Posts tagged Don’t
Don’t Be A Wallflower! 3 Fundamentals Of Data Driven Community Outreach
Feb 9th
Many (even most) corporate community managers are relatively passive, waiting for users to come to them. However there is a real power to assertively identifying themed conversations surrounding your corporate objectives, and diving right in.
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[STUDY] 59% of Customers Don’t Know About Their Banks’ Social Media Presence
Feb 9th
In ComScore’s report on The State of Online and Mobile Banking, it cites social networks as a space where banks are creating a presence, and improving their capabilities. But do any of the banks’ customers even know about this? Apparently not.
Even though financial institutes have increased social networking activity, ComScore says that only 18% of customers knew that their financial institutions had a presence on social networks. A total 59% had no idea, and 24% were unsure of what their financial institutions were doing on social media sites.
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The data shows that customer visits to banks’ Facebook pages have increased by nearly 25%, whereas on Twitter and LinkedIn that number has enjoyed less much less growth.
For institutions that are creating a presence on social media sites, take heed: customers are not interested in solving customer service issues on those sites. If Facebook did update its brand pages to include private messaging options, this might change. For now, however, customers who do follow their financial institutions on social networking sites are mostly interested in retail, credit card and online shopping offers.
As social commerce continues to try and find its place on Facebook thanks to new social apps, and payment services like PayPal build a presence on Facebook, will banking be the next move? Or are social networking sites just a place for banks to build their brand? Tell us what you think in the comments.
Image via Shutterstock.
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Poll: People Don’t Rely On Facebook, YouTube, Twitter For Election Information
Feb 7th
Fewer people are relying on the Internet in general and social media specifically for election news and information than some social media “experts” would have us believe, according to a new poll by the Pew Research Center.
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While many in tech journalism circles have been quick to call the 2012 presidential race “the Social Media Election,” the poll found that few of us are relying on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter for election information. While 25% say they regularly learn something about the election from the Internet, tha’s almost unchanged from 2008, when 24% said they regularly got election information from the Internet.
Even more telling is where on the Internet that information comes from: 6% of poll respondents said they are regularly learning about the campaign from Facebook, followed by YouTube videos (3%) and Twitter (2%), according to Pew.
One reason social media hasn’t grown by the leaps and bounds predicted is less engagement by young people. In 2008, there were two contested primaries, including a Democratic primary which has traditional drawn younger and arguably more tech-savvy voters. This year, only one in five people under 30 say they have been following the campaigns “very closely,” down from 31% in 2008.
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Apple to Developers: Don’t Mess With Our App Store Rankings
Feb 7th
Apple really does not like it when you mess with its finely tuned systems. Especially when it is the company’s cash cow iOS platform. In a short statement yesterday, Apple warned developers to not game the rankings system in its App Store, threatening the loss of Apple Developer Program membership to developers that are found using services intended to artificially raise the profiles of their apps in Apple’s store.
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Full statement from Apple’s developer page:
“Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership. Get helpful tips and resources on marketing your apps the right way from the App Store Resource Center.“
“Once you build a great app, you want everyone to know about it. However, when you promote your app, you should avoid using services that advertise or guarantee top placement in App Store charts. Even if you are not personally engaged in manipulating App Store chart rankings or user reviews, employing services that do so on your behalf may result in the loss of your Apple Developer Program membership. Get helpful tips and resources on marketing your apps the right way from the App Store Resource Center.“
This is not the first time that Apple has reacted to entities trying to game the App Store rankings. Mobile marketing company Tapjoy was famously kicked off the iOS platform last year after providing users incentives for downloads through virtual currency. This latest threat comes as some developers may be turning to third-party services overseas where users are paid to download apps in order to have them rise in the rankings.
The practice of paying users to download apps or flood the Web with posts has been called “water armies” because of their willingness to inundate the Internet with content or downloads for the right price. It is a way to game various ranking systems by playing off what algorithms are looking for. There are different tactics for water armies, such as link and content farming or posting to social media channels. Google has battled water armies in its SEO rankings for some time with its Panda program.
The same concept applies with the Apple App Store rankings. Users getting paid to download apps so as to rise in the rankings became enough of a problem that Apple felt the need to speak out on the subject. As Apple is usually tight-lipped about its metrics and methods, the announcement is a bit of a wonder in itself.
