20 Simple, Useful Content Marketing Tips That Often Go Overlooked (But Shouldn’t)

1) Look for Blog Topics Right in Your Email Inbox

You likely get a hefty stream of questions, comments, and inquiries about your business every day and, chances are, some of them keep popping up again and again. When you find yourself answering the same question from clients or buyers time after time, consider turning it into a blog post for your company’s site. In addition to acting as a one-stop-shop FAQ, this also makes your company more relatable, provides the consumer with valuable information and shows them you are thinking about their needs and concerns.

2) Embed Your Videos

Repeated studies have shown blogs with videos are more likely to get additional hits and shares than those without videos. That said, consider taking all of the promotional or educational videos your company has made over time and integrating them into blog posts.

In addition to providing customers with additional ways to consume your content, videos are also highly linkable, which means there’s a good chance your website will reach more people than just your existing customers.

3) If You Don’t Have Any Videos — Make Some

What does your company do better than any other company out there? What can you teach people? Is there a chance you could take that expertise and excitement and turn it into a video?

A company that sells fly fishing equipment could put out a series of videos on fly tying, whereas a content creation company could put together a few videos on publishing great blogs. There is a huge demand for knowledge in the world and when you share yours, people are likely to pass it around, driving more traffic and additional customers your way.

4) Compile a “Who-to-Follow” List

You’re an expert in your field and people know that, but people always want to learn more. Create a well thought-out “who to follow” list of other people who excel in your field to help them do just that. Doing this offers two distinct benefits: first, consumers will appreciate the fact that you’ve positioned yourself as a trusted source of information and, second, the people you link in the article will appreciate that you’ve directed traffic their way and are highly likely to return the favor.

A good portion of effective content marketing is developing a positive reputation. and there are few better ways to do this than by word-of-mouth and building relationships with other experts in the field.

5) Create a List of Facts that Supports Your Mission

People love learning new things and lists of facts are compelling and easily shared. To create a piece of content that has a high probability of being linked to, compile a list of facts that support your company’s main goal or mission statement and then publish it in a blog or infographic.

In addition to fulfilling the customer’s need for knowledge, this move also goes to show your company is thoughtful and has done its research.

6) Tell a Great Story

Anyone who has ever seen an Apple or a Subaru ad knows the power of those companies lies in their ability to tell a great story that moves their target audience. Take some time to consider what your company cares about and how that intersects with the company’s mission — be that sales or conversions — and then find a way to weave that into your content marketing.

If you’re selling a lifestyle product, tell a story about how the product provides happiness, comfort, or safety. By far the best way to gain customers is by tugging on their heartstrings and telling a compelling story.

7) Consider the Questions Your Customers Ask

When a buyer wants to purchase something, they almost always turn to the internet for advice and research purposes. When a person types a question into Google, they will be met with literally millions of answers and it matter whether or not your company’s answer is among those they see.

In today’s era of content, it is no longer enough to have a great product. People need to see it and rely upon it before they make a purchase and this requires a company to build authority right off the bat.

Consider what types of questions your customers are asking and answer them via your blog or website post. Doing this establishes you as an expert in the field and builds the consumer confidence needed to drive sales and conversions.

8) Make It a Date (Specifically)

While many companies offer ample opportunities for consumers to sign up for an email list or blog subscription, very few offer specific content at specific times. Author and lifestyle coach Tim Ferris often does this with astounding results.

By offering customers an invitation to tune into a podcast, webinar, or video conference in real-time, you build a more tangible connection than can be produced through an email list subscription. In addition to contributing to customer confidence, a move like this also helps build a community around your business or product and may well stem off into additional marketing opportunities, such as podcasts, down the road.

9) Put Promotion First

When a company goes to design a product, the first step is often making sure that there is a market demand for said product. If there is not, manufacturing the product has the potential to result in a huge loss of time and money. The same goes for content, believe it or not.

In order to employ great content marketing, think about how you will market your content before you develop it. If you can’t come up with a place to promote a given piece, it might not be worth the time and effort to produce.

10) Embed Yourself in the Community

Nowadays, there are hundreds of online forums and communities (Reddit being the best known) dedicated to discussing specific topics. Find a few of the communities that pertain to your businesses specialty and join in the discussion.

