duminică, 22 februarie 2015

Seth's Blog : The trolls inside

The trolls inside

The worst troll is in your head.

Internet trolls are the commenters begging for a fight, the anonymous critics eager to tear you down, the hateful packs of roving evil dwarves, out for amusement.

But the one in your head, that voice of insecurity and self-criticism, that's the one you need to be the most vigilant about.

Do not feed the troll.

Do not reason with the troll.

Do not argue with the troll.

Most of all, don't litigate. Don't make your case, call your witnesses, prove you are right. Because the troll knows how to sway a jury even better than you do.

Get off the troll train. Turn your back, walk away, ship the work.

            

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sâmbătă, 21 februarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


"Prepare for Full-Scale War" says Ukraine Deputy Foreign Minister: "With What?" asks Mish; Ukraine Lie of the Day

Posted: 21 Feb 2015 01:25 PM PST

I have been sitting on close to a dozen videos describing the massive damage in military equipment in the latest separatist surge.

For a description, but no videos, please see Debaltsevsky Under Rebel Control, Boiler Remains; What's Next?

I saw no need to post videos because to me it was pretty obvious this was a repeat of the devastating defeat of Ukraine last August in the Battle of Ilovaisk in which Ukrainian forces refused an offer to exit encirclement by leaving behind equipment.

Ukraine Lie of the Day

Today Ukrainian "Antiterrorist Operation" spokesman Andrei Lysenko says Since 2015 Ukraine Destroyed Nearly 3,000 Militants.

I have no idea how many separatists were killed, but the rest of the claim in the body of the article is preposterous.
"According to operational information and data provided by our scouts, since the beginning of 2015, in Debaltsevo area, the Ukrainian military killed 2,911 militants and Russian military. More than 40 tanks, 30 armored combat vehicles, about 30 multiple rocket launchers."

In addition, since the establishment of the cease-fire, that is, from February 15, we neutralized 868 militants, 8 tanks, 11 armored combat vehicles and four multiple rocket launchers.
Tour of Carnage

Does anyone in Ukraine or elsewhere believe the horse hockey by Andrei Lysenko?

If 3,000 rebels are dead, can we have some images? What about images of tanks destroyed? Images of anything?

If there were destroyed separatist tanks, satellites would pick that up.

Let's take a brief video tour of the actual carnage. Here is a short 1:32 video showing a destroyed tank, captured equipment and a Nazi helmet.



Link if video does not play: On the former UAF Position we Found a German Helmet with Swastika. That video may have an annoying 15-second ad.

Here is a 4:16 video whose title roughly translates as Ukrainian Media Officer and Recon Team Meets Fate in Debaltsevo.




Tank Battle Video

Here is an 11:28 video that describes "Details of the Tank Battle on the Night of February 18"

This video starts out slow. You may wish to fast forward to the 2-minute mark. It does not get really interesting until the four minute mark when you see more destroyed Ukrainian tanks and other equipment. You also see captured stockpiles of weapons. The heart of the video is the 4 to six minute mark but more destroyed vehicles around the 7 minute mark and another destroyed tank towards the end.



Abandoned Tanks

Let's assume for a second the Ukrainian forces managed to destroy a tank or two. If it pleases you, assume three or five

Check out this video of abandoned Ukrainian tanks, other vehicles, and munitions.

The announcer at the beginning ends in about 15 seconds. Some of the footage repeats but around the 3:00 minute mark or so it gets interesting for a second time. The video shows an entire Ukrainian army camp abandoned.

No doubt the soldiers wanted to escape on foot with their lives. Again some of the footage repeats so it's difficult to tell how many times and many angles some of the same equipment appears.

Regardless, we can say the separatists captured many "trophies".



Link if video does not play: "Ghost" Brigade Took Novogrigorovku Towards Artemovskii

I have many more of these, from many locations, some showing gruesome bodies. In the above horse hockey, it's as if Andrei Lysenko is describing Ukrainian losses not separatist losses.

Jacob Dreizin comments ...
Politicians and generals in Kiev have been making up statistics on rebel casualties and "Russian tanks crossing the border" (and denying their own losses) since day one. However, it's clear now that the Anglo-American press is finally wising up to this. Although they are not yet wise enough to attempt an aggregate total for Ukrainian KIA to date. I estimate this at 6000 since April 2014 as an absolute minimum. This is about 4-5 times higher than the "official" tally from Kiev. That's my minimum estimate. I suspect the real figure is 1000 or 2000 higher. This does not include those too seriously wounded to ever return to front-line duty, which may be another 50% of the total dead. In addition, Ukraine is prosecuting over 1,000 deserters. Those deserters must also be counted as troops lost. As for rebel losses, I estimate 1/4 to 1/3 of the Ukrainian total.

