looking for ways passengers can access the  on-board entertainment programming via their own mobile/tablet devices.  This is not only a preference of passengers due to their affinity with their own devices but also another way for airlines to generate advertising revenue (and potentially reduce costs to their own in-flight programming mechanisms).   “Allowing customers to access curated entertainment through their personal devices opens the lines of communication in flight beyond a purely utilitarian interaction with flight attendants. This allows airlines (and advertising partners) to target messages based on what individuals are doing at that particular time (i.e. traveling to Paris, watching a live sporting event, etc.).”  When in-flight, passengers are a captive audience so airlines interacting with consumers in this manner could fill a prior void in passenger communication for the airlines and advertisers alike.

Digital Wallet: The Impact of Apple’s Passbook

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Although most people had somewhat experience of using mobile ticket, mobile ticketing has not yet become a mainstream in the ticketing world in US. Most people, like me, still prefer traditional paper tickets – having something material in hand seems to be more reliable. However, the biggest feature of Apple’s new IPhone, Passbook, aims to push mobile ticketing forward.

Simply put, the Passbook app is digital storage for your existing boarding pass (or event tickets, or loyalty cards). “The concept is not new, but the execution has all the hallmarks you would expect from Apple”: when you arrive at the venue attached to your ticket, the location-aware iPhone will pop the pass right up on your screen for easy access and scanning — no paper required.

Here are several examples of how Passbook works:

• Starbucks will integrate their wildly popular Payment System that will open a card in Passbook app when within a preset distance from a store location.  The users will have instant access to the Starbucks Payment Card barcode and present the iPhone to scan as normal.
• Target will be able to present an instant coupon as the user enters the store.  The can also notify the user of the balance on registered gift cards.
• When entering an Amtrak train (CalTrain, Path, Subway) platform, Passbook will notify the user of the amount of credit/rides that are available and present a barcode to be scanned by the ticketing agent. 

The advent of Passbook seems to provide a new breakthrough point for companies. For instance, Fandango -- biggest brand in online movie tickets and StubHub -- the online and mobile marketplace for event ticket resellers are expecting to increase their transaction on mobile phones. “For businesses this means faster, more convenient transactions, better data about customer behavior, and more accurate management of empty seats or cancelled tickets,” as indicated by Erica Ogg. The founder and CEO of Tello, Joe Beninato also pointed out “Most large companies will be figuring out their Passbook strategy at that point. Some already are.” Therefore, companies, especially those in the movie, traveling and sports industry, could attract more customers by developing Passbook-ready-tickets technology.

Another interesting point is that Passbook would also bring huge impact on location based social networking sites such as Foursquare: “If Passbook becomes the new App Store through which you can reach 100MM+ iPhone users, it instantly becomes a formidable presence.  There is much less incentive for merchants and card issuers alike to work with disparate companies to play in the mobile space when they can just as well use Apple Passbook as a distribution channel that is trusted and widely used.  For example, the great local merchant deals that American Express has been offering on Foursquare - will that continue if AMEX can use Passbook, especially if the AMEX card holder can enter in their card number into the iPhone?”

Although the impact of Passbook on companies’ sales through mobile transaction is promising, whether it will function efficiently as expected and thus changing people’s conventional ways of using paper tickets still remains to be seen.

Sources:

http://gigaom.com/apple/how-apples-passbook-can-bring-mobile-ticketing-mainstream/

http://www.quora.com/foursquare/How-does-Apples-iOS-6-Passbook-impact-Foursquare-in-the-short-and-long-term

Google EMD Update: Exact Match Domains No Longer Rank As Well

Sounds like bad news for people who may have paid a fortune for the "perfect" domain.

http://www.seroundtable.com/google-emd-update-15776.html

Amazing that a small tweak in goole's algorithm can drastically cha
nge the market value of a domain.  However I guess this simply forces the owners of EMD's to make sure their content is as good as their URL.

