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Showing posts from January 5, 2016
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Twitter Launches Conversational Ads To Get People Tweeting About Brands

Twitter’s new Conversational Ads mix polls with custom hashtags and rich media with the aim of getting users to share their responses with their own followers.With Conversational Ads, brands can pose a question with two answers to choose from, each incorporating custom hashtags that show up in the ad copy and in the call-to-action buttons. When someone takes the poll or votes from an ad, like the example above, they are given the opportunity to tailor the response crafted by the brand and share it with their followers. It looks something like this:Notice the share above displays as an organic Tweet. Advertisers only pay for clicks on the original Promoted Tweet.When users engage with a Conversational Ad, a thank you message from the brand appears in place of the call-to-action buttons.The ads have been running in beta for a few months with brands like Samsung Canada and Lifetime participating. Lifetime tested the ads to promote the premier of a new series. Marissa Vinciguerra, Directo…
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Bridge The Worlds Of IT & Marketing At MarTech. Lowest Rates Expire Saturday!

Don’t miss the only MarTech in North America this year! Check out the topics and who’s speaking below. Register this week and save $500 on all of the sessions, networking activities and expo full of leading solution providers.Lowest rates expire on Saturday. Register today!

via Marketing Land
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HTC and Under Armour Unveil HealthBox, a One of its Kind Connected Fitness System

2015 was touted as the year of wearables and although it didn’t quite turn out to be the case, this year around it definitely seems to be the year of wearables. The companies are readying themselves to compete in the choc-a-block wearables market with new innovations. HTC and Under Armour have unveiled the UA HealthBox which is a connected fitness system device that measures sleep, fitness, activity and nutrition and is claimed to be first of its kind. The Healthbox aims at taking complete care of one’s health by regularly monitoring the vitals and allowing individuals to tailor cut their activities based on the same.The UA Healthbox comprises of a fitness band, heart rate monitor, connected smartscale and all of these are made to connect with the UA Record app for providing the insights. By the way the app is already available for download on both Google Play and the iOS App Store. The UA Record app is like an aggregator for the fitness machines, soft of a HUD that collects all the i…
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What Every Startup Needs To Know About Marketing

Seventy-five percent of all startups fail. Ouch. Considering that startups and venture funding are on the rise for the first time since the dot-com bust in early 2000, that is an even scarier fact.Here are three tips to make sure your marketing effort will make you one of the 25 percent that succeed.Know Your CustomerStop looking at your product. Focus on your customer.Why? The single biggest reason for startup failure is “lack of a market need for their product,” according to Fortune. Without market need, there are no customers. And without customers, there is no business.Customers make a startup viable and keep us all in business. So who are your customers? What do they value?One way to get a strong understanding of your customers is to build buyer personas.Buyer personas are representations of your customers. They include key triggers like:What is important to each of your customers.What your buyer’s goals are when using your product or service.How your customers define value.What …
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Flurry: Phablets Will Become Dominant Media Consumption Devices

According to a year in review report from Flurry, “Phablets” (horrible term) are set to become dominant by the end of this year. What that means is more people will be reading news, watching video, listening to music and consuming other types of content on these larger format smartphones than on other media devices, including, eventually, PCs and TVs.The report discusses app category growth and other trends for 2015. However the most interesting data in the report pertains to the growth of and time spent with Phablets.The larger format smartphones appear to drive more consumption and more engagement overall. That makes sense because the larger screen makes for a more versatile device.The perhaps surprising projection Flurry makes is that by the end of this year Phabets wil be the dominant form factor in the mobile device category. The chart below reflects the distribution of devices in the US. By the middle of this year small smartphones are gone and conventional tablets become more m…
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Snapchat Is Reportedly Developing An API For Advertising

Slightly over a year since its first ad, Snapchat is actively developing an application programming interface (API) to support advertising.That’s according to a story in today’s Digiday, which cited “multiple sources.” The messaging platform is reportedly now in discussions with various ad agencies and tech firms to determine what their requirements might be, and the API could be ready for testing this spring. Snapchat has declined comment on the story.An API would allow Snapchat to expand its ecosystem of advertisers and the kinds of ads it can offer, facilitating direct response ads like ones for app installs and better enabling programmatic user targeting, ad order placement, ad creative delivery, and analytics.To date, the platform has been handling ad placement through direct contact with brands and their agencies. It’s also received a lot of attention for the development of brand-labeled content, such as through its Discover feature.Other messaging platforms, like Twitter, also …
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The Contrarian Guide To Online Marketing

You will find “best practices” galore in marketing articles. Most are great counsel. However, sometimes bad advice gets regurgitated or isn’t applicable for the person reading it.I want to point out a contrarian point of view gained from being in the trenches for over a decade. As with anything or anyone else, take this view with a grain of salt. Separated by topic, here are my rebuttals to commonly used phrases/ideas:Analytics“Check analytics daily.”I’ve worked at an agency and a large e-commerce site (in-house position) before where this was the rule of thumb. For the large e-commerce website — for an in-house position — this was very helpful and important. When there was a marginal shift in numbers overnight, it often indicated something to research and be reactive to.However, for managing an armful of small websites, time is better spent elsewhere. Weekly serves best for small- to medium-sized sites, but some can get away with monthly research for reporting and strategy.“Beware of…
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Moto X Play Now Receiving Marshmallow Update in India