As you participate in the forum, mention that people can find more information back at your blog. In addition to further establishing yourself as an authority in the field, this approach also allows you to learn new things and gain a deeper understanding of your customers.

11) Upload Visual Content to SlideShare

SlideShare is a popular content-sharing platform that accommodates PowerPoint, PDF, KeyNote, and OpenDocument content presentations. Think of it as the YouTube or Instagram of slideshows.

The great thing about SlideShare is that once you’ve uploaded your content, the sky is the limit. Users can share, link and re-share your content to platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, which means more traffic for you.

12) Join & Use Pinterest

Often thought of as the place where mason jar inspired DIY projects go, Pinterest is an often overlooked social media platform that holds great potential to boost your business to the next level, with millions of active users and growing.

Create some great articles, link them with infographics or visuals and then post them to boards related to your niche. Pinterest allows users to share and re-share content, which means anything you create that is interesting and visually pleasing stands a good chance of being plastered over dozens or even hundreds of Pinterest boards, putting you in touch with new customers and expanding your company’s reach.

13) Recycle Content

For most companies, having a large content creation team is out of reach. For this reason, it’s wise to learn to recycle great content for extended use. Ways to do this include putting the relevant statistics from a blog post into an infographic or tweeting a previously published blog post’s important points throughout the course of a week. By learning to recycle great content in new ways, you save yourself from the burden of having to create great new content constantly without sacrificing

14) Aim for Evergreen Content

If you’re familiar with content marketing, you’ve probably heard the term “evergreen content.” Evergreen content is an important marketing tool that remains relevant no matter when it is published. This means that an article published today can be shared in five years without having to be amended.

This obviously does not apply to content that changes often, such as medical data or sales statistics, but can easily apply to how-to guides or informative content. By aiming to create evergreen content, you set yourself up for highly sharable content and backlinks that persist far beyond when the article was written.

15) Optimize Social Media

Nowadays, social media rules the internet and accounts for an estimated 23% of the total time consumers spend online. By optimizing your content marketing pieces for social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, you increase your chances of being shared and passed around the Internet. Create an informative video to share on Facebook or create a killer infographic and send it out in Tweet form. No matter what you do, do not overlook the veritable content marketing gold mine that is social media.

16) Know Your Audience

Content marketing is a world in which you want to make things personal. If you don’t know who your target audience is, it’s nearly impossible to effectively customize content for them and even harder to get them to engage with your business or product. For this reason, it’s wise to spend some time with Google analytics or another similar tool to figure out who’s truly paying attention.

What do those people do? Where do they live? How old are they? What are their buying habits like? Chances are, you’re going to speak differently to an eighteen-year-old hipster than you would a 75-year-old retired nurse, and it’s important to tailor your content to fit the different sectors of your audience. One-size-fits-all content results in poor business performance and minimal customer connection.

17) Optimize Your Blog URL

This is a simple step, but it can be a big one in terms of accessibility. Before publishing a blog post, alter the generic URL to contain a keyword or relevant phrase rather than a string of letters and numbers. Always, always make sure your keyword is in this string. Your rankings will thank you later. In addition to giving new viewers an idea what the URL contains, this format also makes your URL’s easier and more attractive to share.

18) Opt for a 50/50 Split Between Text and Visuals

Content marketing research and the anecdotal evidence of those in the fieldhas repeatedly proven that a combination of text and images is more effective than either text or images alone. This might explain why infographics are so wildly effective.

Instead of being too text- or visual-heavy in your content marketing material, aim to strike a balance between the two. Write a blog post that is broken up by relevant images or create an infographic that overlies a helpful chart or icon with brief text-based interpretations of the data. Doing this provides the most value for your customers and helps you consistently create high-quality content.

19) Utilize Active Reading

Active reading, or the process of actively picking apart a piece of content to discern things like the narrator’s perspective and unanswered questions allows you to build knowledge and fulfill the gaps in the market, further enhancing authority and content presence in the online world.

Although there is a lot of great content in the digital sphere, much of it fails to meet all of a consumer’s needs and, by actively reading what else is out there, you can learn to identify and then fill in the gaps.

