Posts tagged People
What People Do Is The New SEO – Search Engine Land
Mar 22nd
 Search Engine Land |
What People Do Is The New SEO
Search Engine Land I know everyone loves when a post starts this way, but SEO is not dead, or dying for that matter. At least I certainly hope that's not the case, considering I and many others reading this make a livelihood working in it. But SEO is certainly changing, … On-Page SEO Factors: Which Ones Have the Most Impact on Rankings? Domain Names With Geo Specific Keywords Offer Local Ranking Opportunities [Study] |
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What People Do Is The New SEO
Mar 22nd
This article is all about the lies we tell. I know everyone loves when a post starts this way, but SEO is not dead, or dying for that matter. At least I certainly hope that’s not the case, considering I and many others reading this make a livelihood working in it. But SEO is certainly [...]
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
[STUDY] Why Do People Use Instagram?
Mar 14th
Instagram is the iPhone photographer’s app of choice, and it’s not just because of those slice and dice filters. Are Instagram users hasty and lazy, or do they actually take time to craft the photos before uploading them? A study done back when Instagram was fairly new suggests that the hardcore users of the Instagram app are anything but lazy. In fact, they might be using this tiny app to create art and build beautiful new communites. Zachary McCune, community manager at @piictu, decided to study software users of Instagram, rather than look at the creator side of things.
“I kinda think they’re the neglected part of our technology,” he tells ReadWriteWeb. “There’s a lot of concern about technology but it almost always comes from this creator side, like the brilliant people in Silicon Valley or the people in developer communities. I don’t really like that narrative.” So he set out to do just that. The result is a surprising portrait of social media users who are not only engaged, but rather obsessed with how their images look. But then again, it was June of 2011. And Instagram was just getting big.
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McCune grounded the research in a simple question: Why do users share personal media content with global networks? Rather than waxing poetic or theoretical, he decided to conduct a tight, four-week ethnography, a macro-assessment of Instagram users on the subject of “iPhoneography.” The results show that Instagram users are indeed concerned with personal production and social reception. In other words, they’re not rampant amateur food pornographers. As a caveat, McCune does note that the findings in his study do more accurately reflect the “hyper” user rather than the “average” Instagrammer.
McCune engaged in the Instagram culture by composing and sharing images, commenting on other user photos, engaging in dialogue and building relationships with other users, and studying the patterns of photo styles, sub-communities, practices and popular trends. He also traveled to an InstaMeet in London, learned about multi-app photo-editing tricks of advanced Instagram users – which were more common than one might think – and observed the habits of the London Instagram community. He also passed out 25 open-response survey and received 23 back, 12 from London InstaMeet attendees and 11 from international Instagram users who were deemed “popular.”
From the surveys, six key trends emerged: sharing, documentation, seeing, community, creativity and therapy. People wanted more than anything to exchange images with others throughout the network, find people with whom they had common interests, document the world around them and see provide “visual status updates” to their friends. A community evolved. People were excited about the visual social interaction, and used Instagram as a creative outlet. They also found Instagram to be, in some ways, rather therapeutic.
“I think Instagram can gain a Flickr-like force, and by that I mean it will be content agnostic but people won’t need to use Instagram filters,” McCune says. “There’s definitely an Instagram aesthetic, but a lot of things won’t be about the Instagram aesthetic. It’s like a whole creative ecosystem. And in some communities, there sort of a stigma about overlying on Instagram filters.”
Is Instagram the New Site for Social Media Stardom?
Communities start out small and insular, yet over time as users become “popular” there is an underlying sense of want to become famous. Social media famous.
“When I was studying Instagram, there was a lot more collaboration – tips, try this for this effect, if you’re shooting at night make sure you stabilize the camera in this way,” McCune says. “Early on I think there was more of a pack dynamic – who you engaged with and what that meant.”
When the social media celebrity effect sets in, users stop engaging and start counting numbers. For 15 minutes you can be famous in front of 15 people. Is it worth it?
“Now you see a lot more comments – which is tragic,” says McCune. “But at a certain level of accomplishment, there is a lot of follow this, follow me. The social has taken over. Now it’s more about followers and less about engagement.”
Food photographer Stephen Hamilton is not convinced that Instagram users give two craps. At least not when it comes to food.
“In my opinion, Instagram is a little bit of a bandaid,” he says. “Some of these apps, you can apply contrast and adjust different looks to them. Like anything with these photo apps, it always gets overused.”
But it doesn’t have to be that way, friends. You don’t have to become a social media celebrity who shoots crappy food porn photos. It can be so much more, you see.