After the Moto G3 and the Moto X Style, the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow update is now rolling out to the mid range handset, Moto X Play in India just as promised last month by Amit Boni – the General Manager of Motorola India.It’s impressive to see that Motorola is staying firm on their plans as it is currently the only OEM that has released the latest Android 6.0 for all its latest Generation of smartphones. With this pace, updates for the older handsets including the Moto G2 won’t take long. Other manufacturers should really get on with this trait and start pushing regular updates for their handsets too.The update v24.11.18 for the Moto X Play also includes the Android security update for December along with all the Marshmallow goodies including the doze mode, Now On Tap, specific app permissions and more. The Moto X Play (our review) already has a top notch battery life compared to other smartphones in its price range, so it will be interesting to see how it performs with the add…
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5 Predictions For 2016 After Reaching “Peak Martech”

It’s no surprise that modern marketers are technology-crazy, constantly searching for the latest innovative application to help optimize the customer lifecycle and gain a competitive advantage. But did you know that we have officially hit “peak martech?”That’s the word from technology guru and speaker Scott Brinker, who runs the highly influential ChiefMartec.com blog. In a column a couple of weeks ago, Brinker noted that while his marketing technology landscape supergraphic will continue to grow in the new year, we have indeed reached a plateauing state.“While new martech ventures will certainly be launched in the year ahead, the rate of exits, failures, and pivots (EFPs) will result in a plateauing of the total number of active vendors in the space,” he wrote.This doesn’t mean that marketers will cease their tech spending spree — quite the contrary. Marketers will spend an estimated $130 billion on marketing technology between 2014 and 2018, reaching $32.4 billion annually in the fi…
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Camera MX Brings iPhone’s Live Photos to Android

Apple with the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus introduced a new camera feature, “Live Photos” that can be used to generate dynamic images. It did so by capturing multiple shots before and after the main image providing a much more fun experience as users were able to see a little bit of story behind that particular photo.It was pretty certain that nothing can stop it from coming to Android whether through an official update or some third party app unleashing it. Appic Labs, the company behind the widely popular “Camera MX” in a recent update brought this functionality with the title of “Live Shot” to Android.Taking a Live shot is pretty straight forward on the app, you can switch to the view by clicking the new whirlpool icon on the top sitting right next to the fx tab. Once you get in, the app will take in some more scenes before the shutter button is triggered giving you the feel of a moving image apparently. You can even set how far before the actual image you want to click through the app’s…
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MarTech Today: Facebook’s Human Raters, Tag Management & LeadPages’ “Center”

Here’s our daily recap of what happened in marketing technology, as reported on Marketing Land and other places across the web.From Marketing Land:Facebook’s Human News Feed Raters Are Now Working Worldwide
Jan 4, 2016 by Matt McGee
What began as a small group in Tennessee is now an international panel of Facebook users who increasingly influence what shows in the News Feed.Why Tag Management Is The Way Forward In 2016
Jan 4, 2016 by Nick Iyengar
Still on the fence about TMS? Columnist Nick Iyengar explains why you need to think seriously about adopting a tag management system in the new year.LeadPages Wants Its New “Center” Product To Conduct Your Marketing Orchestra
Dec 30, 2015 by Barry Levine
The Minneapolis-based company is moving beyond its focus on capturing leads, to providing a tracking-and-segmenting hub for the leads from your best-of-breed marketing solutions.Definitive Guide To Duplicate Research For Local SEO
Dec 31, 2015 by Joy Hawkins
Wondering how to identify and clea…
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Link is a Small Cube that will Stream Data to 7 Devices Wirelessly Without the Need for Wi-Fi

It is inevitable for us to carry a number of gadgets along with their accessories when on the move. The accessories tend to include microSD cards, Flash Drives and the external hard discs. The pain point is the fact that you need to bundle the accessories with their cords and adapters in order to actually use them and in case you don’t do so it becomes quiet a daunting task to move your data around.Link is a teeny-tiny cube by Fasseto, a Wisconsin-based cloud start up and is being showcased at the ongoing CES in Las Vegas. The Link is capable of storing up to 2TB of data wirelessly and it also comes baked in with its own operating system, powered by a quad-core ARM processor and 4GB of RAM making it pretty similar to a tiny computer box without a display. The Link can be used by any Wi-Fi/Bluetooth compatible device through a companion app or even the device’s browser. Basically, it eliminates the need of carrying SD/microSD cards to transfer data amongst devices. The Link is capable o…
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Review: YU Yutopia: Shine on, YU Crazy Diamond!

“Comparisons are dangerous….”
As we have mentioned in the past.
It is one thing to take pride in standing up on your own feet.
Quite another to say that you stand taller than someone else.
One thing to prove you are good.
Quite another to claim you are better.No, this is not a spiritual saga – it is still a gadget review. A review of a device that is very good on its own, but perhaps bit off a little more than it could chew when it compared itself with the biggest names in cell town. We are talking, of course, of the Yutopia, the latest and – yes, we might as well say it – greatest device from Micromax’s sister YU brand, which completed a year of an extremely eventful existence. As a brand, YU seemed a more geeky version of Micromax, sticking to the latter’s “good phones at surprising prices” strategy, but adding better processors and Cyanogen or stock Android to the mix. Until the Yutopia came along, the most expensive phone in the YU stable had been the Yureka Plus, priced at Rs 8,9…
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