Posts tagged Little
One Tweet Can Kill A Market, Many Tweets Have Little Effect
Apr 25th
One false tweet from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account wiped $200 billion off the stock market, but most tweets don’t move markets one way or another. In fact, there appears to be little rhyme or reason for Twitter’s effect on individual stocks.
Take Google. While its stock has been on a six-month tear, growing 19% in that period, its “social stock” has been anything but over the same timeframe:
Or what about Cisco? Stock is up 19% over the last six months too, while Twitter reflects 82% bearish sentiment. Apple? Stock is down 33% in the last six months, while Twitter sentiment remains neutral.
Granted, some stocks like Microsoft accurately reflect their Twitter sentiment: Microsoft is up 23% in the last six months, with 71% of tweets cheering the company on. And while Red Hat jumped in the last six months, it has settled into roughly the same position it held in November 2012. Social sentiment? Neutral.
In other words, while it may be wise to consult a financial advisor when investing in stocks, consulting your 500 million Twitter friends? Not so much.
Not everyone, or every hedge fund, agrees. Derwent Capital has spent two years analyzing a subset of tweets to gauge sentiment around a stock. That lasted all of a month, but allegedly because it was so impressive (returning 1.86% in that month) that the Derwent team in 2012 decided to build a trading platform around the idea. It’s unclear how well that went since its website… no longer exists. Hardly a sign of blistering success.
Which is not to suggest that Twitter isn’t a good way to get a finger on the pulse of social sentiment. It is. I use it daily in my work, and find it a great predictor of sentiment around various brands I follow. But it’s unclear, at best, that such sentiment translates into winning stock picks. Now if there were a way to segment out of the general Twitter noise the tweets of those that matter most to discerning a company’s chances?
That just might work.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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A Little SEO Lesson From Calvin and Hobbes – Business 2 Community
Mar 27th
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A Little SEO Lesson From Calvin and Hobbes
Business 2 Community Especially sense many SEO tactics include flooding search engines with different pages, SEOs are often trying to produce copious amounts of content that don't necessarily contain clear writing. In order to present clear content that relates to your … |
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Apple Is Starting To Look A Little Nervous About Samsung
Mar 14th
Today is the big launch of Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone — and Apple has clearly taken notice. Earlier this week, Apple released two new iPhone commercials, which were well-crafted if boring. It is unlikely the timing of these new ads was coincidental.
Yesterday, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller gave a rare interview to the Wall Street Journal. Schiller was clearly on the attack.
Schiller insisted that surveys reveal that iPhone users are more “satisfied” with their device than Android users. Schiller mentioned that Android is plagued by fragmentation and that Android users are often running outdated versions of the operating system.
Schiller wasn’t finished:
Android is often given as a free replacement for a feature phone and the experience isn’t as good as an iPhone.
While Apple’s advertising focuses almost exclusively on its own product, Schiller spent much of his time with the Wall Street Journal knocking Android.
When you take an Android device out of the box, you have to sign up to nine accounts with different vendors to get the experience iOS comes with. They don’t work seamlessly together.
While Schiller mostly talked Android, Samsung was clearly on his mind. For example, he took a swipe at Samsung and its larger-sized Galaxy displays, suggesting that the bigger screen is necessary to mask a larger battery with which to compete with the iPhone 5′s battery life.
Schiller even disputed the recent smartphone market share numbers, touted the claim that Android users are more likely to switch to iPhone, and stated:
I’m not sure that the estimates and the modeling accurately gives an accurate picture of it all.
There is good reason for Schiller to be concerned, at least with Samsung, if not Android. According to the most recent comScore figures, Apple has a 38% share of the US smartphone market. Samsung is second, with 21%. But according to mobile analyst, Tomi Ahonen, Samsung is the clear global smartphone winner — having sold 215 million devices in 2012, compared to Apple’s 136 million.
The disparity could grow throughout the year. Samsung has recently stated that its flagship Galaxy line has sold over 100 million units since its May 2010 launch and that it expects to sell over 300 million smartphones in 2013.
Another point of concern for Apple: Samsung has been outspending Apple on advertising. Samsung spent $401 million just in the U.S. last year to promote its smartphones. Apple spent $333 million. Just as important, Samsung’s advertising has been more impactful. As ReadWrite noted this week, Samsung’s commercials “are the kinds of ads that strike a chord.”
