11 Ideals That Will Change Your Communications

What is the optimum length of time for a presentation to clients? How long should we make make our company video?

These are just two of the questions that are answered in recent collated statistics from a variety of reputable online sources.

Here are eleven statistical findings that should guide your online and offline communications:

1. The ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters
2. The ideal length of a Facebook post is less than 40 characters
3. The ideal length of a Google+ headline is less than 60 characters
4. The ideal length of a headline is 6 words
5. The ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, 1,600 words
6. The ideal width of a paragraph is 40-55 characters
7. The ideal length of an email subject line 28-39 characters
8. The ideal length of a presentation is 18 minutes
9. The ideal length of a web page title tag is 55 characters
10. The ideal length of a domain name is 8 characters
11. The ideal length of a YouTube is 3 to 3 1/2 minutes

And yes, I am aware that the headline for this post is seven words rather than six and that the content is less than  1,600 words; both of which are less than 'ideal'.  But we need to remind ourselves that 'ideals' are not absolutes.

Be Still My 'Bleeding'Heart'

This infographic from 10 TopTen Reviews, highlights some of the major trends in the malware industry and reveals several interesting statistics about computer viruses.

You can see the larger original version here.

I Know What I 'Like', Or Do I?

Somewhere in the steamy streets of Dhaka an earnest posse of veiled women and young men are busily becoming admirers of a bevvy of stars and businesses around the world.

They are employees of what are euphemistically termed 'click farms'; a sort of agricultural production line of fake 'Likes' that pepper Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

In the good old days we had automated bots that did this job and social media companies such as Google waged a war to counter the automated trend.  To a certain extent they won the battle, but the fake brigade still smelt money and re-focused  their operations on human keyboard-tappers instead.

While the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, is a recognised hub for click farms so are other places such as Cairo and Indonesia.  It is no coincidence that these centres are located in countries where workers get paid a pittance.

The Guardian reports:
"For the workers, though, it is miserable work, sitting at screens in dingy rooms facing a blank wall, with windows covered by bars, and sometimes working through the night. For that, they could have to generate 1,000 likes or follow 1,000 people on Twitter to earn a single US dollar."

Another dubious example is Shareyt, whose owner Sharaf al-Nomani, told the same newspaper that: "around 30% or 40% of the clicks will come from Bangladesh". The Guardian equated this statistic to 25,000 people in Dhaka repetitively punching their computer keyboards, hour after hour, to enhance the visibility of a client's product or service.

But these sweatshop conditions doesn't seem to deter well known clients; some of which may surprise you.

For example, the USA State Department recently had its knuckles rapped for spending US$630,000  to boost its Facebook fan following.  Most of these new fans came from Cairo, which given the current political sensitivities has an aura of the absurd.

There is nothing covert about click farm companies and the 'Likes' they generate are quite genuine, in the sense that a human being created the action.  Take a company such as WeSellLikes.com. Its domain name choice is clearly not attempting to mask its activities.  If I was so inclined I could buy 10,000 'real worldwide likes' for less than $US100.

Practical yes, ethical...barely. So why do businesses indulge in such activities?.  

The greatest motivation is fear. Fear that their enterprise will look pathetic with its 200 genuine Facebook Likes compared to Competitor X down the road who has 10,000. A common belief is that customer perception of their brand might be adversely affected by such a discrepancy in numbers.

While there may be an element of truth in this assumption (according to  research 31% will check out reviews, ratings, likes and followers before buying), buying 1 million twitter followers from an Indonesian web entrepreneur for $US600 for your farmhouse cheese brand, isn't necessarily going to solve your online marketing woes.  

Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the ruse and the more savvy they become, the less effective these click farms buy-ins will be.

But one business often begets another. Click Auditors are the new breed, with London's Status People being one such service provider. They assist companies to block out the fakes for as little as $US5.50 per month.

The real trouble for a business begins when you start to believe your own marketing hype and strategically plan based on false social media analysis. I would like to say that such folly does not exist but regrettably it does.

Of course this being a genuine blog post I would welcome genuine 'Likes' and 'Followers' - although it is highly doubtful that Mr Sharaf al-Nomani, will do so personally.

Reference:

• How low-paid workers at 'click farms' create appearance of online popularity - The Guardian
• 4 Ways Click Farms Screw Your Business  - Inc
• Click farms are the new sweatshops - The Washington Post
• Selling social media clicks becomes big business - San Jose Mercury News
• 1000 fake followers for US$10 - NZ Herald
• State Department bureau spent $630,000 on Facebook 'likes' - Washington Examiner

Wearing Thin - Copy Watches, Cops and Cop-Outs

At one stage in my life I had a draw full of watches, albeit a small drawer and a few of the watches were euphemistically titled "copy watches".  One only had to visit most Asian cities a decade or two ago to be propositioned by furtive street vendors who offered you a 'Rolex" for a couple for dollars.

