A/B Testing y otras noticias de los medios sociales

#SocialSkim: Social Media This Week, Including Social as Riot Control, A/B Testing

Angela Natividad 

MarketingProfs 

It may not be "hump day" today, but you'll look forward to the next one with this week's top viral video. We'll also look at how social affects—and maybe even calms—riled-up crowds. Learn how to embed Instagram photos and videos, and check out two new analytics tools: A/B testing capabilities on Google Analytics, and Awe.sm, which lets you tie social activity directly to your KPIs. Finally... ever wonder what "native advertising" means? You're about to find out. Skim for a clearer picture!

Guess what day it is?! This week in viral branded video, Geico topped the charts with its "Hump Day Camel" ad. With 5.3 million views since its YouTube appearance in late May, the ad is living proof that TV and the Web can be symbiotic. Also, we're glad the caveman thing is over.

Choose your holiday with a hashtag. To promote its "all-in-1" travel package, which lets travelers call, text, and use mobile data internationally for about $2.60 a day, Vodafone's designed Hashtag Holidays, a site that curates the most popular trending hashtags from Europe's most popular cities. Click on a hashtag you fancy. #Lovebirds will introduce you to the city where it's trending—the glorious Berlin. Users can also win a free trip to the destinations of their choice by "checking in" on their dream locale every Thursday. Nice little #Addedvalue.

Facebooking it up. A survey by The Creative Group finds that 62% of marketing and advertising execs plan to increase Facebook spend over the next 12 months—up from 53% a year ago. LinkedIn, the B2B darling, comes second at 51% (up from 38%, meaning LinkedIn is an increasingly serious component of the marketing mix). See the full infographic.

When social stops a riot. This week's big headliner was the Zimmerman verdict. After nearly a year after the killing of Trayvon Martin, a jury ruled Zimmerman not guilty—resulting in street protests and Facebook/Twitter feeds overflowing with rage and social commentary. Still, no riots, which the police expected. On NPR, Clay Shirky posits that "rioting comes from people who don't have any other mechanism for response, so other mechanisms for response may reduce" the risk. Did social save the day? Not for everyone. Fatigued by all the Zimmerman commentary online, as well as the pressure to express his own feelings about it, Centup founder Len Kendall writes, "I am offering a reminder to myself and to you that it's not ok to treat causes like digital fashion accessories."

A/B Test with Google Analytics. Google's released a Content Experiments API that lets users measure what assets on a site perform best. In other recent updates, you can now share your Google Analytics dashboards with colleagues—making data collaboration easier—and import AdWords cost data directly into the Google Analytics Attribution Model Comparison Tool, to help you monitor marketing spend.

Measure what matters? Awesome! Say hello to Awe.sm, an analytics platform that shows you how social efforts directly affect your KPIs. Once you've selected benchmarks, Awe.sm will show you what social posts contribute to them—making it easier to do more of what works and less of what doesn't. Request a demo on its website.

A smidge less overshare. Hulu's disabled the Open Graph-powered option to automatically share videos you're watching on Facebook, saying "people prefer the experience of expressly sharing content." So, from now on, if you want your friends to know you're watching the latest Jimmy Fallon video, you can hit the share button yourself. And everything you don't want shared—like your four-hour Scandal marathon—can stay secret. Because good social etiquette is also about good self-moderation.

A little clarity never hurts. Getgood takes the time to provide real-human definitions for "content marketing," "native advertising," and "engagement." If you're working in social, you've likely heard these three in earfuls. Know exactly what people are trying to say when they bandy them around—and be sure to ask for clarification if the context seems weird or somebody tosses a new buzzword into the mix. You may be surprised to find how few people know what these terms mean... even while they're using them.

Embeddable Instagram. Instagram now permits users to embed photos and videos onto blogs or other sites. To embed, simply visit instagram.com/[username], click on the video or photo you want to embed, and then click on the three little dots on the bottom right-hand corner. Click on embed, copy the code provided, and paste it wherever you like! Here's a screenshot from instagram.com/marketingprofs:

Instagram also highlighted how embedding can better serve brands: Sports publications can take you behind-the-scenes at a game, and news organizations can provide real-time imagery and video of breaking news. Or if you're Lululemon, use the feature to punt the lifestyle aspects of yoga:

See more cool retail uses for Instagram.

