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Staples today announced the launch of its Quick Wins app to help small businesses succeed and grow in the New Year. The Quick Wins app offers business-specific ideas, metrics and community support in one easy-to-access place.
Most small businesses (72%) want assistance getting their business metrics on track, yet two in five (41%) are not sure what business metrics they should focus on in order to ensure their success.
Through Staples Quick Wins app, small businesses will sync their most important business metrics such as Facebook and Twitter engagement, site traffic, sales and tools such as Google Analytics and QuickBooks to pull in key financial, website and marketing metrics that can be tracked daily and weekly. Instagram and MailChimp will be available at a later date....
Via Jeff Domansky
While most everyone agrees that the Internet of Things (IoT) is poised for explosive growth and represents boundless opportunities – billions of connected things driving trillions in revenue – understanding where the revenue opportunities lie across different technology layers has remained elusive, according to IDC.
The worldwide IoT market is forecast to grow from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to $3.04 trillion in 2020 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13 percent.
IDC defines the Internet of Things as a network of networks of uniquely identifiable endpoints (or "things") that communicate without human interaction using IP connectivity – be it "locally" or globally. IDC's view of the IoT ecosystem includes intelligent systems, network equipment, connectivity services, data integration, and often other types of software, applications, services and security....
Via Jeff Domansky
For the last couple of years Pixabay has been my go-to resource for public domain images. Pixabay was recently updated to make it easier than ever to find quality public domain images. Now when you visit the search page on Pixabay you can filter your search according to image type (photo, drawing, vector), image orientation (landscape or portrait), and image category (subject matter).
When you find an image on Pixabay you can download it in the size that suits your needs. Most images are offered in at least three sizes. Registered users (registration is free) do not have to enter a captcha code to download images. Users who do not register can download images, but they do have to enter a captcha code before downloading each picture....
Via Jeff Domansky
...Over the last few days I’ve been playing with Truth, a similar app for iOS that lets you send anonymous text messages to people in your phone’s contacts.
The interface is a close facsimile of Apple’s default Messages app, so there isn’t much of a learning curve. There is a bit of friction to get started with the app, however: besides the expected popups asking for permission to access your contacts, Truth also makes you register with an email address and password. ...That quibble with the setup process aside, Truth works as advertised. You can choose any contact in your address book to send an anonymous text, and in several tests, messages arrive in about as much time as they would via a regular text. Messages begin with “The truth is” by default, which is meant to inspire compliments or hard truths that might be too awkward to express openly....
Via Jeff Domansky
Newsreader app Guide is no more… well, at least in its current form.
The company that once aimed to help consumers better digest the news with a video channel of websites read by its lovable avatars has been reborn as a service for publishers. It’s still focused on the news, but has evolved into a platform that provides online sites with inexpensive quality videos, which may have been originally thought of as being too far out of reach. The new service launches today.
What publishers receive from the reborn Guide is technology that will turn any news article, like the one you’re reading now, into a video. The company says that its process will “auto-generate” multimedia videos in a way that is “inexpensive, fast, and at scale.” Prior to launch, the service had already been in use on 270 sites. Guide claims that the average click to play rate was 19 percent, while the average completion rate was 47.8 percent.
Guide intends to monetize its service through standard fees for voice-over work and advertising inserted into videos placed on a publisher’s website. In addition, it will license its technology through a SaaS offering where publishers can pay per video and on a CPM rate....
Via Jeff Domansky
Do you write content that doesn’t appear on the first page of Google after you publish?
Do you spend too much time finding and sharing content and feel results could be better?
Do they know all the tools and technical aspects that are now important (Hint: Subscribe to this site!!)?
The role of the marketer is continuing to change and having some technology skills is a distinct advantage. Nobody expects you to have a computer science degree but there are technology skills that are useful!
Here are 7 signs you need to spend more time on the technical aspects to your job (assuming you don’t have someone else to do it for you!)...
Via Jeff Domansky
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Aware that the one-sided approach is less than desirable, why do marketers continue to pump out the content equivalent to this all-too-familiar bad date? In a landscape where many organizations are increasingly focused on pumping out volume, companies that stand out are those that refuse to pile on.
Rather than task their audience with consumption, and consumption alone, innovative companies are using interactive content to earn the attention of their audience and increase engagement. To give you a better idea of what we're talking about, we've pulled together a list of seven easy-to-use tools for creating more dynamic content....
Via Jeff Domansky
The experience of our primary mobile screen being a bank of app icons that lead to independent destinations is dying. And that changes everything.
How we experience content via connected devices – laptops, phones, tablets, wearables – is undergoing a dramatic change. The idea of an app as an independent destination is becoming less important, and the idea of an app as a publishing tool, with related notifications that contain content and actions, is becoming more important. This will change what we design, and change our product strategy
.NO MORE SCREENS FULL OF APP ICONS
This is such a paradigm shift it requires plenty of explaining. Whilst it may not transpire exactly as I’m about to describe, there is no doubt what we have today — screens of apps — is going to dramatically change. Bear with me as I run through the context....
Via Jeff Domansky
If you haven’t used IFTTT before, it’s like a dashboard of connectors that can make anything hooked up to the web work by itself, using triggers, or ‘ifs’, to power devices, social media and web services. The triggers include Internet of Things devices, time of day, weather, football results or social media pings. The actions include electricity switches, push-alerts, email, and pretty much any web service.
Anyone can create their own ‘recipes’, as IFTTT calls them, and if you are stumped for inspiration, you can browse open, shared recipes that have been created by other IFTTT users. There are over 136,000 of them here.
If you are looking to turbo charge your social media strategy, here are 8 of our favourite IFTTT recipes (with two fun ones for good luck):...
Via Jeff Domansky
Keeping up on the freshest social media tools and software is a pretty difficult challenge for the average social marketer.
New tools are being released all the time. Old ones are retired or acquired or lose that one key feature you really needed them for. And testing every new option is not realistic.
To help you weed through the options out there for measuring, publishing and monitoring, we reached out to past Social Fresh Conference speakers....
Via Jeff Domansky
Content marketing has several benefits but the most important factors which made content marketing the hottest trends is its ability to increase visibility and create business branding and awareness. Since 2013, it’s the most talked about topic in blogging and seo communities. Content is the king, and with the help of content you can reach huge number of people and new readers across several platforms.
Every business model requires a well-structured strategy; same is applicable for content marketing. Its no-way different from marketing rather it’s an integral part of your marketing strategies. But, before you head-off to start your content marketing campaigns, you must learn about the tools which will help you a lot in your marketing and will make it lot easier.
Social Media Strategies Summit has created an outstanding infographic on 25 content marketing tools and has divided them in 5 categories (5 tools in each category) which are content curation, content creation, finding content writers, content promotion and content marketing analytics. These are the must have tools for every marketer who uses content marketing on a daily basis. It’s a simple infographic, but can help you a lot in your business’s content marketing strategy....
Via Jeff Domansky
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Staples launches new business metrics app for small business.