Business | Digital Ethos

Why You Need a Mobile Website

April 6, 2013 by CraigEYaris 1 Comment

Mobile is everywhere. According to Google, more than half of Americans currently own a smartphone, and estimates show that by 2015 there will be more smartphones than PCs surfing the internet.

Why do you need a mobile website?

According to recent studies, the majority of users searching for a local business from a smartphone are looking to buy immediately. They want quick access to important information about your company, which includes services offered, pricing, business hours and contact information. A mobile website puts all of that information at their fingertips. In fact, there was 103% growth in website traffic from smartphones from 2011 – 2012, and US consumers spend almost 1 in every 10 ecommerce dollars using a mobile device (25 Reasons Why You Should Have a Mobile Friendly Website http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/25-reasons-why-you-should-have-a-mobile-friendly-website-0318161). And, if that isn’t enough to convince you that you need a mobile website, how about the little fact that there are more devices connected to the Internet than there are people on Earth.

What is the difference between a mobile optimized site and a regular site?

The biggest difference is screen size. A regular website is developed to be viewed by a desktop or laptop computer with a screen size greater than 14 inches. A mobile site is designed to be viewed on a screen that is considerably smaller. Remember, a mobile website will take advantages of services that mobile devices offer, such as click to call and mapping. This will convert mobile traffic to customers quicker by removing some of the barriers to contact. After all, if I am searching for pizza from my mobile device, it usually means I want pizza now. And, a mobile friendly site will allow me to call that pizza place without having to do anything but click the phone number.

Social Ribbit Desktop View

Social Ribbit Mobile View

In addition, a mobile website will load considerably faster, using less data, than its desktop counterpart. This is important since users expect a mobile website to be faster, and not require major amounts of data, which is paid for by the user.

Finally, check your Google Analytics. How many people visiting your site are are on mobile devices? Google provides that statistic under the “Audience” section of the reports.

The most important reason to go mobile?

Your customers are mobile. Your business needs to be mobile, too. Not only are we using our smartphones while away from our offices and computers, but we are using our mobiles and tablets while watching TV. and movies. We are using them from the comfort of our couches and at our kitchen tables. We are using them to access information quickly and easily. If I can’t access your site from my smartphone or tablet, I’m leaving. I will find a site that provides me the information I need somewhere else.

Have you mobilized your site? If not, why not? If so, have you seen an increase in traffic?

Resources:

5 Reasons Why You Need a Mobile Website RIGHT NOW

25 Reasons Why You Should Have a Mobile Friendly Website

7 Reasons You Need a Mobile Website

Google’s Ready To Go Mo?

About Craig Yaris

Craig E. Yaris is the owner of EsquireTech Solutions, which helps small business get found on the social web, whether through Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, he can both teach you the effective use of any social network or act as your social media manager, enabling you to reach your clients where they are and when they want to hear from you. He can teach your organization the social media best practices that can help you use the tools of today to cost-effectively increase your bottom line. EsquireTech Solutions brings the social web to your business. Visit EsquireTech Solutions or call 516-495-9107 .

Filed Under: Authors, Branding & Marketing, Business, Content Marketing, Design, Digital & Internet Marketing, General, Mobile, Mobile & Technology Tagged With: brand, Business Consulting, internet marketing, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, mobile, Mobile & Technology, mobile websites, websites

Confessions of a Social Media Girl: Why Image based Social Media Marketing might be the Best Sales Tool

March 31, 2013 by Veronica Guzik Leave a Comment

Facebook’s recent change to a more image based newsfeed has got me thinking that perhaps Pinterest may have had the right idea all along. While Facebook is just moving away from highlighting more text based news, Pinterest has been able to capitalize on capturing their audience from the start, and has the viral growth to prove it.

With the new updates allowing businesses to step into the world of Analytics for their Pinterest business page, I can’t help but make the connection that this is a trend in marketing and advertising experts have called on for decades and is really not such exciting marketing news at all. Think of it this way:

It takes our brains seconds longer to connect with text, any seasoned marketer or advertiser will tell you that. As children we reacted better to images because we didn’t need words, and couldn’t use them to associate one item with another. No brainer!