Facebook Mobile News Feed Ads

Source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/27/cheapest-way-to-buy-facebook-fans/

According to Facebook ad platofrm providers, it seems like advertising through mobile news feed ads does generate higher click through rates and conversion rates which can potentially pave the way for the future in mobile advertising.  Giving advertisers the option to choose where and what platform, desktop or mobile, they want to advertise, hence allowing advertisers to determine the most cost effective way of digital marketing.

The challenge is maintaining a healthy user expereience and not bombarding consumers with massive amounts of advertising, and FB's mobile news feed ads seem to have overcome this issue for the time being.  If Facebook can resolve the remaining challenge of measuring post-clock conversion rates, advertisers would definitely utilize the mobile platforms for winning customers and getting their marketing messages out to the mass audience.

Return-on-Investment potentially exists for mobile marketers, but the question is how much exposure can get converted to dollars.  I believe digital marketers and advertisers need a continuously improved mobile news feed ads model in order to ensure clicks do not remain as simple "likes" on Facebook.

Facebook SEO

    According to Media Bistro, an average person spends 7:45Hrs⁽¹⁾ on Facebook per month. Facebook is increasingly becoming a must have for most marketers; Facebook SEO should be a major part of their online marketing plan.

 
    The following article outlines 10 steps that markets can follow to optimize their Facebook pages:

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/07/13/seo-facebook-pages-10-key-strategies/

    The SEO for Facebook is still in its infancy, some of the techniques that don't work on Google anymore still work on Facebook:

       1. Suggestion #3 advises to use the "About" box to insert Keyword dense sentences

       2. Suggestion #4 similarly uses the "Info" tab

       3. Suggestion #5 - Use of "Static FBML"

       4. Getting more links to the Facebook page

   All these techniques used to work on Google search as well, but Google evolved to get more authentic search results. In time, Facebook will also evolve, marketers need to be a step ahead of the Facebook curve as well.

(1)  http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/online-time_b22186 

Time to Spend Some on Content Marketing

This is an excerpt based on the article in eMarketer.

According to the report by SEOmoz, Among different type of inbound marketing tools, SEO is the most prevalent. However other inbound strategies in the last year proved to be very strong tools for marketers.

Although It appears that these categories of tactics are not independent of each other and highly receive impacts from the content. So what is now marketers very eager to spend time on.

SEO is the most widely tactic being used day by day by marketers, and content ads are lagging behind. However visual and written short form posts and contents are now even a part of the social and SEO marketing.

This includes, blog posts(the most used), tweets, statuses in social contexts, video, images, etc.

Widely used categories in visual context is the videos from Youtube used for content marketing which is more utilized than in SEO tactics. This is also true for video sharing websites.

As could be seen still the main basic concentration is on SEO, less on social, and even less on content marketing. However reports show that the use of the content and social marketing have gone through their greatest impact since the last year. This offers to put some more time and effort on those that have been used less. Another way offered by reports is also the integration of different tactics for offering contents.

Source:
SEO, Social and Content Marketing in Top Demand, SEP 24, 2012, eMarketer newsletter
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1009368

P&G is Ready to Co-Innovate on Digital

" Recent news that P&G plans to cut $1 billion from its annual marketing budget by 2016 quite understandably shook up the marketing world, especially because the company indicated it would be cutting back on its traditional strong advertising presence in pricey broadcast television. P&G's global brand building officer Marc Pritchard and CEO Bob McDonald have identified digital as an area where they would attempt to more than make up for marketing-budget cuts by being much more effective."

It will be interesting to see how this unfolds for P&G in the next few years, as traditionally Consumer packaged goods companies and digital media are not an easy mix. CPG companies tend to focus on reaching a mass audience whereas digital marketing focuses on finding niche target market to promote products. In addition, CPG companies have defined excellent ways of measuring marketing effectiveness and sales. However, it will be hard to measure the direct link between digital marketing and sale of goods as these products are commonly not bought online

However, I feel that it can be an opportunity for the company. Traditionally, CPG companies have broadcasted to their consumers and there was no easy for consumer to provide their insights and thoughts. The word of mouth about the products was traditionally limited to people’s friends and family circle. Digital marketing especially social media gives a way to the customers to engage in an ongoing dialogue and spread their thoughts and review beyond geographical boundaries. By using digital marketing strategy companies can listen to consumers and respond to their needs. Instead of finding another way of advertising companies can invest some resources to renew their digital marketing strategy and create new bonds with the consumer.

