What Your Favorite Social Media Network Says About You

“You are what you eat,” or so the old saying goes, but I’m pretty sure it’s high time we update that adage to “You are what you tweet.” Whether you want to admit it or not, the things you get up to online say a ton about who you really are as a person. Read on to find out what your favorite social media network says about you:

Instagram

If you had to describe yourself in three words, you’d say: “Foodie. Adventurer. Storyteller.” You can’t remember the last time you ate a meal without organizing the items on your plate in a particular way. Your fantasize about quitting your office job, taking a cab to the airport, and never looking back. You know a lot about angles and lighting and teeth-whitening products. Your most overused saying is, “We should totally get together soon! I’ll text you!” You dream in shades of Perpetua.

Facebook

You’ve got friends in low places, high places, and downright bizarre places… And you always know where they are at any given moment because they’ve all “checked in” on Facebook. Duh. You believe that everyone has the right to hear your opinion. Your 2016 New Year’s resolution was to stop getting so invested in other people’s problems. You haven’t had much success keeping that resolution, unfortunately.

Snapchat

In your world, the weekend starts on Thursday night. You can’t remember the last time you turned down an invitation of any kind—you is an “up for anything” kind of person. You’re maybe a wee bit “much” for most people’s tastes, but you couldn’t care less, to be honest. You would describe your personal style as “Miley Cyrus meets Instagram model meets Blossom.”

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is your favorite social media network because it’s the only one you participate in. You simply can’t fathom why anyone would be so foolish as to have any part of their personal lives on the Internet for public consumption. Don’t they know that employers have Google, too?

Twitter

No one would ever accuse you of beating around the bush. You’re a straight shooter, and you like to keep things short and sweet. You aren’t afraid to call people out on their bullshit. There’s nothing you love more than a rousing debate, and you are well-versed in the world of Internet acronyms. You always have a dozen projects on the go, but you can’t seem to follow through with any of them. Your current undertaking? Writing a screenplay about a woman who stumbles upon a political cover up in action and live-tweets the entire thing.

 Source : http://bit.ly/1LmeWnj

3 Traits the Strongest Online Entrepreneurs All Share

Here are 3 traits the strongest online entrepreneurs all share that you should be imitating

If you want to be a competitive digital marketer, one of the best ways to do that is to mimic the practices of people who are already successful. After all, the tactics that have helped them build their brand should work for you, too.

Here are 3 traits the strongest online entrepreneurs all share that you should be imitating. 

1. They are amazing and innovative digital marketers who study hard and execute

The most successful online entrepreneurs know how to reach people in their target market. They can craft ad copy titles that beg to be clicked. They know just the right subject line to put in their emails so that recipients can't resist the urge to open them.

They may not know everything there is to know about search engine optimization (SEO), but they've forged alliances with the best SEO teams so that their content ranks in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

How did they get to that point? They learned. They immersed themselves in marketing articles and books.

Marketing isn't something you learn by accident. If you want to know how to sell, learn from the best in the business. Pick up some great books on marketing and apply the principles that you read about to your own marketing efforts.

Great marketers also define their target market and segment it. They'll craft a marketing message that's custom-made to people in various segments within their target market as well as to people who are at various stages of the sales funnel.

They always use analytics to determine if their most recent campaigns have been successful. If not, they dump those campaigns and put more resources into the ones that are generating revenue.

2. They make sure to provide more value and quality online than anyone else

If you want to develop a following online, follow the example of great marketers and start offering freebies. Give so much value away for free, that people cannot ignore you.

The exact nature of the freebies that you will offer depends on your business model. One of the best ways to gain an audience, position yourself as an authority in your space, and appear selfless is to offer free information in the form of content marketing.

Your business website should have a blog. Use that blog to share information that people in your target market will find useful. If you're a great writer, you can write the articles yourself. However, if you're not very good at writing, it's best to leave the task to somebody else.

Remember, though, that content marketing efforts should appeal to people in your target market. If you're selling a skin care product, you'll want to post articles that will interest people who are in the market for a car (for example: "What are the Best Anti-Aging Ingredients for You" or "What are Skin Brighteners and Why You'll Love Them").

When you offer free information in the form of content marketing, you're doing something for people in your target market. That helps build good will and brand name recognition. Most importantly, though, it brings people to your website where you can eventually close a sale or add the person as a lead in your email list.

Finally, keep in mind that content marketing does not only apply to text. This can be videos, images, events, TV, radio, podcasts, etc. Any type of content that your demographic is interested in.

