Educating the World

Share in my knowledge of food, movies, surfing and education.

[mmiller76]

After Instagram Direct: How Blurring Social-Media Boundaries Will Affect Marketers

The introduction of Instagram Direct is further evidence that social networks are moving away from the idea that an app or utility should be born to do just one thing, and to do it brilliantly. While Facebook has long been a multi-purpose service, all the major social networks now are travelling in that direction, which soon will leave us with four or five nearly identical competitors.

Just this week Twitter announced theinclusion of images in mobile DMs, and Instagram announced the direct messaging of images -- can you see the similarity?

This kind of feature-creep is rife among all major social channels. As Instagram shifts from photo-sharing into messaging, Foursquare has moved from geo-tagging to local search. Twitter is as often about image sharing as microblogging. Digital channels want to be all things to all people.

It's alarming how similar they are already. As the chart shows below, the social networks that started out with distinct purposes are merging into a homogenous soup of social, with little to distinguish them except legacy user demographics quickly being diluted by mass adoption.

Read the rest of the article>

[mmiller76]

Salesperson: Ok, so your total comes to $200,000.

You: Oh, wow. That seems pricey for a Corolla.

Salesperson: Trust me, it will be worth it. Think of this as an investment.

You: But can you even guarantee that I'll still be using it in four years?

Salesperson: Look, the stuff you're going to learn and the memories you're going to make in this car will stay with you forever. Things like that are priceless.

You: I thought you said it was $200,000.

Salesperson: You know what I mean.

You: Well, look, I only have about $50,000 in savings right now.

Salesperson: No problem, just take out a loan for the rest of it! You won't have to pay any of that money back until the future! And who the hell knows if that will ever even get here?

You: Hmm, that's a good point. I guess I'm in.

Salesperson: Wonderful! You won't regret this.

Five years later...

Salesperson: Hey, my main man! How's it going?

You: Oh, uh, hi. Things are pretty good, I guess.

Salesperson: Nice! So listen, how would you feel about giving Toyota a few more bucks?

You: ... You mean, like, in exchange for another product?

Salesperson: No.

You: ... So you just want me to give you money again?

Salesperson: Yes.

You: Are you... are you fucking kidding me? You know I still owe the government about $140,000 for that stupid Corolla, right? Not to mention the fact that I've barely used it at all since moving to New York. And that all that "stuff" you said I was going to learn in it pretty much just boiled down to "Don't trust your roommate when he tells you how good he is at driving stoned." So I guess I feel pretty damn poorly about giving Toyota a few more bucks.

Salesperson: Alright, alright, let's just calm down for a second.

You: Also, how did you find out where I live? You know it's kinda weird for a salesperson from five years ago to just show up at your doorstep, right?

Salesperson: Don't worry about that. Look, you're part of a community of Corolla owners now, ok? And that purchase is an indelible part of your identity. It's going to stick with you for the rest of your life.

You: Actually, I'm starting to find that the further away I get from my purchase, the less people ask me about it.

Salesperson: Sorry, I couldn't hear that last thing you said. Anyway, don't you think it's in your best interest to make sure that Toyota continues to have enough money to keep the Corolla brand as prestigious as possible? In the long term, it's only going to make you and your purchase look that much better!

You: But you're still getting money, right? I mean, people are still buying Corollas, aren't they?

Salesperson: Well... yes, they are. But we'd like more money, that's all. Besides, you kind of owe us after all we've done for you.

You: Really. Because I thought I just owed you $200,000 for the car. Which I've paid.

Salesperson: Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase!!!!!!!!!

You: Oh, for fuck's sake, fine. How much do you want?

Salesperson: Well, you purchased your car in 2009. So, in honor of that, how about a nice, round donation of $2,009?

You: I'm gonna give you five bucks.

Salesperson: OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH THANK YOU SO MUCH THANK YOU THANK YOU THANKYOU THANKYOUTHANKYOUTHANKYOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

You: It's fine. Now will you get out of here? I've got to be at work soon, and the subway comes in five minutes.

Salesperson: No problem.

The next day...

Salesperson: Hey there, buckaroo! How's life? I couldn't help but remember you saying you had to go to work yesterday. How about sending some of that nice fat paycheck over to Toyota, eh?