20) Be Original

Ultimately, every company does content marketing a little differently and while there may be some value in taking a hint from the world’s most successful companies, there is no use in trying to imitate them. Dedicate some time to figuring out what makes your company special and unique and build on that. Your customers will appreciate it.

Conclusion

A thread that runs throughout nearly all my points is originality. I cannot stress enough how important it is to be original in all you do. Use storytelling and visual content. Think about who you’re talking to. Then secondarily, think about keywords so you can keep your ranking potential high when you publish your content.

So, in conclusion, find your content marketing style and balance consistency, SEO implementation, and engagement.

Source : http://bit.ly/29fvSO4

3 Reasons B2B Marketers Must Embrace Mobile… Now

Have you optimized your B2B website for mobile search? 

We’re all familiar with recent statistics that illustrate the growth of mobile device usage. 

Over the last few years, we’ve seen internet usage on mobile devices grow to exceed PC. In 2015, Google announced that mobile searches now exceed desktop searches on their search engine. And it’s estimated that nearly 75 percent of the US population now owns a smartphone.

Mobile is clearly a critical element of any successful marketing strategy. But what does increasing mobile usage mean specifically for B2B marketers? 

Why are so many B2B companies slow to adopt mobile marketing strategies, and how will this ultimately impact their business success?

Here are three critical reasons B2B marketers need to embrace mobile… now!

1. Mobile Impacts Fundamental Marketing Metrics

According to CWS, businesses that do not provide a solid mobile experience encounter the following:

• A drop in organic ranking.
• A loss in mobile site traffic.
• An increase in bounce rate.

I believe that many B2B marketers remain unaware that providing a less-than-optimal mobile experience is jeopardizing fundamental online marketing success metrics such as visibility and website traffic.

2. Mobile Is Required For Customer Engagement

In addition to ensuring brand visibility and driving traffic, mobile-friendly websites increase customer loyalty, sentiment and engagement. Here’s a sampling of facts from a Google study entitled What Users Want Most From Mobile Sites Today.

• 74 percent say they are likely to return to a company’s site in the future, if it is a mobile-friendly site.
• 48 percent feel frustrated and annoyed if a company doesn’t have a mobile-friendly site.
• 52 percent are less likely to engage with a company that has no mobile website.

These are fairly dramatic statistics. B2B marketers can’t afford to annoy prospects and certainly shouldn’t erect barriers to engagement.

A positive mobile experience is now absolutely required to successfully interact with prospects in order to drive engagement, leads and sales.

3. B2B Decision Makers Are Increasingly Using Mobile Devices

We know that business buyers rely on the internet during their research and selection process. But did you know that more and more of these decision-makers are using mobile devices? 

In fact, B2B mobile usage is intensifying throughout the entire buy cycle.

Google partnered with Millward Brown Digital to survey 3,000 B2B decision makers about their research and purchase habits. According to the study:

• 42 percent of researchers use a mobile device during their B2B purchasing process.
• Search activity for those using a smartphone has intensified. Google is reporting a 3X growth in mobile queries.
• B2B researchers are not just using mobile devices when they are out of the office; 49 percent of B2B researchers who use their mobile devices for research do so while at work.

It isn’t just consumer mobile usage that is growing. These days, B2B marketers, you must understand that your customers, your prospects and your buyers are using mobile devices more frequently than ever, at the office and outside of work hours, to make critical business decisions.

Get Started: Mobile-Friendly Website Tips

So how should you determine the effectiveness of your company’s current mobile experience?

 I recommend taking these two very simple “get started” steps:

1. Assess and improve your Mobile PageSpeed.
2. Understand and implement Mobile Design Best Practices.

Along with your PageSpeed Score, Google provides specific recommendations on what you should fix to improve the mobile experience. 

For example, in order to improve page load speed, you may need to enable compression, leverage browser caching, minify CSS, optimize images and avoid landing page redirects.

In terms of implementing mobile design best practices, you may need to improve things by using more legible font sizes, simplifying navigation, configuring the viewport and avoiding plugins.

These two resources provide a simple and effective starting point for improving the mobile experience.

Mobile, Your Competitive Advantage

Here is the bottom line for B2B marketers:

• The mobile experience is now directly impacting your fundamental online marketing success and affecting metrics such as visibility and traffic.
• Providing a favorable mobile experience is absolutely required to continually engage prospects and drive leads and sales.
• B2B decision-makers are using mobile devices across all phases of the buy cycle and throughout the day (including at work).

