Both We Are Hunted and Twitter are staying mum about what the team will be doing. And now we know that Twitter is working on a standalone music since Ryan Seacrest of “American Idol” just reported that he’s playing around with it, as retweeted by Twitter’s VP of Business and Corporate Development, Kevin Thau, for those of us who don’t follow Seacrest:
Since Seacrest also hosts the radio show “American Top 40,” there’s no shock that the app found its way into his hands. Given the fact that he points out “trending” songs, perhaps there will be some sort of integration between his show and the yet-to-be-released app. Twitter Top 40, anyone?
As for We Are Hunted, they informed its users of the acquisition on its site, giving them the opportunity to grab their favorites before their accounts are shut down, along with the site:
While we are shutting down wearehunted.com, we will continue to create services that will delight you, as part of the Twitter team.
There’s no question that Twitter and music go well together. Artists turn to Twitter first to connect with fans, and people share and discover new songs and albums every day. We can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on at Twitter.
This is a sign that Twitter is becoming a hub for all media: news, photos, videos and now music. All of the pieces are falling into place, and the platform is strong enough to handle all of it now, probably for the first time. Instead of relying on third-party services to bring the content to the platform, the tools are being built to share and interact with the content within the platform. Does this mean that Twitter is morphing into a “media company?” Not really, but it is most certainly a platform that now supports all of the top media types.
By Donald Melanson at Engadget: LinkedIn has been pretty clearly repositioning itself as a source for news as of late, and it's now made that shift even clearer with a fairly major acquisition. The company announced today that it has acquired Pulse, maker of news reader appsfor mobile devices (in addition to a web-based offering) at a cost of some $90 million. In its own blog post announcing the news, Pulse says that its apps will remain as they are for now, although they will now offer a "LinkedIn Influencer" feed featuring the company's hand-picked contributors. According to Pulse, its apps currently have over 30 million users around the globe, with approximately 40 percent of those outside the US; for its part, LinkedIn recently topped 200 million users. Read the full story >>
You want to customise your site, but where do you start? We present the 10 best WordPress plugins around, for adding social features, ecommerce capabilities, and more.
WordPress is both the world’s most popular blogging platform and the widest used Content Management System (CMS). And one of the reasons it's so popular is that it happily supports templating and plugins, making it highly flexible and customisable to suit different website needs.
This flexibility, alongside the platform’s huge popularity, means there’s thousands of free plugins available on the web. That's the good news. The bad news is that sorting the wheat from the chaff can be a real challenge. So below we’ve chosen 10 of the best WordPress plugins to add functionality to your website - and as the icing on the cake, are all available free of charge!
BuddyPress: the best WordPress plugin for social features?BuddyPress is a social media platform in a box. Building on top of the WordPress system, it allows you to register, maintain a list of friends, @message other users, create groups of common interests and host your own forums. BuddyPress itself is also extensible, allowing you to further extend functionality to include document upload, integration with other social media streams, create membership-only websites and much more. If you’re looking for a user-led or project-based system that encourages collaboration and interaction between visitors to your site, BuddyPress is an ideal solution and one of, if not the, best WordPress plugins for social networking.
Use WP e-commerce to start earning money from your WordPress siteWP e-Commerce turns your WordPress website into a fully featured ecommerce store, complete with built-in connection to (and integration with) many major Payment Service Providers (PSPs). The system enables you to upload products into different categories and offers customers a shopping cart system to allow them to build an order. It handles calculation of shipping, payment capture and all the email confirmations associated with buying and selling on the web. The plugin is free, and while you can buy additional upgrades to the system, it’s open source just like WordPress - so it’s perfectly possible to extend the cart’s functionality yourself. It's for these reasons that many champion it as the best WordPress plugin for ecommerce.
If you upload to Vimeo and have a WordPress site, Vimeography is a must-have downloadIf you’re a film-maker or someone who handles video on a regular basis, you’ll know it can be tricky to display your film content beautifully without resorting to manual hacks around embedding content. Vimeo users can take advantage of the Vimeography WordPress plugin to create and display fantastic-looking galleries of video content - all orientated around displaying nicely within your WordPress site. Multiple galleries of content can be created, and are inserted into posts or pages using the standard WordPress shortcode system. Vimeography is arguably the best WordPress plugin for video, although note that only supports content from Vimeo. And that's not likely to change soon because the developer believes Vimeo is the best platform to displaying portfolio-quality content (ie without advertising or unnecessary platform branding).
SlideDeck 2 Lite is a quick and easy way to create slideshowsSlideDeck enables you to create customised slideshows that are displayed in a content slider on your WordPress site. Each slide can be filled with text, images, video, social media stream feeds and syndicated content. Content supported includes Twitter feeds, YouTube, Pinterest, Flickr and more. The slides are presented through a template system, referred to by SlideDeck as a “lens”, which can be configured to match your site design. The premium version of the plugin adds more lenses, but the free version does allow you to develop your own.
