Pylon Sounds

Facebook appears to have removed Page updates from the streaming ticker on the right portion of the screen. No official announcement has been made yet, however, its been days since I've seen any updates from any pages I follow. This means that even if a user is subscribed to receive notifications from a page and constantly engages with their updates, they still will not see their posts within the streaming ticker, which solely consists of updates from your friends now.

We are storytellers by nature, so our best tool for creating great stories is our hearts. Tune into yours and listen carefully. If you listen carefully, you will begin to hear a great story. Then post it on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest to see if it speaks as loudly to your community.

Good content marketing oftentimes requires companies to go out on a limb. And they call it “going out on a limb” for a reason. It’s risky, uncharted territory, and it wouldn’t be all too surprising if you fell. In this post, you’ll find some companies that… well… fell.

An update on the Amy's Bakery Company social media fiasco. They've hired Justin Rose PR and are planning to carryout a grand reopening. I can't help but feel that a huge amount of the people following this story are purely people wanting to watch the carnage unfold. And unfold it has! They will get next to zero value from that increased audience.

An app that gives Facebook users a one in six chance of having their profiles deleted has been banned by the site.

Social Roulette – aimed at those considering a break from the digital demands of social networking, or those just game for a gamble – promises to remove Facebook photos, friends, comments and updates before deactivating the account, providing the player drew the ‘loaded chamber’ in an app game mimicking the very real and lethal game of Russian Roulette.

“Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it’s a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture,” states the app’s website.

However, if users spin to an empty barrel, their accounts remain unaffected except for the message: ‘I just played Social Roulette and survived’.

But just four hours after the app launched, Facebook shut it down for “violating its platform policies”.

Some observers note that this is simply responsible behaviour on Facebook’s behalf: if the user strikes out and immediately regrets the decision, who can help? The developer? Clearly it’s not up to Facebook to clean up the metaphorical mess.

But on the other hand, some are accusing Facebook of being too controlling. After all, it’s your account to do with what you will, right? Well, that’s debatable – and perhaps it’s this level of control that’s prompting people to ‘pick up the gun’ in the first place.

Roadtrip Forever is a personalised experience for you and your best friend where nothing is off limits, highlighting just what can happen if you aren’t focused on the roads as a teenager. The campaign takes users on a journey through an interactive film and Facebook experience with your best friend, to deliver a road safety [...] Related posts:

1. Facebook Ad Campaign: Things That Connect Us
2. Intel ‘Me The Musical’ Facebook Experience
3. The “Prototype Game” Facebook Experience

Foul-mouthed British chef Gordon Ramsay was at the centre of a social media meltdown this week after he walked off an American episode of Kitchen Nightmares, claiming he was unable to help the couple who restaurant he was tasked with turning around.

The show revealed that the hapless restaurateurs, Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, of Amy’s Baking Company in Arizona, had fired more than 100 employees in a year, and would routinely shout at customers that complained of poor service. One diner who asked why he had not yet been served was told: “go f**k yourself.” Now, Ramsay is not adverse to the odd fiery outburst so for him to walk away from such behaviour is a damning indictment indeed.

In any case, the episode was aired and shortly afterwards viewers took to social media in droves to lambast the couple’s shoddy business ethic. Across the restaurant’s Facebook page and over Twitter, Reddit and Yelp shocked Kitchen Nightmares fans criticised the couple, with most – for once – on Ramsay’s side.

And then the Bouzaglos did the worst thing possible: they retaliated, raining down a maelstrom of abuse at the ‘haters’:

 

The tirade continued for several days before coming to an abrupt halt with the following message:

Hmm, obviously. Call us cynical, but it does seem a tad unlikely that this excuse could really hold up. Fingers crossed the ‘FBI computer crimes unit’ can bring the real perps to justice, or that the couple at least take a crash course in social media crisis management. Or manners, for that matter.

 

Many small businesses wonder if Facebook is really a good investment of their time and resources, particularly when getting into the Facebook newsfeed of their fans is such a challenge.

Under this section, LinkedIn lists other users who have these same skills. This can be used to find new networking contacts, but it also illustrates how easy it can be for a potential client to find you when searching for targeted professional skills and services.

How much of your social media traffic is bringing about real return on investment (ROI)? And if the answer is "not much," then what can be done about this problem? Getting more results from social media can be difficult. Here are a few tips that may help.

