Central Perk

marți, 18 decembrie 2012

Damn Cool Pics

How to Light a Cigarette with a Hammer [Video]
The Funniest Tweets of 2012
Christmas Drunk Parties in Britain
Best Selling Christmas Gifts from 1980 to 2011
Anime Girls vs Real Life Girls
How to Become a Wedding Planner [Infographic]

How to Light a Cigarette with a Hammer [Video]

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 05:02 PM PST

Now this is a pretty odd way to light a cigarette. Still have to give the guy some style points though!

The Funniest Tweets of 2012

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 04:52 PM PST

Christmas Drunk Parties in Britain

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 02:54 PM PST

In Britain, the weekend before Christmas is traditionally a celebratory occasion and revelers are out in full force, drinking and partying. In preparation for this time, a centre for drunks was set up in Soho at a cost of $810 000 (£500 000) to the government. Paramedics are kept busy dealing with injuries caused from silly drunken accidents and fights. In Newcastle, they received 1200 emergency calls on Friday alone.

Best Selling Christmas Gifts from 1980 to 2011

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 12:55 PM PST

From 1980 to 2011. How many have you owned?

1980: Rubik's Cube. was: $1.99
BUY IT NOW: $10.14

1981: Lego Train Set. was: $70.00
BUY IT NOW: $199.95

1982: BMX Bike. was: $230.00
BUY IT NOW: $324.27

1983: Cabbage Patch Kids. was: $30.00
BUY IT NOW: $63.44

1983: Transformer Action Figures. was: $19.99
BUY IT NOW: $34.99

1985: Care Bears. was: $24.99
BUY IT NOW: $43.00

1986: Lazer Tag. was: $50.00
BUY IT NOW: $44.50

1987: Koosh Ball. was: $3.99
BUY IT NOW: $3.99

1988: Ghostbuster Toys. was: $8.77
BUY IT NOW: $21.60

1989: Game Boy. was: $189.95
BUY IT NOW: $200.00

1990: TMNT Toys. was: $5.95
BUY IT NOW: $33.94

1991: Sega Game Gear. was: $150.00
BUY IT NOW: $28.77 (used)

1992: WWF Action Figures. was: $6.99
BUY IT NOW: $21.99

1993: Talkboy. was: $29.99
BUY IT NOW: $44.95

1994: Power Rangers Toys. was: $10.00
BUY IT NOW: $24.84

1995: Pogs. was: $2.99
BUY IT NOW: $12.99

1996: Tickle Me Elmo. was: $29.99
BUY IT NOW: $145.00

1997: Tamagotchi. was: $20.00
BUY IT NOW: $37.95

1998: Furby. was: $35.00
BUY IT NOW: $68.54

1999: Pokemon Nintendo Games. was: $29.99
BUY IT NOW: $31.49

2001: Bratz. was: $20.00
BUY IT NOW: $19.99

2002: Beyblades. was: $7.99
BUY IT NOW: $40.77

2003: Robosapien. was: $99.99
BUY IT NOW: $249.99

2004: Nintendo DS. was: $149.99
BUY IT NOW: $299.95 (3DS XL)

2005: Xbox 360. was: $299.99
BUY IT NOW: $249.96

2006: PS3. was: $399.99
BUY IT NOW: $299.99

2007: iPod Touch. was: $299.99
BUY IT NOW: $299.99

2008: Elmo Live. was: $60.00
BUY IT NOW: $229.99

2009: Nintendo Wii. was: $199.99
BUY IT NOW: $172.95

2010: Apple iPad. was: $499.99
BUY IT NOW: $455.52

2011: Kindle Fire. was: $199.00
BUY IT NOW: $199.00 (HD)

Anime Girls vs Real Life Girls

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 11:32 AM PST

The same girls as anime character and in real life.

How to Become a Wedding Planner [Infographic]

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 10:28 AM PST

Wedding planners help walk couples through the biggest day of their lives. From the time a bride says "yes" to a groom's wedding proposal until after the last bottle of champagne is popped, a good wedding planner will work tirelessly to ensure the big day is a total success. That could include everything from arranging wedding photography and food to scrutinizing fabric swatches and finding a last minute solution for a lost earring or missing best man.

Learn more about what it takes to become a wedding planner in our infographic.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

Via: Schools.com

Marketing Analytics and the Problem of Attribution Modeling

Posted: 17 Dec 2012 06:43 PM PST

Posted by RuthBurr

Guys, we need to talk about attribution modeling. It’s a hot issue in our industry and most of us (SEOmoz included) aren't doing it as well as we want to be. It's tough stuff. Mike P from Distilled gave a great MozCon presentation on the topic, but most of us aren't anywhere close to that sophisticated - and even his model is impacted by Google Analytics' limitations.

