Posts tagged Companies
10 Companies Using Facebook To Grow Their Likes
Feb 10th
Growing the number of “Likes” on your company’s Facebook page isn’t just a matter of pride. In fact, the social proof generated by an active fan page can be incredibly powerful in building your brand’s authority and engagement. However, earning these votes of confidence isn’t as simple as just asking people to click “Like” on [...]
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Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy – Toronto Star
Feb 9th
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Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy
Toronto Star … including key link to al Qaeda Air Canada loses $60M in fourth quarter Tooba Yahya to appeal murder convictions Google Plus SEO could equal profit for companies with smart social media strategy Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, social media and. |
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Local Lighthouse Changes How Internet Marketing and SEO Companies Do Business … – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Feb 2nd
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Local Lighthouse Changes How Internet Marketing and SEO Companies Do Business …
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) The Orange County based Internet Marketing and SEO Company, Local Lighthouse, has announced the arrival of its new online portal, PARC, making it easier for clients to assess the performance of their site. Through PARC, Local Lighthouse hopes to make … |
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Forrester Ranks Mobile Marketing Companies, Ignores the Brightest Startups
Jan 30th
The necessity of having a clear and cohesive mobile marketing strategy has never been greater. Companies that do not have a mobile marketing strategy now are light years behind the curve in the face of booming smartphone adoption and changing consumer behavior. Research firm Forrester took a look at some of the biggest and best mobile marketing companies to see how they stack up and what benefits they can add for companies.
There is a problem with Forrester’s research. Mainly, it looks only at the biggest and best. It is an enterprise-focused report that narrows in on nine mobile marketing companies and the strengths behind each. Fundamentally, this is the wrong approach to take in a world where dozens of innovative startups are tackling the idea of mobile marketing with fresh ideas and eager teams.
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The nine vendors that the Forrester Wave research report focused on are: AKQA, iCrossing, Ogilvy, Possible Worldwide, Razorfish, Rosetta, SapientNitro, TribalDDB and VML.
It is important to note the criteria in which these companies were chosen for inclusion in the report:
- A comprehensive mobile services offer: the ability to provide core mobile marketing services with strategy, native and mobile Web development, messaging, advertising and management.
- Experience developing mobile programs: five years of experience.
- Strong and growing revenue stream from mobile marketing: met or exceeded Forrester’s threshold for revenue from mobile services.
- Recognition of mobile work from peers and marketers: Forrester asked agencies to name mobile marketing competitors. It also asked “11 mature mobile marketers” to share the list of agencies in their selection process. A company needed to be on each list three times to be included in the report.
As you can see, the criteria makes the selection process stacked in favor of established entities. The “leaders” of this survey were SapientNitro (with the highest score across all criteria), AKQA, Ogilvy, TrialDBB and Razorfish. All the other companies figured into the “strong performers” category.
Clients looking for mobile marketing strategies would do well looking to these companies. They have strong development teams and good strategic initiatives. Most include analytics and audience insight into their offerings. There is nothing wrong with choosing a so-called industry leader, even if the criteria in which is was chosen is inherently flawed.
Yet, if you are looking for tools that are more powerful or are under the radar of this enterprise-focused group, there are a variety of terrific startups across the country. For instance, Apsalar has an innovative and ambitious set of mobile marketing tools and robust analytics. Flurry and Localytics are both great startups with intense analytic tools and engagement philosophies. In the gaming world of native apps, PlayHaven has a great dashboard to produce results. Jumptap is emerging as a leader in targeted mobile marketing.
Each of these companies has one or two tools that could be of significant use to companies looking to make a splash with their brand on mobile devices. What they often lack in comparison to the so-called leaders is the experience (as an established company) and the development shops that enterprise-grade mobile marketers have. More often, they can be classified as “tools” better than fully well-rounded mobile marketing shops. There are perhaps a dozen more startups in the mobile marketing arena that are worth consideration.
There is nothing wrong with going to a smaller company that has the tools that are right for you. Often the smaller companies will be more attentive to your needs. What they lack in scale they make up for in innovation and eagerness. That is not to say that the bigger mobile marketing shops are not eager but the point is that there are plenty of options. A company does not have to match some set of obscure criteria to be a great option for mobile marketing needs.
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The Mac Comeback: Analysis Reveals 46% of Companies Issue Macs
Jan 27th
Over six years ago, I rounded up a group of analysts to elicit their opinions on what was then a startling trend: People who purchased iPods were then purchasing Macs. Was it a fluke, I asked? Some said maybe not: Buyers were learning to trust the Apple brand again. But there were too many mitigating factors at that time which could eventually derail the Mac’s comeback, for which the only route to its eventual culmination appeared to be by way of the home entertainment center.