Apple remains the leader, however, where it may matter most: profits. As we noted last week, “Samsung is winning every way but one” against Apple. That one way, of course, is profits. Nonetheless, Apple clearly is watching Samsung carefully — and isn’t above having the likes of Schiller toss a brushback pitch from time to time.
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Software-as-a-Service: The Dirty Little Secrets Of SaaS
Mar 5th
The IT industry may be embracing the model of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), but there’s just one problem: Up to 20% of attempted SaaS deployments are failing due to serious problems with data integration. And that’s just one of many problems facing the hot but problematic movement.
This fact doesn’t make the headlines, as vendor after vendor instead hails the signing of marquee clients for their particular service. But after the media spotlight fades, new SaaS customers are often left with shiny new portals for an online service, and plenty of headaches trying to get their legacy data to work with the new service.
That enterprises and other businesses are attracted to SaaS is nothing new: a 2010 Forrester report commissioned by Symantec reported even then that “58% of enterprises use two or more SaaS-based business applications today, and 72% plan to in 12 months. More strikingly, 19% of enterprises report having six or more SaaS-based business applications today, and 30% plan to have that many in 12 months.”
There is little evidence that this situation has changed in the past 27 months, according to Mike Hoskins, CTO of Pervasive Software. Indeed, as SaaS technologies have improved, applications have become even more robust and easier to deploy.
Integration Is Still An Issue
“But integration is still an issue,” Hoskins said. Even in the 2010 report, 39% of SaaS customers reported concerns with data integration – a concern second only to security worries. Today, the outcome of many SaaS deployments paints an even bleaker picture.
“49% of our potential customers report difficulties with post-deployment integration,” said Lance Speck, General Manager, Integration Products at Pervasive. And these are not trivial problems, either, Speck emphasized. They are enough to derail the entire deployment operation for around 20% of SaaS migrations.
It’s not just the potential for failure. The costs of data integration can be huge, and this potential expense is not typically mentioned by SaaS sales teams knocking on enterprise IT’s door. For every dollar spent on a customer resource management deployment,” Hoskins cautioned, “a customer can spend up to $5 on integration.”
These figures punch a big whole in the theory that SaaS is the end of the rainbow for enterprise IT. And data integration is not the only problem facing SaaS deployments.
Not Just Data Integration
Security remains the prime concern for SaaS deployments. Actually, it was a huge concern, and now it probably ranks high on the “Something Wicked This Way Comes” scale, as service after service this year have announced hacks that have compromised their security.
(See also Evernote Is Latest Hacking Victim and World War III Is Already Here – And We’re Losing for more on SaaS security.)
Data portability is another pitfall of SaaS deployment. If you spend all that time and money getting your data to work with a particular service, the last thing you want to hear is that this service is about to shutter its doors. We’ve seen quite a few consumer services roll up their welcome mats, enough to warrant concern for enterprise customers.
(See also Sudden Site Shutdowns And The Perils Of Living Our Lives Online.)
It’s not just the threat of a SaaS vendor dying, either. Price changes, poor service or a better mousetrap are all valid reasons for wanting to pick up your data and move. With integration so expensive, that makes choosing the right SaaS vendor all the more important.
Warning Signs
Speck warns IT customers to be on the lookout for tell-tale signs that may indicate that a SaaS vendor may be trying very hard to get that initial signature on the contract – and not worrying about the all-important follow through.
“Whenever the SaaS vendors says, ‘we’ll worry about integration in Phase II’,” it’s a big red flag, Speck said. Another call from the cluephone? “‘Don’t worry about integration, we have an API,’” Speck added.
APIs (application programming interfaces), which enable a customer’s applications to talk to the service’s code, are indeed an critical component of data integration, but the mere existence of an API is only a part of what’s needed. Other relevant questions to consider: How open is that API? How well documented? And how easy is the API is to use?
Not every SaaS vendor should be greeted with suspicion, of course, but enterprise IT departments should consider the entire process, from deployment to integration, as well as security and data portability, when selecting a SaaS vendor.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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This Little Box – The Death of Hotel SEO? Dream On. – Wednesday, 12th … – 4Hoteliers
Dec 11th
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This Little Box – The Death of Hotel SEO? Dream On. – Wednesday, 12th …
4Hoteliers But Georg Ruebensal, Managing Director of Expedia Australia, said: “We have not seen an impact on SEO at this stage, either for domestic or international searches. Travel SEO has been pronounced dead a couple of times before but it hasn't happened. |
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If Content Quality Is Key, Why Is So Little Attention Paid To Quality For Global Sites?
