Here's a look at three of them:
Facebook: Traffic is highest between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. ET.
Best time: Between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. ET
Worst time: 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. ET
Pinterest: Saturday morning is the best time to post.
Best time: 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET or 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. ET
Worst time: 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. ET
LinkedIn: Post before or after business hours.
Best time: 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. ET or 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. ET
Worst time: 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. ET
1. Publish your email newsletter to social accounts
2. Boost the chance that social and email content will rank high in organic searches
3. Make emails easier to share
In a study of 3,128 HubSpot B2B customers, LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.60%, four times higher than Twitter (.67%) and seven times better than Facebook (.39%).
During a special lunch-time event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Facebook's CTO Bret Taylor introduced a number of new industry-wide initiatives for the mobile web. Facebook is also working with a number of other vendors to define better web standards that can be implemented across devices to ensure that users can get a consistent mobile web app experience across devices. The Core Mobile Web Platform, as this new group is called, will work to ensure that there are very specific mobile web standards that developers can expect to be available across devices and mobile browers.
COMMANDMENTS
- Work on one thing at a time until finished.
- Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
- Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
- Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
- When you can’t create you can work.
- Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
- Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
- Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
- Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
- Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
- Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well.
Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.
Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it. 8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
By creating in-house content, social Web sites can increase the amount of time that users spend on their sites, thereby increasing their value to advertisers.
Andrew McLaughlin, a vice president at Tumblr, said that in telling stories about its users, the company wanted Mr. Mohney and Ms. Bennett, the only two hires for the time being, to “do real journalism and analysis, not P.R. fluff.”
“Of course, it’s obviously in our self-interest as a company to surface more compelling stories about creators on Tumblr; at the same time, though, we think Chris and Jessica will be able to do so in ways that embody professional rigor and first-rate writing,” he said in an e-mail message.
According to people familiar with the situation, the review is an effort by the marketer to consolidate the nearly 20 media agencies it works with around the world to one or two agencies.
I say it almost every day, but the real value of social media is enabling PR, marketing and sales to work together more effectively. Generating a warm lead out of a conversation with a group of people self-selected to be interested in issues the surrounding your product or service is a hell of a lot more likely to close than a cold lead generated from a palm card sent to 10,000 names on a spreadsheet or an email sent to 100,000 names in some rental email database.Some of the features to be found in Service Cloud 2 Sales Cloud 2:
Twitter integration: In Sales Cloud 2, uses may Twitter stream into Salesforce so sales people can engage in conversations with people and add that information into the sales funnel. In Service Cloud 2, customer support may follow Twitter and respond to people with real-time customer support.
Answers: This is a pretty cool feature. A Dell executive showed how an "Answer," tab can be added into Facebook where customers may pose their questions.
Mobile: A sign that moble apps are here to stay. Sales people may use the platform to send documents through the Salesforce platform.
Social media is just one of the tools that I use on a daily basis. To focus on just that and make it my identity would be like calling a runner a "sneaker guy." They might love their sneakers, but it's still the method they use to get from where they are to where they want to be. The way I use social media is similar ... I use it for marketing. I'm a marketing guy first and foremost. It's why my blog is called Influential Marketing and why you won't ever hear my introduce myself as an expert in social media. I use it often, and do know what I'm doing - but my expertise and my career is in marketing.So many people are fixated on the tools of social media that they are missing the big picture. Marketing is still marketing, you just use additional channels- channels with some different rules and best practices.
Hmmmm. Tempting.....but no.
This is one of the most high profile and rewarding beats in Sports because our coverage of the city's MLB franchise is at the center of our department's mission. It is also a very demanding job. It involves covering upwards of 140-150 games per year, in addition to spring training and the off-season.The beat writer is also responsible for regular posts to the Nationals Journal blog, which has a large and passionate following of baseball fans. A background in sports is not essential, though the ideal candidate would be someone who has high energy, a willingness to travel and a love for the game of baseball.
We would like to fill this position soon to give the writer time to acclimate before the start of spring training in Florida in mid-February.
1) Newsprint may be black and white but the media business isn’t – While people tend to lean towards a twofold viewpoint (the world was this way, now it’s that way; people used to do things this way, now people do things another way), the truth is that the advent of new forms of media have yet to wholly kill previous forms. Television didn’t kill radio. The VCR didn’t kill the movies. Okay so maybe the Internet struck a near fatal blow to the music industry, but even in that case, things continue to evolve. In Chris’ words, “People want to get into a binary debate that we used to just all want (the newspaper) because we had no choice and now people want the raw feed to mix up their own news. From where I sit what’s really happening is that people have splintered in a lot of different directions. You still have people who value the gatekeeper/passive experience at one end and then you have (people on the other end) who just want the raw feed of all data washing over them, but mostly people exist on the span in between.”
2) Never underestimate the power of human nature - The people who get newspapers in print tend to be committed to getting the product in that form and whether it’s habit or not, they tend to stick with getting that paper delivered to their doorstep. O’Brien related that when the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased publishing its print edition and went web only, thanks to a joint operating agreement all P-I subscribers were switched automatically to the only remaining Seattle daily – The Seattle Times. People had the option to cancel, but something interesting happened. They didn’t. Not only did they retain their existing subscriptions, but when those began to run out, almost everyone renewed. O’Brien is not surprised by this and spoke of the digitally saturated people with whom he speaks every day – the venture capitalists and tech company executives whose lives are shackled to Blackberries and RSS feeds. “These are people who use technology for everything in their lives and they still get the paper in print. They still have it delivered to their doorstep.”