“There’s a lot of things in the photo that someone can respond to, promote conversation – then you get a wonderful interaction out of it,” says McCune. “I hope that continues, because that’s what’s beautiful about being able to relate to photographs.”
Images via Instagram.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Why People Should Chill Out About Targeted Advertising
Mar 13th
The other day, I was reading a news article when a skyscraper banner ad to the right of the story caught my eye. It was for a particular bass guitar, which was for sale on Amazon. I happen to be in the market for a new bass, and this model looked like one that I might like. So I clicked on the ad to take a closer look and then and browsed through a few other options.
I didn’t end up buying anything, only because I have more a little research to do before I make a decision. But I will make a purchase within the next few weeks. Maybe I’ll get one through Amazon. Either way, I couldn’t help but notice something rather incredible about the aforementioned experience: I actually clicked on a banner ad on a website.
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This was probably the second or third time I have ever done this in my life, despite being served probably millions of ad impressions since I first encountered the Internet via a dial-up-connected AOL account. I’ve clicked on text ads in Google search results and on the occasional Facebook ad, but like most Web users, display banner ads have always fallen into my blind spot while I’m browsing. I rarely even notice them.
This phenomenon is by no means limited to the digital world in which we now live. As a teenager, I would bemoan the number of full-page ads in the magazines I’d pick up, as I flipped through the cologne stench in search of articles to read. To this day, I can’t bear to sit through a television commercial. Most of them are weirdly manipulative and completely irrelevant to my life.
The Value For Consumers
On the Internet, my relationship with advertising has begun to change. Thanks to the social graph, search engines and ad targeting technology, I’m seeing more advertisements for things that actually interest me. Instead of an annoyance, ads can be useful to me as a consumer. This is a concept I never knew growing up.
As tolerant – cautiously supportive, even – as I am of targeted online advertising, it just so happens that I am in the minority. The latest evidence illustrating this fact came last week with the release of a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. According to the survey, 68% of American consumers have a negative view of targeted online advertising.
Above all, people take issue with the privacy implications associated with personalized ads. To know which ads to deliver, marketers and ad networks need data about consumers. Whether they get it from your search history, the data you pump into Facebook or by tracking your browsing history, they have to get that information somehow. This creeps a lot of people out.
To be sure, companies do have a special obligation to keep their online advertising practices transparent and easy to opt out of for those who don’t wish to participate. They also should never expose private data in any kind of a public way, as Google learned the hard way with their launch of Buzz.
The “Do Not Track” initiatives outlined by the FTC and being undertaken by Mozilla and Google are necessary to protect consumers’ privacy and ensure that the way this data gets collected is indeed transparent.
As long as privacy controls are available and private data is never made public against anyone’s wishes, I see no problem with targeted ads.
The Value For Publishers (And in Theory, the Public Good)
Not only do personalized ads make for a more relevant and enjoyable experience, but in theory, they should make life easier for publishers down the line. It’s no secret the traditional news business is in peril. For the time being, print publishers trying to make the transition to the Web are still seeing more lucrative ad sales per unit in print than they are online, even as readers flock to the Web and mobile platforms to get their news.
There’s been a lot of handwringing in the journalism world over the last few years, especially when the recession was at its peak. One of the concerns is that as news makes the transition from paper to pixels and vital resource are cut back at traditional operations, we could lose some of the best journalism, which many view as the lifeblood of democracy.
There’s certainly a case to be made that the Web is improving journalism (even if it also has a way of dumbing it down in some cases), but the concerns about the future of news and how to financially support the best reporting are not without merit.
Advertisers are themselves still making the transition from traditional to new media, but it’s easy to imagine that to many marketers, measurable, more effective units will have more value – and thus be worthy of a higher ad spend – than the old, one-size-fits-all advertising model. Sure, some ad campaigns will still be more effective for building brand recognition than encouraging immediate consumer action, but even those ads would be better served to the right people.
Of course, there are major differences in the economics of advertising online and advertising in traditional mass media. It’s not as though the companies formerly known as newspapers are going to suddenly replace their old print revenue with a single, digital revenue stream. But the more effective digital advertising becomes, the more valuable it will be.