Take a look at your website analytics data. Even if mobile traffic isn’t a huge device segment today, it is growing and will continue to do so.

Get ahead of this curve. Start embracing our multi-screen world. Turn mobile marketing into your competitive advantage… today.

Source : http://selnd.com/1WS8mWs

8 Tips for Growing Your Social Media Presence

Social media has become a standard form of engaging and connecting businesses, brands and people. As of March 2015, Facebook has more than 1.44 billion users. As of 2015, Twitter has had more than 300 million monthly users. 

These statistics suggest that more and more people are using social media as a way to connect for personal and professional reasons. For the serious entrepreneur, business owner or brand builder, it's a wise decision to create a social media presence not only to reach the millions and billions of people around the world, but to also build brand awareness. 

For all you social media beginners out there, here are a few tips that will help you to grow your social media presence.

1) Know your audience. Before posting, understand who's reading and why. Once you know who's reading, you'll have a better idea of what, when, why and how to post.

Ex: If you're targeting professional men and women ages 30-45, you have to assume that between the hours of 9-5, the average person in this age bracket is at work. Finding the times they frequent social media will be crucial in your marketing success.

2) Post quality pictures, videos, blogs and texts that interest your audience. Creating a social media presence is all about keeping your audience entertained.

Ex: If your target audience is women who are interested in beauty products, you wouldn't simply post a message about what works, no... if you're smart, you'll post a video and photos to show your customer why they should invest in your products/services.

3) Be consistent. You are the news, so post daily and regularly. If you take any days off, your audience will follow the pages that don't.

Ex: Take advantage of Holidays, current events and worldly trends to tie it back into your brand.

4) Engage with your audience. If they have questions, give them answers. Customer service is the key to any successful business. Include this in your business model.

Ex: Acknowledge your fans and supporters when they post about your brand, reward them for their loyalty, and by all means, answer any questions they may have about customer service.

5) Show support. Follow other people, engage, share and promote their content on your page. The idea is to grow your audience. It's better to partner, than do it alone.

Ex: Do cross promotion for social media contests, do a special discount on your page for other people's events, host a TweetUp and promote a hashtag to raise brand awareness.

6) Promote social media contests. People are more likely to follow, like or share your page if there's something in it for them.

Ex: Collaborate with an author, coach or restaurant. With their permission, offer a selected winner from your audience their products and services in exchange for likes/follows.

7) Tell stories. No matter what you're selling, people want to know the seller. Share stories about what connects you to people and what connects you to your brand and you'll create a cult of supportive followers.

Ex: If you're a clothing designer, tell the story about how you grow up getting "hand me downs" as a kid and decided to design your own clothes out of sheets and fabrics. Your story will inspire others to support your brand simply because it touched their heart. That's BRAND power! 

8)Promote your social media presence online and offline. Brand yourself!

Source : http://huff.to/1HCsRnf

Five social media hacks to make you a better boss

Social media can be a tool to help you better manage your employees.

When the words 'social media' and 'work' are used in the same sentence, it is usually in relation to one of two activities – self-promotion and time wasting. Either you're the one watching the cat video, or you're the one who filmed it (in the hope it will make you and your feline a viral sensation).

But, can social media also make you a better manager? I believe that it can if you're calm, calculated and compassionate when posting, pinning, liking and lurking.

Do you want to boost team morale, exert your authority or just spruce up the office? Then follow my top tips:

Show your trust

​I remember at the dawn of Twitter, many employers banned their employees from mentioning who they worked for in their social media bios. Or, if they did say they worked at [insert company name] they had to put a disclaimer saying, "views are my own". I take the opposite tack with my team members. Not only am I happy for them to proudly say they work for The Collective, but I encourage them to have strong opinions, because I trust their ethics and morals. Imagine sending a staff member to a party in the real world, but banning them from telling anyone where they worked.

Track their overtime

I've written before about the downsides of over-dedication in staff members. Although I applaud passion and adore anyone who goes the extra mile, I am also extremely aware of the dangers of burnout. Is a star employee uploading Facebook posts at 9pm on a Wednesday ("Location: the office")?