Sharpen your skills without sharpening a pencil. Looking to brush up on your SEO... or maybe build leadership skills? MasterStreet is a search engine for professional and executive education programs. Use it to build savvy in everything from HR to accounting to product development and HTML. Unlike sites like Coursera, which brings together free online classes from great universities, MasterStreet focuses on in-person classes: "knowledge workers who seek to develop themselves professionally already spend a large portion of their day in front of a screen" and could probably benefit from the human contact, according to Erin Griffith of PandoDaily.

Let's wrap with a pretty Slideshare that brings us back to basics. Salesforce offers a primer on the "undeniable authority" of the social customer: who is she, why does she matter, and what marketing triggers does she respond to?

Sponsored by

You have an active presence on social channels, but now what? Sharpen your social engagement skills with a new guide on how to amplify social interaction. You’ll learn how to plan, listen, communicate, measure, & test and improve. Download 5 Steps to Social Media Engagement.

Angela Natividad is a social strategist, copywriter, and journalist based in Paris. A Bay Area native and lover of vending machine candies, she co-founded AdVerveBlog.com and is a frequent guest on marketing podcast The Beancast. You can follow her on Twitter at @luckthelady.

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11 cosas que los usuarios de Android pueden refrendar a los usuarios de iPhones

11 Things Android Owners Like To Say To Make iPhone Users Jealous

STEVE KOVACH

Business Insider

My screen is bigger.

I can add more storage with a SD card.

I can swap out my battery whenever I want to.

I can fully customize my home screen with any widget, app, or moving wallpaper.

My phone can double as a tablet.

My voice assistant (Google Now) is much better than Siri.

My maps app just works out of the box. But you have to download one separately.

My phone seamlessly syncs with Gmail, Chrome, and all other Google services.

I can easily share photos and other content just by tapping my phone with another one.

I can use my phone as a virtual wallet to pay for stuff.

I can charge my phone with a standard USB charger. No need to dig around for that special iPhone 5 charger.

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Google pide a los ópticos que programen en Android

Google Asks Glass Developers To Start Working On Android-Based Apps Ahead Of Glass Development Kit Launch

TechCrunch

It looks like Google is about to unleash a new wave of more powerful applications for Google Glass. Currently, Glass developers can only build apps that are essentially web-based services that talk to the user’s hardware through a set of relatively limited APIs. At its I/O developer conference earlier this year, Google announced that it would soon release its so-called Glass Development Kit (GDK), which would let them build Android-based apps for Glass that can run directly on the device.

So far, however, Google hasn’t launched the GDK. Instead, Google today encouraged developers who are waiting for the GDK to start working on Android apps for Glass using the standard Android SDK (API Level 15) to try out their ideas.

As Google notes, developers can use the SDK to access low-level hardware to render OpenGL and use stock Android UI widgets, for example. Developers can also access the accelerometer of Glass through the SDK.

Glass, after all, runs Android 4.0.4, so it’s a pretty well-known platform for many developers. To help newcomers get started, though, the company also released a number of sample apps (a stopwatch, compass and level) today that highlight some of the things developers can do with Android on Glass. Over the next few weeks, Glass team member Alain Vongsouvanh writes on Google+ today, the team will also use these sample apps to “demonstrate the migration path between a traditional Android app and a full Glass experience.”

For Glass to reach its full potential, developers need better access to the device’s hardware, so it’s nice to see Google moving ahead with this. It’s still a bit of a surprise that Google hasn’t released the GDK yet. And the fact that it made today’s announcement indicates that it could still be a few weeks out. If you’re a Glass developer, though, now is probably a good time to start thinking about how you would use Android on Glass.

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Canvas Model: Groupon vs. Otros negocios de listas de email

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Los servicios basados en ubicación transforman la industria celular

How Location-Based Services Are Transforming The Mobile Industry



The possibilities for location-based services on mobile go beyond consumer-facing apps like FourSquare and Shopkick.

With over 770 million GPS-enabled smartphones, location data has begun to permeate the entire mobile space. It's powering advertisements, and many other services — from weather to travel apps.