Ukrainian equipment lost in the "Ilovaisk cauldron" and the various mini-cauldrons last summer were replaced from mothballed Soviet-era stocks and to a much lesser extent from new production.

I believe Kiev has finally hit the wall. Its stocks are nearly empty. There's still enough ammo to fight for a few years, but in terms of equipment, Ukraine no longer has anything to replace what it just lost around Debaltsevo, let alone to seriously equip new units coming online.

So all of these new draftees they are now "mobilizing" will have to fight on bicycles. Either that, or American tanks. Or, Kiev will need to ask the rebels for a 3-year ceasefire while it produces enough new equipment from its half-ruined factories. Take your pick.
"Prepare for Full-Scale War"

Jacob's comment came in yesterday. Today we see this headline from Colonel Cassad: Ukraine Deputy Foreign Minister Vadim Pristayko Says Ukraine Prepared for "Full-Scale War."

According to Pristayko, Kiev "Ukraine is no longer afraid to come into conflict with a nuclear power".

Don't like Cassad? OK I have Canadian source. CBC News says Ukraine preparing for 'full-scale war,' says former envoy to Canada.

An envoy to Canada is one thing, and a Deputy Foreign Minister is another. Vadym Prystaiko is now Ukraine's deputy foreign minister. And he is begging Canada for weapons for obvious reasons.
Ukraine's deputy foreign minister says he is preparing for "full-scale war" against Russia and wants Canada to help by supplying lethal weapons and the training to use them.

In an interview with CBC Radio's The House airing Saturday, Prystaiko says the ceasefire brokered by Germany and France was not holding.

"The biggest hub we ever had in the railroad is completely destroyed and devastated," he told host Evan Solomon about Debaltseve, captured by Russian-backed rebels after the terms were to have taken effect earlier this week.

The former ambassador was in the room during the attempts to broker a political solution with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Minsk.

"Personally I don't trust him," he says. "You look at him and you think, 'Are you serious?'"

[Mish comment: And why the hell should anyone, including Ukrainian citizens trust Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko. Poroshenko has lied about the losses, the civilian casualties, amnesty, constitutional reforms, and damn near everything else. This does not condone Putin. It's a statement that lies are not one sided.

"Nobody knows what is going on in his head. I believe he is becoming very emotional [over the two countries' historic ties]," he suggests, calling Putin's intentions "difficult to predict."

[Mish Comment: I do not pretend to know what is going on in Putin's head. But what the F is going on in Poroshenko's head to not give a damn about willingness to engage a nuclear power? And if anything it's easier to ascertain Putin. He does not want NATO on his back porch any more than Kennedy would allow Russian missiles in Cuba.]

"We don't want to scare everybody, but we are preparing for full-scale war."

What to do in the face of such a threat? For starters, get over your fears, he says.

"What we expect from the world is that the world will stiffen up in the spine a little," he says. "Everybody is afraid of fighting with a nuclear state. We are not anymore, in Ukraine — we've lost so many people of ours, we've lost so much of our territory.

[Mish comment: Prystaiko now begs Canada for weapons.]

"We would like Canada to send lethal weapons to Ukraine," he said. "Weapons to allow us to defend ourselves."

Canada has been helping to train Ukrainian soldiers for the last decade, but it isn't enough, he says. "It wasn't on the level that would help our army [against an] invasion." Ukraine wants weapons, and training to use them, he said.
Prepare for Full-Scale War - With What?

Why is Prystaiko begging Canada for weapons?

Because Ukraine is out of weapons. Ukraine lost masses of weapons last summer in various cauldrons and were pounded again recently.

These idiots in Ukraine do not care how many of their citizens die.

Why should the US or Canada or anyone else care about a civil war in Ukraine? So what if Russia is backing one side. It's none of our business.

And now these jackasses are prepared to up the ante risking war with a nuclear power. They are nuts and Canada would be nuts to give Ukraine weapons.

Flushing Action



Should there be a Maple Leaf on the above leg as well?

War is Over

On January 29, in Conscription of People, Cars, Businesses in Ukraine for Mindless Slaughter; Entire Villages Leave to Avoid Servitude; Hop on the Bus Gus I made these statements:
This War is Over

The Vietnam war ended when public support turned against it, even though fighting continued long after.

The same applies here. The war is over. Hearts and minds have been lost along with the will to fight. Ukraine is split in two, barring a major military intervention by the US.

Even though the war is over, the fighting can continue. How much longer the battles go on now depends on the US and IMF.

  1. The US can fund the bloodshed for a while longer and so can the IMF. US war-mongers may decide no price is too high to pay, even to the absurd point of engaging Russia directly.
  2. The US and IMF can force true peace negotiations on Kiev with a partition or federation of the country. But, what may have been acceptable to the separatists and Russia six months ago may no longer be so.