Not only were they bad fakes but their guarantee lasted only as long as its battery life.  After moving up the corporate ladder a real dress watch may be added but that was really the limit of my interest in timepieces as fashion accessories.

So the recent release of the over-hyped iWatches offers no appeal to me at all.  In fact I would go so far as to say that thus far, the whole iWatch movement (pun intended) is a bit of a cop-out.  These are not wearables that dazzle with innovation and I really can't see the point of having an adjunct to my smartphone strapped to my wrist?

While I made an earlier prediction in 2011 that wearables would be a significant megatrend, iWatches were not what I had in mind.  To me these 'wristlets' are examples of the dangers of moving away from innovation to commercialisation; the latest iPhone being another example.

Another example of where technology innovation doesn't quite fit the gadget is the taking of photographs with an iPad.  To see a horde of avid photographers holding their iPad's aloft always reminds me of Charlton Heston holding up the tablets of stone in the Ten Commandments.  The results though are far from similar.

Some wearable tech is moving in the right direction. The BioMan shirt keeps track of your body vitals through a weave of embedded steel threads which transmit data via Bluetooth to another device such as a smartphone.  Great for fitness fanatics but with a more serious capability of alerting your health professional in the event of your 'ticker' playing up.

According to an article looking at the intersection of the fashion industry and technology there were some 14 million such items on the market by the end of 2012 and the prediction is that this number will rise to 171 million by 2016. Another guesstimate from Juniper Research is that there will be 15 million wearable smart devices sold worldwide in 2013, rising to 70 million in sales by 2017.

So to put it succinctly, what is my expectation of the 'wearables' of the future?

I see such devices as being embedded into the Internet of Things and not operating as a standalone body add-on.  For example, my hat turning into a weather station and transmitting data, my clothing adjusting to the climatic conditions during the tropical hear or Arctic cold, better still priming my washing machine form afar to say that grimy work clothes were coming its way.

Wearables that monitor the smells that surround us, eliminating the less desirable. My personal tastegraph influencing such decisions.

Some wearables are  designed in a slightly less serious vein. The Cocktail Making Robot Dress in this video is enough to drive one to drink; quite literally.


Let us also not forget the commercial value of wearables and how they can potentially drive traffic for retailers.  Econsultancy, in collaboration with YouGov, looked at the impact of Google Glass as an example of wearable in-store.

Their key findings were:

• 38% of customers said they would use Google Glass to create a shopping route
• 27% would use Glass to check stock availability
• 22% saw Glass as an opportunity to unlock additional offers and promotions. 
• 70% of women however felt they would be embarrassed wearing such a device and the figure for men who felt similarly disinclined was 54%.

This UK reticence when it comes to wearing Google Glass ties in with other research conducted by Omnibus in May.  In that poll, less than a quarter of those surveyed (24%) said they would consider buying and wearing a pair of Google Glass-es.

It could well be that wearables will have a greater future with enterprises than consumers and Forrester sees this as a more likely trend.  If you doubt their findings look no further than  Motorola's Connected Law Enforcement Officer Of The Future.

Source: Motorola

Which reminds me, I need to get a new battery for my watch.

I Share Therefore I Am

This video presents a hypothesis that I don't entirely agree with, but does touch on the sociological implications of social media at the expense of "real" relationships.

There is little doubt that there are those who hide behind online persona rather than facing the trials and tribulations of the 'real world'. But equally there are others who use social media to advantage; expanding their already formed networks and staying in touch with old friends.

Credit: Keisuke Jinushi

Some sad cases who have very few friends have to pretend that they do, to keep up with the small circle that they actually have.  

Not that I am recommending taking this course of action to the extremes of the Japanese photographer (right), who faked a romantic attachment by using Instagram, a smartphone and dollop of nail polish!

A sad lad maybe but I guess he was really just making a point.  See his full account here and turn on Google's translation if you can't read Japanese.

Apparently overuse of Facebook can be totally depressing.  A study by  the University of Michigan over a two week period resulted in Facebook participants  experiencing a darkening of mood the more they browsed the social medium.  The sample of 82 college-aged volunteers was large enough to get a reasonable result.  As media has reported, this is the core demographic among Facebook's nearly 700 million active daily users.

University of Michigan social psychologist Ethan Kross said: “Loneliness predicted Facebook use, and loneliness also predicted how bad people felt. But the effect of Facebook on how people felt was independent of loneliness.”