You: You know, I think I'm just gonna move.

[mmiller76]

Celebrating the Heroic Women of 2013

These heroic women show what spirit, courage, and perseverance can achieve. May their bravery inspire us in 2014 and beyond.

[mmiller76]

This Christmas we had the incredible opportunity to spend the day with the children of Little Angels Orphanage located just outside Siem Reap, Cambodia. Along the way we passed by 100′s of amazing scenes that caught my eye. There are so many photo op’s here its insane. It becomes so overwhelming at times, I wish my tuk tuk had a seatbelt to keep me from jumping right out of the thing.

About 20 minutes in, we spot a group of young men chiseling an elephant and other large sculptures from massive blocks of solid stone.  I immediately know this site is perfect for a future project. I make a note in the iPhone and drop a pin on the map so that I can hopefully make it back before I leave Cambodia in just 9 short days.

A few days later I am headed back into the same countryside to photograph the locals of a fishing village with a friend and fellow traveling photography Alex Olyeynokiv. On our way there he reminds me that we are approaching the site where we had seen the boys working. We decide to pull in and take a closer look and just maybe we can catch a couple photos for a few minutes.

For the next two hours I am completely taken back by the scenes I am presented with. These boys and men are incredible artist and by far the most talented and patient craftsmen I have ever met. With projects that are as big as small elephants, they will carve and chip away for up to six months on one piece. The elephant in the image above is one of two ordered for an unnamed high ranking government officials home in the capital city of Phnom Penh. This particular piece will be sold for $5000 USD.

During our visit we are walked through the workshop and introduced to multiple workers on a range of different projects. The level of detail these men are able to achieve is in incredible and is a reminder of the rich history and traditions that have lasted centuries here in Cambodia. The tools and techniques used are nearly the same used to achieve the amazing stone work of the Angkor Wat and surrounding temples 0ver 1000 years ago.

[mmiller76]

Seems like everyone is using social media these days. Case in point:

A sophisticated recruiting campaign conducted openly on social media, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, seems to have played a large role in drawing the estimated thousands of foreign fighters who have come to Syria to fight for two Al Qaeda-linked rebel factions, Al Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and other Sunni Islamist groups.

[mmiller76]

This is an older article, but very interesting about Tumblr.

Pop quiz: what is the favorite social networking site of Americans under age 25? If you guessed Facebook you are way behind the eight-ball, because Tumblr now enjoys more regular visits from the youth of America. That figure struck me while reading Garry Tan’s January 2013 survey and I wondered why? So I delved deeper; this article describes what I discovered while exploring the Tumblr network.

What are the young and restless doing on Tumblr all day? The answer is more complicated than it first appears and speaks to the continuing importance of the public web in the era of the walled garden.

For a long time, I thought of Tumblr as topic-based image blogging: In other words, self-expression through collecting pictures of a particular type of thing. Hence I thought that the iconic Tumblrs were Things Organized Neatly, Girls in Yoga Pants (NSFW) and Food on my Dog. Tumblr itself gives the impression that this is the main use-case for its service by highlighting almost exclusively this type of Tumblog in The Tumblr Directory.

ALL WRONG. Or rather, some of these Tumblrs are necessary for the system to work but, surprisingly, only a small percentage of them.

Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.

[mmiller76]

The introduction of Instagram Direct is further evidence that social networks are moving away from the idea that an app or utility should be born to do just one thing, and to do it brilliantly. While Facebook has long been a multi-purpose service, all the major social networks now are travelling in that direction, which soon will leave us with four or five nearly identical competitors.

Just this week Twitter announced theinclusion of images in mobile DMs, and Instagram announced the direct messaging of images -- can you see the similarity?

This kind of feature-creep is rife among all major social channels. As Instagram shifts from photo-sharing into messaging, Foursquare has moved from geo-tagging to local search. Twitter is as often about image sharing as microblogging. Digital channels want to be all things to all people.

It's alarming how similar they are already. As the chart shows below, the social networks that started out with distinct purposes are merging into a homogenous soup of social, with little to distinguish them except legacy user demographics quickly being diluted by mass adoption.