It’s been covered in far more detail elsewhere, but in a nutshell: attribution modeling attempts to solve the problem of which channel gets credit when a user touches multiple channels prior to converting. Many marketers simply throw up their hands and say the last touch gets all the credit – but then we have to live with the knowledge that some of our efforts are far more effective than we give them credit for.

Not-so-super modeling

dog model
Supermodel by Soggydan on Flickr

Unfortunately, attribution modeling is very hard to do well for a lot of reasons:

Any site to which users return daily (like, for example, SEOmoz.org) quickly fills up with touches that may or may not be related to conversions.
Channels like social media and community building are often a first touch but rarely the only touch before conversion, meaning they tend to get less credit than they deserve.
Attributing offline sales to online efforts can be very painful, not to mention tracking one user’s conversion path as she uses multiple devices during her buying decision.
In our post-Panda world, we’re spending a ton of time and effort on content that may end up on third party sites, opening us up to the near-impossible task of tracking view-through conversions.

In my opinion, however, the biggest problem with the attribution models available to us today is that their roots lie in web analytics tools like Google Analytics. This means that attribution models tend to be biased toward on-site efforts. The bulk of our marketing efforts doesn’t happen on-site, so why should our measurement? Our competitors certainly aren’t doing things on our site, so why should we content ourselves with on-site data?

Web-analytics-based attribution models also tend to break up sources at the channel level: organic search, social media, direct traffic, etc. Anyone who’s worked for months on driving traffic from Twitter and then had one tweet from Rand break their site can tell you not all social media touches are created equal, so why lump them all into Social Media?

tweet from @randfish

Finally, attribution models are incredibly difficult to implement for success metrics beyond conversion (more on that later).

Marketing analytics is about campaigns, not channels

Here at the MozPlex, we’ve been talking a lot about marketing analytics: the way we measure and optimize our marketing activities. I think Joanna put it best in her post: “Marketing analytics is the act of looking past mere website results, and asking yourself, ‘How did that marketing campaign really go?’”

Marketing analytics means going beyond the data we can get from our web analytics tool so you can measure off-site and even offline activities. Capturing that additional data about how your off-site and on-site marketing activities are performing allows you to test with greater confidence, and as marketers, we should always be testing. It’s probably not as simple as “social media doesn’t drive as many conversions as organic search.” Instead, we can test how to spend our time and money - which levers to pull at which time and in which way - to attract, keep, and delight our customers. At the same time, we can take a cross-channel, holistic view of our efforts to see what messages are resonating best.

All conversions aren’t created equal

Of course, one thing we want to do with our marketing efforts is make more money. ROI-driven modeling is always going to be part of what we’re measuring. However, modern marketers are driving for more than just the lead or the sale or the free trial. We’re looking at micro-conversions like newsletter signups. We’re watching and participating in conversations about our brand. We’re investing in customer happiness. We’re tracking shares, tweets, mentions, and views – and we’re keeping an eye on how are competitors are doing, too.

In addition to major conversions, marketing analytics is about tracking customer loyalty.

customer loyalty
Forever Friends by dprotz, on Flickr

We can often gain as much revenue from keeping our existing customers happy as from getting new ones. What happens after the conversion?

Marketing analytics is also about tracking brand identity. This is becoming more and more important as the major search engines focus more and more on brand strength as a quality indicator. This is another area where typical attribution models just don’t go far enough. Brand-centric campaigns are as much about generating conversation and positive feelings as they are about directly causing more conversions – this makes it harder to prove value if conversions are your only KPI. Branding has an influence on direct traffic, but it also has a big influence on organic search traffic from branded keywords.

So, should that traffic still count as organic search, if branding efforts are what inspired the search in the first place? This is another area where a more campaign-centric view can provide more insight than simply attributing conversions to channels.