George Lois, the famous creative marketing genius back in the 1970′s had the right idea-If a message isn’t translated to the audience in a millisecond, and then you’ve already lost them. It’s a tale as old as time really.( Yes I was just referencing Beauty and the Beast). Using image, as the basis for a marketing message is the best way to convey an idea, consumers can make their own interpretation and its strikes them emotionally. It seems as marketers we’ve just been so consumed with communicating with words that we’ve forgotten about our other senses. All signs point to Image based marketing as the best sales tool.

On that note: For years trends in the Far East, specifically Japan have focused their advertising centrally around an image that evokes emotion from the viewer. For beauty products featuring an image that dictates the way a woman will feel after using the product, or depicting a benefit has been widely used. In the case of food industry marketing, highlighting an image of a satisfied customer or family rather than the picture of the food sitting on a plate has been a popular way to advertise. I don’t know about you, but if I saw a bunch of happy people standing around a plate of food, I’d imagine it was good. Reading words that TELL me how good something is, is much less powerful or believable.

Lots of folks say history repeats itself; so far it’s been true in every sense, from fashion to politics, and social media is no exception. We’ve been lucky enough to have a new space to connect businesses with the consumer, but seem to have forgotten a few of the fundamentals of marketing, and are now shocked when a new trend seems to evoke a consumer response.

So Why is Image based Social Media Marketing the best sales tool? It quickly evokes emotion from the consumer, and emotion rather than logic is what drives more sales. Consumers react more often on what they THINK they need, rather than what they really do.

About Guest Blogger

This article is a guest post provided by a third party, its content was added to Digital Ethos to help provide additional information for our readers and followers. While the Guest Blogger posts do not undergo the same scrutiny as Authors and lack sources, the content was reviewed and approved as valuable to our mission.

Filed Under: Branding & Marketing, Business, Design, General, Guest Bloggers, Social Media

What the #? Hashtags are Coming to Facebook

March 30, 2013 by CraigEYaris 2 Comments

In every class and presentation I do, I always tell people to keep Twitter and Facebook separate. They use two different languages. Facebook is all about “natural language”. We post the way we speak. We use full sentences, and have posts that can go on for paragraphs. Twitter is the complete opposite. It’s all about brevity. After all, you need to fit everything into 140 characters (and we recommend only using 120 to allow for retweets). That includes any links, and hashtags that you may use.

What is a “Hashtag”?

In it’s basic form, a “hashtag” is an organizational tool. It is a way to search for tweets that have a common topic or idea. For example, if you search Twitter for #HungerGames or #Bacon, you will get every tweet that uses these hashtags, and would be able to follow conversations and find out who says what about a certain topic. Anything can be a hashtag, and no-one owns them. While teaching my class at Hofstra University on Digital and Social Media, I use the hashtag #HofstraDigital so that the students can communicate through Twitter, and with me, on any topic they wish.

In addition, if you use social dashboards like Hootsuite, you can set up columns for specific hashtags to follow, and you will see all tweets using that hashtag in an organized fashion.

Hashtags can also be found on other social networks, including Pinterest, GooglePlus, and Instagram, and I’ve even seen them on T.V. shows, so that people can follow the conversation about the show in real-time (#thefollowing, #BigBangTheory).

So, it would seem a natural progression that hashtags would move to Facebook, where over 1 billion users visit daily.

Should I Care?

In short, yes. Hashtags are coming. There is no way to stop this. They are a great tool to organize conversations and topics. But, I don’t think it will change the way people interact with Facebook, at least not in the short term. People are used to longer posts, and that won’t change with the use of hashtags. They would be embedded within the posts. An example could read:

I can’t believe that #target is not going to match their on-line price with their in store price for me. That is #badbusiness.

This would allow Facebook’s Graph Search tool to offer up conversations around hashtags, when searching for the store “Target” or the phrase “Bad Business”.

This will also allow businesses to search around terms that they feel would be relevant to their business. Target, for instance, would find this post by searching #Target, as would anyone else, who could then join in the conversation.

It would become a great way to engage in a conversation around a specific topic, and allow you a broader reach than just your friends or fans.