I strongly feel that this strategy of investing efforts in digital marketing will definitely result in cost savings and add to the competitive advantage of the company.

 

Read the P&G Article on  its push towards digital marketing by clicking on the link: http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/PG-Digital-031612.aspx

I found the following article about SEO:

http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/seo-pyramid-4-most-important-keys-to-better-ranking-infographic/

Although it touches upon many concepts we've already discussed, I thought that the SEO Pyramid infographic was a helpful reminder for the priorities one should set for building better site discoverability.

The four level pyramid is structured with server response and site structure at its bottom. Well-designed URL and internal link structures are foundational to effective SEO. The second layer focuses on title tags, effective keyword sets, and diversity of content, including text, images, and video. Level three of the pyramid includes directory submission, conversational linking, and outreach linking. Finally, the top of the pyramid is focused on community building in social networks and video sharing sites. As I work on optimizing a friend's website, I plan to refer to this graphic so I optimize both my time and the site's SEO.

Coke: Moving From Creative Excellence To Content Excellence

Source: http://blog.flite.com/home/2012/4/4/coke-moving-from-creative-excellence-to-content-excellence.html

Here is a summery of the Video and the article I read

"Coke no longer believes that creative alone will reach the target customers. With greater connectivity and an always on culture, consumers expect to converse and engage with brands rather than simply watch clever 30 second TV spots.

The videos highlight the following key insights:

• Iterative Production Processes replace "Finished Creative"
  • Brands need to produce much more content than ever before and invest in a serial, iterative stream of content that connects, engenders participation, and spreads
  • Coca Cola is focused on serial story telling and the ability to launch campaigns and to then produce content AFTER the campaign is in market
• Coca Cola is moving to agile content strategies
  • Radically reduced testing of message, content, and user feedback
  • Increased investments in direct vendor relationships with technology companies that enable automation and real-time execution
  • A creative focus on curation and editorial; Coca Cola will filter the stream and incorporate on-strat egy content in campaigns"

Even though this was only a video depicting coca colas marketing strategy, it has in a way depicted just how big a change social media has brought into the mass marketing playground. Before, marketing was an influence, an ideology, a process highly controlled and carefully crafted, but now with the emergence of the social space, consumers are no longer on the isolated islands, and word of mouth is able to launch products successfully.

As the article point out

"Its too hard to bet on creative excellence in a world where Twitter, FB, UGC produce more content than ever before. Coca Cola's strategy makes clear that the new model of marketing is content marketing and a shift from creative execution to content curation, publishing, measuring and monitoring, and agility. "

this is a space where traditional powers are not able to control and shape as they did before. It could be both an opportunity and a threat to most of the commodity products, and it seems that coca cola has embraced this opportunity.

Facebook, Twitter, email passwords made private under California law

Facebook, Twitter, email passwords made private under California law

Source: http://www.timesheraldonline.com/news/ci_21651158/facebook-twitter-email-passwords-made-private-under-california

   According to the article, California, home to many of the world's social media companies, now has the nation's strictest privacy laws preventing boss or college from surfing through the personal information posts on sites like Facebook. It will be illegal for companies or universities to ask for access to personal social media or email accounts under two bills signed Thursday. California is the first state to enact laws protecting both students and workers after Maryland and Illinois earlier this year approved laws affecting just workers and Delaware did the same for just students. (About a dozen other states and Congress are considering similar legislation.)

