If you haven’t been using Google Trends to help with your business, you’re missing out. It does more than just tell you what the latest hot searches are. Under the Explore menu, you’re able to analyze search terms of your choice, found out when they were popular, where they came from, and what search phrases they appear in.
This can be incredibly useful in conjunction with other analytics that tell you how google searches drive traffic to your site: you can find out if certain events drive searches, how better to optimize your content to pick up on broader search trends, and the like. But Google’s analysis of its own search trends doesn’t stop there.
Just a few days ago, Google released a new way to track search trends. Called Top Charts, it appears to be a simple tool: it tells you the search trends for given topics from actors to whiskey. It’s a pretty simple idea that has pretty powerful implications. Like their knowledge graph that shows up on the side of many of their searches, Google has been working not just to provide us with webpages that have the words we want, but also with the actual knowledge we’re searching for. Read More
Yesterday, we talked about how well the SyFy movie Sharknado used social media to deliver ratings. A powerful social media strategy involves more than just keeping your twitter feed updated regularly. Content, of course, plays an important role, but just as important is making sure that your message reaches the right audience. Having a broad message designed to reach a large group of people should always be a part of your strategy, but we all know that people are more likely to listen to people they trust. So it makes sense to target people who command a lot of influence with their peers.
Marketing theory calls these people, unsurprisingly, “influencers”—people with a lot of clout over other folks’ decisions. If you can tailor your messaging specifically for them, it’s more likely that they’ll pick it up and transmit it through their own networks. And with all the social networks springing up on the internet, it can be easier than ever to figure out who matters most to a community. The flip side of this is that there are so many communities and so many networks, it can all seem overwhelming.
So we’re here to help. Identifying influencers is as much art as science. But there’s a method to the madness to help you find the folks that matter the most.
Step One: Make sure you understand your target audience Read More
The biggest thing to hit Twitter last month (beating even certain scandalous selfies) was the SyFy made-for-TV movie ‘Sharknado’. If you’re not up on the latest in intentionally ridiculous movies, I’ll let Wikipedia explain it: “‘Sharknado’ is a 2013 made-for-television disaster film about a waterspout that lifts sharks out of the ocean and deposits them in Los Angeles.” Silly–and silly on purpose–something about it captured the imagination of the Twitterverse, and by the time the movie was playing, twitter mentions hit a peak of 5,000 tweets per minute.
‘Sharknado’ was such a phenomenon that the official Twitter blog wrote a really interesting piece on how it happened. It’s a must-read if you’re interested in how twitter trends hit critical mass and how major influencers (and smart companies) can really drive a conversation.
But when the ratings came out the day after the premier, it turned out that just over a million people watched, ratings even lower than the average SyFy movie, none of which had ever come close to generating the same buzz as that twitter hit. News outlets–which covered the twitter phenomenon before the movie aired–sounded like they were gloating, with headlines like “Sorry Twitter: ‘Sharknado’ Was An Enormous Ratings Bust”, and “Sharknado ratings: Lot of wind, little bite.”
It looked like the ‘Sharknado’ team did everything right when it came to building a brand online. They connected to the right people, they maintained a strong presence, and they kept engaged with a core group of followers. So it makes sense that people started wondering whether social media buzz was worth anything if it couldn’t turn trending hashtags into ratings. Read More
Just a few days ago, TechCrunch reported that Samsung has filed trademarks indicating that it may be entering the burgeoning smart watch market. With this news, it joins the ranks of other companies rumored to be developing smart watches: Apple, Google, and Microsoft all allegedly have watches in the making.
Interestingly, this emerging wearable computing market has been driven by small players—perhaps most famously by Pebble, a smart watch that was crowd funded through Kickstarter. But with these bigger companies moving in, it’s worth reviewing the smart watches on offer and asking whether this newest tech trend has something to offer you.
The tagline about smart watches is “hands-free computing.” The general idea is that the watches will wirelessly connect to your smart phone and move some of its functionality out of your pocket and on to your wrist. If you ever get furious about having to take the phone out of your pocket to make a call, check your messages, or read a text (or, for that matter check the time), then these might be products for you.