So what may you well ask is causing this sinking feeling after excessive exposure to Facebook? 

According to The Economist the University of Michigan study didn't really address the differences between socialising on Facebook and socialising in person.  The paper  suggests the answer to social media depression is  one of green-eyed envy.

"An earlier investigation, conducted by social scientists at Humboldt University and Darmstadt’s Technical University, both in Germany, may have found the root cause. These researchers found that the most common emotion aroused by using Facebook is envy. Endlessly comparing themselves with peers who have doctored their photographs, amplified their achievements and plagiarised their bons mots can leave Facebook’s users more than a little green-eyed. Real-life encounters, by contrast, are more WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)".

One wonders if reading blogs on a regular basis has the same effect?  I suspect not, but to play it safe I will think twice about promoting this post on Facebook - it might be too depressing to contemplate!

Related articles

• Facebook Is Bad For You: Get A Life!
• Facebook use 'undermines well-being'

Will Google Glass actually harm our perception of the world rather than aid it?

I am as keen on tech gadgets as the next person but I can't help but wonder if the advent of virtual technology actually takes something away from our perception of the world, rather than adding to it.

There is a marked difference between 'looking' and ''seeing.  As a person who started my professional career as an art teacher I know that the secret to visual creativity is to train the mind to actually take in and process the visual stimuli that bombard us every day.

To do this one needs to focus on the subject at hand and exclude the other 'visual gunk' that surrounds it.  Only then can the creative juices start flowing and creative interpretation follow.  Let's face it, the world needs creative people who can dream.

So in our brave new world where a pair of high tech 'specs' provides us you a constant stream of third party data, are we muddying the creative process rather than aiding it.  Imagine how little Leonardo would have achieved if he had been constantly bombarded with virtual reality data? Very little I suspect.

Put bluntly, is too much virtual data for tech-delivered sources scrambling our cranial database?

Robert E. Franken in his book Human Motivation suggests that to be creative, one needs to be able to "view things in new ways or from a different perspective".  But I don't believe he had in mind a quite literal 'different perspective' delivered through technology. The 'uniqueness of alternatives' cannot be considered and interpreted creatively if they are constantly being prompted by pre-programmed data.

According to Hungarian psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, creative individuals alternate between imagination and fantasy at one end, and a rooted sense of reality at the other.

I would suggest that the problem with tech gadgets such as Google Glass is that they only allow an individual focus on the latter.

While I wouldn't go as far as Brian Merchant in suggesting that "products like Glass may turn daily life into a neurotic consumerist hellscape", I wonder if people have fully thought through how the purchase of a virtual technology device might effect them?

Related articles

• If This Is What Using Google Glass Will Eventually Be Like, It's Going to Suck
• This Is Why Google Glass Is the Future
• Designing Virtual Reality Avatars Can Change Your Actual Perceptions of the Environment

2013 - The Year Ahead - Lucky For Some?

Here is a snapshot of the mega-trends and predictions for 2013.

1. Your personal data locker will become increasingly important to you and, if you haven't got one you already, you should probably consider it.

According to Forrester Research the business of managing personal data, which is already worth billions, will grow substantially in the next two years. Taking the US as an example, more than $2 billion is spent each year collecting data from third parties.

A cloud-based data locker has been described by CNN as "part virtual safe and part personal digital assistant.

"Dave Siegel, author of Pull: The Power of the Semantic Web to Transform Your Business, argues these cyber vaults will eventually replace PCs, tablets, iPhones, and Microsoft's (MSFT) Windows and Apple's (AAPL) Macintosh operating systems. Yes, Google (GOOG) Android, too."

      2.  Home Sweet Home:

The Connected Home is a component of the Internet of Things; where devices talk to devices, in many cases without human intervention.

Cloud-based smart home systems allow you to monitor and control your house from your smart phone, tablet, or computer, no matter where in the world you are at the time.  An example of this is Lowe's Iris system.

Iris can be installed directly by the home owner and the basic level of monitoring service is free. This includes text alerts to the home owner when alarms are triggered; remote control of connected devices, thermostats and locks; and access to remote video streaming from cameras in the home via smart phone or computer. Lowe has partnered with AlertMe to  produce this product.

          3. Programmatic buying will get bigger

Programmatic buying allows advertisers to bid, often in real time, on ad space largely based on the value they have assigned to the consumer on the other side of the screen.  It uses a range of technologies to achieve this.  As this New York Times article notes, "major advertisers and many of the world’s largest ad agencies creating private exchanges to automate the buying and selling of ads."