3. They are great planners, can delegate and focus on what moves the needle the most (80/20 rule)

Overall, great online entrepreneurs need to have outstanding business acumen and there are few key things that go along with that.

First, they're great planners. They don't craft marketing campaigns on-the-fly. Instead, they meet with stakeholders, build a consensus that's backed up by empirical evidence, and craft a marketing plan. That plan will define the overall marketing strategy and define activities that will help reach specific goals. 

Second, great marketers delegate. Simply put, there is too much involved in digital marketing for one person to "do it all." A successful online business includes design, development, copy, online advertising, email list building, email distribution, social media marketing, and search engine optimization.

Those are all disciplines that are best left to trained professionals. It's asking too much to expect one entrepreneur to wear all those hats. They need to be able to find the right people, for the right cost, who can do the job well and delegate.

Finally, great online entrepreneurs focus on most of their effort on what works (80/20 rule). They don't assume that a particular campaign or marketing message is going to work. Instead, they run a couple of different options, evaluate the outcome, and stick with the option that yields the best results. 

Once they have the numbers, they double down on what is the most effective in order to maximize that channel. 

 Source : http://bit.ly/1QBDvbE

Predictions for marketers and brand managers in 2016

The start of a year means a new slate of predictions.

Here are some key things we expect to see in 2016:

1. Networks and advertisers will realize engagement is key. Though some measurement organizations continue to opine about the value of measuring conversation on Twitter and Facebook and how that affects TV/advertisers, 2016 will mark the year when networks and advertisers wise up to the fact that most people don’t talk on social media.

So, if you’re measuring talk, you’re missing the big picture. Focus will turn to measurement of “engagement” more broadly defined to analyze and measure the signals that all users of social media actually do, not just the hyperactive users who represent the majority of content on everyone’s feeds. In our view, conversation is just a subset of engagement.

2. Companies will resist processing too much information. The first use cases of social media data in respect to driving business decisions was a game of cherry-picking metrics and flipping a coin to get meaningful business results. Over the years, we’ve championed looking at the complete picture of metrics as the only way to get meaningful business results.

Though many people in the industry now agree, looking at 2,000+ social media and digital metrics also has its set of challenges. Brand managers who analyze and make use of the right curated and derived metrics will provide the advantage of coming to most business decisions more quickly, digging into lower-level metrics only when they need more specific analysis.

3. Chat platforms will embrace their value.  Younger social media users are shifting their attention to chat platforms (WhatsApp, Snapchat, WeChat, Viber, Kik, etc.). There is a great and exciting opportunity to hyper-target audiences; however, you must do it correctly.

Chat platforms will look to build the right native ad products and, more important, the right measurement to gauge engagement. Brands’ stories must align with how the platforms work, not be repurposed or syndicated from other platforms.

4. New measurement tool will excite and confuse. The entire TV/advertising industry is waiting with bated breath for Nielsen’s Total Audience Measurement—the magic solution to cure the ills of declining TV viewership. (It’s not declining, but rather moving to new platforms: tablets, mobile, computers, OTT devices, etc.).

We know it’s launching in 2016 and will, no doubt, have glitches that everyone will complain about. Hopefully there will be compassion out there for this massively complex undertaking.

This year will therefore be a big year of education and testing in this world:

• Education—because everyone has to learn exactly what this is measuring, all the vocabulary and all the features.

• Testing—because these data have never been available to the marketplace, so packaging and pricing will be all over the place.

5. Network advertising will go old school. Harkening back to the days of sponsored programs, networks will expand advertising inventory for integrated experiences and other non-30-second pod advertising opportunities. This year’s Pepsi/Empire collaboration will be unleashed in many different forms by major networks and advertisers to cut through the clutter, avoid time-shifting behavior and make a meaningful impact.

6. TV programs will evolve into brands living in a post-viewership world. Though we’ve been saying it for years—and someone (Philippe Dauman in Viacom’s earnings announcements) finally said the same thing—the notion of selling 30-second pods is not the way of the future.

With the realization finally sinking in that consumers can interact with shows (beyond watching 30- or 60-minute episodes) every day across social media platforms, expect that network execs will make moves as simple as selling native posts on network-owned feeds, releasing sponsored mobile games inspired by the shows, or creating real-world sponsored events with talent and non-episodic content.

7. The “audience targeting/programmatic” honeymoon may wear off. The ad world will continue to focus on hyper-targeting and addressability of everything—linear and nonlinear, across different screens and devices. The question is whether all the time and financial investment going into these technologies will reap premium ad pricing to sustain the continued investment and evolution. Industry pros might be asking for it, but that doesn’t mean they’ll put their money where their mouths are.