In a recent report from BI Intelligence on location-based data, we analyze the opportunities emerging from this new local-mobile paradigm, examine how location-enabled mobile ads have generated excitement, look at how location-based feature have boosted engagement for apps, explain how local data can connect hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to the mobile economy, and demystify some of the underlying technologies and privacy issues.

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here's an overview of a few ways location-based data is transforming the mobile ecosystem:

• Location-enabled mobile ads: have generated excitement for their effectiveness and the impressive prices they command. The simple fact of a user being physically close to a business, within two miles or so, gives a significant lift to click-through rates on mobile banner ads. Many mobile ad trading platforms are reporting triple-digit increases in location-enabled impressions. However, it turns out some of the underlying location data is unreliable.
• Location-based features: have turned out to be great for boosting engagement on apps. Facebook, Google, Yelp, Instagram, Groupon, Twitter and dozens of other popular apps offer location-enabled features. These mobile properties, and many others, have moved beyond the "check-in" concept, which in any case never really caught on with users. They may still offer the ability to "check-in," but are also trying to be more imaginative with location-based notifications and location-aware services.
• Local data based search: can connect hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses to the mobile economy. Google highlights the "local mobile consumer," in its ad sales material, and touts statistics that show a third of mobile searches have local intent, and that 94% of smartphone users have searched for local information. In a Google survey, 76% of the respondents said they would like businesses' location or operating hours, and 61% said they would like to be able to "Click to call" the business.

Business Insider 

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Factores importantes para un SEO

¿Qué factores son más importantes para el SEO?

Las redes sociales se sitúan como el factor de posicionamiento más importante para las marcas. Un estudio publicado por Search Metrics  demuestra que ni los keywords ni la densidad de palabras en el texto van a dar mejor valoración a la web o marca en Google.

Search Metrics ha realizado el informe basándose en el análisis de las 30.000 urls mejor posicionadas en función de términos de búsqueda.

Esta investigación muestra que un 70% de los factores que aportan valor y relevancia a un site son las propias menciones que éste recibe a través de las principales plataformas de comunicación online.

Google + se consolida como la red que más ayuda a alcanzar los primeros puestos dentro de una lista de resultados. Le sigue Facebook, donde cualquier mención o interacción es importante para el posicionamiento en buscadores.

Otro dato muy importante derivado del estudio es que para hacer una buena estrategia SEO es necesario cambiar de tornas. Los keyword domain están perdiendo usabilidad de manera generalizada y los links con palabras clave pueden incluso afectar al posicionamiento de manera negativa.

La velocidad de carga de una web es otro dato altamente valorado por el usuario, por eso el hecho de que una web tenga una estructura limpia y que la palabra clave se encuadre dentro del título le puede otorgar a la marca un mejor posicionamiento en el buscador.

Evidentemente, el contenido de la página web es muy importante. Un buscador como Google es capaz de valorar si la web tiene contenido actualizado y de calidad e incluso con enlaces internos y de extensión correcta incluyendo fotos y vídeos. Estas son las pequeñas cosas que le van a aportar valor a la web, y por lo tanto al producto o marca.

Si se ofrece una buena web que reúna los anteriores requisitos al usuario, éste la compartirá en las redes sociales, proporcionando una mayor viralidad al contenido y con ello ayudando al mejor posicionamiento en los primeros puestos del buscador.

Search Metrics ha recogido en su particular ranking los factores con mayor influencia en el SEO y los ha clasificado del siguiente modo:

MathMen

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5 soluciones costo-efectivas para hacer despegar su emprendimiento

Five Cost-Effective Tech Solutions for Getting Your Lean Startup Off the Ground

Posted by Brian Spero 

Recently published research by the Harvard Business School suggests that three out of four startups fail—a sobering figure, but not necessarily reason to flush your promising business plan down the tubes.

While it's true that the majority of startups have historically registered a low rate of success, new progressive business models embracing a lean philosophy allow entrepreneurs the chance to swing for the fences while reducing risks associated with striking out. For those grinding away for employers offering minimal job security and limited return on creative and professional sweat equity, a 25% chance of launching a sustainable business and being your own boss is a gamble many are increasingly willing to take.