          4. A Sense of Touch and Smell

IBM believes that in the future computer devices will be able to mimic our ability to touch, taste, smell and hear.  Sophisticated algorithms will be able to analyse  why people like certain tastes and the chemical structure of food.

Download a copy

         5. Cyber Security or insecurity?

If you own a cyber security company you could be in the money as many predict that banks and other online transactions sites, who have been seen a surge in cyber attacks, are anticipating that these will get even more sophisticated as time goes by. As a result these entities will increasingly turn cyber security firms to combat these intrusions.

We are still slack about cyber security matters. A recent study found that 35% of all data required data protection in 2010, but despite this, less than 20% of it is actually protected.

Ericka Chickowski, writing for Dark Reading believes that security research firms will turn away from less lucrative vendor contracts in 2013 and instead sell the information they glean about software vulnerabilities on the open market.

"Cyber-mercenaries are becoming more protective of their discoveries as the technology involved becomes more complex and the secrets more valuable".

Now this should be a worry to all as these cyber-mercenaries don't need to reveal who they have sold their research to although some like Vupen are on record as saying that they wouldn't sell their findings to oppressive governments or criminals.

eWEEK has also compiled some 2013 predictions to help organisations prepare to counter increasingly sophisticated hacks and malware.

         6.  The amount of Data will grow and grow.

By 2020 that amount of data on planet earth will be 40 Zettabytes; one Zettabyte is 2 to the 70th power bytes. According the Computer Weekly that equates to 57 times the number of all the grains of sand on all the beaches on earth.  I 'll have to take their word for it as counting grains of sand is simply soporific!  Machine generated data is the main contributor to this increase, rising from the current 11% of all data top 40% by 2020.

 Predictions from other sources.

Juniper Research predicts the following for wireless in the year ahead:

• Big Data to Become Big Business
• Smart Glasses & Other Wearables: 2013, the year of ‘announcements’
• BYOD trend on the rise, as security issues escalate
• Retail to embrace the in-store mobile strategy
• Operators to adopt seamless WiFi & LTE connectivity
• Mobile Becomes the Connectivity Hub
• The Year of Microsoft
• The multi-screen, seamless user experience becomes a reality
• New mobile and tablet form factors to emerge
• Social Gaming is on the Rise

CIO sees an end to offshore outsourcing. IT robots  and autonomic systems will be taking over.  So you will no longer need to be an engineer to create software or intelligently manage IT infrastructure. An example is Blue Prism; giving companies a software development toolkit and methodology to create their own software robots to automate rules-driven business processes. According to the company there are significant cost savings with its robot full-time equivalents (FTEs) costing a third of offshore FTEs.(video below)



And finally, the digital playing field is levelling out thanks to Cloud computing with developing countries able expand their role in the global economy. The University of California, San Diego's Dean of International Relations and Pacific Studies, Peter F. Cowhey, and Senior Fellow at the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, Michael Kleeman, found that Third World countries can now utilise the cloud in the same way developed countries have in the past. This is due to the lower costs, resulting in higher Internet adoption rates.

Emerging market businesses can now access similar storage, compute, and uses application services as the Global 2000 do.

Related articles

17 digital marketing and ecommerce trends for 2013 by Econsultancy CEO Ashley Friedlein

• 2013: The year of cyber war or just cyber panic?
• Predictions for IT priorities and the cloud in 2013: Experts weigh in

Baa, Baa, Electric Sheep

Coming as I do from a country that has more sheep than people, the thought of 'electric sheep' generating art is a source of endless fascination!

Scott Draves a.k.a. Spot is a Google Engineer and visual and software artist living in New York City and has a PhD in Computer Science. Draves is the creator of the Electric Sheep, a continually evolving abstract animation.

It is described as a form of artificial life where the software recreates "the biological phenomena of evolution and reproduction though mathematics. The system is made up of man and machine, a cyborg mind with 450,000 participant computers and people all over the Internet".


As a collaborative abstract artwork project Draves' wants to demonstrate that “computers can be that soft and beautiful and have that spark of life".

What makes it particularly novel is that much of the action happens while your computer is in sleep mode.  When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep".

Electric Sheep is run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. To build further upon the engagement factor of the project, the human participants guide the survival of the fittest by voting for their favorite animations in the flock.

You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.  If you would like to view the most popular sheep in the flock you can do so here.

This blend of the organic with the inorganic and mathematics with the visual art is great for those who are up to the coding challenge.  More importantly it blurs the lines between what have traditionally been silo-ed disciplines.

The results are simply "Baaaaaaaaaaaaaautiful".

