First of all, Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful women in the world that gave life to us and have put up with all our tantrums growing up! In honour of this special day, Google have placed a doodle animation on their homepage, with two “children” jumping into their “mother’s” arms, giving her a hug and flowers. Hover your mouse over the doodle to reveal the special message “Happy Mother’s Day!” and click on the animation to see their search results for Mother’s Day.
American Anna Jarvis was the pioneer of this holiday. She campaigned to make “Mother’s Day” a recognized holiday in the United States, and succeeded in 1914.
While we Australians celebrate Mother’s Day on the 12th of May every year, it’s actually celebrated on the 18th of March in countries including Saudi Arabia, Portugal, United Kingdom and El Salvador. Google celebrated this with the doodle below. Read more →
So you’ve spent quite a bit of time writing the kind of high quality content you hope will be valuable for your readers. Would you rather confine your audience to your blog subscribers or expose your article to a greater audience? Of course everyone would choose the latter, but where do you start? Fortunately for you, Divvy HQ created a handy 12-step infographic blog promotion strategy checklist you can follow for each blog post you write. With these simple steps you can leverage your existing articles to generate a lot more exposure for your blog post.
Some recommendations such as posting to social media sites are more obvious. But others less known tactics such as including your most recent blog post title and link in your email signature make this infographic worth reading. Read more →
I’m always surprised at the lack of people taking advantage of internet browser extensions. Whether you have Firefox, Internet Explorer or Chrome, there are thousands of extensions that save you a lot of time and effort (and for free I might add). If you use social media as part of your business promotions or offer services to your clients, chances are you will be managing multiple Twitter accounts. Juggling these accounts can be cumbersome when you’ve got other more pressing daily tasks to attend to. That’s where these internet browser extensions offering improved Twitter management come in handy.
Silver Bird for Chrome & Windows
The Silver Bird Twitter management extension offers a lot of features packed into a pop-up box. While it is only available for the Chrome internet browser, it also comes in the form of a Windows app. Simply click on the extension icon in your current browser to perform quick Twitter tasks.
Silverbird uses tabs to separate your timeline, mentions, direct messages, favorites and lists with a search box for quick Twitter hashtag or keyword searches. You can also see the latest Twitter trends. It also offers great flexibility with complete control over which tweets you want to see such as direct messages, mentions, lists and your home timeline, as well as the option to have notices for new tweets pop up.
Today’s Google doodle is brought to you in the form of an interactive zipper running across the Google homepage. This doodle pays homage to the late Swedish-American electrical engineer Gideon Sundback, who revolutionized the clothing industry with the invention of the fastening device we love, the zipper. Unless of course, during those times when you’ve forgotten to zip up your pants on public outings. Yes, we’ve all been there.
Google rarely creates Google doodle animations, but this is a much deserved honour for the inventor since modern society owes a lot to the zipper, which has become a staple item on clothing, luggage and so forth.
In 1913, Sundback was the first to perfect the idea for a fastener based on interlocking teeth after almost 20 years of unsuccessful experimentation by his peers. This stroke of genius came from placing a dimple underneath each tooth on the fastener and a nib on the top so it wouldn’t have enough room to move on its own within the dimple of the tooth above it. This safely secured the teeth into place. He took this one step further by creating a manufacturing machine for the new zipper.
Sundback thought his invention was to be used as a simple replacement for hook-and-eye fasteners on women’s boots, not comprehending how widespread it would become within the entire clothing industry by the 1930s. Interestingly, one of the most popular sales campaign began in the 1930s for children’s clothing featuring zippers. It promoted self-reliance in young children as the zippered clothes made dressing oneself easier.
Check out the video of the history of the zipper below if you’re interested.
Pinterest is the talk of the social media town, proving that while content may be king, a picture is still worth a thousand words. Users can “pin” images from across the web to their virtual “board”, creating a collection of their favourite images easily shareable with others. Pinterest wasn’t designed to be a business tool, yet quite a handful of brands have reported that Pinterest drives more traffic to their website than Twitter or LinkedIn or Google+ these past few months. But is it worth acquainting your business with the fastest growing social network around?
Intuit have created a simple infographic I recommend you use to initially screen your business for compatibility with Pinterest. Check it out below:
Read more →
If your Google + account has been gathering dust over the past few months, you’ll find a nice surprise when you log in again. In response to the dwindling activity in its flagship social network, Google announced the start of a major re-design to reinvigorate Google +, starting with a more visually appealing layout and easier navigation. Will these changes make Google + anymore valuable for your business? Read on to find out.