What literally no one foresaw in 2005 was the possibility that an Apple-branded device could become a future year’s most successful and desirable business tool. The iPad bounced the Apple brand right back into the office; and now, results of a survey of 10,000 IT professionals worldwide by Forrester reveal that as CxOs find themselves embracing iPads, their companies end up opening their front doors to Macs.
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Among survey respondents in North America and Western Europe, an astounding 46% of the enterprises where IT professionals worked in 2011 were reported to be offering Macs as an option to employees. That does not mean half of employees are choosing them – right now, Forrester’s respondents say only 7% of those respondents are personally using Mac OS X in their workplace. But that’s a lot more than in previous years, and much closer to the peaks set in the late 1980s when the first Mac adopters realized they needed them for laser printers and “desktop publishing.”
The iPad has become the Mac’s re-launch pad in the enterprise. Even those companies that officially don’t want iPads yet (they may have policies against BYOD) have employees who do. Some 27% of respondents said their enterprises presently support the iPad, with another 31% planning to, and yet another 23% actively campaigning to make them support it. That’s important, because while 46% of enterprises offer Macs, only 30% of them support Macs – and that’s a big difference. The hurdle for enterprises wanting to adopt, and maybe even embrace, the Apple brand is integrating them into the network.
One more factor playing into the Mac’s enterprise success, astonishingly… is Android. It’s a strange, backward chain of events that Forrester’s research indicates begins with the inconsistency of that platform – something which the latest version 4.0.x, Ice Cream Sandwich, hopes to eradicate if only it weren’t just one of the fragments in its own right.
As the Forrester report’s principal author, Frank E. Gillett, writes, “Google’s Android platform is selling very well with consumers for smartphones, but the wide variety of devices, features, and software support, plus inconsistency of support for OS upgrades, is fragmenting the Android ecosystem. Meanwhile, Google has yet to dent the iPad’s dominant tablet position, while Amazon’s popular new Android-based Kindle Fire tablet bypasses Google’s app store, Android Market, altogether. In PCs, Google’s Chromebook initiative to replace Windows PCs will take years to gain traction. By comparison, Apple has solid offerings in all three categories, keeps a limited but still highly desired range of models, and creates great consistency and upgradeability across the devices, characteristics that are very attractive to enterprise buyers. Forrester hears from CIOs that they feel protected by Apple’s brand and app store strategy in a way that they don’t with Android products.”
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How Companies Use Social Media To Pick Stocks
Jan 24th
This week Topsy Labs Inc. released a report claiming its model was able to predict a drop in Netflix’s share price after it decided to split its DVD rental and streaming video services by tracking phrases like “just canceled my Netflix subscription.”
It’s arguable whether investors really needed a sophisticated sentiment measuring analyses to predict Netflix’s shares would drop after what has been called the worst business decision since the introduction of “new” Coke in 1985. But social media sentiment analysis is growing more sophisticated and may soon become a key component investors look at before making a decision to buy or sell stock.
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“In future it may very well be unwise to not take some kind of sentiment analysis into consideration,” said Neil McGovern of Sybase, a company that provides its complex events processing technology to banks and securities firms, “But at moment it’s not make or break variable.”
How Twitter Beat The Mainstream Business Media On iPhone 4S
“People don’t really tweet about stock ticker symbols, at least not in any predictable or useful way,” said Rishab Aiyer Ghosh of Topsy. “But they do talk about companies and products.”
Ghosh pointed to the launch of iPhone 4S, which was initially greeted with lots of negative reviews from the mainstream media. Those negative articles fueled a steep decline in Apple’s share price on the first day iPhone 4S was available. But on social media, early reviews were mostly positive with normal people tweeting about how they liked and wanted the latest version of the iPhone.
“Ten days after the launch Apple announced they had the biggest backlog for a product in its history,” Ghosh said. “The day of the release the Twitter chatter was more positive than negative: as an analyst, if you had known that, you would not have sold your Apple shares and you would have made a lot of money.”
Later this year, Topsy will begin marketing its historical and real-time data to trading firms and equities analysts. Ghosh, like everyone else interviewed for this article, stressed that the social media sentiment data was just one component used by Wall Street to build trading models.
“The big-picture social media content data we provide can augment, if not totally replace, the news media content,” he said. “One of the advantages of the news media is its curated and it doesn’t have a lot of noise; what we do is take the noise out of the social media sentiment data.”