3) In today’s rapidly moving world, tactile yet passive experiences have merit - One of my favorite things about that morning paper is, quite simply, turning the pages. Humans are, after all, kinesthetic creatures, so the hands-on experience of a paper has some value. O’Brien agrees with that, and thinks that there’s something even more simple. Sometimes people just want a “psychologically different experience … a purely passive experience.” He went on to explain that oftentimes people don’t want “something with buttons or to click around. Even with a Kindle, there are buttons to push and that’s not appealing to them. They just want something that’s there. Something they don’t have to think about.” There are some who disagree with that perspective, but I’m not one of them.
Now, we turn our attention to two of my favorite topics, history and food.
Verizon has performed well despite not having the iPhone. On Monday, the company reported solid first-quarter results in its wireless business, edging out AT&T in net customer additions.Jeez.
The OpenSocial foundation also launched a website: opensocial.orgYahoo's announcement Tuesday could also put pressure on Facebook, the closely held social network that so far has not signed on to the effort.
Yahoo called itself a "founding member" of the foundation, which is planned to be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework. Related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1.
The foundation will focus on issues including technology, documentation and intellectual property.
Social applications -- which let users do things such as see the music friends are listening to and share photo slideshows - have emerged as a popular activity for users of social networking sites, and a potentially powerful vehicle for delivering advertisements. Prior to OpenSocial, if a developer built a "favorite photos" application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site.
Google introduced the initiative to put pressure on Facebook and MySpace, which is owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Facebook offers its own specifications for software developers and the over 7,000 such add-on applications for its site have contributed to Facebook's popularity and usage.
Steve Pearman, MySpace's senior vice president of product strategy, said, "Yahoo is an important addition to the OpenSocial movement, and through this foundation we will work together to provide developers with the tools to make the Internet move faster and to foster more innovation and creativity."
Nokia is rumoured to be poised to take a stake in Facebook as part of a partnership between it and the mobile phone maker where the social network will be integrated into Nokia's handsets. A report on tech blog, PaidContent claims that the "the Facebook placement could be as prominent as the YouTube button on the main screen of iPhone." The site also cites "sources" who say the "early stage talks" involve the possibility of Nokia purchasing a stake in the company. Spokespersons from either side failed to comment, although a Nokia exec reportedly admits: "There is talk of a partnership in the works."Interesting no? How many times have we seen the builders/owners of the "pipes" look enviously at the content developers/organizers and wonder how to get a piece of the action? Nokia is hardly a carrier, but it is very intriging that they are differentiating themselves by trying to associate themselves with a popular destination community- a la iPhone and YouTube.
The rumours come a week after Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said on a US TV interview that the site was "highly unlikely" to go public in 2008. However, the firm reportedly took an undisclosed amount of funding last week, rumoured to be between USD10m and USD15m, from European Founders Fund, a firm owned by three German entrepreneurs, the Samwer Brothers. The investors are also said to have a stake in Facebook rival, LinkedIn. Various rumours surround Facebook and it was also recently linked with an acquisition of social community and online address book, Plaxo.
Nokia, which said it was to cut some 2,300 jobs last week as part of the closure of a German plant, has been making moves into the online space of late. Earlier this month it signed a deal with mobile games firm Vivendi. Last month, it said it is to offer mobile users unlimited access to music downloads from the second half of 2008, with a content deal with Universal Music. Meanwhile, it has also been expanding and making deals based on its newly launched Ovi mobile platform.
Publicis CEO Maurice Levy is warning that too many new media companies are relying on advertising for their business model, reports the FT. "Everyone is seeing advertising as the manna," says Levy. "Far too many people are building plans based on advertising and they may well be disappointed because there is not enough money for everyone." Levy likened the growth of web 2.0 businesses to that of internet companies prior to the dotcom bust. "Now everyone building a Web 2.0 operation believes he will receive the advertising," he says. IAC/InteractiveCorp chairman Barry Diller, meanwhile, says that Microsoft's USD240m investment for a 1.6% stake in Facebook reflected not as much a USD15bn valuation of the site, as a strategy by Microsoft to prevent Google from snatching the stake. "If it's real money it's insane," he says. Paris-based Publicis has made several acquisitions to boost its digital marketing portfolio in the past year, of which the largest deal was its takeover of Digitas in Dec 2006 for USD1.3bn.
Microsoft is rumoured to be considering making a public offer for Yahoo! if it isn't successful in its bid for a Facebook stake, according to the New York Post. The Murdoch-owned US paper claims that the software giant has thought about bidding publicly for the search engine for some months, after former Yahoo! CEO Terry Semel rebuffed all efforts to buy the company. It was hoped a public offer could stimulate shareholder interest, which would in turn put pressure on the management of the search giant to sell. Microsoft has USD21bn in cash available to spend, and is reportedly in talks with Facebook to acquire a stake in the social network, which Microsoft values at USD10bn. But, the New York newspaper claims, it is not willing to buy into both the social network and the search engine, given that it has already spent USD6bn this year buying aQuantive, and so is currently weighing up the two acquisition options.On the other hand, the cynical angel on my shoulder asks, "so how long would it take to integrate Microsoft and Yahoo, fifty years or so?"