On that front, brand managers will be forced to reconcile which initiatives drive conversion and which ones drive brand. Driving conversion clearly drives the bottom line; this will lead to more questioning of the role of brand marketing that’s not tied to conversion and the weight it receives in advertisers’ marketing strategies.

8. The industry will up its game so consumers don’t want to block ads. Ad blocking is a hot topic, but the conversation will shift from, “How do technologies stop it or enact it?” to, more critically, “How does the industry change the ways in which ads are conceived and put in front of consumers so that consumers don’t want to block them in the first place?”

9. Election year will usher in a new era of social media analytics. Social media data will be finally be used in meaningful ways to project contest results, including the race for the White House. Though we are not sure we’ll see something as sophisticated as Nate Silver’s 538, these data signals are definitely heading in that direction.

Source : http://bit.ly/1PGGdw1

4 Things Successful Change Leaders Do Well

We know that two-thirds of large scale transformation efforts fail. But that’s not a terribly helpful piece of information―unless we’re looking for confirmation that this is hard, really hard. What is useful is to understand what leaders can do to substantially increase the odds that their companies won’t be among the two-thirds of those that fail. From my research and work with companies around the world leading large-scale transformation initiatives, here are the four things I’ve found that virtually all successful change leaders do really well:

Recognize embedded tensions and paradoxes

Smart, capable, solid professionals most often perform well in their roles until they reach a level in their organizations at which they are confronted with a series of embedded tensions and paradoxes that make leading effectively much more complicated. The most common paradoxes leaders face when driving a transformation effort are:

1. Revitalization vs. Normalization. At the core of every change initiative is the desire to breathe new life into the organization―to revitalize ways of thinking, behaving and working. But one change initiative often morphs into many, and before long employees become “change weary.” Thus, we find ourselves in the conflicted situation of needing revitalization but desiring normalization.
2. Globalization vs. Simplification. Doing business today means doing business globally, but the complexities brought on by globalization are often in conflict with the need for organizations to make it simple for customers to do business with them. Leaders struggle with creating organizational responses that address the need to master globalization while offering customers and employees optimal simplification.
3. Innovation vs. Regulation. Many organizations, particularly in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, are saddled with trying to do business, let along innovate, under increasingly crushing regulatory environments. This is a stifling tax on a company’s capacity to find creative approaches to solving unmet customers’ needs. As such we struggle with the tension between the desire to boost innovation and the need to operate under increasing regulation.
4. Optimization vs. Rationalization. Customers not only have more power today―in some industries, they seem to have all of the power. Organizations are struggling to provide solutions that are better, faster, cheaper and increasingly customized. Leaders are caught in a seemingly endless struggle to reconcile the tension between optimizing benefits to customers while rationalizing their costs of doing business.
5. Digitization vs. Humanization. Advanced technology is at the core of virtually every company’s business model today. Entire value chains are being digitized. Yet, the onset of ubiquitous digitization is occurring at the same time that individuals are yearning for a sense of meaning in their organizations. Leaders are struggling with how to reconcile the increasing need for the digitization of their business models while trying to create organizational climates that have an authentic sense of humanization―creating an overarching sense of purpose and collective ambition.

Successful transformation leaders embrace these tensions even though they make the challenge more complex. There are no easy answers; however, the leader’s bedrock commitment to helping to reconcile these tensions is paramount. That means above all committing to an on-going communications and listening campaign so people know what’s going on and know how they might contribute to the transformation effort―and know that they are invited to do so. This process starts by the CEO and top team telling powerful and compelling stories of where the company has been, where it is now and where it needs to go―and why. But it doesn’t end there. Senior leaders must be ready to open up the flood gates so managers and employees closest to the client interface can surface these tensions and discuss them openly. While this might not resolve the tensions and paradoxes, it enables people to at least acknowledge that they exist, have their concerns heard, and discuss proactive ways forward together.

Hold everyone accountable

The leadership of the change effort can’t end with the top team, the top 100 managers, or the top 1,000 managers. It has to be an all-hands-on-deck engagement. The change leader must signal that enterprise-wide transformation will be a collective effort, with accountability distributed throughout the organization.

But it is far easier to say this than to do this, so change leaders must be ready to back up their statements with real world initiatives that will strengthen engagement. For example, when Hess Corporation launched its 2020 Change Initiative, CEO John Hess challenged his entire leadership team to come up with solutions that would make the company more agile, cost conscience, and faster at decision making. And to minimize change weariness brought on by needless duplication of effort, he created a champions team responsible for coordinating the variety of efforts underway.