Whether you are developing a tech product, providing professional services, or operating a blog or e-commerce store out of your home, utilizing low-cost tech solutions that cover the fundamentals of a functioning independent business allow you to test the waters without plunging into the financial deep end. If you wish to take the leap on a startup concept you believe in without extending beyond your reasonable means, consider these effective, scalable tech solutions to start your own business.

THE WEB

While it's no longer necessary to invest in a physical location to launch a new business, a website that establishes an online identity and serves as a sales floor or hub of communication is a basic essential. Working with a designer or firm can cost thousands of dollars to develop a functional, professional-looking website. However, for a do-it-yourself entrepreneur with a clear vision and basic content creation skills, Squarespace is a highly effective, inexpensive one-stop for an attractive, customizable online home with minimal complications.

An incredibly successful startup in its own right, Squarespace supplies everything required to create a fully functional, branded website, featuring a selection of attractive templates, page builders, and user-friendly tools backed by 24/7 customer support. At the maximum level of $24 a month, users can build an e-commerce website with a fully integrated mobile store complete with inventory tracking, tax, shipping, and coupon controls.

While there may come a time that your business outgrows this all-inclusive solution with unlimited bandwidth, custom domain name, and safe hosting included, it's likely you'll be a happy entrepreneur when that day arrives.

TELEPHONY

While a full-service business phone or VoIP system will be necessary for certain startup scenarios, it's often an investment that doesn't make much sense, especially when working from a home location, primarily using email, and interfacing with a limited number of clients and collaborators.

For many small or independent ventures looking to isolate specific business communications while still receiving all of their calls to the same phone or device, Google Voice is a solution with many attractive features that's simple to set up and free to use.

Just register with an existing phone line (your home or mobile will do), and receive a unique business number to distribute to your startup contacts and associates. Calls are forwarded according to your settings, allowing you to set your individual voicemail greetings, screen incoming calls, receive voicemail transcripts, and even record important conversations. Google Voice allows for conferencing in multiple callers, sending SMS to email, free domestic long-distance, and low-cost international calls. Configure it with Google Hangouts, and you can further modernize communications with video conferencing, online group chat and talk, and live streaming for events and presentations.

COLLABORATION

A typical challenge of a lean, modern startup environment is streamlining the logistics of communication and project management with partners, vendors, freelancers, and clients working out of mobile and remote locations. Priced at $9 a month per user, Socialtext is a cutting-edge collaboration platform solution that helps create a branded virtual office dashboard that effectively addresses internal organization, teamwork and coordination, and sharing of data, tools, and company resources.

Also a powerful solution for integrating your social media content, marketing, and networking strategies to test products, identify audiences, and build brand identity, Socialtext allows you to provide individual profiles and work spaces for each unique user. Accessible from anywhere you can access the Internet, a busy small business owner can assign projects, monitor workflow, and improve collaboration through automated content management that keeps everyone in the loop and on task. 

A fully scalable system with discounted rates for volume deployment, Socialtext not only allows you to oversee the progress of all of your projects and campaigns, but also seamlessly integrates with CRM, ERP, and HR platforms.

ACCOUNTING

Few startups on a limited budget have spending flexibility to contract a dedicated bookkeeper, yet keeping an eye on the bottom line is essential to ensure that your venture stays financially fit.

FreshBooks is one of the best online accounting systems featuring just about everything an emerging business needs to organize documents, manage projects, make and accept payments, and track invoicing. Highly rated for its ease of use and second-to-none live support, Freshbooks is not only an out-of-the-box invoice management wizard (available free for your first three clients), but extends to handle everything from expense and time tracking, to detailed accounting reports.

Freshbooks exists to help time-strapped entrepreneurs lighten their load by automating recurring invoices, expense reports, and payments, while at the same time staying on top of overdue accounts to get paid faster and maximize cash management. From unlocking efficiency by shedding light on unbilled time, to providing insight into business strategy with profit and loss reports, balance sheets, and item sales reports that help identify top performing products and services, there's good reason Freshbooks has been a hit for thousands of small businesses around the world.

SALES

Similar to Salesforce, Zoho CRM is a more affordable customer relationship management software designed to help growing businesses start generating online leads, manage workflow more efficiently, and collect and analyze vital data to improve sales performance.