Facebook could even go so far as to offer a dedicated page for hashtag searches, where people can save specific terms to be constantly updated (GooglePlus offers this). It may allow deeper and more meaningful conversations among people, and create new relationships.

Facebook could even begin to roll out a new advertising platform that would appear only on these hashtag pages, where advertisers could directly target people searching specific words or phrases. It would bring a more targeted audience to your brand.

In the end, there is no stopping the hashtag, whether you #love it or whether you #hate it, it will begin to show up in our news feeds. Why not #embracethehorror?

What do you think? Do you #like them or #hate them? Sound off below.

Resources:

3 Changes to Facebook Pages: Replies, Cover Photos, Hashtags

Hashtags: from Twitter to Facebook

Facebook Plans to Introduce Hashtags, Reports Say

Facebook Working on Incorporating the Hashtag

About Craig Yaris

Filed Under: Authors, Branding & Marketing, Business, Digital & Internet Marketing, General, Social Media, Social Media Topics Tagged With: facebook, internet marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Media Social Brand Visibility, social network

The FTC Guidelines are getting a little crazy, here is why

March 25, 2013 by BasilPuglisi Leave a Comment

The FTC Act’s prohibition on “unfair or deceptive acts or practices” broadly covers advertising claims, marketing and promotional activities, and sales practices in general.

The clip above is from a panel at the SxSW in Austin, Texas and the session was about influencers. The panel covered a variety of aspects of what influencers are and where they are found and spent a fair amount of time bashing Klout, Kred, PeerIndex and others for being “unreliable tools” as one panelist called them. However, you couldn’t talk about influence and ignore the guidelines set out by the Federal Trade Commission (FCT.gov). Overall, the panel felt they were not only fair, but needed.

In a recent article from the Long Island Business News, Pedram Tabibi a Social Media attorney, broke down 5 takeaways including;

The FTC paying close attention to Twitter and making sure each tweet discloses.
They also specifically made sure that mobile is included, explaining that the medium doesn’t change the requirements for disclosure.
Hyperlinks are not enough to reach disclosure, the message needs to convey the “importance, nature and relevance”.
Thoughts on how if your scrolling through content, the ad shouldn’t scroll with the content; and
That Analytics means you can no longer claim to be innocent. Read more about this here Takeaways from the FTC’s new online advertising guidelines

As for my thoughts, I am stuck balancing a middle ground. I feel that you should know who you’re listening too and there should be some emphasis on freedom of speech in a manner that doesn’t require a set parenthesis every two seconds. I should be able to praise or bash whoever I want in the manner I choose for my own reasons. I am curious, when we complain about a brand, must we disclose that we use them, in what manner and now how long? Interesting requirement that makes for sites that offer reviews…

Should I disclose that the video clip at the beginning of this article was gathered because I was granted access to the SxSW as Press and I didn’t pay the $1,000 others did to attend? Should I mention that I have a business relationship with Ekaterina Walter, one of the panelists, and that’s why I was in that session? Is it crucial that you know I wanted to use the clip because I expect additional business dealings to take place with the panelists and SxSW so it’s a good idea to use their branding, or am I cleared by the fact that SxSW makes their press and video policies clear and I openly present myself as a digital professional? I was recently featured in an article by Long Island Business News, one that was done freely by a journalist but garnished me some business. So, do I have to tell you that too? What about the fact that I have been a panelist with Pedram Tabibi and I may solicit his support from time to time… Should every speaker at an event have a label that discloses “I have been paid $XXXX.xx to be here and speak to you or have been granted free access and food”?

The point is, the FTC is making it really hard to be me, an individual whom has many relationships, benefits from many aspects of favors or financial rewards in my industry. If I have to start adding lines of disclosures next to every mention of a relationship that I benefit from my content, and livelihood, will die. The consumer should have some responsibility for knowing who they are listening to and have a method or manner in with which to measure the value in that voice or content, I for one, do not think consumers are as unintelligent as the FTC would have us treat them, after all I am a consumer and know when Chris Brogan, Mari Smith, Jason Falls or say President Obama attend an event in their industry (especially if their speaking), it likely has to be that they didn’t pay to be there and in fact if it’s a subject tied to their industry they are going to have relationships with those individuals, many of which have a direct effect on their earnings and profits.