Invest in new organizational capabilities

Change leaders must go beyond storytelling, motivation, and mobilization efforts―they need to provide resources so that the organization has what it needs to win in the new environment. This might include capital improvements, process improvements, and building new talent capabilities.

For example, for three decades leading up to 2010, HSBC had successfully pursued a growth strategy and organizational capability that was founded upon acquisitions. However, with acquisition upon acquisition, the leaders within HSBC failed to develop a one-company culture, which made it difficult to integrate its offerings to an increasingly demanding customer base. As such, Stephen Green, HSBC’s Chairman at the time, set the company on a course that called for a dramatic slowdown of acquisitions, at least until the current portfolio of companies was integrated and a culture of what Green referred to as Collective Management was cemented. This meant nothing short of building new organizational capabilities based upon collaboration and client-first thinking, which not only meant developing new systems and processes but building a collective mindset that would make aspiring to being a one-company culture a reality.

Emphasize continuous learning

It’s far easier to talk about revitalization and renewal than to actually do it. The companies that pull it off have transformation leaders that commit to a relentless learning process.

Perhaps the best example I know of a remarkably successful transformation leader is Alan Mulally, who not only led the transformation effort for Boeing Commercial Airlines, but also the stunning turnaround of Ford Motor Company. Mulally would be the first to insist that Ford’s transformation was not his achievement but rather the collective achievement of thousands of stakeholders, including employees, suppliers, dealers, unions, financial institutions, Board members and others. Mulally believed deeply in his “leading together” philosophy from his Boeing experience, but this became even more critical at Ford, due to the multitude of stakeholders and a political infighting culture that had become toxic. Mulally would have none of that. He brought his top managers together weekly to assess problems and progress, through his implementation process called the Creating Value Roadmap. Met with heavy resistance at first due to fear of admitting problems, Mulally pursued this course and built trust that those who were brave enough to acknowledge that they needed help were actually showcased as exactly the kind of leader that Mulally was looking for in Ford’s future. At every meeting, managers were asked: what have we learned by airing concerns, making course corrections, and especially, fixing problems together? By combining his relentless focus on implementation and making tough calls with an equally important focus on continuous learning, Mulally transformed Ford from a moribund company on the verge of bankruptcy to one of today’s most successful automobile companies in the world.

Leveraging these four activities, while framing the transformation effort as a collective challenge to be embraced together, fuels positive change over the long haul—which is important since the transformation journey is a never-ending one for most companies today. Ultimately, these practices create a culture of agility and resiliency that will pay dividends out into the future, as large-scale change becomes an organizational capability and not a recipe for management failure.

Source : http://bit.ly/1SlSxH1

How to Find the Best Hashtags and Boost Your Social Media Engagement

Before we start talking about how to find the best hashtags, let’s do a little review of what exactly hashtags are — this is for those of you who aren’t exactly social media gurus; the rest of you can feel free to skip over.

A hashtag is just a way of labelling and finding social media updates. It could apply to something that’s trending, like #Movember, or it could be specific to a certain campaign, like #CureBreastCancer.

Hashtags started out on Twitter, but now they’re used across all social media. So, which ones are relevant to your niche, and which ones should you use? I’ve given advice on hashtag use and overuse elsewhere; today we’re mostly going to focus on the tags themselves.

There are a number of online tools that you can use to find the best hashtags.

Twitter is still one of the best resources for finding great hashtags, but don’t discount the usefulness of other tools. The following are three of the best — and they’re free!

WhatTheTrend

WhatTheTrend is a veritable wellspring of Twitter statistics and information. It’s owned by Hootsuite, which means that you can track hashtags as streams within Hootsuite. It lets you see trends globally, nationally, and even trends that are specific to your own city. You can track by the day, or by the month. The basic service is free, but if you want more options you can upgrade to paid service. 

Hashtags.org

This venerable service got its start in 2007 as a freebie, and the basic tracking functions are still free — you can see what’s been trending over the previous 24 hours. However, if you want to store hashtags and monitor them over longer periods of time, you will have to upgrade to the paid service.

Trendsmap

To be realistic, Trendsmap isn’t the most exciting tool visually when it comes to helping you find the best hashtags, but it does allow you to see hashtags by city, country or continent on a world map. If your main focus is local, this is a very useful, very practical tool.

Using hashtags effectively

It’s not enough to just know how to use hashtags. You need to make sure that your hashtags are relevant to your subject matter. It’s also a good idea to base your hashtags on popular keywords. Google Keyword Planner is a great resource you can use. You also want to be careful how you structure your hashtags.