Starting with a free entrepreneur and startup edition and expanding to a small business plan priced at $12 a month per user, Zoho CRM delivers a shared sales database to provide associates in the field simultaneous access to important customer contact information and marketing collateral to help cultivate leads and close more deals.

Zoho CRM not only supplies real-time insight into your sales activities with detailed reports and status updates, but also saves precious time by automating day-to-day functions relating to lead generation and qualification, advanced forecasting, and pipeline, competitive, and sales stage probability analysis. With the power to integrate your CRM with an existing project management platform and sync with Google Apps, Zoho CRM allows you to stay on top of your sales team and promote collaboration, cultivate profitable client relationships, and more effectively deploy resources.

FINAL THOUGHTS

The reality that a majority of startups are destined to fail make it all the more important to adopt a lean approach to funding your dreams of entrepreneurial success.

By embracing cost-effective tech solutions while establishing fundamentals such as an Internet presence, communications, accounting, and project and sales management, you can avoid sinking into the red while striving for the greener pastures of running a successful startup.

TechVibes

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Una aplicación saludable

Remedying the search for reliable drug info

Microsoft Research Connections Team 

Research Connections Blog

Healthcare providers increasingly appreciate the value of patients having access to accurate and understandable information about their health and treatments. This is why Microsoft Research’s Dan Morrisand a team of researchers at Columbia University, led by Professor Lauren Wilcox, have been working to develop Patient Friendly Medical Displays that automatically create simplified, personalized, plain-language views of the information in a patient’s electronic health record.

Now this team of researchers has developed Remedy, a prototype search system that assists laypeople in assessing medication-related Internet search results. General-purpose web search engines give a broad array of results, without providing tools to help people narrow in on technical or non-technical content, avoid ads, and spot indicators of quality and credibility. Remedy supports rapid filtering and comparison of medication-information search results, based on a number of website features and content topics. It thus helps users find reliable, patient-friendly educational material more easily. Remedy summarizes the topics that it finds in the search results and lets users navigate to websites according to these topics. It also provides a topic-based view in which users can see what multiple sites have to say about a single topic of interest. This video shows how Remedy helps patients find relevant, reliable information about their medications. 

Remedy was tested with patients in the cardiac aftercare unit at New York Presbyterian Hospital. The researchers are evaluating the outcomes of this pilot study, but initial results indicate that patients were enthusiastic about using Remedy. A second, more substantial hospital study is under consideration based on these positive indications. In addition, Remedy was demonstrated at the 7th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare in Venice, Italy, May 5–8, 2013.

Although Remedy is still a prototype at this stage, the initial positive reaction to it bodes well for further research and development on tools to ensure that patients can easily access and understand reliable information about their medications, health, and medical treatments.

—Simon Mercer, Director, Microsoft Research Connections

Learn more

• Patient Friendly Medical Displays
• Remedy: Supporting Consumer-Centered Medication Information Search
• Health and Wellbeing at Microsoft Research Connections

Format: mp4
Duration: 1 minute 56 seconds

Health, Simon Mercer, healthcare, medications, Remedy, Patient Friendly Medical Displays, Dan Morris, medical information, medication information, search tool

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Pivotando en LSU para desarrollo de productos

Pivoting when Using Lean Startup for Product
Development

by Ben Linders 

The lean startup approach expects that you are able to decide whether to persevere or pivot during product development. The build-measure-learn loop help startups to get quick feedback from customers and learn about their needs, which support pivoting decisions. In the lean startup principles, Eric Ries describes the purpose of pivoting in product development:

When this process of measuring and learning is done correctly, it will be clear that a company is either moving the drivers of the business model or not. If not, it is a sign that it is time to pivot or make a structural course correction to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth.

There are different types of pivots possible in lean startup, each with their own purpose and ways to use them. Let’s explore some of them to see when and how you can pivot? Or maybe have to decide that it’s better to quit?

The blog post vision pivots vs. discovery pivots by Marty Cagan describes two kinds of pivots. He describes the product vision as “the big picture of what you are trying to achieve, typically over a 2-5 year timeframe”. Pivoting on the product vision should not be done too early:

In a nutshell, the job of the product organization is to make that vision a reality.  So we don't work for a few weeks or even a few months and then just declare it's not happening and we should do a pivot.  We will typically work hard for many months on a product vision and not even entertain the possibility of giving up.