The vision driving these new changes can be summed up in Google Senior Vice President Vic Gundotra’s words,
“A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations,” Mr. Gundotra wrote. “So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google Plus. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly…by focusing on you, the people you care about, and the stuff you’re into, we’re going to continue upgrading all the features you already know and love — from Search and Maps to Gmail and YouTube. With today’s foundational changes we can move even faster — toward a simpler, more beautiful Google”.
Read more →
I can list dozens upon dozens of businesses that have successfully used Twitter to promote their brand, but I have to give special kudos to Smart Car’s official Twitter account for Argentina for creating a very innovative and dare I say, genius, Twitter campaign. When you first see their account, you’re confronted by random lines and incoherent tweets. But follow the instructions on the left hand side of the background and you’ll be in for some digital magic that must have taken a whole lot of patience to implement.
@smartArg
smart Argentina┈┈┏┳┓┈┈┈┈┈┏┓┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈┈
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18 days ago via web · Reply · Retweet · Favorite · powered by @socialditto
Simply hold down the ‘J’ button on your keyboard to continuously scroll down the page and watch the world’s ‘first Twitter commercial’, as the company puts it, unfold. You’ll be taken on a tweet-powered ride through a town full of houses, trees and of course traffic.
Campaigns like this remind me just how powerful a tool Twitter is for brands, allowing them to entertain their fans in new and exciting cost effective ways.
You can check out the video below but I would definitely recommend you experience this first hand.
A new study has revealed that a mere 21% of companies measure their social media efforts. But how do you bridge the social media and ROI divide? Fortunately, in the coming weeks marketers will now be able to more accurately measure their social media through Google Analytics. Social Reports in Google Analytics will enable marketers to measure which social media channel drives the most returns and the tactics behind them that lead to goals being achieved. You can expect these analytics reports to be integrated into SocialMotus in the near future.
The official blog states, this will help you:
What makes these new reports stand out is the sheer number of networks being followed to peace together detailed stats for visitor flow (400 in this case). Contrary to recent actions, these Social Reports don’t seem to be bias towards Google properties with data coming from Google +, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Digg, Quora and the like. Here is an overview of the reports you can expect to see:
Overview Report: see social performance at a glance and its impact on conversions
On the 21st of March 2006, Twitter’s executive chairman and product lead Jack Dorsey sent the first public tweet. Fast track 6 years later and Twitter has become a worldwide phenomenon with an estimated 500 million people using its real-time information and social networking service today. Moreover, Twitter has emerged as a proven marketing channel and communication tool for millions of businesses around the world.
The official Twitter blog says this of the occasion:
Six years may not be very long in human terms, but it’s been quite an enormous span for the thing we know and love as Twitter. When @jack first sketched out his notion in March 2006, no one could have predicted the trajectory of this new Twitter tool for wide-spread communication. Now it seems that there are as many ways to express yourself in 140 characters as there are people doing it. And at last check, there are more than 140 million active users (there’s that number again) — and today we see 340 million Tweets a day. That’s more than 1 billion every 3 days. However concisely, it turns out there’s plenty to say.
Without you, of course, there wouldn’t be a Twitter. We mark our sixth birthday with you in mind, and celebrate your myriad ways of engaging, enjoying, and emoting on our platform. As Jack noted when he posted his sketch of the service he envisioned, “I’m happy this idea has taken root; I hope it thrives.” Thanks to you, it is.
In honour of the big day, here is an infographic by Infographic Labs on just how big Twitter has become. Read more →
As widely anticipated, Facebook timelines have rolled out for business pages. The new timelines are a welcomed addition for businesses, offering greater opportunities for branding and relationship building with fans. The design presents status updates in two columns in a much more visual way. Some of the highlights of the new Facebook timeline pages are the dominant cover page, pinning prominent stories to the top of the page, private messaging, activity logs and more comprehensive admin tools. Here’s a look at the new features and how to take advantage of them.
Cover Photo
Gone is the small profile image on the left hand side of the page. A giant 851 x 351 pixel cover photo will now be displayed on the top of your page which is fantastic for brand building. Unfortunately, you cannot use this as a replacement landing page. Facebook has specified that you cannot include images with:
Pinning & Wide Posts
One feature you must take advantage of are pinning & wider posts.
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