I get the need for clarity, my concern is when it forces us to destroy our voices, our content, and in turn, our livelihood. After all, even if you don’t have a relationship or know the person, your either making a living talking about it, or hoping to do so!

Sources:

About Basil Puglisi

@BasilPuglisi is a Content Contributor and the Chairman of the Board for Digital Ethos. Basil C. Puglisi is also the Digital Marketing Manager for PMG Interactive. As the Digital Marketing Manager he provides oversight and support to Digital Campaigns, from Website Development to Search and Social Reach.

Filed Under: Authors, Business, Business Networking, General, Sales & eCommerce, Social Media

Facebook and the Sponsored Page

March 23, 2013 by CraigEYaris Leave a Comment

Over the last 11 days, I have been experimenting with Facebook’s advertising engine with the sole goal of increasing “likes” on two different pages, one a community organization and one a local business. I set the budget for these two pages at very different dollar amounts and let Facebook do their thing. The results have been very interesting.

What does $20.00 a day get you?

On the community organization page, I began with a budget of 20.00 per day, which promised me between 14 and 129 new “likes” per day. That would be a cost of between .15 and 1.42 per new fan, which seems like a small price to pay to spread their message. After 11 days, the page went from 406 fans to 631, which is an increase of 225 new fans. This is much lower than the anticipated 1419 fans, should we get 129 per day, but more than the possible minimum of 154.

But it’s not all about the total number of fans. The weekly total reach, according to Facebook Insights increased by 31% and the Friends of Fans increased by more than 29%, giving this client access to a much broader audience, than they had with only 402 fans. In addition, their “People Talking About This” reached a high of 221 people which means that over 200 unique people created a story about this page over this time-frame, which is a great indication that the content is being shared. In addition, the viral reach of over 1,900 indicates the number of unique people who saw a story published by a friend about this page. For a small grass-roots organization, these are staggering numbers.

Most importantly, the total reach for this page reached a high of 6,889 people, which is an indication of the number of unique people who saw any content associated with this page. That’s what you call word of mouth!

What does $5.00 a day offer?

On the small business page, I decided to counter the higher price by running an ad for the purpose of increasing the number of “likes”, but with a budget of only $5.00 per day. Facebook promised a rate of between 2 and 21 new likes every day. And, after the same 11 days, the number of likes increased by 85. Again, this number was on the low side, quite short of the possible 231 new fans over this time period.

For this page, the total reach increased to over 6,800 people, which is a great number. But, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Although the number of likes and the total reach increased, there was still a lack of constant engagement, as shown by the number of people “talking about this” and the virality of all the posts during this time frame.

What does it all mean?

In the end, I don’t think that the numbers say anything specific, regarding these two pages. The higher budget page was for a community organization that has a lot of local support and that gets people excited and engaged. The lower budget was for a local company that only appealed to a niche group.

In the end, I believe that Facebook’s advertising program accomplished what we set out to do, increase likes. But, that can’t be your company’s only goal. You need to increase engagement, virality of your posts, and the number of people “talking about” you. That is where the real benefit will come from. Keeping your audience engaged is worth much more than just the number of people that have “liked” your page.

What do you think? Have you had success with Facebook ads? What about failures? Let’s discuss it.

Resources

Advertise on Facebook

Facebook for Business

About Facebook Ads

About Craig Yaris

Filed Under: Authors, Branding & Marketing, Business, Content Marketing, General, Social Brand Visibility, Social Media, Social Media Topics Tagged With: advertising, analytics, internet marketing, Marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Social Brand, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Media Social Brand Visibility, social network

Steps to become a successful and powerful LinkedIn user – Part I

March 18, 2013 by Bill Corbett Jr. 4 Comments

Looking for a magic formula to be more successful on LinkedIn? The fact is you need to create your own strategy for success on LinkedIn. The magic formula is understanding marketing, creating a system for developing trusting relationships, putting time in and having an understanding for the tools and opportunities LinkedIn offers.

Your success strategy must be part of an overall personal marketing plan and system. LinkedIn can and must be an integral component in a personal marketing effort. To be successful users must have a plan for leveraging what LinkedIn provides. Using social media including LinkedIn cannot be set on “auto pilot.” Just creating a profile and posting occasionally will only bring modest success.