When A + is Not A Plus

It would seem that receiving a +1 on Google Plus is no great benefit in raising your profile in Google's search rankings.

As a social metric the number of +1's you receive may be heart warming but doesn't mean that you will be discovered online any better.

Matt Cutts,  the head of Google Web Spam team confirmed in a ‘Power Searching With Google Hangout on Air #2’ that this was the case.  This is not to say that +1's won't become more important in the future but right at the moment Google is more interested in 'authorship'.

"In the short term, we’re still going to have to study and see how good the signal is, so right now, there’s not really a direct effect where if you have a lot of +1s, you’ll rank higher. 

But there are things like, we have an authorship proposal, where you can use nice standards to markup your webpage, and you’ll actually see a picture of the author right there, and it turns out that if you see a picture of the author, sometimes you’ll have higher click through, and people will say, ‘oh, that looks like a trusted resource.’ So there are ways that you can participate and sort of get ready for the longer term trend of getting to know not just that something was said, but who said it and how reputable they were."


So perhaps the main lesson to be learnt is that you need to have Google Authorship enabled on your site. Your online visibility will improve with the number of results your achieve as an author,within the results pages.

Going Down The 'Googla' - Bottom of the List For Sharing Stories

Google claims 170m Google+ users but other reports have said it is a ghost town, so what is the truth?

Findings released appear to confirm the latter – despite its large number of accounts the platform is bottom of the list of social network users’ favoured channels.

Social media agency Umpf analysed 100 random online entertainment, health, business, technology and general news stories and looked at how many times each story was shared by Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter users.

The findings show Twitter as the most active social network for sharing stories, followed by Facebook in second, LinkedIn third and Google+ last:

1. For every 100million users of Twitter, 197.3 people were likely to share an online story
2. For every 100million users of Facebook, 41.8 people were likely to share an online story
3. For every 100million users of LinkedIn, 15.2 people were likely to share an online story
4. For every 100million users of Google+, 6.0 people were likely to share an online story

Whilst Google+ is the second largest of the four in terms of official users*, and despite it arguably being the best placed of all four to succeed – it was created by Google post-Twitter, post-Facebook and post-LinkedIn, and designed to be the most socially-integrated network (“Online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.”) – it performs the worst.

Jon Priestley, of PR and Social Media agency Umpf, said: “Our findings clearly show a gulf between Google+ user numbers and their willingness to share online content, particularly when compared to rival platforms such as Facebook and Twitter".

Irradiated Swamp Rat BBQ's and The Demise Of Google+

This somewhat irreverent infographic contains some sobering facts. Based on current data it is unlikely that Google is getting a good return on its investment in its social networking platform, Google+.

As with all "Johnny Come Lately's" it is difficult to grab market share and move people away from a product they already love.

As it stands, Facebook won't be looking over its shoulder any time soon, with people spending an average 450 minutes per month on its platform while Google+ records a measly 3.3 minutes.

Related articles

• Does Google Have Any Social Skills at All?

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• Hitwise: Bing Has Chipped Away 5 Percent Of Google's Search Share Over Past Year

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Seeing The 'TV Light'

A large segment of the population don't bother too much about TV watching. They are often referred to as 'Light TV Viewers'.

31% of the18 to 49 age demographic spend an average of 39 minutes per day watching TV, so where can advertisers get better bang for their buck?

Google would have you believe that they and YouTube are better options for advert retention. TV by itself misses a whopping 63% of this target market, but with the addition of online there is a 27% increase in brand impression rate.

Hate To Say I Told You So, But I Told You So

Late in 2011 I predicted the steady decline of  Internet Explorer as the browser of choice. Confirmation this month based on StatCounter global statistics that this has now happened. And it should be noted, unlike IE which comes pre-installed on 90% of the world's computers changing to Chrome is purely a personal choice.

 Source: Silicon Valley Insider

Firefox is also struggling to make any headway against Chrome. So unlike Google+ which is being cast aside by many, Google's browser seems to be grabbing increasing Market share.

Related articles

• StatCounter: Google Chrome Pushes Past Microsoft's Internet Explorer (Again) (techcrunch.com)
• Chrome now world's top browser, but beware the math (news.cnet.com)

Should Your SEO Guru Vacate Their Throne?

If you have been religiously over-hyping your keyword content in the hope of getting a higher search ranking then Google's recent's pronouncements should be of concern.