Create a customised audio player that sits within your WordPress siteWe'd consider this the best WordPress plugin for creating a customised audio player that sits within your site. It supports multiple or single tracks, complete with playlists and is inserted into your standard content with the familiar shortcode system. HTML5 is used as the default delivery method, but to ensure backwards compatibility it also features a Flash-based fallback. As a consequence, this will happily work across desktop and mobile devices without breaking a sweat! The plugin also connects with FetchApp, enabling you to sell your audio tracks directly from your site. Which makes it ideal for musicians or podcasters who want a reliable way to deliver their audio through their website.
Activate or deactivate widgets on your site based on the day of the weekThis is a handy little WordPress plugin that allows you to activate or deactivate widgets used on your site based on the day of the week. Ideal for any scenario where the day is important to the content being displayed, such as a restaurant that wants to show daily specials, a school displaying timetable information or a business with different opening hours. It’s very simple, but extremely functional and useful.
Serve a different WordPress theme to users of different mobile devices with this handy pluginIf you're looking for a mobile skin solution, WPTouch is probably the best WordPress plugin for your needs. It allows you to serve a different theme to users on mobile device such as an iPhone or Android phone, providing a user-friendly and small-screen-optimised version of your content instead of forcing mobile users to navigate a desktop-orientated design. Installation is very simple, and the plugin can be configured to match your overall design aesthetic relatively easily. This is a great quick-fix solution if you don’t want to get into designing your own mobile theme.
Blogging plugin JetPack's features are wide and variedJetPack brings some of the functionality of WordPress hosted blogs to self-hosted WordPress installations. The features are wide and varied but include cloud-hosted stats for your site, email subscription to your site, a built-in URL shortener service, social-network-based commenting, inline spelling and grammar checking and an enhanced gallery system.
Price Table offers a simple drag-and-drop solutionWant to create interactive pricing tables? Then this is the best WordPress plugin for you. It offers a simple drag-and-drop solution, inserting the tables directly into your page content. The system offers a straightforward solution to editing price table content, without the need to understand the underlying HTML and CSS - making it ideal for websites being maintained by non-technical users. Being built entirely in CSS, the design is easy to theme too, making Price Table highly recommended!
Create image galleries for your WordPress site with the NextGen Gallery pluginIt's open to debate whether NextGen Gallery is the best WordPress plugin for creating image galleries, but it’s certainly one of the most feature-rich, and that alone makes it our personal favourite. This plugin offers a great deal of flexibility in creating gallery content, including the ability to watermark images, create slideshows, organise content into albums and use different themes for display of your images. And, like all those on this list, it's absolutely free!
Every business-to-business CEO and CMO I've met — most of whom came of age prior to the social media era — is trying to understand how to leverage social media to grow their business. They want to understand Twitter. They want reports on their Klout scores. They have marketing departments retaining outside social media consultants. They pay content marketing firms to write company blogs and produce YouTube videos. They hire 20-somethings to manage the corporate Twitter account, and they are in the process of spending untold dollars on social media monitoring systems.
Yet I've never once heard the question: Is this social network actually the one where our prospects and customers are influenced to buy?
While social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are massively popular, they're so topically diffuse that they can be poor places to target and market products to your audience. When your customers discuss the actual business problems that your company solves, they are likely spending their time within a domain-specific social network. This could be an old-fashioned (by Internet standards) discussion forum, hosted on a dedicated website or with a vendor like ProBoards. In-depth topical discussion rarely happens on Facebook and Twitter, but you can find it on dedicated social networks with domain-specific features.
My company, ChartIQ, builds software to analyze and annotate stock charts. Our users — current and future — are, of course, on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, but when they want to discuss stocks, and the software like ours that they use to inform their trading decisions, they're on domain-specific social networks.
The stock and forex trading marketplace is full of old-school discussion boards, but recently a new breed of truly domain-specific social networks has emerged. Looking to develop and launch our business, we set our sights on one particular network — StockTwits. It supports sharing of annotated stock charts, a key visual aid when discussing stocks — but far too esoteric to be found on Twitter.
We developed a strategy to accomplish three goals across this social network: customer development, brand awareness, and traditional marketing and customer acquisition.
Customer Development, a concept popularized by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, calls for spending time in the field with customers to understand their needs and develop product features to meet those needs, as well as to understand the market dynamics themselves. We immersed ourselves in the StockTwits community among our target users, listening, asking questions, and building relationships (some people became our beta testers and early adopters). Finding a large number of users that we could observe and engage with would have been extremely difficult without a community like StockTwits (we tried).
We approached brand awareness, a traditional marketing goal, in a new way through social networks. As a bootstrapped startup, we couldn't afford to launch a traditional branding campaign — no Super Bowl ads for us — but by contributing stock chart analysis to the StockTwits community and participating as members, we've driven thousands of eyeballs to our brand and products, while providing value to the community. As active StockTwits members, we've developed relationships with key influencers within the community who now use our product and publish stock charts across the network.