These are three steps on the road to becoming a power LinkedIn user:

Plan – Create a personal marketing plan and include LinkedIn as a vehicle for building your reputation, connecting with the right people, enhancing relationships and making it easy for those you want to do business with find you. A marketing plan that includes LinkedIn requires that the user spends time on the site, becomes familiar with each section and creates a strategy for using each part of LinkedIn. This step is broad but before you ride a bike or drive a car you have to know how it works and how it will get you from Point A to Point B. Your plan, like any marketing plan should have goals and objectives. Certainly business secured and funds generated are great goals, but there are many objectives you will have to achieve first. Set realistic and achievable goals, track when objectives are reached and what the results of activities were. Create questions and milestones that will help you judge success.

Don’t be a bystander – According to an article from the Wall Street Journal, the average LinkedIn account/user checks in and uses the site for about 17 minutes per month. To be a power user you have to commit more time. You must be active, seen and remembered. This requires daily activity, attention and focus. At first it may take more effort, but over time you will find the activities, groups and interactions that will yield the greatest results. In marketing, strategies need to change. If an approach or tactic does not work, after time change it. For example, when using status updates the key is to generate a response and create a buzz. If your activities are not attracting attention look at the content of your posts, and compare them to the responses others are getting. Don’t be afraid to change or implement several different approaches at the same time.

Spend time but don’t waste time – The goal of marketing is to develop a system that allows for growth and the development of relationships and business. Focus on those activities that work, to prevent the wasting of energy. Create a schedule and time budget. A schedule is what you will do each week and the time budget is how much time you will spend. Do not exceed the amount of time you have allocated and don’t do less. Monitor and track this time and refer back to records to see if you are keeping with your goals. Time is money and must be spent in an efficient way.

Your profile, title and image- Much has been written on this and I will start briefly with your photo, it must be professional and clear. No image means fewer connections and only 1 in 7 will even look at your profile. Also stay away from logos, caricatures, and other images. These are frowned upon by users on LinkedIn and they don’t present you in a professional manner. What your profile and title says about you is key, and will make the difference between people getting to know you or moving on to someone else. Let’s start with your title. Here is an example of a big mistake, having President, CEO or account manager listed as your title. No one searches for president, CEO or account manager. If they do they will find thousands of people from all different sectors in no particular order. Be more specific with your title based on your industry and what you do. My title is Public Relations, Personal Branding and Social Media Consultant. I do list president of my firm but at the end not the beginning.

Your profile text must be optimized the same way. Include what you do, where you do it (geographic market) right at the beginning. Make sure those different terms that describe what you do and your industry appear often. To be the most effective and to connect with prospects your profile should be written in the first person, (I am the leading PR professional on Long Island…), should include some history, experience, accomplishments, success and some personal information about what you like to do when away from work. How much you share is up to you. However, we have found that in many cases this personal information is as important if not more important than business background and information. Why? This type of information allows you to offer and find common interests with others. This information helps people understand who you are, what you’re interested in and offers a great way to start conversations that have nothing to do with business. These easy conversations allow for relationships to start, grow and put you in a position to eventually do business with the other individuals. Text that only talks about company services, products or benefits thereof is an instant turn off and limits the effectiveness of your post. Your profile is where your personal brand will shine, take advantage of this opportunity.

Sources:

About Bill Corbett Jr.

This article is provided by Bill Corbett, Jr., President of Corbett Public Relations, Inc., a leading media relations, social media and personal branding consulting firm. For more information, go to corbettpr.com or to his blog corbettprblog.com. He can be reached at wjcorbett@corbettpr.com or @wjcorbett.

Filed Under: Authors, Business, Business Networking, General, Social Brand Visibility, Social Media, Social Media Topics Tagged With: business, Business Consulting, LinkedIn, Social Brand, Social Media, social network

Pinterest Analytics – Pinning Grows Up

March 16, 2013 by CraigEYaris 1 Comment

Back in November, 2012, Pinterest began shifting from a purely personal social network whose goal was to connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting, to one where businesses would have the tools to use Pinterest for their marketing purposes (Pinterest Makes the Business Leap http://digitalethos.org/pinterest-makes-the-business-leap/).