Google is working on making SEO matter less important, or to put it another way less time consulting.  To quote Mike Cutts, Distinguished Engineer, Google Inc, at a recent SXSW session:

"The idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit, so all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, ‘over-optimization’ or overly doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little more level. So that’s the sort of thing where we try to make the website…the Googlebot smarter, we try to make our relevance more adaptive, so the people who don’t do SEO, we handle that, and then we also start to look at the people who sort of abuse it, whether they throw too many keywords on the page or whether they exchange way too many links, or whatever they’re doing to sort of go beyond what a normal person would expect in a particular area. So that is something where we continue to pay attention, and continue to work on it…we have several engineers on my team working on that right now.”

This statement has made more than a few people nervous; will Google come down hard on sites that are using SEO Optimisation techniques?  The answer is probably yes for those who go overboard building up their keyword density.  On the plus side, those who are newbies in the web site publishing world will have a greater chance of search visibility.

The fact remains that search still remains a vital consideration as this infographic shows.  While social media works best for promoting brand awareness and interactivity, search works best for local business visibility and most importantly, lead generation.

Less is More

And if you are relying on the tried and true engagement through email then the outlook just got a little bleaker.  Recent research shows that that global email deliverability declined by 6% to 76.5% in the second half of 2011.  According to the report this is due to more stringent ISP filtering and deteriorating sender reputations.

The old adage that less is more seem to hold true as an increased volume of emails contributed to the fall in delivery rates. The more 'stuff' we get in the inbox the more likely we are to flag messages as spam rather than unsubscribing. In the Asia Pacific region for example only 67% of email reached its intended inbox destination.

Source: Return Path

All communications need to focus on quality content, not quantity. In addition, to improve email pick up rates the following should happen:

• Adjust the frequency of your mailings sending our fewer but with more interesting and engaging content. It is also advisable to have someone coordinating this activity so that various departments or individuals aren't sending out separate and divergent email to the same subscriber database.
• Clean up you email data base and target content to audience. Relevance is a key factor in getting your email opened.
• Aim to build your reputation through whatever channels you choose as being 'the definitive source'

Users are now getting more savvy in their message filtering.  Return Path also conducted another study in the latter half of 2011 which showed that 93% of Gmail subscribers now have priority inbox set up but  21% of mail arriving through the Gmail system is delivered straight to the spam folder.

Related articles

• Google's Pending Algorithm Update to Penalize Over-Optimized Content
• Over-Optimization vs Optimization

Share and Share Alike - 2011 Trends

The dominance of Facebook and the rise of Google's Chrome browser are two points of note in this infographic from AddThis.

The use of Google+ for sharing seems to have lost momentum since the initial enthusiasm of its roll out.

Sharing by mobile continues to grow and this trend will continue but Twitter is still the dominant sharing tool in Japan.  Twitter had a stellar year with a 600% rise in sharing.

Related articles

• AddThis sharing trends: infographic (econsultancy.com)
• How Did Firefox Fare in 2011? (Infographic) (readwriteweb.com)

2012 Predictions - A Year to Digitally Disengage and Plant Vegetables?

Well at least the headline was catchy but you get my drift; any digital or social prediction for the year ahead needs to be prefaced by the financial realities that our world will be facing.

Bricks and mortar establishments will continue to struggle in shaky economic times and these trends will impact on employment and consumer purchasing patterns. Money will be tight and a lack of resources will make it difficult for many companies to fully assess and capitalise on digital and social opportunities.

Election year in the USA will see political compromise to garner support from the electorate, which may result in the Stop Online Piracy Act becoming law.  If it does, it will have a dramatic effect on any form of content creation.

Control
Authoritarian governments will have the ability to monitor all electronic communications in the near future as it becomes increasingly cheaper to do so; "every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner" says a report from the The Brookings Institution.

"Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution. "

eCommerce
2012 will be a year of continuing financial uncertainty which will affect business confidence and reinvestment.  Paradoxically these conditions also present opportunistic for those willing to take a calculated gamble and we will see more mergers and the ongoing growth in eCommerce.

Crowdsourcing
These platforms will show strong growth and provide opportunities for micro-economies to circumvent the challenges of the global macro economy. Examples include Quirky, which takes submitted product ideas, filters through community engagement and produces them, letting the idea creator 'cash in' at the end of the manufacturing and sales process. Kickstarter which is a funding platform focused on a broad spectrum of creative projects is such another example.

Ideas to Revenue using Crowdsourcing

MicroPayments
Sites that promote 'design to product' will increase.  Examples such as Zazzle and  RedBubble allow the creative amongst us to upload a  digital file while they take care of all manufacture, shipping and customer service.

Browsers
Google's Chrome browser will continue its rise and surpass IE as the #1 ranked browser

Gamification
The design and interaction lessons learnt in online gaming will become increasingly mainstream appearing as social apps in your mobile device and browser.

