Skip to main content

Home/ @Publish/ Group items tagged Business Opportunities

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Pedro Gonçalves

Channeling Anna Wintour: When Creating Branded Content, Think Like An Editor-In-Chief |... - 0 views

  • These days, developing a successful online presence requires approaching traditional digital efforts like link-building, web traffic, lead generation, and sales from a decidedly more editorial, content-rich approach: a hybrid marketing and storytelling strategy that drives customer actions by creating, documenting, distributing, and optimizing content. Some companies have created their own internal content development departments or are working with agencies to create everything from infographics to documentaries that highlight where the values, interests, and personality of brand and customer overlap. Coca Cola believes so strongly in the power of content that they are relying on this approach to help them double the size of their business by 2020.
  • While your office probably looks a lot different than a newsroom, approaching content strategy by thinking like a magazine publisher or a television producer is an effective way to approach content development and promotion. Utilizing influential voices to develop and promote content can help ensure that you meet the first requirement of securing readership and viewers--be interesting.
  • The people who already create for you: We often hear “write about what you know” because it comes easiest. Identify the talented storytellers within your own walls. Those with an intimate knowledge of company activities are primed to create impactful content, even on a tight deadline. Identify employees who are weekend filmmakers, amateur photographers, poets, and guitar players and invite them to bring these talents to the table.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The people who use your product or service: The voice of the customer is the most influential of all. Provide loyal consumers with an opportunity to get involved by sharing their stories. Identify digital influencers that fit your brand aesthetic and explore partnership opportunities. This approach is heavily evident in the fashion industry, where brands routinely work with fashion bloggers on everything from Twitter chats to advertising campaigns.
  • The people who support you: Why not collaborate on content development with partners or vendors? By working together, budgets become more manageable and both parties can benefit from the potential PR story. By working together, you can deliver deeper impact and cast a wider net. 
  • With more brands developing more and more content, we will naturally reach a point of over-saturation where only the very best stories will make an impact. As such, it is absolutely crucial to begin to refine and optimize current content marketing practices. Also, with the line blurring between marketing or brand managers and content developers, it’s worth noting that those best suited for positions in content marketing have a rare combination of business and marketing acumen, digital savvy, as well as journalism, public relations, film, and even creative writing. For those with this mega-mix, employment opportunities abound.
Pedro Gonçalves

Want To Hook Your Users? Drive Them Crazy. | TechCrunch - 0 views

  • online, feedback loops aren’t cutting it. Users are increasingly inundated with distractions, and companies find they need to hook users quickly if they want to stay in business. Today, companies are using more than feedback loops. They are deploying desire engines.
  • Desire engines go beyond reinforcing behavior; they create habits, spurring users to act on their own, without the need for expensive external stimuli like advertising. Desire engines are at the heart of many of today’s most habit-forming technologies. Social media, online games, and even good ol’ email utilize desire engines to compel us to use them.
  • At the heart of the desire engine is a powerful cognitive quirk described by B.F. Skinner in the 1950s, called a variable schedule of rewards. Skinner observed that lab mice responded most voraciously to random rewards.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Humans, like the mice in Skinner’s box, crave predictability and struggle to find patterns, even when none exist. Variability is the brain’s cognitive nemesis and our minds make deduction of cause and effect a priority over other functions like self-control and moderation.
  • Recent neuroscience has revealed that our dopamine system works not to provide us with rewards for our efforts, but to keep us searching by inducing a semi-stressful response we call desire.
  • Email, for example, is addictive because it provides all three reward types at random intervals. First, we have a social obligation to answer our emails (the tribe). We are also conditioned to know that an email may tell us information about a potential business opportunity (the hunt). And finally, our email seems to call for us to complete the task of removing the unopened item notification in a sort of challenge to gain control over it (the self). Interestingly, these motivations go away as soon as we’ve actually opened all our emails and the mystery disappears. We’re addicted to checking email while there is still variability of reward and once that’s gone, emails languish in our inboxes.
  • We’re meant to be part of a tribe so our brains seek out rewards that make us feel accepted, important, attractive, and included.
  • But as sociable as we are, our individual need for sustenance is even more crucial. The need to acquire physical things, such as food and supplies, is part of the brain’s operating system and we clearly wouldn’t have survived the millennia without this impulse. But where we once hunted for food, today we hunt for deals and information. The same compulsion that kept us searching for food coerces us to open emails from Groupon and Appsumo. New shopping startups make the hunt for products entertaining by introducing variability to what the user may find next. Pinterest and Wanelo keep users searching with an endless supply of eye candy, a trove of dopamine flooding desirables. To see an example of how the hunt for information engages users, look no further then the right side of this page. There, you will find a listing of popular posts. Using intriguing images and short, attention-grabbing text, the list is a variable reward mechanism designed to keep you hunting for your next discovery.
  • We also seek mastery of the world around us. Game mechanics, found everywhere from Zynga games to business productivity apps like to-do lists, provide a variable rewards system built around our need to control, dominate, and complete challenges. Slaying new messages in your inbox stimulates neurons similar to those stimulated by playing StarCraft.
  • Variable rewards come in three types and involve the persistent pursuit of: rewards of the tribe, rewards of the hunt, and rewards of the self.
  • As B.F. Skinner discovered over 50 years ago, variable rewards are a powerful inducement to creating compulsions.
Pedro Gonçalves