Now, nearly 4 months later, Pinterest has begun to roll out a full suite of analytics tools that will enable users to get some “deep dive” information about people’s habits when it comes to pins. Pinterest’s analytics tool is completely free, but has some requirements before you are able to access it. First, you will need to switch your account to the new profile. Don’t worry about this much, as it isn’t all that different, and you will have no problem finding all of your boards and pins. The second step is a bit more involved. It requires you to have a verified account, and this can be done when you try to edit your profile, but does require some knowledge of uploading a file to your web host. Pinterest offers help with this step, so don’t let it scare you.

Once you have the new profile set-up and you have verified your account, you will have access to the analytics engine, under the user name in the upper right side of the screen.

What will I find in the Pinterest analytics?

According to the Pinterest website, you will find some very useful information, including how many people are pinning from your website (which you verified), how many people see your pins and how many click on your content. You will be able to see which of your pins have the most repins and what else they are pinning.

Specifically, Pinterest offers you the following data under their Site Metrics tab, including:

daily average number of pins
daily average number of people pinning from your website
daily average number of times pins from your website were repinned
daily average number of people who repinned your pins
daily average number of times your pins appeared on Pinterest in the main feed, search results or on other boards
daily average number of people who say the pins on Pinterest
daily average number of clicks to your website that originated on Pinterest
daily average number of people that visited your website from Pinterest.

Pinterest also offers statistics for the most recent, most repinned and most clicked pins.

How can marketers use the data?

Most importantly, this new data is incredibly useful for businesses, since they can now see the types of pins getting good traction and they will have a look into the behavior of their customers, as their pins are repinned and as people visit their website from Pinterest, and it will allow businesses to tailor their websites to these new found visitors.

Finally, for e-commerce companies, they will now have a great insight into which products that they are pinning are driving traffic and which ones are resulting in immediate action by their customers.

I believe, as I said in my previous article (Pinterest Makes the Business Leap), that this is just one more step towards Pinterest implementing an advertising engine.

Will the rollout of analytics force you to take another look at Pinterest for your marketing efforts? Have you been using Pinterest for marketing, whether successfully or not? Sound off, below.

Resources:

Pinterest unveils web analytics, offers insight into visitor pinning behavior

Pinterest Web Analytics

Pinterest Launches Free Analytics Tool for Business Accounts

Pinterest Analytics: Making the Most “Actionable” Social Network More Actionable

How Users Can Get Access To Pinterest Analytics For A Website

About Craig Yaris

Filed Under: Authors, Branding & Marketing, Business, General, Social Media, Social Media Topics Tagged With: internet marketing, Marketing, pinterest, Social Brand, Social Media, social media marketing, Social Media Social Brand Visibility, social network

Minimize Technology Mistakes (save a fortune!) Nelly Yusupova

March 14, 2013 by Jeff Ogden Leave a Comment

In this show just for software entrepreneurs, Nelly Yusupova @digitalwoman, CTO of Webgrrls and Founder of DigitalWoman.com share tips for leaders of software firms. In this show, you’ll learn:

Nelly Yusupova

Why business owners need to personally embrace technology
Tips for turning ideas into great products
How to develop software products – without being ripped off

During the show, Nelly has a great offer for show viewers on her two day Techspeak workshops – a big discount! Watch the show to get your discount code.

Marketing Made Simple TV “TV on the Web” is a production of Find New Customers and it is produced and directed by Craig Yaris of Social Ribbit. Editor of the show is Kevin Ogden.

About Jeff Ogden

Jeff Ogden (@fearlesscomp) is the President of the B2B lead generation consultancyFind New Customers. Find New Customers helps companies dramatically improve revenue results by transforming the way they attract, engage and win new customers. Contact Find New Customers by calling (516) 495-9350 or sending an email to sales at findnewcustomers.com.

Filed Under: Authors, Business, General, Mobile & Technology, Professional Spotlight

What I’ve Learned at SXSW..So Far

March 10, 2013 by Amee Tomlinson Leave a Comment

Being a stereotypical type A personality, I approached SXSW with structure and organization. A month before the conference launched, I narrowed my session list down to one session per time slot. Flight was booked. Objectives for the trip were determined. Out of office plan was put in place.