Are they posting Instagram snaps from their desk when everyone else is tucked up in bed? If you start to notice patterns that a staff member is neglecting rest and restoration, it could be time to sit them down and check they're not burning the candle at both ends.

Find a virtual mentor

Social media isn't just a way of boosting staff morale, but also your own. On Twitter I follow an inspiring army of business leaders and managers, including Sheryl Sandberg, Sir Richard Branson and Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. They share wise words and insightful articles and what it's really like to run a company.

I also use social media to peek behind the scenes at other people's offices. No, I'm not just nosy! Pinterest boards like The Muse and Instagram accounts like Todd Selby (@theselby) give me ideas for how to design a creative and productive office space for my own team.

Give out gold stars

Do you name an 'employee of the month'? No, me neither. My employees are no longer 15-year-olds working in a burger joint. But I do think it's important to give credit where credit's due, publicly, and social media offers a subtle way to do this. I recently posted a picture on Instagram which just read, "Thankyou".

I gave a shout-out to my extraordinary team who make my big vision a reality. I also tagged all of them in the picture. It not only (hopefully) gave them a happy glow, but also reminded me how much I appreciate them all.

Send a postcard home

As a manager, you might travel – a lot. I am personally on a plane at least once a week, travelling to an event, speaking gig or far-flung meeting. As I head to another airport, I never want my team to think I'm just jetting off on a frivolous vacation. That's why I use social media like a postcard from my working holiday, to prove it's not all play.

Although I will sometimes post a photo taken by a hotel pool, I always try to make the point that I just had a quick dip before a conference or to unwind after a long day of negotiations. When you're remote-managing a team, don't let social media undermine how much work you're really doing.

Source : http://bit.ly/1LfHpsp

The next wave of startups that will help publishers make money

A growing number of startups are thinking about how they can help publishers make money outside of advertising. These innovative young companies may not be able to sever the tie between publishers and advertisers, but they could help digital content makers offset their dependence on advertisers through additional revenue streams.

The intervention is much needed.

Every day, new market data shows the dire state of banner ads. A flurry of condemnations faces these digital ads. For instance, no one clicks on them. If someone does click on one, it was probably an accident. Furthermore, consumers that do click on them may be subjected to malware. Free consumer software exists specifically to block digital ads from ever being seen.

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It’s a bad environment for the banner ad, and yet when it comes to replacing it, we’re seeing little innovation.

This is a problem for publishers, who have forever relied on advertising dollars to run their publications. To shore up the damage, a number of media outlets, such as Vice and BuzzFeed, are working on better integrating ads into their content. The purpose of this native content is to have it coexist seamlessly with existing articles and videos on the platform, meaning journalism is hardly distinct from advertising save for a “sponsored content” label.

Sponsored content comes in two flavors: native advertising, and posts paid for by advertisers who may not influence the material itself but pay to have their name associated with it. Though many have ethical questions about posing advertising as journalism, publishers like native ads because they garner a higher price than banner ads. Native video advertising, a blossoming tactic, comes at an even higher price.

Native content may be fine for publishers, but it doesn’t have to represent the only way they monetize their businesses.

Market research
One company is using market research as a way to help fund publishers. The concept is simple: Rather than forcing readers to pay a subscription fee or to slog through ads, HelloToken is helping publishers push market research questions to their audience for a fee. Readers get to read a set number of articles (as determined by the publisher) before they have to answer a market research question to continue reading.

The company, which has raised a $400,000 preseed round, launched earlier this week with clients that include 50 bloggers and the Harvard Political Review.

Founder Brian Truong said a publisher can get $0.03 per question answered from market researchers. By comparison, most digital display ads garner publishers $0.004 per impression or anywhere from $0.10 to $10 per 1,000 impressions depending on the outlet. And the demand for market research is big.

Companies have lots of questions about the market they’re targeting, but conducting market research can be expensive. Asking one question to a thousand respondents can cost up to $1,000, depending on the firm a company is working with. Even low-cost options like SurveyMonkey charge at least $1 per respondent, and the price goes up as demographic preferences become more detailed.