Do’s And Don’ts Of Trading On Social Media Sentiment
How much of an advantage does social media sentiment give a trader? Last year WiseWindow commissioned an independent researcher to track its stock-picking model as it followed four stocks – Ford, General Motors, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines – for the first six months of 2011. The model imporved performance between 30% and 48% on an annualized basis.
“One area we haven’t really been able to get into these models is consumer sentiment: survey data,” said Marshall Toplansky of WiseWindow. “If you do a traditional survey, you may be able to get 1,200 or 1,500 comments. With social media we can get tens of millions of comments per month.”
For Toplansky, there are several keys to using social media sentiment to predict movement in an individual stock, including:
- Using data from several different platforms, including Facebook, blogs and even comments left on YouTube videos. “Twitter on its own is not a leading indicator,” he said. “You have to take into account all of the different forms of social media.”
- Tracking conversations on a stock or a $ thread on Twitter won’t cut it either. Toplansky found that the biggest predictor of a stock’s price are comments about product quality, which often don’t mention a ticker symbol or even the company by name.
- That can mean tracking up to 2 million social media messages in a month, as opposed to the few thousand WiseWindow would uncover if it only focused on discussions about a company’s share price. “You continually have to go out and look for patterns — it’s almost a 24-7 kind of thing,” Toplansky said. “You have to do the math over time and see what trends evolve and emerge.”
Strategy Doesn’t Work For Individual Investors – Yet
And therein lies the problem for individual investors, as well as many investing firms: Sybase’s McGovern said the upfront costs and the lack of a proven track record make it difficult for most investors to justify adding a sophisticated sentiment analysis component to their trading models.
“The reason all of this is appealing to people is there’s a general understanding that shares obviously don’t just move on the underlying aspects of the company,” McGovern said. “The fact that stocks can go up 5% or10% day, which is unusual but not unheard of, can often be because of rumors in the market. This all seems to make sense to people in the markets as a way to be able to tap into those rumors and help their short-term trading strategies.”
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Hosting Decisions by YCombinator Companies in 2011
Jan 20th
Ever wonder what other companies are choosing for hosting, Email, DNS, etc.? As it happens, there’s an app for that (so to speak) and someone put the Y Combinator companies under the microscope. With 248 companies examined, you get some pretty interesting results. If Y Combinator companies are the future, Google is looking really good for email hosting, and Amazon is doing really well for Web Hosting.
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One of the surprises, for me at least, was the fact that even after all the SOPA protests more than half of the companies, 130, are still using Go Daddy. The second closest registrar is eNom, with 39, followed by 1 and 1, and Gandi. Actually "Other" comes in higher than Go Daddy.
More interesting to me is email and Web hosting. Nearly 90 companies are using Amazon for hosting, followed by Rackspace with 36 of the companies.
Email? Google takes the lion’s share here, with the majority of companies using its email. "Other" comes in second, along with self-hosted. What it doesn’t say, of course, is whether the users are paying for Google’s Apps or just using the free version.
The information was gathered using a tool called domain-profiler, and last updated on January 17th. It’s written in Ruby by Joël Franusic, and available under the MIT License on GitHub.
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Seo Las Vegas Announces Wholesale Prices For Local Companies Looking to Expand … – Emailwire (press release)
Jan 13th
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Seo Las Vegas Announces Wholesale Prices For Local Companies Looking to Expand …
Emailwire (press release) With the announcement from Seo Las Vegas offering wholesale pricing for local companies seo services have become affordable for all Las Vegas businesses. (EMAILWIRE.COM, January 13, 2012 ) Las Vegas, NV — Seo Las Vegas today announced that they would … |
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Magic Logix Ranked in Top Ten SEO and Web Design Companies on TopSEOs.com – PR Web (press release)
Jan 12th
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Magic Logix Ranked in Top Ten SEO and Web Design Companies on TopSEOs.com
PR Web (press release) Magic Logix was recently awarded the #7 spot in TopSEOs rankings for the Top 50 SEO Companies and Top 30 Web Design Companies. “We're honored to be recognized with a #7 ranking as an industry leader in SEO and web design by TopSEOs.com. … |
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Magic Logix Ranked in Top Ten SEO and Web Design Companies on TopSEOs.com – PR.com (press release)
Jan 11th
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Magic Logix Ranked in Top Ten SEO and Web Design Companies on TopSEOs.com
PR.com (press release) TopSEOs.com rankings for the Top 50 SEO Companies and Top 30 Web Design Companies. TopSEOs.com is a top independent authority on search vendors that evaluates and ranks various disciplines in the industry. Through an in-depth analysis, … |
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