As our product matured, we again tapped domain-specific social networks for product integration and traditional marketing efforts. From our previous customer development work, we learned that allowing users to participate in StockTwits from within our app would be a differentiating feature, so we launched a deep integration between our products, building a full StockTwits client into our app. Aside from competitive differentiation, we've seen a dramatic increase in time spent per visit within the app (from 16 to 30 minutes on average). Finally, we launched a set of banner ads across the StockTwits site to attract the customers we had worked so hard to understand and develop a product for.
When we set our social media strategy we didn't ignore Twitter and Facebook, but we focused our time, content strategy, and community building in the specific networks where people congregate to discuss stocks. By concentrating our efforts and key performance metrics on these networks, we free ourselves from vanity metrics such as "Likes" and "Followers," focusing on what really matters: customer acquisition.
Dan Schleifer is the Co-Founder and President of ChartIQ, a leader in web and mobile stock charting. Prior to founding ChartIQ, Dan served as head of Product and Corporate Marketing for a number mid- and late-stage software startups. Follow Dan on twitter @dschleifer or reach him at dan@chartiq.com.
By Gregg Hamilton, at Search Engine Watch: Every search marketer knows Google dominates in U.S. search volume, handling two-thirds of all search queries. And yet, less is known about the entity that reportedly accounts for roughly the other third of searches – the Yahoo Bing Network (YBN). This brings up a number of interesting questions for paid search marketers. For example:
Is Google dominant in every vertical?
How do the two engines compare on click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC)?
Are paid search auctions as competitive on YBN as on AdWords?
AdGooroo (disclosure: I work there) addressed these questions in a recent study comparing the paid search performance of advertisers on Google AdWords and Yahoo Bing across six verticals in the U.S. during Q3 2012:
Shopping & Classified (composed of a broad range of retailers)
Financial Services
Travel
Education
Computer & Internet
Business to Business (B2B)
These vertical categories account for the majority of total search traffic and click-throughs in the U.S. search market.
AdWords Leads in Paid Search Spend, Clicks in All Verticals
AdWords delivered significantly higher impressions in five of the six categories studied – especially in the Shopping & Classified retail category, where it displayed 1.6 times as many first SERP ad impressions as YBN (an incremental 7.3 ad million impressions) during the quarter. However, in the sixth category, Financial Services, YBN actually displayed more ad impressions than AdWords (although AdWords still yielded more total click-throughs within the vertical). In addition to earning more search traffic, advertisers on AdWords generally experienced higher CTRs – with AdWords campaigns found to be 2.4 to 5.9 times higher than those on YBN during the period, depending on the vertical. However, among the advertisers who were active on both engines, AdGooroo found some who actually had better CTRs on YBN than AdWords. For example, 9.5 percent of the Financial Services advertisers who sponsored paid search on both engines enjoyed higher CTRs on YBN than on AdWords, including Citicards and Fidelity Life. In the Shopping & Classified category, 5.7 percent of the overlapping advertisers had higher CTRs on YBN, including JCPenney, QVC, Old Navy, Kmartm and Shutterfly.
The Yahoo Bing Network Offers Certain Advantages
CPCs were almost invariably lower – and usually significantly lower – on YBN than AdWords – from 37 to 77 percent of AdWords' CPCs, again varying by vertical. So, advertisers were paying a high premium to gain access to AdWords' heartier search traffic and CTRs. And, as a result of lower CPCs, Brand Impressions (first SERP CPMs) varied from 76 to 90 percent cheaper, on average, on YBN than on AdWords. The study also showed that there is significantly less competition on YBN than on AdWords. Across the six verticals studied, AdGooroo found 25,056 paid search advertisers on YBN receiving at least one first SERP ad impression, compared to 39,006 advertisers active on AdWords during the quarter. In other words, there were 36 percent fewer active search marketers on YBN to bid against.
What Does This Mean for PPC Marketers?
AdWords is the logical first choice for paid search advertisers for two reasons: superior impressions and click-through rates. However, YBN's advantages – lower CPCs and CPMs and less competition for ad position – offer a ripe, incremental opportunity for advertisers seeking to maximize their search efforts. Even so, that notion doesn't appear to be widespread in the industry. Of the 41,548 advertisers who had paid search ads appear on either engine during Q3 2012, 42 percent (or 17,458) didn't record any ad exposures on YBN's first SERPs during the period. By comparison, only 6 percent (or 2,542) did not have first SERP ad exposures on AdWords. The report's findings notwithstanding, over the last four years both search networks seem to be more or less fixed in place in terms of their share of domestic search volume. Time will tell whether that will change, and whether we'll see changes in the media buying habits of PPC marketers as well.