HelloToken, Truong said, charges $0.06 to ask one person one question. Put another way, it would cost $60 to ask 1,000 people one question. Making surveys cheaper is just the first step, according to Truong. Eventually, he wants to make market research more meaningful.

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“At the end of the day, there’s so much technology — everything is programmatic. It’s so predictive,” he said. “But it doesn’t actually know what your preferences are.” Ultimately, he said, HelloToken should be able to better understand its survey candidates and their likes, allowing retailers and advertisers to tailor the ad experience to the consumer.

Tips

Another option percolating among content creators is the pay-what-you-want model. This tactic has been most famously employed by Radiohead for its album In Rainbows.

Within this scope, Tipjar is enabling independent artists, writers, and musicians to make money off their past and present work by linking to a digital tip jar on YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Soundcloud. Those who want to send a tip can set up what is essentially a digital wallet with Tipjar by typing their credit card info into a popup box. Content creators don’t pay anything to set up the jar; however, they fork over a hefty 20 percent fee when cashing out their donations. That’s likely because of the expense associated with micropayments.

The company is still prelaunch, but the concept isn’t entirely new. Companies in the Bitcoin community have been promoting the idea of tipping for some time. There’s also Patreon, which allows fans to make recurring payments to their favorite content creators.

Another company with a similar offering is Cointent. This company has created a platform for managing both subscriptions and micropayments for content. The company enables publishers to charge small amounts of money for a piece of content, like $0.50 for an article. A survey among its early partners showed that micropayments lead to 3 times as many paying customers as subscriptions do. However, like Tipjar, Cointent charges a heavy transaction fee, though the rate depends on the publisher. Depending on the size of the publisher, Cointent might take $0.40 on a $2.00 article.

Tips and pay-per-article offerings may never fully replace ad dollars, but they could help to loosen the ropes tying publishers and advertisers together.

The untethering of publishers and advertisers would be a welcome change. For years, publishers have relied on advertisers for their survival, and it has taken a toll on the industry, especially as the value of display ads continues to plummet. If publishers can expand beyond advertising revenue in a meaningful way, it could usher in a whole new era of media.

Source : http://bit.ly/1QwLKXS

The Real Unicorns Are Female Angel Investors

Despite the attention over the past year, the lack of diversity in tech — both in race and gender — has not markedly changed. Only 3 percent of tech CEOs are women, and just 15 percent of startups have at least one female founder.

Most agree that something needs to be done, but much of the attention is misplaced into a caricature. You see the issue raised on SNL and the other late-night shows — and then there is the hyperbole that penetrates into pop culture (see HBO’s Silicon Valley).

To be fair, programs have popped up to teach women how to code, while others drive awareness of the developer career path for adolescent teen girls. Even some VCs have developed funds for women or minority-owned startups — Golden Seeds and 500 Startups among them.

What’s missing in these solutions? The role of women as angel investors — not just founders or developers.

Women make up just 4 percent of venture capital partners. And though the University of New Hampshire’s Center for Venture Research said there are more than 50,000 female angel investors, my experience from raising $1.2 million in seed funding in Chicago suggests otherwise. I sought a female angel — but could not find her. I asked all of the contacts I met for a recommendation. They all said, “I’ll think about it,” but never got back to me. I do have one female investor, who I am thankful for, but even she backed us alongside her husband.

To get more women in tech today, we need women investors.

Women investors are important because they signal to women You belong here. In a study co-authored by MIT economist Esther Duflo, she saw that an increased presence and visibility of female politicians in local government raises the academic performance and career aspirations of young women in India. “[MM1] We think this is due to a role-model effect: Seeing women in charge persuaded parents and teens that women can run things, and increased their ambitions,” said Duflo, a co-founder of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

To get more women in tech today, we need women investors — and we need them early in the process. That means female angel investors.

Progress is being made. Over the past decade, women have begun taking more leadership roles in business. As a result, women are excelling financially. The number of wealthy women in the U.S. is growing twice as fast as the number of wealthy men. And by the next generation (or perhaps sooner), more families will be supported by woman than men.

But more wealth will not automatically translate to more angel investors. Women tend to be more conservative investors that may even lack confidence, a critical element in becoming an angel.

We haven’t yet tapped into that next wave of female angels.