Getting closer to marketing analytics

We’re still in the early days of true marketing analytics, which means we’re still mashing up data from a bunch of different tools and struggling to find the right ways to track campaigns. In the meantime, we can start hacking our web analytics’ attribution monitoring tools to go beyond simple channel attributions:

Advanced metrics for attribution modeling

Top referrers (separated out from the rest of referral traffic)
Top keywords (separated out from the rest of the keywords)
Long-tail keywords (same deal)
Top partners and/or affiliates
(not provided) search traffic
Branded and non-branded search traffic
Individual social networks (A friend and a follower may not be the same!)
Individual feeds
Individual paid advertising sources

We can also start thinking of (and tracking) our data with a marketing analytics mindset:

Advanced metrics for marketing analytics

Messages
Type of touch (Branding? Promotion? Retention? Happiness?)
Type of product
Audience
Time of day
Conversations

In the end, marketing analytics is more useful than straight-up attribution modeling, because it allows you to view your marketing efforts holistically. When you view individual customer touches as part of a larger whole instead of siloed by medium, you can take a longer and more customer-driven view of your marketing efforts.

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Hanukkah at the White House

Your Daily Snapshot for
Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Hanukkah at the White House

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama welcomed friends and leaders from the Jewish community last week to celebrate the sixth night of Hanukkah. In his remarks, the President remembered the enduring story of resilience and optimism that is the essence of this holiday.

The 90-year-old menorah used in the ceremony came from the Temple Israel synagogue in Long Beach, New York, which was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy. It served as a symbol of perseverance, and as a reminder of those who are still recovering from Sandy’s destruction.

Find out more about last week's Hanukkah celebration at the White House.

President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and Rabbi Larry Bazer participate in the Menorah lighting during the Hanukkah reception in the Grand Foyer of the White House, Dec. 13, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Does Santa need an online marketing strategy?

Posted: 18 Dec 2012 04:33 AM PST

A few years ago, this blog brought you ‘Online marketing tips for Santa‘. Well, this year (to guarantee our place on the right side of the ‘naughty or nice’ list), we’ve looked again at how he could improve his online presence.

Frankly, it’s not looking good. Father Christmas needs to rank for some incredibly competitive keywords, like ‘Christmas’, ‘present’ and ‘Santa’. So does the jolly fat man need to ditch his old routine and find a dynamic new online identity that’ll be easier to drive up the SERPs? For a bit of fun and for a bit of a laugh, this article takes a tongue-in-cheek look…

Should he rebrand?

On some occasions, it’s worth considering dumping a name that’s simply impossible to rank for. Too many other organisations use his branding; he's everywhere this time of year. That makes it very difficult for the genuine item to rank highly for his own brand, because there's such a lot of competition. He could consider a new name – Doc Frost, or the Gift Geezer perhaps – but there’s plenty of positive sentiment and goodwill surrounding his existing name, and he may not want to ditch it.

Of course, once the online community recognises that he's the real deal, he's likely to get a tonne of inbound links and will soon be considered a high authority site, pushing him to the top of the SERPs.

But how to find that initial audience… Here are some ways he could increase his brand awareness levels, without changing his name or selling his soul to Coca Cola.

Local Search

Services like Google Places are a useful way to make your location known to customers who need to visit you, so Santa should make sure he has Place pages for each of his offices in Lapland and the North Pole.

Once these are established, long-tail geographic key phrases, such as “Christmas presents in Lapland” or “Christmas presents in London”, should help him to rank for location-specific searches without harming his rankings for shorter terms. Those shorter terms, where used, should adopt a scatter-gun approach to cover all likely variations and synonyms – it’s no good ranking for ‘Christmas presents’ if your customers are searching for ‘Christmas gifts’.

And of course, anybody searching for those longer phrases should find his location-specific landing pages highly relevant, helping to get them engaged with his content more quickly.

Mobile

It’s a mobile world these days, but responsive web design can make sure web pages look right on any kind of device, without limiting access to content. Google recommends using responsive web design, and it makes sense from a visitor's perspective as it lets you show all of your content to visitors on PCs, laptops, tablets, and phone handsets, with full control over how it appears.

If Santa doesn't have the technology or know-how, there are plenty of agencies that would be happy to give him a good deal. After all, a recommendation from Father Christmas probably goes a long way…

Penguin

Penguins may be more Antarctic than North Pole but they're still something for Santa to consider. A well-stuffed turkey is a Christmas tradition, but a keyword-stuffed website is definitely out, along with way too many keyword-stuffed anchor text backlinks from low quality and irrelevant websites.

Fortunately, there are a lot of variations on Santa's name (Father Christmas, Saint Nick etc.) so he can fill his website with his brand without spoiling the site for humans. Google’s Penguin update began to penalise websites for containing too many keywords within a website’s text fields. Varying the key phrases and setting up targeted outreach activities and link-bait campaigns that attract natural and high quality backlinks is a good antidote to this.