Influence
Converting digital influence into business value will remain a challenge but platforms such as Klout and the new kid on the block, Kred, will be there to provide some guidance.  However, the focus for the year ahead will be less on the measurement and more on how to achieve greater online influence with a variety of techniques and tools.

Social
Taste Graphs (things a consumer is actually interested in) rather than a person's social connections will provide better insight for marketers engaged in social commerce.  This will give rise to the use of 'tastemakers'  -  experts who are recommended to a consumer.

Twitter's growth and revenue will continue rapidly in 2012. This will mean more Twitter 'Promoted' ads appearing with some experts predicating an 80%+ revenue growth as a result. The proviso is that Twitter doesn't fall prey to an acquisition takeover and that Google+ does not perform better than expectations.

Social Burnout -  Facebook growth is slowing and people are already starting to question their own social existence and activity.  It could be a question of too much of a good thing when it comes to social and digital activity in 2012.  Users will be re-evaluating their social lives with issues of privacy being top of mind.

Quantifying the true value a business creates for online clients will remain one of the biggest challenges for companies in 2012.

Media
Trans-media campaigns such as the Jello Pudding / Twitter / billboard will increase in 2012 further expanding the definition of the term "social".

Sharing
Social sharing capitalises on the fact that social networks have 'turned people into bragging machines' (as David Armano has so eloquently expressed it).  The integration of social sharing opportunities on corporate and brand web sites will gather pace in 2012 as more businesses seek personal endorsements of their products and services across personal networks. Adding sharing options to content ensures better status in search results and a greater number of page views.

Television
Social TV will take off in 2012 predicts the Harvard Business Review. Socially integrated shows such as the X-Factor, where people voted using Twitter, point the way to what will be happening more frequently.  The TV's themselves are more likely to be of the 3D variety particularly if you are in Asia, although those in the USA still prefer the cheaper, lower spec'ed models.
70% of video is consumed on Internet connected devices so revenue models for television advertising will change.

Tablets and Ultrabooks
Android vendors are continuing to challenge the dominance of iPads and Apple's premium pricing for its products. 2012 will see an increase in tablet computer sales but more likely a dramatic rise in sale of  Ultrabooks which are powerful laptops with the advantage of being thinner and lighter than their competition.
And while we are on the subject of Android, I predict that the sale ofAndroid mobile devices will surpass Apple's iPhone in the coming year.  Web sites will be optimised for Tablet and Ultrabook use as mobile commerce will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 39% through to 2016 (Forrester Research).

The Rise of Ultrabook - Google Trends

Augmented Reality
This adds a virtual experience to the real experience of our world and we are about to see exponential growth for Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) according to Mashable's Lance Ulanoff. Visiongain predicts that the the advent of MAR will have a profound and lasting impact on the way that people use their mobile devices. It will push the telecoms industry towards ubiquitous computing and a technologically converged paradigm.

Big Data will be Big Business for Small Business
At the moment much data is still contained in silos. Storing data in the Cloud and using systems such as Bime will put the necessary tools at the fingertips of SME's (Small to Medium Enterprises). They will be able to get a clear and consistent query model across all of their data.

Marketing departments will be employing analytics experts who can monitor real-time data from web sites, social media and industry-leading news feeds but simply monitoring will not be sufficient.  They will be expected to provide accurate data on visitation to web & social media sites, what content people are engaging with and how quickly they get to the product, service or messaging that the company is pitching. Human language interpretation of unstructured conversations will help this process.

"Companies will need to centralize Business Intelligence to feed every aspect of the business – marketing, product, innovation and customer service. Only then will BI help companies transform themselves into true social businesses.” Brian Sollis.

Publish or be Damned
Businesses will increasingly bypass traditional media outlets and go directly to their target audiences themselves by creating branded niche media properties. They will not only publish their own content but also disseminate it themselves predicts Sandra Fathi of AffectStrategies.

Freemium at a Premium
One hopes that in the year ahead other companies will see the value in building business, by offering a free option of their product or service, albeit with less functionality than the paid version.  Mailchimp is an example of this digital strategy. People who like the product and embed it in their daily use are more likely to upgrade to the paid version with all the bells and whistles.

Scheduling
This will increasingly be on the Cloud using platforms such as Schedulicity. Founder believes that the traditional pen and paper appointment book is dead in the water. "Over the next two to five years, the physical appointment book will be gone altogether and replaced with online counterparts".

Some companies are already using scheduling options to great effect and dispensing with more traditonal methods. Emerson Salon for example is sourcing up to 75% of its business from Facebook, Twitter and its blog.