Either way, Ukraine is never going to be a single country again. Such is the madness of arbitrarily drawing borders with no regard to cultural, political, or religious beliefs.

The war is over. Kiev lost, even with the backing of the US. Let the peace process begin before more lives are lost and more needless destruction occurs.
I believe that was an accurate assessment, and no one else called it.

Not only have the citizens of Ukraine given up the will to fight, Ukraine is out of military equipment and now begs Canada and the US for some.

For what? Why?

Ukraine is never going to be a single 100% united country again. Crimea is gone for good. Of course, Crimea was never really part of Ukraine in the first place.

There is still hope for a loose federation with what remains. But that requires 100% guarantees of amnesty and constitutional reforms.

Meanwhile, if the US and Canada send more weapons, so will Russia.

The US and Canada should both tell Ukraine, as did Chancellor Merkel, "the solution is political not military".

If that were to happen, and especially if the IMF demanded a ceasefire before agreeing to more funding, the fighting would end tomorrow.

You cannot fight war with no money, no arms, and no will of the people. Realistically, the war is over. You may prefer the term "decided" instead of "over". Regardless, all the US and Canada can do at this point is prolong the misery.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Seth's Blog : Mass production and mass media

Mass production and mass media

We invented televisions so marketers would have a way to run TV ads. We have magazines so marketers can run magazine ads.

Make no mistake: mass media exists because it permits mass marketers to do their job.

Mass production, the ability to make things cheaply, in volume, demanded that we invent mass marketing--it was the only way to sell what was being made in the quantity it was produced.

The internet, though, was not invented so marketers could run internet ads.

And, at the same time, mass production is being replaced by micro production, by the short run, by customization, by the long tail.

Just in time, mass media is going away too. 

Mass marketers don't like this and they often don't even see it. They're struggling to turn Snapchat and Twitter and other sites into substitutes for TV, but it's not working, because it's an astonishing waste of attention.

The Ed Sullivan Show existed to sell Jello to everyone. Today, there's no everyone, and certainly no media channel that can sell everyone, cheap, to the folks who market Jello.

This is an ongoing challenge for mass marketers, and the opportunity of a generation for everyone else.

For fifty years, TV and TV-thinking was the shortcut. Make average stuff for average people (by definition = mass) and promote to every stranger within reach. It worked.

But mass is fading, fading faster than our desire to be mass marketers is fading. The shortcut doesn't work every time now, and the expectation that success is the same as popularity is still with us.

Fifty years ago, producers and marketers got smart. They saw the miracle of mass marketing and they adopted it as their own. They amped up mass production and bet on the masses.

The smart creators today are seeing the shift and doing precisely the opposite:

Produce for a micro market.

Market to a micro market.

When someone wants to know how big you can make (your audience, your market share, your volume), it might be worth pointing out that it's better to be important, to be in sync, to be the one that's hard to be replaced. And the only way to be important is to be relevant, focused and specific.

            

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vineri, 20 februarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Lacy Hunt on Financial Repression; Deleveraging Not

Posted: 20 Feb 2015 12:30 PM PST

In another of his series on Financial Repression, Gordon Long of Market Research and Analytics interviewed Dr. Lacy Hunt, Executive Vice President of Hoisington Investment Management Company.

Previously Lacy Hunt was with the Federal Reserve in Dallas. He was also the chief economist for the largest bank in Philadelphia, and the chief economist for HSBC (at the time the largest bank in the world).

Hoisington manages over $5 billion for pension funds, endowments, insurance companies and others. Hunt has been with Hoisington for 19 years.



link if video does not play: Lacy Hunt on Financial Repression

Lacy describes financial repression as "a superficial attempt to deal with the excessive indebtedness that grips the global economy, not just the US, but Europe, Japan, the United Kingdom, and even now China and the emerging markets."

"In my opinion will not work," says Hunt.

"Monetary Policy is not the solution here. There are Fiscal Policy solutions but they require shared sacrifice, strong leadership (something we don't have in the US or Europe - no one has).

"Basically what we are trying to do is to solve an extremely over-indebted situation domestically and globally by taking on more debt and aggravating the problem. Rather than bringing us closer to the return of the normal business cycle, they are pushing it all further and further into the future."
 
2015 Parallels to Currency Wars of 1920s and 1930s

  • First, there is a global problem with debt and slow growth, and no country is immune.
  • Second, the economic problems now, like then, are more serious and are more apparent outside the United States. However, due to negative income and price effects on our trade balance, foreign problems are transmitting into the U.S. and interacting with underlying structural problems.
  • Third, over- indebtedness is rampant today as it was in the 1920s and 1930s.
  • Fourth, competitive currency devaluations are taking place today as they did in the earlier period. These are a combination of monetary and/or fiscal policy actions and also, with floating exchange rates, a consequence of shifting assessments of private participants in the markets.