That’s why groups like 37 Angels andBroadway Angels — groups of women angel investors who fund early stage startups regardless of the founder’s gender — are critical. 37 Angels, for example, requires its members to be active investors, making at least one $25,000 investment each year from the 35 to 50 companies it finalizes as candidates each year.

But as great as those networks are, they don’t do much to drive awareness of angel investing and teach women to make the leap from investing in stocks and mutual funds to investing in early stage startups. The Pipeline Fellowship is one group that is trying to make a difference with a six-month angel investing bootcamp. And in four years, Pipeline boasts more than 100 graduates — it’s a start, but not nearly enough to make a dent in the deficit of women angel investors.

We haven’t yet tapped into that next wave of female angels — the ones currently succeeding in Corporate America. If that happened, we would see more female founders.

Source : http://tcrn.ch/1FbJpRW

Forget the Internet of Things – the Internet of Data is where it's really at

Everyone's getting in a fuss about the Internet of Things, whether it's excitement about smart appliances like Nest, Belkin WeMo, smart bulbs and smart TVs, self-quantification fitness trackers, or about new genres of connected gadgets like smartwatches, Google Glass and the spread of Bluetooth beacons in stores.

Everyone's getting in a fuss about the Internet of Things, whether it's excitement about smart appliances like Nest, Belkin WeMo, smart bulbs and smart TVs, self-quantification fitness trackers, or about new genres of connected gadgets like smartwatches, Google Glass and the spread of Bluetooth beacons in stores. Oh, and the smartphone...

What all of these Internet of Things (IoT) devices - as many as 50 billion of them by 2020 - have in common is that they create detailed data about their users, and lots of it. From transactions and customer profiles to usage patterns and even location, the Internet of Things is really an Internet of Data that is begging to be cross-referenced and analysed. It exists not to help people per se, but as a new tool for collecting valuable business intelligence.

We asked a few business intelligence experts for their views on the Internet of Data - what it is, how it's organised and how organisations should best make intelligent, but ethical, use of it.

Data from smart devices

"By storing and analysing this data, companies have the opportunity to gain valuable business insight from IoT," says Matt Pfeil, Chief Customer Officer and Co-founder at big data applications company DataStax, who gives an example of a device that is being internet-enabled - the thermostat.

"Now you get a clear picture of how much energy is being used, when it is being used, and can compare this to other energy users," he says. "Link this up to other account data, and the company can observe patterns to save energy - for example, setting the default temperature a degree cooler at installation." It may seem a trivial amount, but across millions of devices it adds up to a huge amount of savings for customers.

"As more devices connect to the internet, the data they create can be linked together, and if you don't have that record over time, you can't get value from it," says Pfeil. "Time-series data provides the potential for insight around how we live and interact with our homes, our jobs and our cities."

The Internet of Data equals business intelligence

Companies are collecting data from all quarters to gain insight, but it's not just about understanding customers' 'buying journeys'."Operations and supply chain data would not normally be looked at alongside sales data, as they are viewed as separate departments within the business," says Southard Jones, Vice President of Product Strategy at business intelligence and analytics company Birst. "However, using analytics, you can see if there are common patterns in the customer base - are customers that spend more on service levels or speed of delivery more profitable than those that focus on price alone?"

This analysis then allows marketeers to target potential customers based on their favourable patterns of behaviour, whether that be the time and location they use an app, how and when they heat their homes, or - in the near future - when and where they drive their car.

Is money being wasted on collecting useless data?

With Markets and Markets predicting that the big data market will hit $46 billion (around 30 billion, AU$65 billion) in value by 2018, there has been much investment going on.

Existing systems and software are creating a lot of the data that companies collect. "A lot of money is being invested for potentially minimal short-term return," says Fletcher, who thinks that the potential of big data is in the interconnections and interrelationships it will reveal, not the volume of it collected. "Realising the benefits of big data in the sense of interconnectedness will inevitably take time and investment," he adds.

Since the cost of storage has plummeted, this is at little cost to businesses. "When storage costs peanuts, it becomes more economically viable to store data that you can create value from over time," says Pfeil. "Each transaction that a customer takes part in can create more value for the future, improving the service or providing further opportunities - the opportunity cost of not storing that data is less than the investment required to keep it."Source : http://bit.ly/1KNy6BE