This actually turns Santa’s diluted brand name into a strength, as there’s no reason why he can’t perform well for all of the names people commonly use for him, bringing that fairly disparate audience together in one place – his new, branding-heavy website – to deliver a clear and cohesive message to the world as one.

Coming to Town – Fighting Duplicates

With a Santa impersonator in every high-street store, Saint Nick needs to reclaim his true place as the face of Christmas. A few well-timed flash mobs, guest appearances on the news, and holding press conferences for the print and television media could quickly make the headlines, winning him some high-quality mentions.

If he’s persuasive with his gifts, he could potentially get links back to his website from high-authority news sites – not bribes, obviously, but perhaps a couple of well-chosen items for column editors to review.

In a fast-moving world, genuine brand heritage is still something that many consumers appreciate, not to mention good customer service. Santa not only has centuries of brand-building behind him, he also has a reputation as never failing to deliver, even against the world’s tightest deadline.

Nobody can do it as well as he does, and that’s always a powerful brand message.

Going Social

Santa’s a busy man, but he has a full-time team of elves to manage his Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ profiles. He can use foursquare to keep his followers updated on his every move. He can also share photos on his social media profiles and also use his video channel on YouTube to build a global community.

All of this will help him create true engagement, allowing this long-time absent figure to return to the 21st century Christmas gifts market with a bang and stake his claim as the true brand identity for the festive period.

For good little girls and boys all over the world, sending a tweet or a Facebook message is also a slightly more reliable method of reaching Santa directly than simply throwing a letter on the fire and hoping the smoke reaches him at the North Pole.

Social Marketing

As Santa is looked up to by children the world over, he can align his brand with good causes, such as support for vulnerable children all over the world. Aligning his brand with social causes will not only help him increase brand equity, but help create a sustainable solution to global issues all year round – transforming Santa into a brand that’s for life, not just for Christmas.

This type of socially responsible marketing, often referred to as ’cause marketing’, is a win-win situation for brands that want to give something back, their customers who want to shop ethically, and for the good causes they help.

Who knows, Santa – whose ‘naughty or nice’ policy has set his brand ethics in stone from the very start – might make social marketing so successful it could come to be known not as ’cause marketing’, but as ‘Claus marketing’ in the years to come.

What advice would you give Santa? Share your opinions in the comments below. You never know, Father Christmas might take your advice, which has got to be worth a place on the 'nice' list.

Image credit: PepOmint

Seth's Blog : Utility vs. entertainment

Utility vs. entertainment

A graduate seminar is going on, with a dozen students paying a fortune to fill seats that are in high demand. Some of the students are using cell phones to update Facebook or tweet--and they are sitting right next to students listening intently and not merely taking notes. This juxtaposition puts a very sharp point on an overlooked distinction: some forms of media we engage with because there's a significant utlity, and sometimes, we're merely entertaining ourselves.

Every student in the lecture makes a choice in each moment--to be entertained and be in sync with the crowd online, or to find utility, by doing the more difficult work of focusing on something that only pays off in the long run.

And if that was the end of it, caveat emptor. But it's not, because media consumed doesn't merely have an impact on the consumer.

Media, of course, has morphed and expanded, and the change is accelerating. It has grown in both time spent and impact on us. Now, media consumption changes just about everything in our lives, all day long. While a century ago, a few minutes a day might have been spent with a newspaper or reading a letter, today, it's not unusual for every minute of the day to involve consuming or creating media (or dealing with the repercussions of that). Media doesn't just change what we focus on, it changes the culture it is part of.

I think we can agree that sending animated gifs or wasting an hour with the Jersey Shore have no utility, really, other than as a pasttime. Court TV didn't make us smarter, it just wasted our time and attention. At the other extreme is learning a difficult new skill or attending an essential meeting, bringing full attention to something that doesn't always delight or tantalize. Or consider the difference between viewing politics as a sporting event with winners and losers each day, compared with the difficult work of digging in and actually understanding (and participating in) what's being discussed...

The blended situations, though, are worth sorting out. Is watching the news an activity that has utility? Perhaps it does for a headline, but is an endless, shallow, pundit-filled examination of politics or disasters actually producing value? When we involve desperate strangers in reality TV shows (planned or not), where is the utility? Does it make us better?

The media-industrial complex, of course, wants to turn everything into a profitable show. Is that what we want?

More media is not better media.

Fast media is not improved media.

Pack media is not the media we need.

Entertaining media is not the only option.