Interest Rates

Regarding interest rates, Lacy says "The downward pressure on global economic growth rates will remain in place in 2015. Therefore record low inflation and interest rates will continue to be made around the world in the new year, as governments utilize policies to spur growth at the expense of other regions."

Three Problem Types of Debt 

  1. Borrowing to finance daily living needs
  2. Debt that leads to bankruptcy
  3. Worst type of debt is where excess debt creation inflates asset prices.  And that only leads to economic instability.

"Good debt" to Lacy is debt that yields an income stream sufficient to pay back principal and interest.

Deleveraging Not

"The world now has $35 trillion more debt today than in 2007. We are not in the age of deleveraging; We're still in the age of leveraging up. Unfortunately, the overleveraged condition is virtually everywhere in the world."

Thanks to Lacy Hunt for taking the time to share his thoughts.

Mish on Financial Repression

Gordon Long interviewed me on the subject of financial repression in October of 2014.

I describe financial repression as "a set of fiscal and monetary policies for the expressed benefit of the ruling class: politicians, banks, and the already wealthy, at the expense of everyone else."

You can find a synopsis and play the interview here: Gordon Long Video Interview of Mish: Topic - Financial Repression (and How to Defend Yourself From It)

Long also interviewed Dr. Marc Faber. On Long's Financial Repression Website, you can see all the interviews in this series.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Bailout Blueprint: Deal or Capitulation? ECB Prepares for a Greece Exit from Euro Zone

Posted: 20 Feb 2015 11:11 AM PST

Bailout Blueprint: Deal, Capitulation, or Neither?

At the 12th hour Finance Chiefs Draw Up Greek Bailout Blueprint.
Negotiations led by Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who chairs the eurogroup of 19 eurozone finance ministers, have produced a common communiqué on the extension of Greece's €172bn bailout, according to a eurozone official.

The text was produced after nearly five hours of bilateral talks between Mr Dijsselbloem and key ministers, including Yanis Varoufakis, Greek finance minister, and Wolfgang Schäuble, his German counterpart. The eurozone official also said Mr Dijsselbloem was in direct contact with Alexis Tsipras, Greek prime minister, during the talks.

The text must now be presented to all 19 eurozone ministers for approval. "It will be fast," said the official.

According to a Greek government official, the new text was also agreed by the three institutions that monitor the country's bailout: the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Mr Varoufakis had earlier insisted that Greece had made sufficient concessions to reach a deal to extend the bailout for six months after it expires next week and predicted that he and his 18 eurozone counterparts would reach an agreement.

He said Athens had "gone not an extra mile [but] an extra 10 miles" in its proposal for the extension, submitted to eurozone leaders on Thursday, adding it was now the turn of other ministers to meet Greece "not half way, but one-fifth of the way" to reach a deal.

Mr Varoufakis and a group of German-led eurozone countries are locked in a stand-off over the conditions of a bailout extension, with Berlin insisting the new Greek government agree to the terms of the existing bailout before it engages in negotiations over any changes in the programme.

Mr Tsipras's government has refused, saying it was elected to end the current bailout, but has made significant concessions, agreeing to ask for an extension with some loopholes that would give it some leeway to negotiate terms.

Speaking after a meeting in Paris, the leaders of both France and Germany said they remained committed to keeping Greece in the EU's common currency, but Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, added that Mr Varoufakis' request needed to be changed before it would be acceptable.

"There is a need for significant improvements in the substance of what is being discussed so that we can vote on it in the German Bundestag, for example next week," Ms Merkel said, standing next to her French counterpart, François Hollande.
Is there a deal? Does it need to be changed?

ZeroHedge reports according to Capital.gr, the preliminary agreement covers the following points:

  • 4 not 6-month extension
  • no completion of current program
  • no new austerity measures
  • no unilateral actions

If that's really the deal, then Greece bought time to speed up tax collections. In turn, that would strengthen its hand four months from now when this process starts all over.

As I pointed out previously, as long as Greece has a primary account surplus, it can stay on the euro.

I have wondered if tax collections had shrunk so much ahead of Syriza's victory that it no longer has a primary account surplus.

ECB Prepares for a Greece Exit from Euro Zone

Meanwhile, Spiegel reports ECB Prepares for a Greece Exit from Euro Zone
The European Central Bank is preparing for the event that Greece leaves the euro zone and its staff are readying contingency plans for how the rest of the bloc could be kept intact, German news magazine Spiegel reported in a preview of its magazine.