For some time, marketers have been moving away from the traditional selling tactics of TV commercials. It is no longer enough to tell audiences that your product is great and that they should buy it. One of the buzzwords that characterizes the shift away from pure selling is ‘storytelling.'

Uberflip's latest infographic illustrates how brands are leveraging mobile channels, current trends and future projections for mobile marketing. Mobile ad spend has quadrupled since 2009, and it is expected to keep growing at the same pace for the next 2 years.

I just saw some mind-bending work Chartbeat is about to release about measuring the time users spend exposed to an ad online.

As background, to quote Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile: “Chartbeat monitors activity by checking in with users every second and looking for signals (mouse movement, key strokes, etc) that show they are actively consuming the content in front of them. This means they can measure how long readers spend actively engaged on a page and what parts they’re reading. Because of this Chartbeat knows how long are actively reading while an ad is in view — both for an average user and the cumulative time of all users.” Chartbeat then did some internal research that found high correlation between engaged time exposed and a user’s ability to recall the advertiser’s brand and message. This has many implications:

* Measured this way, ads that appear down alongside the middle of a story turn out to be more valuable than the supposedly premium banners at the top of the page. That’s because people quickly scroll past those banners and all the big hair on the top of the page — logos, promos, and all that — to get to the substance of an article, where they spend time. So inventory that was undervalued becomes more valuable.

* Chartbeat suggests this means that quality content that engages people longer yields better ad performance. That, they say, would be a good thing for better content makers everywhere.

* Now web publishers can sell time like broadcasters — only this is assured exposure time. Advertisers like buying time. Will this make them more comfortable with buying on the web?

* I think this enables publishers to take on some risk for advertisers — guaranteeing them assured exposure time — thus increasing the value of what they sell.

* I wonder whether this spells trouble for the big-ass ads and takeovers we users try to escape as quickly as possible.

* I also wonder whether this spells trouble for the slideshows and other gimmicks that pump page views without increasing time spent exposed to an ad.

* I’d like to think this opens opportunities to find new value in ads next to videos and games and also — this could be important — mobile pages (though don’t think that mobile’s value will come from exposure to messaging; it will still come from knowing people and serving them relevance and value). The longer we spend on a page, the longer we see the ad, the more valuable the ad should be, right?

* I can only hope that this is another nail in the coffin of the dangerous, old-media-like metrics of unique users and pageviews. Engagement will matter more.

A sample report on an ad location:

Those who declare advertising dead are Mark-Twaining-it, I think. There are still many things to learn to find more effectiveness and value in advertising online. This is just one lesson. I say the real value of the net and mobile is in relationships: in learning more about people by delivering them more value so we can be trusted to deliver them greater relevance and value and, in turn, extract greater value from the interaction. More on that later….

Content Curation, in its most simplest terms, is the act of gathering related, targeted pieces of content and sharing it. Like an art curator, a Content Curator is a taste maker—an influencer—and has authority in a given topic. You can curate content that you create and curate the content that is important or interesting to you and your brand.

I don’t know the history. I don’t want to know it. There are probably reasons they are so upset. However, there should never be a reason any brand behaves in such a way on the social networks. If you feel the need to tell your community off, take a breath, take a walk, turn off your computer. Don’t blast it on your page.

Pinterest has announced an improvement to its suite of mobile apps that includes notifications, mentions, easier search, sending pins and more.

Unfortunately, because of all the noise in this vast Internet maize, it’s no easy task getting your infographic out there, and even the most beautiful ones need lots of heavy promotion to get in front of as many people as possible, generate shares and get plenty of quality backlinks.

Ever wonder where a viral pin originates? How many people pinned it before it took off? How long did it take for the pin to go viral? We wondered, too! So, we mapped out Dan Ashbach's most popular pin and found quite the family tree.

Instead of relying on exclusively on locks–and waiting for the new locks to be installed—companies need to invest in proactive monitoring to complement the locks. Just like in the physical world, this virtual “police force” looks for suspicious patterns and attempts in the neighborhood and, by learning how the criminals behave across multiple locations, can stop them before they even reach your door.

In dealing with Infinite Scrolling, the use of SEO is going to be absolutely essential. You can tell if you are making it easy for your site to be crawled by disabling JavaScript and then looking to see if there are links to static archive pages, usually organized by year and/or by month. You can also organize this by topic instead, if that makes more sense for your website.