After you create your hashtag, read it, read it again, and then say it out loud. Why? Because a bad hashtag can make you an object of embarrassment and ridicule…it’s happened to personalities as wonderful as singer Susan Boyle and companies as big as Research in Motion (RIM).

Measuring the competition

I often head over to Twazzup to see how people are using a certain hashtag at any time of the day. You sign in with Twitter and then enter a hashtag or keyword. You get all the latest results scrolling down your screen, as well as how influencers are using the hashtag.

This lets you see what kind of competition there will be to get eyeballs on your hastagged tweet. Twazzup will also tell you about how many times that hashtag is used in one hour. If you’re using a hashtag that is used 3,000 times per hour, you know two things:

• It’s a popular hashtag, and
• Your post will be pushed off the top of recently published posts very quickly.

Those two attributes play against one another. You want to use a hashtag that gets some use, but if it’s too popular, your tweet might get instantly buried.

To decide what to do in situations like these, you’ll have to do some testing. You can also develop long-tail hashtags and use them along with the more popular hashtags; for example #smallbusiness and #smallbusinessorlando.

Now for a final word: #goodluck!

    Source : http://bit.ly/1ZfVCZp

Vintage advertising

Entrepreneurs: 10 Things to Do When You Feel Like Quiting

1) Go ahead and quit! It's only for a day or two. Sometimes you have to just surrender what you think should be happening today. Let go... There is is so much freedom to be found in the releasing of all your "shoulds."

2) Reach out for support from like-minded people. These people can be your spouse, best friend, religious groups, or Facebook groups. You'll be surprised how strangers can sometimes understand and encourage you better than people you've known all your life. The point is, reach out for encouragement from people who get where you are, but have the right words to push you forward, because they have been there themselves, 1,000 times.

3) Go to bed. Your body needs to heal from the stress life is applying. Plus everything looks better in the morning.

4) Keep your rituals. Exercise, gratitude, affirmations, visualizations are what got you this far. They will carry you to the finish line. Examine how these rituals are working for you: see number five.

5) Recount your victories. When David (in the Bible) got ready to fight Goliath, he reminded himself that he had already slain a lion and a bear. This gave him the reassurance he could defeat the giant at hand. What life or business giants have you already defeated? You are well able.

6) Clean your physical space. When I get stressed or overwhelmed, I clean. I used to close the shades and go to bed for days (before I had a baby). So this is an improvement. Cleaning gives you back control over your environment. Clear work space clutter. Wash up those few nagging dishes, etc. Clean till you feel free again. That's a good time to talk on the phone to a buddy too. Helps with the crazy need for multitasking.

7) Tell yourself the truth. What false beliefs made you quit? Were you telling yourself, "You can't, you'll never get there, there's too much to do, if other people only knew what a failure I am, I should be able to contribute financially to my family, no money means I'm a failure, or I can never learn it all." Wow! We are so rough on ourselves. Lighten up! Feel your feelings. But tell yourself the truth for every lie. Review number five.

8) Revisit your teaching or business philosophies. Make sure they are still true for you. Do you believe in Magic or is it just all hard work? Good question. The goal is to become more and more authentic every day.

9 )Set some goals that you can accomplish tomorrow without much effort. This restores the feeling of success.

10) Laugh. Dance. Grab a raft and ride the wave. This too will pass.

Source : http://huff.to/1N1q57h

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Kids using secret mobile apps to keep things hidden from parents.

There’s a parenting alert about kids keeping secrets on their phones.

Kids are installing so-called secret apps that hide media like texts and photos from their parents. 

So how do these cyber secret keepers work? One of the apps looks like an ordinary calculator app on the iPhone.

In fact, it is a standard calculator, but when you enter the secret password that your child created and hit the percent key, a photo album appears.

Now there’s pictures hidden that your child didn’t want you to see.

Apps like these are becoming so popular, a county district attorney in Alabama sent out a warning to parents on Facebook. Pamela Casey said a parent called her about "Private Photo"

“You and I know if one child knows about it, many children know about it, so take a minute and grab that phone,” Casey said in the video.

   

Experts say you can keep your kids from these apps by turning off their ability to install apps without your approval.

“The problem with these apps is they allow kids to hide their cyber lives from their parents and sometimes the things they’re hiding can harm them,” Yahoo! Editor in Chief Dan Tynan told ABC's "Good Morning America."

You can watch GMA's full story below or click here for a link:

Source : http://bit.ly/1NWBIRV