Newspaper boy photo by Kelly B.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
How People Power (& Personalize) Bing’s Social Search
Mar 13th
The good folks over at Stone Temple Consulting released an in-depth interview with Bing’s Principal Group Program Manager for Bing Social Search, Paul Yiu. The Bing social search team integrates social content and indicators into the search results to add both personalization and relevance…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
Survey Paradox: People Like Google But Not What It’s Doing
Mar 12th
Last week the Pew Internet Project released findings of a survey on search, personalization and targeted advertising. In a nutshell, survey respondents had a very positive view of search and the quality of search results. Yet the majority gave an unequivocal thumbs down to search personalization…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
View full post on Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing
SXSW In A Nutshell: Homeless People As Hotspots
Mar 11th
UPDATE IN PROGRESS: Quotes from a phone call with the creators of the campaign will be added soon. Check back in a few minutes. South By Southwest 2012 can be summarized thusly: An impossibly-named marketing company called Bartle Bogle Hegarty is doing a little human science experiment called Homeless Hotspots. It gives out 4G hotspots to homeless people along with a promotional t-shirt. The shirt doesn’t say, “I have a 4G hotspot.” It says, “I am a 4G hotspot.“
You can guess what happens next. You pay these homeless, human hotspots whatever you like, and then I guess you sit next to them and check your email and whatnot. The digital divide has never hit us over the head with a more blunt display of unselfconscious gall.
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The Homeless Hotspots website frames this as an attempt “to modernize the Street Newspaper model employed to support homeless populations.” There’s a wee little difference, though. Those newspapers are written by homeless people, and they cover issues that affect the homeless population.
By contrast, Homeless Hotspots are helpless pieces of privilege-extending human infrastructure. It’s like it never occurred to the people behind this campaign that people might read street newspapers. They probably just buy them to be nice and throw them in the garbage.
If the New York Times hadn’t posted this on its SXSW Tumblr, I would have had no idea it was happening. It was only when I came out of my interview-hole to write that I saw this lovely piece of SXSW news – while everybody else was pounding brewskis at the Cheezburger party.
So no, I haven’t seen a human hotspot. I’ll be on the lookout tomorrow. Honestly, anyone worried enough about connectivity at SXSW enough to pay someone on the street for it has a longer list of problems than first-world guilt. But this conference is so hugely, expensively over the top as a monument to the privilege of Internet access that I didn’t think it could top itself. It just did.
@tcarmody @dansinker @kissane Do we know for sure that this is a real thing and not brilliant parody? Raises good Qs about street newspapers
— Tim Maly (@doingitwrong) March 12, 2012
An understandable reaction. Pitch-perfect satire often strikes the exact same agonizing chord as the real, terrible truth.
It most assuredly is real, though. Here’s a sample of BBH’s astonishingly tone-deaf blog post announcing the “experiment:”
“One particular aspect we find intriguing is Street Newspapers, which are print publications created and sold by homeless populations as a form of entrepreneurial employment. The model has proven successful enough to be adopted in cities spanning 30 countries. The issue however, is that like any print publication, these newspapers are under duress from the proliferation of digital media. How often do you see someone “buy” a paper, only to let the homeless individual keep it? This not only prevents the paper from serving as a tool for the individual to avoid begging, but it proves how little value people actually place on the publication itself. Yet the model isn’t inherently broken. It’s simply the output that’s archaic in the smartphone age.
So we decided to modernize it.”
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
How to Make Friends & Influence People at #SESNY
Mar 8th
SES is now on Vivastream. You’re probably thinking “oh no, not another social network to keep track of.” But this one is definitely worth joining to make sure you’re meeting the right people and attending the right sessions and events at SES New Yor
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
People Polled on “What Part of SEO Process is the Most Difficult?” – Albany Times Union
Mar 3rd
 Industry Today (press release) |
People Polled on "What Part of SEO Process is the Most Difficult?"
Albany Times Union Internet Marketing Company (http://www.internetmarketingcompany.biz) reveals results of the poll, "What Part of SEO Process is the Most Difficult?" on the Facebook® Platform. Internet Marketing Company, a search engine marketing company and internet … People Polled On “What Part Of SEO Process Is The Most Difficult?” Importance of regularly practicing SEO techniques Link Building Company (linkbuilding.org) Announces New Blog, "Importance of … |
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People Polled on “What Part of SEO Process is the Most Difficult?” – San Francisco Chronicle (press release)
Mar 2nd
Industry Today (press release) |
People Polled on "What Part of SEO Process is the Most Difficult?"
San Francisco Chronicle (press release) Internet Marketing Company (www.internetmarketingcompany.biz) reveals results of the poll, "What Part of SEO Process is the Most Difficult?" on the Facebook® Platform. Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) March 02, 2012 Internet Marketing Company, a search engine … People Polled On “What Part Of SEO Process Is The Most Difficult?” Importance of regularly practicing SEO techniques |
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