Text Messaging
Text messaging is growing quicker than most have predicted and is highly prevalent in 19 of the 21 countries surveyed by Pew Research, with a majority of mobile phone owners regularly sending text messages. Many use their mobiles to record personal videos and this growth trend will continue.

Deal or No Deal
Deal and coupon sites mushroomed in 2010/2011.  However, as business realise they cannot manage their offers and cover all the coupon bases, we will see a rationalisation of these platforms with the likely outcome being that the major players such as Groupon will gobble up the smaller fry.  Deals by mobile which don't require a pre-purchase are likely to grow at the expense of those that do.

Business Process
Faced with financial challenges and the impact of social business, companies will need to restructure and refocus. Those that don't will whither on the vine.

"Companies of all sizes will need to transform their business and existing infrastructure, and reverse engineer the impact of business objectives and metrics. Businesses will have to embrace all of the disruptive elements, such as mobile and social technology, in a new, cohesive organization that is focused outward and inward." Brian Sollis

Bernie Borges believes that 2012 will be the year that more organisations embrace the convergence of employee personal branding and corporate branding through content marketing strategies.

Web
While the Internet itself remains robust, the World Wide Web will suffer as further as consumers and general users move on to dedicated platforms that deliver their personal preferences better. This trend will accelerate, although the company web site will remain the bedrock brand statement and the place on which many depend; as the definitive source of company information.

Social Media Content Marketing Predictions 2012

Reference:
2012 Social Marketing & New Media Predictions (Awareness)

Beta and Beta

Here's the rub; Google Music was launched around the world yesterday with much fanfare but trying using it and you will join the majority of the global population in getting this message.

Google music offers some 13 million songs to the lucky few who can access it but does not have affiliation with one of the major labels - Warners.  Despite this, it aims to gazump Apple and Amazon and take the lead in the online music market.

It will be up to Google's Android services to match iTunes as music is stored on the Cloud rather than on your own device.  As a user you can can store up to 20,000 songs on Google's cloud servers and you will be able to share any songs you have purchased with friends on the Google+.

The cost of a song is US 99 cents and if you are an artist you can create your own space on Google Music and sell direct to the public.  That is, if they are in the USA.

Related articles

• Google Music online store officially launches for U.S. customers (news.consumerreports.org)
• Google Music Storefront Goes Live on Android Market (fool.com)
• How to get started with Google Music
• Google Music is open for business

Are Search Engine Ranking Pages Becoming Irrelevant?

If you felt secure in the knowledge that your web site ranked on the front page of Google or Bing search results and would therefore result in click-throughs, think again.

A recent survey from Slingshot clearly demonstrates that users are now far less inclined to click through and these rates have tumbled.

Back in 2006 a number one ranking equated to 42% of clicks and a number two ranking was worth about 12%. By May of 2010 these figures had dropped to 34.35% and 16.96% respectively and in December of last year Optify found that there was a 36.4% CTR for the number one result in Google and 12.5% for the number 2 ranking.

The most recent Slingshot survey charts this decline. A Click-through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of users who click on a given domain after entering a search query. In this study, CTR is calculated as total visits divided by total searches for a given keyword over a stable period.

Key Findings from the Slingshot report:

• By studying user behavior through click-through rates they  emphasised the importance of ranking in the top ten positions in search engines. A higher ranking results in a higher click through rate.
• For Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), the observed Click Through Rate (CTR) was 18.20% for a No. 1 rank and 10.05% for a No. 2 rank.
• For Bing SERPs, the observed CTR was 9.66% for a No. 1 rank and 5.51% for a No. 2 rank.
• Relative CTRs across each position in the SERP reveal the importance of an increase in rank.  With an average CTR of 18.20% for position 1 and 1.04% for position 10, this staggering difference shows that a change in rank from 10 to 1 will generate approximately 1650% more traffic and associated sales.
• Slingshot observed that there was a significantly higher CTR curve for Google than for Bing, which suggests that Google’s organic results are more reliable, as many users abandon searches.  They went on to say thought that this was simply an interesting implication from their CTR studies, as they do not have actual bounce rates for the search engines

The direct correlation between these findings and the growth of social media is also an interesting one. As I wrote in an earlier article, for many people online in 2011 Facebook is the internet and viceversa.  They are increasingly finding the content they need through social media rather than relying on more traditional web sites and this change extends to search habits.

So while search remains a vital part of any online strategy, total reliance on search engine page rankings, as this report proves,  is no guarantee of online exposure to business prospects.

Full report

Related articles

• Top 10 SEO Myths... Dispelled (searchenginewatch.com)
• The New SEO Metrics You Need to Know About (singlegrain.com)