Advertisers can now target Facebook ads by recency of activity - 0 views

  • Facebook has created a new way for businesses and developers to target ads to users who have taken an action on Facebook or in an app within a more specific time range. Using the “action spec” targeting capability, which allows advertisers to reach users by the actions they take in Open Graph apps and on Facebook directly, an advertiser could designate a time range shorter than 14 days
  • a local business might want to reach users who checked into their store within the past week. A developer might want to target users who installed their app in the past three days. A page owner might want to retarget users who viewed one of their page tabs the day before.
  • Action spec targeting is still a beta feature limited to advertisers working with Preferred Marketing Developers
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the feature offers developers unique opportunities to reach users who have taken specific in-app actions, including in their competitor’s apps. It also gives brands ways to segment and target their fans by the actions they take on their page or a competitor’s page.
  • Action spec targeting is also interesting in that advertisers can define a “negative action spec,” meaning users who have not taken a particular action. For example, a developer could reach users who have played a game, but not made an in-app purchase in the last 10 days. Advertisers can also reach friends of users who have taken a particular action.
Pedro Gonçalves

What Your Teen Is Really Doing All Day On Twitter And Instagram | Fast Company | Busine... - 0 views

  • now they’re doing multiple things--it’s not like if you’re on Instagram you’re not on Tumblr. You use Whatsapp for this group, and you use Snapchat for these friends. It’s like a complete mess right now.
  • The thing that is really different has to do with how your life is configured in relationship to technology versus other opportunities. As an adult, you have the ability to go out and hang out with your friends when you want to. Yeah, work may get in the way; yeah, you might not feel like it; yeah, you might be too busy, but you still have a choice over your time and your schedule in a way that young people do not. Their lives are very heavily configured and structured. Their ability to get together in unstructured time with friends is extremely difficult.
  • To them Facebook is everyone they ever knew, and Twitter is something they've locked down to just a handful of people they care about--which is often the opposite of how adults use them.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The story with marketing and young people is the story with marketing and adults. When people are looking for information, they're much more open to advertising than when they're trying to hang out with their friends and you're getting in their way. Branding and being recognized as a brand is a lot about being an authentic participant in those spaces. Young people are totally aware of when a company is making a YouTube video just to sell to them. They're not dumb, they totally get this. The thing is, it's funny when they're on YouTube and seeking it out, it's not funny when it's getting in the way of talking with their friends.
  • What's interesting is that as a lot of young people are running away from their parents into a variety of apps, they're also running away from marketers. That will be an interesting battleground in the next couple of years, because that creates monetization issues for the app creators.
Pedro Gonçalves

Google Glass: Way Too Much Google For Its Own Good - ReadWrite - 0 views

  • its faults (battery life, tends to cause headaches, etc.)
  • By constantly presenting Glass wearers with information, or the opportunity to get information, Google manages to over-deliver on its mission statement at a time when we actually rely on Google to filter out noise, rather than fill our lives with more noise.
  • the secret to Google's business model is to embrace the abundance of the Internet's information overload but then remove the detritus and give me only what I want, when I want it, and serve up context-relevant advertising.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Google Now gets the balance nearly perfect. Google Now anticipates my information needs based on where I'm going, what I have on my calendar, the time of day, etc. It's genius
  • Sergey Brin has stated that "We want Google to be the third half of your brain."
  • With Glass, Google has taken a step too far toward pushing information on its users rather than letting them control the flow of information. 
Pedro Gonçalves

How Marketing Will Change In 2014: The Creative Forecast | Co.Create | creativity + cul... - 0 views

  • According to the many advertising leaders we surveyed, connected devices and wearable technology--or, more broadly, the Internet of things--are top of mind for 2014. But where the last decade of digital experimentation has generally made technology front and center of an experience, the feeling is that the general relationship with technology has now matured to a point where it doesn’t need to be the star of the show. Instead, people are predicting a more seamless integration of technology into brand’s efforts. Or, as Scott Prindle, partner/chief digital officer, Made Movement puts it: “I think we'll see interesting opportunities to use technology to save us from technology.”
  • We'll see a trend towards ambient intelligence where our devices learn about our individual habits and interests, anticipate the kinds of information we're looking for, and surface it at the right time and in the right place. Our technology will be doing more work for us in the background, helping to free up the time that we're currently spending staring at screens.
  • It's better to try to invent the future rather than predict it.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Our social feeds will continue to be under siege by the world of inane crap. Truly great content and masterful storytelling will be the only thing that breaks through the morass. The best brands and agencies will focus on this.
  • Share-worthy content will become the Holy Grail.
  • There are no experts in this business, and we find that everyone can use a digital brush-up, including clients. If you want to sell innovation, everyone needs to know how to evaluate and measure it. Creating the right conditions for innovation is essential. And you don't just do it once. It has to be done regularly.
Pedro Gonçalves

How Internet Ads Work | Co.Design | business + design - 0 views

  • When you first load a webpage, the first thing that happens is it generates an impression, which is then forwarded to an ad server. So far, so good, but you might be surprised by how much that ad server knows about you. Using information gathered from Internet cookies, social media, and more, an ad server is capable of generating a unique profile of various metrics, almost like a QR code, that contains everything it knows about you: how old you are, your relationship status, what websites you browse, where you're located, etc. With that code generated, the ad server tries to match it against a pre-sold inventory of ads, almost like a key fitting into a lock. If the key fits, the process ends there, and an ad is returned that advertisers believe jibes with your unique personal profile. But it's what happens if the server doesn't have an ad that matches where things gets interesting.
  • Without a pre-sold ad to serve you, an ad server forwards your profile to an international ad exchange, where a network of different ad servers examine it and bid on it in real time. In a fraction of a second, a host of third-party servers around the world go into a bidding war for the opportunity to show you an ad, with the highest bidder taking the prize and filling your eyes.
1 - 18 of 18
Showing 20 items per page