The ECB declined to comment on the report, Reuters reported.

The German magazine also reported that the ECB was pushing Athens to introduce controls on the movement of capital.

Earlier this week, the European Central Bank denied a report in a German newspaper that it wanted Greece to introduce capital controls to stem the outflow of deposits from its banks.

Germany΄s finance minister was hostile to Athens΄ proposal this week although the government softened its tone on Friday as euro zone finance ministers raced to break the deadlock.
I suspect the ECB has been preparing for Grexit for months, and that helps explain the hard stance of Germany.

Deal or not? Capitulation by Greece or not? More negotiations in 4 months? If the latter, Greece bought some time to get back to (or strengthen) its primary account surplus.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Spotlight Japan: Inflation Barely Positive, Consumer Spending Down, Exports Up, Growth Slowing; Record Streak of Bad Weather

Posted: 20 Feb 2015 01:18 AM PST

Inquiring minds are looking at the latest inflation reports from Japan for clues in the success or failure of Abenomics and prime minister Shinzu Abe's stated goal of two percent inflation.

In December, Japanese inflation fell to 0.5% despite massive economic loosening, a 1% rise in industrial production, and a dip in the unemployment rate to 3.4%, the lowest since 1997.

Today Reuters reports Japan January Inflation Seen Easing, Factory Output Up.
Japan's core inflation is seen slowing for a sixth month in January while factory output is expected to rise, underlining the policy challenge facing the Bank of Japan as it strives to speed up economic growth and achieve its 2 percent price target.

Stripping out the effects of a sale tax hike, the nation's core consumer price index (CPI) - excluding volatile fresh food but includes oil products - is forecast to have increased 0.3 percent year-on-year last month, a Reuters poll showed.

The Bank of Japan is counting on exports to help offset the still-weak private consumption, and for weak oil prices to spur companies to spend more, helping the economy gather speed after last April's sales tax hike tipped it into recession.

The nation's factory output is seen jumping 2.7 percent in January from the previous month, the poll showed. In December, output increased 0.8 percent on-month, after a 0.5 percent fall in November.

Household spending is expected to have fallen 4.1 percent in January from a year earlier partly due to bad weather, down for a tenth straight month, the poll showed. And retail sales are set to fall an annual 1.3 percent last month, down for the first time in seven months.
Record Streak of Bad Weather

Household spending is down 10 straight months, partially die to bad weather. Is that a record streak of bad weather or what?

Those are forecasts of course, but with expectations of a 4.1% decline in spending, I will go out on a limb and guess the report is at least in the ballpark.

Markit Manufacturing PMI Suggests Growth Slowing

Markit claims the Japan Manufacturing PMI shows "solid production growth" but that is not my takeaway from looking at the data.

The February "Flash" Manufacturing PMI is 51.5, down from 52.2 last month and is the slowest since July 2014.

Manufacturing output is at 52.7, the same as last month, supposedly "solid" growth. Check out the summary.



Slower Growth

  • PMI
  • New Orders
  • Employment
  • Output Prices - In Actual Decline
  • Input Prices - Increase Slower

The big positive is an increase in export orders but the chart does not look too impressive.



GDP and Export Discussion

Every country wants a weaker currency to boost exports relative to imports. It's mathematically impossible. If Japan succeeds dramatically, it will be at the expense of some other country. Take your pick: USA, Germany, China.

Recall that exports add to GDP while imports subtract from GDP. If Japan is once again exporting more cars and technology to the US, and if the US is exporting less due to the rising value of the US dollar, where does that put US GDP?

And what about the possibility China enters a beggar-thy-neighbor scheme to lower the yuan to compete with Japan.

None of this sits very pretty for upcoming US GDP reports or for various trade retaliations.

I wonder if this is what's really on the Fed's mind when the Fed minutes surprised the markets with statements on being patient (See Patience is a Virtue, Unless It's Not)

More than likely, such thoughts give the Fed too much credit because history shows they are totally clueless.

Regardless, Japan is once again on the verge of price deflation in spite of Abenomics. That's a good thing actually for the Japanese consumer, but few see it that way.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Damn Cool Pics

Damn Cool Pics


How Game of Thrones Characters Look Based On The Books Vs TV

Posted: 20 Feb 2015 12:09 PM PST

Various artists have created some amazing artwork recreating "Game of Thrones" characters based on how they're described in the books. Which depiction do you like better, the books or the TV show?