Then I arrived in Austin.

On the first day of sessions I had a fire drill at work and had to skip my 9:30 AM session. Dedicated to keeping my schedule, I arrived 30 minutes early for my 11:00 AM session. Over capacity. Convincing myself that I could stick to MY plan, I arrived for my 12:30 PM session an hour early. The room had a different session name. After consulting conference staff, I was convinced that I was going to miss this session too. I took a deep breath and decided to throw my carefully crafted agenda out the window and embrace the serendipity that SXSW was presenting me.

20 minutes later I found out that the 12:30 PM session was still on; they had just changed the name to Experience vs Ownership: The Rise of the Experience Economy. The session was led by Jenn Hyman, co-founder of Rent the Runway, and Aileen Lee, a venture capitalist and investor in Rent the Runway. It was this session that set the TRUE tone for every other session I’ve attended thus far:

Consumers are more concerned with individual EXPERIENCE than they are ownership. EXPERIENCE is everything from brand messaging, to the purchase process to using the product or service.
Stop overcomplicating everything! Your brand message, your internal process, your business plan should all be so SIMPLE that they can be explained in 30 second, resulting in understanding and excitement.
You are your biggest obstacle. CONFIDENCE in your industry knowledge and intuition is what will help you identify the next breakthrough for your consumers and organization.
Be AUTHENTIC. If you don’t know who you are or what you are trying to communicate, it will impact your consumer’s experience (remember that your consumer isn’t just your end user; it’s your peers, boss, followers, etc).

SXSW has taught me, so far, that I need to embrace who I am, trust my gut and take action. Now that we’ve had a feel good pep talk, we need to accept that without technical skills, the feel good pep talk is bullshit. So, to ensure you have the technical skills, the next few blog spots will look at strategic approaches and tactical application for social media, business models, creating content, and more.

About Guest Blogger

Filed Under: Branding & Marketing, Business, Conferences & Education, Content Marketing, General, Guest Bloggers

Facebook’s New News Feed – What it Means for You

March 9, 2013 by CraigEYaris 2 Comments

I’ve been writing this blog for Digital Ethos for almost 2 years, and it seems that I’ve written about changes to Facebook at least once every few months. This month is no different. On Thursday, March 7, 2013, Facebook announced drastic changes to its newsfeed. They have decided to unify the newsfeed across all devices, desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile, and to provide a better “newspaper” like experience, providing “all the news that you want to see.”

In addition, Facebook will begin to sort the newsfeed chronologically, and will place a greater emphasis on pictures and videos. In fact, they are increasing the size of the newsfeed, and decreasing the size of the two sides. There is also talk that they are removing the ticker from the right side, and that sponsored stories are now going to be placed within the newsfeed, as they currently do, only bigger.

The question remains, how does it affect business?

The biggest change for businesses will be the increased size of posts, pictures and videos, but a decrease in screen real estate where ads currently reside. But, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, since Facebook is unifying the look across all platforms, ads will begin to appear in their mobile apps.

BUT, Facebook is also introducing (or re-introducing) sub-feeds, where you can organize your newsfeed according to specific criteria. Through the new “all friends” feed, users will be able to see only those updates that their friends have posted. There will be no updates from business pages at all. Users can even focus their newsfeed to their closest friends, excluding all others.

Facebook is also going to implement feeds specifically related to photos and music, which may be a boon for advertisers within these respective genres. They can target their ads to only show up for users within these respective feeds, which may lead to greater engagement.

They are also implementing a new “following” feed, which will aggregate all the stories from the brands that you follow, and also will show ads from all brands.

So, will these new changes be accepted, or will their one billion users revolt, as happens whenever a change is implemented? Only time will tell. What do you think of these changes? Will they affect your use of Facebook? Will they affect brands ability to connect with you?

Resources

Facebook Newsroom

The NEW Facebook News Feed: Everything You Need to Know

What Facebook’s New News Feed Means for Marketers

Facebook’s new News Feed: Bigger is Better

Hands On With the New Facebook