Posts tagged Learn
What Customer Services Can Learn from SEO
Apr 3rd
The principles guiding search engine optimisation are sound business goals for all areas of a company, including customer service. From showing off how local you are, to putting quality of calls above quantity, here’s what your customer services team can learn from SEO… Analytics A good SEO campaign is informed by feedback from your web [...]
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Watch, Know, Learn: A Rich Online Video Academy
Apr 2nd
The Khan Academy gets a lot of deservedly favorable attention for its breadth and depth of online video instruction. But there’s another, similar site that I think deserves applause for quality, authoritative online video instruction. It also happens to be a freebie. It’s called…
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Learn the Latest Online Marketing Tactics at SES New York 2012
Mar 2nd
The SES New York 2012 early bird discount expires TODAY. Don’t miss out on the chance to see keynote speaker Avinash Kaushik of Google, 70+ sessions covering search, social, and display, plus numerous networking opportunities – all at a discount!
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Camera Awesome: An iPhone App That Instagram and Apple Could Learn From
Mar 1st
The fact that smartphones have made a huge mark on photography is no breaking news. The company that was once most synonymous with taking photographs is now in bankruptcy, while the most frequently-used camera on Flickr isn’t one of Nikon or Canon’s DSLRs, but the iPhone 4.
The cameras that come built into iPhones, Android devices and Windows Phones are now capable enough to replace point-and-shoot digital cameras in most people’s lives. On top of that, we’ve seen the rise of photo-editing and sharing apps like Instagram, Hipstamatic and Camera+, all of which give new visual life to the images people snap on their phones. If you thought there wasn’t room for one more photo app, you obviously haven’t played around with Camera Awesome yet.
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The app comes from the folks at SmugMug, but is not strictly tied to the company’s flagship photo-sharing website. Instead, it’s a stand alone iOS application that gives the iPhone’s native camera a serious run for its money and includes a feature or two that the Instagram team would be wise to emulate.
Camera Awesome has basic photo filters like Instagram and Hipstamatic, but the app’s functionality goes well beyond that. Its photo-editing features are comparable to more sophisticated apps like Photo Gene, and start to make Photoshop Express look like something of a joke. You can adjust sharpness, temperature, vibrance and contrast on a photo once it’s taken. You can crop images and select from preset visual effects, filters, textures and frames. Each tab offers a handful of options for free, and then includes dozens more for a 99 cents each. That’s how they’re monetizing this otherwise free app.
Before you even get to the filters and editing features, though, the act of taking a photo is markedly improved from what’s possible with most other photography apps out there. There are visual guides to help with composition, including a level to help ensure the horizon is straight and a grid that splits the screen into thirds so budding photographers can craft images that adhere to the age-old “rule of thirds.” Using multitouch, you can tell the camera to focus on one part of the image and adjust the exposure on another part.
Other features they managed to cram into the camera include image stablization, multiple exposures and timed exposures. These are all things that come standard on many digital cameras these days, but are not built natively into most smartphone cameras. Apple could learn a thing or two here.
Camera Awesome also shoots video, and even has the ability to record things that happened up to five seconds before you hit the “record” button, which is kind of insane.
Of course, this is, at its heart, a photo-sharing app. Yes, they’d like you to upload images to a SmugMug account, but you don’t have to. It works with Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa and YouTube. They’re interested in adding support for Instagram, Path, WordPress and Tumblr, CEO Don McAskill said on Twitter. It’s not clear if integration with services like Path and Instagram are feasible.
Camera photo by Alan Levine
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What Marketers Can Learn from Procter and Gamble and Old Spice SEM
Feb 4th
Procter and Gamble (NYSE:PG) made headlines with their recent cuts and pending layoffs. The reports have P&G cutting their marketing and 1,600 workers. Per the CEO Robert McDonald, “As we’ve said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent… In the digital space, with [...]
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What Marketers Can Learn from Proctor and Gamble and Old Spice SEM
Feb 2nd
Proctor and Gamble (NYSE:PG) made headlines with their recent cuts and pending layoffs. The reports have P&G cutting their marketing and 1,600 workers. Per the CEO Robert McDonald, “As we’ve said historically, the 9% to 11% range [for advertising as a percentage of sales] has been what we have spent… In the digital space, with [...]
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How To Learn Who Has You In Their Google+ Circles
Jan 27th
The second-most important thing about social media is talking to people. The most important thing is to know whom you’re talking to. We can’t have a conversation about “authenticity” or “realness” or any other airy social media concept until we understand that there are people listening on the other side of that megaphone, and that’s very nice of them to do. In order to get something out of social media, our listeners have to get something out of listening to us.
To give them what they want, it helps to know who they are. With the integration of Google+ into search, Google’s social network will become an increasingly important part of the Web. By Google’s count, it has 90 million users already. If you want to have a presence in Google search, active participation on Google+ is a good idea. I tested a tool for understanding the Google+ audience today and found some interesting insights.
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Global Google+ Demographics
The tools at PlusDemographics.com gather many of the basic statistics one needs to understand who uses Google+. They offer a free global report that they compiled by crawling 45 million public profiles, a very healthy sample of the estimated total, and normalizing the somewhat erratic data they got to within acceptable limits.