Discovery as Marty describes is looking for features or approaches to develop a product that realizes the vision. He suggest to be flexible and prepared to pivot on discovery:

(…) during product discovery we will need to try out a great many ideas.  We expect that many of these ideas won't work, and the ones that do will require several iterations. So it's critical in product discovery that we not be wedded to particular solutions or features or approaches.

This is why it's so essential that a product team be strong at product discovery.  Product discovery is how we get as many iterations towards our vision as possible.  Our objective of course is to get to product/market fit before we run out of money (or management runs out of patience). And being good at product discovery means being very open to the many forms of discovery pivots.

Brian Millar describes what large companies can do to become more innovative, in the article 5 ways big companies can pivot like lean startup on Co.Design (published by FastCompany). He states that “Pivoting means that new technologies don’t get wasted. They get repurposed”. Brian describes how you can use a pivot workshop as a way to do pivoting on technology:

The innovation team brings along the technologies they’re working on plus any side projects or shiny things that have caught their interest. The insight people bring along as many consumer needs as they can. The next bit is simple. Match the technologies to the needs. (…) If a technology matches a need that it’s not currently serving, then you have an opportunity to pivot--if the opportunity is big enough.

In the article everyone pivots on LinkedIn, Andy Rachleff talks about pivoting on markets. He suggests that starting with a product and finding a market can be a successful approach for companies. Andy describes why pivoting on markets is important to find the market for your product:  

The challenge lies in is figuring out who cares about your incredible new product. Rarely do companies get it right the first time and it often takes years before they do …if they ever do.

Enterprise-focused startups typically need to run trials with potential customers to prove the value of their products. If you pull the trial after 30 days and the majority of prospects don’t flinch, then you don’t have a compelling product/market fit. Therefore, you need to pivot.

Sometimes it can better for a startup to quit, as Ben Yoskovitz describes in when is it time to pivot or quit? He gives several suggestions on dealing with pivoting, and when and how to decide to pivot or quit.

Pivoting is only possible when it is properly done within the build-measure-learn feedback loop in lean startup, as Ben explains:

To pivot, you need to have learned something through your previous efforts that gives you clues as to where you should focus. You can’t pivot without some form of validated learning and new assumptions. If you don’t have new insight that gives you even a hint of a direction, you need to really question whether it’s worth continuing. Pivoting for the sake of pivoting isn’t the answer (although you can get lucky…)

When you need to pivot, it can be good to check your passion:

I’ve met quite a few people (it’s happened to me too) that get so lost in what they’re doing, and they invest so much into it, that they actually forget why they got into the business in the first place. So as you investigate the potential of a pivot, you have to ask yourself, “Why am I even going to do this? Will I be passionate about this new thing?” If the answer is yes, you pivot. If the answer is no, you stop.

Ben explains how entrepreneurs are driven by guts, and how you can take that into account when deciding to pivot or quit:

If you get to the point where you don’t know what to experiment on anymore, and you’ve lost your purpose (in terms of why you started the business in the first place), you need to seriously look at shutting it down. If you don’t know what to do anymore, pragmatically, but you’ve still got a fire in your belly for what you set out to do, take a break and look for a restart.

Pivoting can also help a company that has been in a “sleeping mode” to revive, as Vincenzo Pallotta describes in reviving a zombie company: can lean startup help?:

(…) if your business is stagnating, you need a shake! The pivot might (and probably should) [be] very radical. You have probably a core technology or competence that has not found a compelling problem to solve and you don’t have customers. Therefore, start looking again for problems. Even if you are very biased by the technology you have, you might discover a new applicability of it to a completely different problem (and sometimes even with minimal adaptation). 

Reviving can be considered as a restart of the company, or a new attempt on a product idea, where you can use practices from the the lean startup:

It goes without saying that your pivot will entail an entire rethinking of your Business Model. So, define your new hypotheses and setup the right experimental framework to validate them.

InfoQ

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¿Que hace viral a un video?

Make Me A Viral: The Art & Science Of Video Virals from Mindshare

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