Joffrey Baratheon



Tywin Lannister




Petyr Baelish



Oberyn Martell



Daenerys Targaryen



Tyrion Lannister



Theon Greyjoy



Brienne Tarth



Ygritte Snow



Renly Baratheon



Stannis Baratheon



Cersei Lannister



Sandor Clegane



Melisandre



Jorah Mormont



Davos Seaworth



Tormund



Syrio Forel



Daar Naharis



This Hottie Nailed It With Her Supergirl Cosplay

Posted: 20 Feb 2015 11:00 AM PST

It's safe to say that Supergirl has never looked so sexy.






















Driving Traffic from Facebook - Whiteboard Friday - Moz Blog


Driving Traffic from Facebook - Whiteboard Friday

Posted on: Friday 20 February 2015 — 01:16

Posted by randfish

Facebook sends a remarkable amount of traffic, but there's a lot of confusion around both just how much and (perhaps more importantly for our work) how we can optimize our work to take advantage of it. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand clears up some of the statistical noise and offers 10 tips for optimizing your Facebook traffic.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk a little bit about Facebook. Facebook has been growing massively. It sends out a tremendous amount of traffic, and as a result, more and more of us in the field of web marketing as a whole, and because it's so interesting as a correlated factor with things that tend to perform well in Google, are interested in the traffic that Facebook can drive and in potentially growing that.

So I'm going to start out with a few stats. I think it is actually very important that marketers like us understand how statistics work, especially as they're represented. I hear from folks all the time like, "Oh, my boss emailed me the new Shareaholic report, and it says that 25% of all traffic comes from Facebook, and we only get 10% of our traffic from Facebook. So we must be doing Facebook badly." That's not actually the case.

Then I'm going to talk a little about some rough estimates, just for theoretical fun purposes, around traffic that Facebook might send versus Google, and then I actually have a bunch of tips for Facebook optimization. None of this is going to be dramatically brand new, but I've tried to distill down and aggregate some of the best ones, throw out some of the ones that no longer apply as Facebook has been maturing and getting more sophisticated and those kinds of things. All right, let's start with these stats.

So let's say your boss does send you this Shareaholic report, and Facebook sends 24% of all referral traffic. Wow. Shareaholic is on 300,000 websites. That's a pretty big group. Like how can we ignore that data? It's not that you should ignore it, but you should also be aware of why is Shareaholic installed and who uses it.

So these 300,000 sites are almost certainly massively over-representative across the several hundred million websites that exist on the Internet of those that receive and are optimizing for social media traffic. I think this is an excellent stat, and if you are a social media heavy site and you are getting less than say 20%, less than 15% of your traffic from social, well, you probably have some work to do there and some opportunity to gain there.

I also like this one from Define Media Group. Define of course is a Marshall Simmonds' company, and they measure across major publishers. So one of the things that you might hear is Buzzfeed, for example, last year put out their big article about how they get 70% plus of their traffic from social, and they don't even care about search, and search is dead. No one does SEO anymore and blah, blah, blah. It turns out actually, I think Buzzfeed does a tremendous amount of caring about SEO despite what they say, but they don't want to be perceived as doing that. Define said across all of their 87 major publishers -- so these are big news sorts of publishers and entertainment content publishers and that kind of stuff -- social sent about 16% of all traffic, search 41%, and direct 43%. That's a very big difference from the social sharing site. So again, you're seeing that granularity and disparity as we look across different segments of the web world.

Worldwide by the way, according to StatCounter, whose stats I like very much because they're across such a wide range of distributed websites, many hundredths of thousands, I think even millions of websites in the U.S. and abroad, so that's really nice and they share their global statistics at gs.statcounter.com, which is one of my favorite resources for this type of stuff. According to them, worldwide Facebook, in January of 2015, driving around 80% of all social referrals in the U.S. Interestingly enough, people like Pinterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+ have more of a share than they do in the rest of the world, and so Facebook is responsible for only about 68% of all social referrals in the U.S. as a conglomerate.

It is the case for anyone measuring Facebook traffic, the average pages per visit tends to be around one. Now, you compare that to Google, where it's around 2, 2.2, or 2.5, you compare that to Direct and Direct is usually closer to the 3, 4, or 5 visits per session. So Facebook's traffic is kind of at the low end of the performance and engagement scale. It tends to be the case that when you're in that Facebook feed, you're just trying to consume content, and you might see something, but you're unlikely to browse around the rest of the website from which it came, and that's just fine. Although, interestingly enough, Facebook does perform better, slightly better than Twitter does by this metric. So Twitter's traffic is even more ephemeral.

I tried to do some rough statistics and think about like, okay Rand, I really need a comparison between how much traffic does Google send and how much traffic does Facebook send. This is something that people ask about all the time. There are no terrific sources of data out there, so we sort of have to back into it. I think you can do that by saying, "Well, we know that Google's getting around 6 billion searches a day currently, and we know that those send on average . . . well, we don't know for sure. We know that years ago an average Google search resulted in 2.1 or 2.2 clicks." I think that was 2009, so this was many years ago. So it could have gone down, or it could have gone up from there. I'm going to say between 1.5 and 3 visits on average, somewhere in there.