Apple paid $700 million to developers last quarter with the top performing apps likely taking up the bulk of that revenue. Hence, it is very important for publishers to get their apps in the top rankings as it is the difference between making hundreds of dollars on an app or thousands.
There are a variety of third-party marketing services that developers can use to avoid the ire of Apple. Options include analytics firms like Flurry, Localytics, Apsalar, PlayHaven (among others) to more traditional marketing outlets like public relations firms or mobile marketing studios like SapientNitro or AKQA.
In any business, marketing is not easy. There is really no easy fix. Attempts to game the system are likely to be punished or be scorned by the larger community. Apple has put its foot down on this issue several times. Tapjoy found out the hard way and has been spending a good portion of the last year finding ways around the App Store (through its own application marketplace and HTML5 initiatives).
The best advice to get into the top of the rankings of the Apple App Store is to have an app worthy of the attention. Releasing a mediocre app and gaming the system will only work for so long as users find it subpar and start flooding the reviews sections with calls for the developers head on a pike.
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Don’t Miss Networking with Your Marketing Peers at SMX West – Feb. 28-Mar. 1 in San Jose
Feb 6th
We’ve already highlighted the exceptional content and highly qualified presenters at SMX West. But there’s another aspect of the conference that is just as important and valuable – networking. And with well over 1000 companies sending delegates (so far), there are lots of people to…
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Data Visualization for People Who Don’t Visualize Data: CA ERwin 8.2
Feb 3rd
In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we’re dealing with?
Donna Burbank – who’s a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies’ long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. “When I talk to our customers, they tell me it’s a whole new… thing, for lack of a more technical word. They’ve heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don’t have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don’t want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand.”
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So it is that CA Technologies found itself in the business of manufacturing a class of software that a new and growing chunk of its customers might not actually care about all that much: database visualization tools. ERwin has been the market share leader in this category ever since its creation in 1998. Its typical customers have been database architects (DBAs), the people whose jobs are to model the classifications and structures for the relational data that businesses rely upon every day.
Welcome to Your World
But the shift to cloud technologies has partly been fueled by the need for tremendous space for data warehousing – to house the huge data stores generated by millions of Internet customer transactions. It’s that shift which is pushing data outside of the constraints of traditional SQL relational databases. That push is forcing businesses to examine, some for the very first time, the structure of their data. And what they’re seeing, they don’t understand.
“A lot of the move to the cloud is a business decision. The technical people doing the move are probably still the DBAs, but they’re challenged,” CA’s Burbank tells RWW. “There will always be that core group of people who want to use a data model, that’s our sweet spot right now: the data architect, the DBA. Those people and more would like to use a Web-based interface.”
ERwin’s new Web portal, she explains, is a browser-based interface for information that has otherwise been modeled for DBAs by ERwin Data Modeler (which itself moves to version 8.2 this week). This new portal will help both architects and Burbank’s “sponsors” to analyze the relationships of data from a business impact standpoint. “If I’m building a data warehouse, I want to see how data moves from the source system to the target warehouse to the reporting tool. Maybe I’m changing a data element; what other parts of the organization are affected? You could sort of get that through ERwin’s repository [in Model Manager] with some queries, but it wasn’t the tool for that.”
The new, more objective breakdown aims to give multiple classes of users a comprehension of the data that they may have never had before. A “sponsor” who wants to search for relationships is going to expect search to behave like Google, Burbank explains. So the Web Portal tool gives that user a text-based search query line (shown above). What that user gets in return will be something that may explain what tables or fields relate to the search criteria, but it might not directly correlate to the model as the original DBA intended.
As Burbank explains, the business user, not getting a complete overview from the initial response, may decide to export the data he’s seeing into Excel, and generate some PivotTables from them. The DBA, on the other hand, may use the Portal’s new graphical impact analysis tools to drill down further, or perhaps execute a “What If?” experiment. If a column is changed on a table, for instance, the DBA can see how the rest of the schema is impacted. “It’s that type of drilldown over the Web that they could never do before,” she remarks.
Big data vs. “lots of data”
All this said, ERwin is not quite yet a data warehousing assistance tool. While CA’s Donna Burbank says it’s something her company is considering, she points out that Hadoop and the restructuring of data it entails, lend themselves to very different situations.