As it stands in January 2012, 70.38% of Google+ users identify as male, 28.77% are female, and the remainder fall into Google’s third category: “other.” Nearly 80% of users fall into the 18-34 age brackets. Over 30% of users are from the U.S., followed by around 14% from India, although the #2 state/region and seven of the top 10 cities are in India.
The majority of Google+ users surveyed are not active on Facebook or Twitter. 99.7% are not active on Foursquare. Google+ is a different place altogether from the rest of the social Web. How do my own followers compare?
Personal Google+ Demographics
PlusDemographics also offers personal reports for a fee. Single reports cost $4.99 for personal profiles and $9.95 for business pages. There are discounts for buying reports in packs. Personal reports crawl up to 10,000 followers, which ought to be enough to get a sense. It gives you general demographic information about your people as a whole, and it highlights some individual users following you based on their “prominence” on the network. Here’s what it found from mine:
Almost 87% of my encirclements identify as male. That’s a pretty remarkable indication of the demographics of people who follow tech bloggers on Google+.
The age breakdown is comparable to the global population, trending slightly older, which I find flattering.
The majority of my Google+ followers do use Facebook, which is different from the general population. Almost none are active on Klout, but that’s more than in the global report, which found less than 0.1% used Klout.
These are all very basic data points, of course. Only a rough understanding of my encirclements is possible from these data. The way to get to know the people they represent is by talking to them, sharing with them and following their links.
How do you get to know the people on your social networks?
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Google Isn’t Just About the Web, Learn About Google’s Driverless Car
Jan 19th
I have to admit that this infographic is the first time I have heard about the “driverless car”. There is a lot of news out there about it and varying opinions. If a Google driverless car were to be available to consumers what would be the pros and cons? There might be less DUI-related accidents [...]
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How the Web and Mobile Tech Are Changing How People Learn Music
Jan 12th
That the Web has revolutionized music is not exactly a news flash, but most people typically think about that in terms of music consumption. iTunes. YouTube. SoundCloud. Spotify. Group listening sites like Turntable.fm. Recommendation engines like those of Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest. Now voice-controlled Internet radio apps are coming pre-installed in new cars. There’s no doubt that they way people discover and listen to music has changed radically, and will continue to do so.
The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.
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From Skype to YouTube, Music Lessons Move Online
These days, instead of traveling across town to attend music lessons, many people are using tools like Skype to learn from a distance, just as they can do things like attend meetings and take academic courses regardless of their physical location. The new model allows for more flexible learning and in many cases improves the regularity of lessons since it avoids things like traffic jams and bad weather.
Even if one doesn’t get one-on-one lessons via Skype, the Web is loaded with music education resources for all skill levels. When a few friends and I started a band last year, I decided to brush up some more advanced drumming techniques, since it had been a few years since I last played. Much like Lynda.com and Tuts+offer video tutorials for software and coding, there a number of sites out there who do the same for drummers and other musicians. I found one in particular that published a free video podcast, enabling me to download the lessons to my phone or iPad and bring a virtual teacher down into the basement with me.
Online music lessons range from having the structure of a college course to being as loose and on-your-own-time as a series of YouTube searches. On YouTube, the quality of the material may vary, but there are quite a few dedicated sites with legitimate, high-quality video lessons available, sometimes for free.
For those who are especially serious and have the money to spend, the Berklee College of Music offers online-only courses and certifications through a website called BerkleeMusic. The courses don’t come cheap, but enrolling and paying for them is a straight-forward, Web-based process.
Learning Music Goes Mobile
The explosion of smartphones and tablets has impacted countless aspects of daily life for millions of people, and budding musicians are no exception. Not only can you watch video tutorials on your iPad or Android phone, but there’s a growing selection of educational apps that allow for casual learning from any location.
Some of the numerous mini-piano and keyboard apps for the iOS and Android, for example, come with built-in guides to musical notation, with some of them going into more depth about music theory. Other apps drill down further into music theory, such as Wolfram Alpha’s Music Theory Course Assistant app for iOS.
There’s a wide selection of instrument-specific learning apps for iOS alone, such as GuitarLab and Gibson Learn and Master Guitar or Piano Tutor and Virtuoso Piano.
Like with any learning process, the effectiveness of mobile apps and Web tutorials like these will depend somewhat on one’s approach and level of motivation. Ultimately, in-person music lessons may still work best for some. There will likely always be a place for one-on-one, in-the-flesh education, but these new tools and methods open things up to a wider group of people with virtually no restrictions on time and place.
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FedEx & UPS Learn Online Video Lessons The Hard Way – ReelSEO Online Video News
Dec 26th
 ReelSEO Online Video News |
FedEx & UPS Learn Online Video Lessons The Hard Way
ReelSEO Online Video News He is also founder of The Viral Orchard (http://www.viralorchard.com), an Internet marketing firm offering content writing and development services, viral marketing consulting, and SEO services. Jeremy writes constantly, loves online video, … |
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