Facebook has 890 million daily active users, and we don't know the statistics again perfectly there. But again, several years ago, I want to say maybe 4 years ago, 2011, they had a stat that around 2 external clicks per day per Facebook user. So let's say it's probably gone up maybe 2 to 4, somewhere between there. So given that, Google is in the 9 to 18 billion referrals per day stage and Facebook 1.8 to 3.6 billion.

So if you think Facebook has grown just absolutely huge, it could be as big as a third of the smallest growth maybe that Google has experienced in terms of referral traffic. I think that's possible. I think the numbers are probably closer to the 9 and 3.6 than they are to the 18 and 1.8. That would be my guess. I think Facebook is somewhere between 15% and 30% of the traffic that Google's driving. So pretty massive. Definitely bigger than any of the secondary search engines. Probably driving more traffic than YouTube, driving more traffic than Yahoo!, driving more traffic than Bing. Probably driving more traffic than all three of those combined even. That's quite impressive, just not as impressive as the enormous amounts of traffic that Google does set.

Still, one of the reasons that we care about Facebook even if we don't love the traffic that Facebook sends us because we don't feel that it performs well, Facebook's likes and shares are very indicative of the kinds of content that tend to perform well in search. So if we can nail that, if we understand what kind of content gets spread socially on the web and engages people on the social web, we tend to also perform well in the kind of content we create for search engines.

So some tips. First off, make sure that the Facebook audience and whoever your . . . well, that pen is going to work beautifully for someone never. Let's see if I can make it from here. You guys can't see this, but we'll just pretend I make it. Oh yeah, nailed it. Oh, it almost went in. It like bounced off the shelf and then almost went in.

All right. First off, make sure that your Facebook audience usage matches your content goals and targets. If you're saying, "Hey, we're trying to convert people to a B2B software product in an industry that really targets technical folks on the engineering side," Facebook might be really, really tough. If, on the other hand, you are selling posters of adorable cats and dogs, woo, that's a Facebook audience right there. You should nail that. So I think you do have to have that concept. You can't just disassociate those two. If you're working for a patent attorney, trying to get likes and shares is going to be really hard for their content versus maybe trying to get some tweets or some shares on LinkedIn or those kinds of things.

Second, learn what does work in your topics in Facebook. There's a great tool for this. It's called BuzzSumo. You can plug in keywords and see the pieces of content that over the past six months or a year have performed the best across social networks, and you can actually filter directly by Facebook to see what's done best on Facebook in my niche, with my topics, around my subjects. That's a great way to get at what might work in the future, what doesn't work, what will resonate, and what won't.

Number 3, you should set up your analytics to be able to track future visits from an initial social referral. There's a great blog post from Chris Mikulin. Chris basically shows us how in Google Analytics you can set up a custom system to track referrals that come from social and then what that traffic does after it's come to you from social and left, oftentimes coming back through search, very, very common.

Number 4, headlines often matter more than content in earning that first initial click. I'm not going to say they matter more than content overall, but headlines are huge on Facebook right now, and that's why you see things like the listicles and click bait all of those types of problems and issues. Facebook says they're working to update that. But for right now there's a ton of sharing going on that's merely around the text of that 5 to 15 word headline, and those tend to be extremely important in determining virality and ability to make their way across Facebook.

Number 5, it is still the case -- this has been true for many years now across all the social media platforms -- that visuals tend to outperform non-visual content. When you have great visuals, the spread and share of those tends to be greater.

Number 6, timing still matters a little bit, but actually, interestingly not as much as it used to. I think a lot of folks in the social media sphere have been looking at this and saying, "Gosh, you know what? We're running the correlations and we're trying these experiments, and what we're seeing actually is that it seems like Facebook has gotten much smarter about timing." So they're not saying, "Oh, you posted in the middle of the night and you didn't get very many likes, so we're not going to show your post to as many people." They're now saying, "Well, as a percentage of the engagement on average that's received by this group in these geographies, in these time zones, at these particular times, how did you do?" I think that relativism has made their algorithm much more intelligent, and as a result we're seeing that posting at a certain time of the day, when more people are on Facebook or less are, isn't quite as powerful as it used to be. That said, if you want to try some timing experiments, watch your Facebook Insights page, and figure those things out. There's still some optimization opportunity to be gleaned there.