“I’ve done several presentations where I’ve explained to people that there’s ‘big data,’ and then there’s ‘lots of data,’” she relates. “And these are different use cases. Maybe I’m an energy company, and I’m trying to use a Hadoop-type structure to see uses across my different [operating units], and I need to eventually manage that in a warehouse. It’s that analysis of that big data that then goes into a data model. One use case [involves] massive volume, real-time, more of a programmatic approach to data. There’s a lot of messaging there around, is data modeling going away? Is data warehousing going away? Today, it’s two different use cases. You’re doing an analysis, and then you use the data model to make sense of that raw data. And if I’m going to use it for a BI report, that’s when your data model comes in. I’ve done my data analysis with the big data; here’s my data model to say which pieces of that I used in the warehouse.”
Real-time analysis of big data, she goes on, may enable DBAs to add some elements to the relational data model that they may not have seen before.
As for the other use case, Burbank agrees that data modeling may never be appealing to 100% of the “sponsor” audience. But making it appeal to a somewhat greater audience through more intuitive graphics, along with Google-like search, could go a long way toward enabling those tasked with new responsibilities to be able to better understand what they are, and carry them out with a greater sense of confidence.
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…Because Most SEOs Don’t Know What Strategy Means
Feb 2nd
There seems to be some confusion when people talk about SEO strategies that could lead to problems for your own efforts…and your clients. What’s interesting is this confusion seems to be created and sustained not by people who don’t know what they are talking about, but the very people who should know what they are [...]
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Google Responds to Privacy Policy Backlash: Don’t Log In
Jan 30th
For years legislators, privacy advocates, and the FTC have suggested Google simplify its privacy policies. In consolidating policies associated with various Google products, it stands to reason the company believed it was satisfying such requests.
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SEO Efforts Don’t Have to be Dead on Arrival – Search Engine Journal
Jan 10th
 Search Engine Journal |
SEO Efforts Don't Have to be Dead on Arrival
Search Engine Journal Well, for some business owners, they probably feel that way sometimes about their company's SEO efforts. The intent may be good, but the bottom line is the search engine marketing campaigns their companies are employing are on a fast track to nowhere. … |
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You Don’t Need A College Degree to Be a Great Coder
Jan 7th
Okay, so we all know that both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg never finished their Harvard degrees, and look where they are now. But for the rest of us who just aspire to have a full time job, let alone an equity share in a hot startup, is a college degree really necessary to code? Maybe not, according to this blog post from Good Technology.
Erin Biba, who wrote the post back in November, asks: “Programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?”
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Exactly. And she cites a recent study by Dice.com that puts the number of available tech jobs at more than 84,000. While not all of them are programmers, certainly a good portion of them are. It is a good time to be a nerd.
The stories about the perks at Google and Facebook are now the stuff of urban legend. I was recently in the trendy SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco, and visited a typical 200-person tech firm that had the required bicycles, snack room, and catered lunches and dinners. So why do hiring managers insist on the sheepskin (that means the actual diploma, for those of you too young to remember the reference)? Tradition, perhaps?
I went shopping around a few typical college Web course catalogs, looking for the kinds of software engineering classes that would teach kids today how to do a Hadoop cluster or learning CSS/XML. I came up empty-handed. Granted, I didn’t spend hours on this research.
Take a look at this course listing from the University of Texas at Austin’s Computer Engineering Department. Disappointing, from a place that has an active software community. Or how about this list of classes offered at the University of Urbana-Champaign, where the Web browser was invented? You can find plenty of advanced computer research happening on campus, but teaching something practical to undergrads? Not in the catalogs that I could find.
Both Vatterott and ITT Technical Institute teach Java programming as part of their certificates, so there is some hope for those who have the time and money to afford these expensive programs. But not on every one of their campuses.
As the software market heats up (and you have noticed that it is heating up, right?), the idea of a degree becomes less and less necessary, especially if you can prove your coding chops and demo what you have actually built. As you can see from my brief exploration, sometimes a CS degree doesn’t mean that you can actually program, and many schools are woefully behind on teaching the sorts of tools and techniques that the bread and butter of modern Web apps.
Granted, teaching programming skills is a lot more than offering a course in Java. But you need both the theory of software design and the actual language instruction too. It would be like teaching French by only showing what art you can find in the Louvre and d’Orsay museums. In the meantime, we need a better match between courseware and software practice, and better understanding by hiring managers of what is important.
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