If that seems silly, keep in mind how everyone thought that the iPod (and mp3 players in general) were useless and that they’d never take off. Almost every reviewer has recognized the advantages in terms of convenience and connectivity of having a device that’s more accessible on your wrist. Read More
We spend a lot of time talking about ways we can best manage our time. And when there’s a lot on our plates, the dream is just to get someone to take care of business for us. Fortunately, we looked at ways to do just that: there are a lot of small-scale outsourcing options available, connecting people that have surplus time with people that have a deficit.
This has always been one of the promises of the web: connecting people that wouldn’t otherwise be connected. And while the time crunch issue has been addressed, some major players have identified an opportunity to make a different kind of valuable link: connecting experts with those that need expertise. Both Google and eBay are rolling out services that promise to link up people that know something with people that want to know something.
These services share something in common with Elance, which we talked about before, but each aims to carve out a specific, special niche when it comes to connecting specialists with those who need their help.
eBay opened the salvo with SecretGuru. Currently in beta and available only in the UK, SecretGuru is an attempt to bring a curatorial eye to selling expertise. Unlike Elance, which allows almost anyone to ply their services, SecretGuru is highly selective about which experts it offers. It wants to create “memorable experiences,” from specialized cooking classes to learning to make shoes to personal style advice. Read More
Today, I noticed that every time I tried to buy an app on my iPhone I’d get an error message saying, “Couldn’t connect to the iTunes store.” I thought that was strange, so I tried again—no dice.
My first thought was, “Oh no! Is something wrong with my iTunes account?” After checking my account details and trying a third time, my next thought was, “Is the iTunes Store down?”
Thankfully, I remembered that Apple recently built a System Status page where you can check on all of their service. It turns out that the iTunes store is currently down. Apple provides info on not just the iTunes store, but the status of things like Siri, iCloud, FaceTime, iWork, Backup, and much much more.
Unfortunately, they don’t go into much detail. All Apple says about today’s iTunes store outage is that “Some users are affected”
About a year ago, the consulting firm McKinsey and Company conducted a study that concluded about 28% of the average workers’ time is spent on email. Thinking about my own email experience, I know a lot of those emails are basically useless. Or, at least, things that don’t have to be dealt with immediately.
SaneBox is an inbox management program that wants to help you deal with your chronic email bloat. Compatible with Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, and most other web-based email programs and email clients you might use, SaneBox gives you a toolbox to let you manage your email rather than having your email manage you.
There are a lot of products that help you manage your email, but SaneBox has given some deep thought to the problem, and their efforts show. Based in part on the principles of the popular productivity principles of Getting Things Done, SaneBox is more than a simple email filtering tool like Gmail’s priority inbox.
Though it does filtering quite well, too, which is the foundation of most email management tools. SaneBox defaults to two levels of importance, but is able to manage up to five. And while their importance algorithms work well on their own, SaneBox allows you to connect to you various social media accounts to better learn what’s important to you and what isn’t. Best of all, it summarizes your unimportant emails for you so you can decide quickly what needs your attention and what you can ignore.
But what makes SaneBox really interesting is what it can bring to your inbox besides basic filtering. One of my favorite features is the summary of email activity, which includes the summary of your latest unimportant emails, but more powerfully, provides a lot of statistics on your email behavior, which lets you think critically about how much time you’re spending and the load of messages you’re dealing with. A richer understanding of how much time I can expect to spend on email helps to plan my workload—and lets me consider whether I really need to read everything I think I need to read.
There are a whole host of other great features: one-click unsubscribing from email lists you don’t want to be on anymore, automated nagging features that will email you to let you know if an important email hasn’t been replied to, cloud-based attachment storage, and others. It also works with the email on your mobile devices, so you don’t have to worry about scrolling through a ton of useless messages on your phone.
SaneBox will cost you $5 per month (and you can try it for free for 14 days), but given that the company estimates that it saves the average user two hours per week, it just might be worth it to you.
A couple days ago, I wrote about the release of Microsoft Office for the iPhone and Android. This got me thinking about the state of the original killer apps: the productivity software that really drove the original personal computer revolution.
It’s interesting that the mobile revolution hasn’t really produced the same kind of software that made the pc ubiquitous in homes and businesses. The founders of Quip hope to change that. Founded by Bret Taylor, the former Facebook CTO and one of the driving forces behind Google Maps, and Kevin Gibbs, who headed the technical team for the Google App Engine, with $15 million in startup funding, the Quip team has the brains and muscle to make a real difference in our mobile productivity.