   From my point of view, I strongly support these movements and believe that these laws somehow will protect people from unwarranted invasions of their personal social media accounts. It's true that there have been some employers asking for personal passwords or requiring applicants to open their Facebook pages during interviews. In addition, companies and universities are increasingly trying to monitor employees' or students' personal pages like Twitter and Google+. So far, we've had no choice but to follow their instructions or just change our privacy settings to protest. From now on, at least, we have a protector, legally.

   However, despite the laws, there is still nothing to prevent employers and universities from looking through our social media pages if they are made 'public'. Even though experts recommend tweaking privacy settings to protect ourselves so not everyone can see personal posts and many people block public access through privacy settings, there are still possibilities to make our personal information open on public, unintentionally. That's why there's enough information on the Internet where we can find out ample information about people that we know.

   The first thing we have to do is to admit that we live in social media era and try to manage our personal information on social media pages very carefully. By the way, It can be both new opportunities and threats for companies which always try to get consumer's information for certain purposes like marketing. I believe companies somehow can take advantage of these trends. For instance, It will lead to companies to find some legal and proper ways to interact with consumers & fans and ask for access to personal information or opinions, such as making some new-concept, protected online communities or Facebook pages, prompting consumers to trust them and have better images of them.

 

Spam or Ham? Naive Bayes - the Base Case for Spam Classification

Source:

1. “Week 3: Naive Bayes, Laplace Smoothing, APIs and Scraping data off the web” –

http://columbiadatascience.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/week-3-naive-bayes-laplace-smoothing-apis-and-scraping-data-off-the-web/

2. “Reflections after Jake’s lecture” –

http://stat.columbia.edu/~rachel/

People need spam-classifiers, because they don’t want spam in their inbox or important messages to be thrown out. But how? Should we use Linear Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors, or Naive Bayes?

Why is linear regression not going to work?

Say you make a feature for each lower case word that you see in any email and then we used R’s “lm function”:      lm(spam ~ word1 + word2 + …)

However, that’s too many variables compared to observations! We have on the order of 10,000 emails with on the order of 100,000 words. This will definitely overfit. Technically, this corresponds to the fact that the matrix in the equation for linear regression is not invertible. Moreover, maybe can’t even store it because it’s so huge.

Why not k-nearest neighbors?

To use k-nearest neighbors we would still need to choose features, probably corresponding to words, and you’d likely define the value of those features to be 0 or 1 depending on whether the word is present or not. This leads to a weird notion of “nearness”.

Again, with 10,000 emails and 100,000 words, we’ll encounter a problem: it’s not a singular matrix this time but rather that the space we’d be working in has too many dimensions. This means that, for example, it requires lots of computational work to even compute distances, but even that’s not the real problem.

The real problem is even more basic: even your nearest neighbors are really far away. This is called “the curse of dimensionality”, which makes for a poor algorithm.

How about naive bayes?

Naive Bayes is considered the base case for classification. It makes simplifying assumptions about the independence of features, but still manages to perform fairly well. In the machine learning literature, researchers introducing new classification algorithms compare the performance of their new proposed algorithms to that of Naive Bayes. Also note the goal is to label or classify unlabeled observations, and the actual parameters themselves (estimated probabilities) aren’t commonly considered of interest. The classification is evaluated using a mis-classification rate. For spam detection in particular, consider which is worse: false positives (calling something spam when it’s not, e.g. putting email from your boss in the spam folder); or false negatives (letting spam get into your inbox).

K-nearest-neighbors has one tuning parameter (k, the number of neighbors), while Naive Bayes can include two hyper-parameters in the numerator and denominator for smoothing. Naive Bayes is a linear classifier, while k-nearest neighbors is not. The curse of dimensionality and large feature sets are a problem for k-nearest neighbors, while Naive Bayes performs well. K-nearest-neighbors requires no “training” (just load in the data set), while Naive Bayes does. All classification problems we looked at so far have been supervised learning (the data comes labeled).

More references:
•   “Idiot’s Bayes – not so stupid after all?"
•   “Naive Bayes at Forty: The Independence Assumption in Information"
•   “Spam Filtering with Naive Bayes – Which Naive Bayes?"