Dec 11th
Everywhere I go and in every conversation I have, the importance of the quality of content keeps on cropping up. You’ve no doubt had the same conversations where Pandas and Penguins keep poking in their nosy beaks? So, here’s my question: “If quality is so important, why do we…
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View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
6 Ways You Can Put a Little ‘Gangnam Style’ into Video Marketing
Dec 11th
Most video marketers have probably heard of the famous video from Psy – it’s only the most viewed and liked video on YouTube ever. If you want to spice up your video and make it come to life, look no further than “Gangnam Style” for inspiration.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
The Web’s Dirty Little Secret: Ad Services Can Kill Your Traffic
Dec 10th
It’s a dirty secret that ad providers want you to ignore: The vast majority of website failures are caused by online-advertising services. They’re choking the very sites from which they’re trying to generate revenue.
This is a symptom of the distributed Web with which we work. Sites today depend on a sheet of services – like social media, security and advertising – to bring the full Web experience to their users.
And the problem is growing even more complex with cloud-based services. Naturally, sites can be impacted by data-center outages, but problems with the services themselves can also slow or bring down your own site. And it doesn’t take a natural disaster to create the first tear that rips apart other connections, either. Sometimes it’s just one service getting hammered that starts a chain reaction that knocks your site off the Web.
Catch-22 In Action
Compuware, which monitors cloud and site performance, says the No. 1 culprit is ad services.
The graph below highlights errors found in Compuware-monitored sites over 24 hours in early October. As Stephen Pierzchala, APM Technology Strategist, explained, the failures signify any event that returned an HTTP error or reflected a serious timeout period, caused by either an application failure or slow down, or connectivity problem.
Ad services were the prime cause of failures, according to the survey, followed by Web-analytic and Web-page component services. What’s telling about these errors is that both categories are ubiquitous for any site trying to generate revenue through ads. Analytics can be even more pervasive, because even admins not dealing with ads need to understand their traffic.
For something that seems to comprise such a large portion of third-party failures, there is little anecdotal evidence of ad-service problems reported on the Internet. Some quick searches reveal little first-page information on various search engines. This would seem to suggest that either the problem is not as big an issue as the Compuware data would suggest, or there may be some active reputation management going on.
Reasons For Problem Vary
The causes of the third-party errors can vary: a failed server, lost connectivity, or even a bad script that wreaks havoc on the client’s initial load of the site. Front-end optimization vendor Strangeloop surveyed third-party scripts that affect the top 200 Internet retail sites and found an average of 6.7 third-party scripts on each. That’s 6.7 ways a site can be slowed to a crawl or stopped altogether.
Strangeloop’s report includes some telling video demonstrations about how some sites do better than others with third-party scripting.
While completely avoiding ad services isn’t an option for most websites, site administrators should use this data to more closely examine the terms of the service-level agreements they sign with each of their service providers. If you rely heavily on ad services and analytics, make sure your site is designed to work around slowsdowns and breakdowns – and that the vendor in question has its own work-arounds.
Site delivery is increasingly about supply chain management, where the supply is content. Website owners need to make sure their chains are as strong as possible.
Title image courtesy of Shutterstock.
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#SocialChat: The Little Social Sites You Should Not Overlook
Nov 15th
On Monday Nov, 12 the #SocialChat crowd gathered to welcome Monica Wright (@monicawright) for a round in the hot seat to discuss some of the social media sites often overlooked by businesses looking to get a little more out of their online marketing. Monica Wright is a veteran online marketer specializing SEO and social media, [...]
The post #SocialChat: The Little Social Sites You Should Not Overlook appeared first on Search Engine Journal.
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Google Paints a Happy Little Bob Ross Birthday Doodle
Oct 29th
“The Joy of Painting” TV show host Bob Ross is celebrated on Google’s homepage today with a Doodle paying tribute to the artist known for teaching PBS viewers to paint landscapes, including mountains surrounded by happy little clouds and trees.
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