The inaugural blog post for quip makes a really good point: after showing a picture of MacWrite, one of the first graphical word processors that was released in 1984, they note: With the exception of some additional color and a stack of toolbars at the top of the screen, it doesn’t look different from the software that probably came bundled with your current laptop. We still use the same metaphors and the same workflow that we used when shoulder pads and leg warmers were cool.
Quip tried to rethink word processing from the ground up for the mobile experience, emphasizing four design goals: collaboration, mobility, interactivity, and simplicity. We’ll walk through these to understand what Quip has to offer.
Central to Quip is the idea that you’ll want to share your documents and work on them collaboratively. Quip allows a single document to be edited simultaneously on any device by multiple users, which is a pretty good feature in itself. Most revolutionarily, tho’, is that the document is combined with an editing and commenting thread, so you can keep up-to-date on the conversation and the edits that have been made.
Image from Quip
Quip also provides shared folders that automatically update users when something inside them has changed.
Quip strives to make word processing truly optimized for mobile: besides working well offline, Quip looks great no matter the device you’re working on. And it’s not just a pretty face: the formatting of documents changes depending on the device. If you’re reading on an iPad, for instance, pictures and text might be integrated in a different way that takes advantage of the larger screen. The same document on the iPhone might separate the text and photos to make reading easier. Quip promises that whatever the device, you won’t need to pinch and resize to have a usable document.
Quip supports printing, but they also realize we usually just look at documents on the screen these days. To take advantage of this, they offer some interactive features that seem truly handy. You’re able to “@-mention” people and other documents, for instance, to link directly to them. You’re also able to transform text simply. To borrow Quip’s example, you can change a bulleted list into a checklist that multiple users can update at once.
Finally, Quip is pretty easy to use. That said, some users might find this simplicity a disadvantage. Some of the standard ways we’re used to dealing with word processors just don’t apply to Quip. There’s something of a learning curve. There also aren’t the same robust formatting options we’re used to. This is the trade-off for what the Quip folks say is “a minimal, elegant design that helps you focus on writing — not ribbons.”
Unfortunately, Quip doesn’t offer any compatibility with Microsoft Word—just Quip’s native format and PDFs. So if you’re interested in making the transition, you have to jump in head first.
Quip is available now for desktop and iOS devices, and there’s an Android app in the works, too. The basic service is free for up to 5 users, and the professional edition (currently in beta) costs only $12 a month.
It’s 2013, and by now most of us know that a powerful social media presence is essential to building your brand on the internet. To make that responsibility a little easier, a number of social media management applications have emerged to coordinate your presence through time and across social media platforms.
One of the applications that seems to be picking up a lot of steam is Buffer, an application that started life managing twitter feeds but has expanded its focus to include Facebook, LinkedIn, and many other platforms and features.
The basic idea behind social media management software is that you’re able to make updates to your various social media accounts in a single convenient location. And best of all, you’re able to schedule your updates so you’re able to prepare your posts and tweets beforehand. Most applications also offer various analytics to determine your social media impact and help you to refine your strategies for maximum reach.
In this respect, Buffer behaves a lot like its competitors, which include HootSuite, perhaps the most popular of these applications, and others such as TweetDeck, and SocialFlow.
Buffer really distinguishes itself when it comes to ease of use. The scheduler is often singled out for approval: you’re able to set up default posting times so you don’t have to specify for each new post, which is the case for most other social media management software. This is especially useful as you can schedule your posts to correspond to peak usage time for each different networks, set it, and forget it.
Besides scheduling posts, generating and sharing content online is also a snap. Buffer provides you with browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to make sharing content from the web a snap. Just find something you like, click on the Buffer button in your browser, and you’re all set to either share immediately or to put it in your buffer and share at your previously scheduled times. Read More
You’ve probably heard of Google’s new $35 Chromecast dongle. And if not, here’s the elevator pitch: a small device that plugs into a free HDMI port on your HDTV and gives you a smart TV that can play content from your smartphone, tablet, or computer. Half the price of a Roku that supports 1080p video, and a third of the cost of an Apple TV, the Chromecast is certainly the budget smart TV dongle many have been waiting for, but what the heck is it anyway and what’s inside?
If you haven’t been using Google Trends to help with your business, you’re missing out. It does more than just tell you what the latest hot searches are. Under the Explore menu, you’re able to analyze search terms of your choice, found out when they were popular, where they came from, and what search phrases they appear in.