Number 7, the really big driver of Facebook spread and of the ability to be seen by more and more people, have a post seen by more and more people on Facebook, appears to be -- at least from all the social media experts, and I would validate this myself from my experiences there -- the percentage of the audience that's seeing the post, interacting with that post -- and by interacting I mean they like, they comment, they share, they click on the link, or even, I'm fairly certain that Facebook is also using a dwell time metric, meaning that if they're looking at that post for a considerable amount of time, even if they're not clicking Like or Share or Comment or clicking, if they're observing it, if that's staying active on their Facebook feed in the visual portion of the panel, that seems to be a metric that Facebook is also using. I would be fairly sure it is. I think they're pretty smart about that kind of stuff. Because this is a big driver, what you're trying to do is grow engagement. You want more people to interact more heavily with your content. I think that's one of the reasons that unfortunately things like click bait work so well and great headlines do too.

Number 8, brand page reach is limited. We know this. There have been many sort of Facebook algorithmic updates that talk about what's the organic reach if you post, but you don't pay at all, those kinds of things. However, the flip side of this is that in order for Facebook to not be overwhelmed by content, because the amount of content that's posted there is simply enormous, they've reduced some of those things. But that means a little bit more room for individual people. So individual accounts, like your Facebook account, my Facebook account, not my public page, but my personal Facebook account, your personal Facebook account, those have a little bit more opportunity to get reach versus brands, which for a while were more dominating than they are. Now it's pretty small.

Number 9, if your traffic from Facebook has good ROI -- and this is one of those big reasons why you need to be measuring the second order effects and when that traffic comes back and those kinds of things -- go ahead and pay to amplify. This is just like Google. If you see that a key word is performing well and you can turn on AdWords and you can get more of those visitors and they're going to convert, hey, the same thing is true on Facebook, and Facebook's traffic, generally speaking, is much cheaper on a per-click basis than Google's is. It's also much less targeted. It tends not to perform as well, but much less expensive. So I would urge you to pay to amplify. When you see sites that are performing gangbusters -- Buzzfeed being a very fair example of that -- they're paying a lot of money to drive all that traffic to their site and to amplify their organic reach. They're getting organic and paid reach.

And the last one, number 10, Facebook is really hard to game anymore -- it didn't used to be this case -- with direct signals. It used to be the case that if you posted something on Facebook, you could have a bunch of your friends like, "Hey, everyone go check their Facebook feed now. Make sure you're subscribed to me. If you don't see it in your feed, go over to my specific feed, click it, Like it, Share it, comment it." Then we can sort of amplify its organic reach, because Facebook cares a ton about those first 5 or 10 minutes and what the engagement is like there. That doesn't work very well anymore. Facebook is very, very careful, I think, nowadays to look at: Who did we organically show this to in the news feed? How many of them interacted and engaged with it? What's their history of interacting and engaging with stuff on this particular site? Are they somehow connected? Is there gaming going on here? Have they consistently liked everything that's come from this site in the first five minutes of it being published? All those kinds of things that you would expect them to eventually get to, they've really gotten to, and so gaming it is much more hard.

But gaming people is not much harder, because unfortunately our software has not been considerably upgraded in the last few hundred years of evolution. So as a result, gaming human psychology is really how to, I don't want to say manipulate, but certainly to get much more reach on Facebook. If you can find the angles that people care about, that they're vocal about, that they get engaged, excited, angry, passionate, of any emotional variety about those things, that's how you tend to trigger a lot of activity on Facebook. This is a little different than how it works on other social networks, certainly LinkedIn, parts of Twitter, Instagram different. Facebook very much this kind of controversy, passion, excitement, tribalism tends to rule the day on this platform. I think that's part of why you see some of these click bait and headline heavy sites performing so well. But if you want to find ways to make Facebook work for you, you might want to marry the things that are on brand, on topic, helpful to you, actually will earn you good visits, but do take into account some of that human psychology that exists on Facebook.

All right everyone, what I would love, and I don't always ask for this, but I would love if you have great tips or things that you've seen work really well on Facebook, please share them in the comments below. I would love to read through them. I'm guessing there are some folks in the Moz community who have extensive, wonderful experience here. We'd love to hear from you.

All right everyone, take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Seth's Blog : Pitchers and hitters

Pitchers and hitters

Hitters don't have much of an agenda other than, "swing at the good balls." No one blames the hitters when the pitcher has a hot hand and throws a no hitter.

Pitchers, on the other hand, decide what's going to happen next. Pitchers get to set the pace, outline the strategy, initiate instead of react.

When your job is in reaction mode, you're allowing the outside world to decide what happens next. You are freed from the hard work of setting an agenda, but in exchange, you dance when the market says dance. "I did the best I could with what was thrown at me..."

Finding the guts to move up the ladder is hard. When you decide to set the agenda and when you take control over your time and your effort, the responsibility for what happens next belongs to you.

            

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