[mmiller76]

On Thursday night, as millions tuned in to see Carrie Underwood ambitiously take on the role of Maria von Trapp, croon about the hills being alive, and make children's clothing out of drapes in NBC's The Sound of Music Live, DiGiorno Pizza was also watching—and live-tweeted the whole thing. The Nestlé brand's tweets were funny and hilariously pizza-related. Let's have a moment of appreciation for how difficult a task that must have been, considering The Sound of Music heavily features a convent and also the Third Reich. Also, a solid nod of respect to whomever came up with the hashtag #DiGiorNOYOUDIDNT.

[mmiller76]

First Tumblr milestone reached!

[mmiller76]

Email marketing produces a super-heroic ROI of about $40 for every $1 spent. However, email marketers are only human.

Even with extreme attention to detail, email marketing mistakes and goofs will reach your subscribers’ inboxes.

Given that email has no ‘un-send’ button, what do you do?

[mmiller76]

There are Twitter brand disasters, and then there are all-out Twitter brand implosions with a gravitational force so great, they seem to suck in all light and matter in the universe. This weekend, Pace salsa had the latter.

Comedian Kyle Kinane noticed that Pace's Twitter account had favorited an old tweet of his actually mocking the product, so he decided to test whether the brand was using a bot to follow any mention, positive or negative. It was. So, he began making all sorts of obscenity-filled and insulting posts about the salsa, which just kept favoriting each one.

[mmiller76]

Once you've mastered the basics of Tumblr, consider learning a few more tricks to make the blogging experience even easier.

From browsing the dashboard to editing and publishing, the tips listed above can be valuable to seasoned Tumblr users like you — especially if you juggle more than one account.

[mmiller76]

Tongal wanted to wrap its head around Snapchat marketing, so in mid-November the crowdsourcing contest platform encouraged its social-media-minded community to contribute ideas for major brands. Five-hundred-eighty-three creative folks quickly pitched campaign concepts, and the 10 most-mentioned brands were (in this order): Facebook, Starbucks, Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Twitter, Doritos, Google, Lego and Nike.

For the uninitiated, Snapchat, with more than 8 million users, is an increasingly popular app among millennials that lets users send photos and videos—sometimes for sexting—that disappear after moments. 

Here are the five standout ideas for big-name brands, per Tongal's community.

[mmiller76]

In a reminder that brand chatter doesn't just happen on Facebook and Twitter, one data middleman is bundling together the conversation stream from four of the web's most pervasive blog and commenting platforms.

Gnip -- the conduit to the so-called Twitter firehose – is getting into what you might call the packaged-data goods business. The firm already provides access to several digital data streams used by social analytics firms and marketers, but today will start offering a combined data set with content from Tumblr, WordPress and commenting platforms Disqus and IntenseDebate.

[mmiller76]

Like any cohesive story, résumés need a beginning, middle, end and takeaway. You need to explain who you are, how you have succeeded, a scope of why that's important and what you will do for your potential employer. Here are some ways to use common résumé formats to effectively tell your career story.

[mmiller76]

Jack's Surfboards // Newport Beach GRAND RE-OPENING!!! TOMORROW, Saturday, November 23rd 11:00am - 2:00pm FREE BBQ with Vans, GIVEAWAYS & MORE... 20% OFF STOREWIDE* *excludes surfboards & Go Pro cameras 2727 Newport Blvd. Newport Beach, CA 92663 [phone]

[mmiller76]

Nearly a century of research has shown how print-magazine ads can best grab readers' attention: the optimal mix of colors, compelling copy, uncluttered formats and other graphical techniques. But how well can print compel consumers to actions that help drive purchases -- like visiting websites?

The latest data from GfK MRI Starch Advertising Research show that ads for a wide range of product categories, from cosmetics to cruises, were effective in prompting consumers to visit websites. Endemic ads -- highly targeted messages in publications whose editorial content is closely related to the ads -- comprise just over half of these top performers.

This research covered 30,352 one-page, four-color ads in the first half of this year, surveying consumers about which ads they noted and, of those, which drove them to advertisers' websites.

Among those who noted any given ad, an average of 13% wound up going to the marketer's website. For the ads described below, that average was north of 35%.

Here are 11 ads from across magazine genres that stood out for the percentage of readers who noted an ad and visited the marketer's website as a result.