Central Perk

luni, 2 decembrie 2013

Damn Cool Pics

Chinese Female Bodyguard Training
'Fast and Furious' actor Paul Walker dies in car crash
How to Teach Your Cat to Poop in the Toilet
7 of the Planet’s Coolest Bike Safety Innovations

Chinese Female Bodyguard Training

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 10:45 AM PST

Female bodyguard training course in China.

'Fast and Furious' actor Paul Walker dies in car crash

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 10:20 AM PST

On November 30, 2013, Paul Walker and his friend Roger Rodas left an event for Walker's charity Reach Out Worldwide. Shortly after leaving Roger Rodas lost control of his red 2005 Porsche Carrera GT and crashed into a light pole and tree in Valencia, Santa Clarita, Californa. The vehicle burst into flames. Both men died at the scene. R.I.P.

How to Teach Your Cat to Poop in the Toilet

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 09:27 AM PST

He didn't know what to make of the lasagna tray of pine chips at first

We moved the litter box by it and added some of his "product" to the pan.

He figured it out.

We cut bigger and bigger holes in the center of the pan (the pine litter is flushable) over 2 weeks time til it was gone.

Now mommy and daddy don't buy litter and nobody can tell a cat lives here, we're odor free.

Via aperfectmentlegen.imgur.com

7 of the Planet’s Coolest Bike Safety Innovations

Posted: 02 Dec 2013 08:46 AM PST

Throughout the world, more and more people are taking to two wheels instead of four. Cycling improves fitness levels, saves money, reduces fuel emissions and is less hassle than public transport. What's not to love? Well, riding a bike can be a risky business, which is why clever people all over the planet are coming up with ways to make it safer. We've hunted down some of the most amazing inventions and initiatives that aim to make cycling safer. From invisible helmets to portable pole-dancers, these videos highlight the most exciting and interesting developments for cyclists right now.

1. The Cuddling Cops

In Denmark, cycling is big news. Danish commuters ride their bikes whilst eating breakfast, smoking or precariously carrying cups of coffee. But bike helmets aren't popular in the Scandinavian nation, mainly because people fear they will mess up their hair. Vanity comes before safety, so capital city Copenhagen has come up with a novel way of spreading the safety message – along with a little love. If Copenhagen cops spot cyclists with bare heads, they pull them over, give them a cuddle, brief them on the benefits of protecting their heads, issue them with a brand new helmet – and send them on their way. See the warm arm of the law in this beautiful video.

View Entire List >>

Progress on those 23 executive actions:

Twenty years ago, President Clinton signed the Brady Bill into law.

That law said that if you want to purchase a firearm from a federally licensed dealer in this country, you have to get a background check first. It was a historic piece of legislation -- one that's kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a firearm in the last 14 years.

But in the wake of the tragedy in Newtown -- a year ago this month -- we know we've got to keep working to build on that progress.

And so even after a minority of Senators blocked commonsense legislation to reduce gun violence this spring, we're pushing forward.

President Obama laid out 23 executive actions to make sure the Administration took essential and rapid steps to save lives while respecting our Second Amendment rights. And since January, we've completed or made significant progress on all of them.

President Obama is keeping his word to make sure our families and communities are safe. See the progress we've made.

Those 23 executive actions are keeping guns out of dangerous hands. They're providing support for communities to hire school resource officers. And they're reducing the stigma around mental illness.

Now, it's not enough to take these steps on our own -- we still need Congress to pass comprehensive legislation to reduce gun violence. We need expanded background checks, and we need to create serious penalties for gun trafficking. There is no question that these kinds of measures would protect our kids and keep our communities safer.

No parent should ever face the horror of the scene at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Or a movie theater in Aurora. Or a temple in Oak Creek. Or the campus at Virginia Tech.

We've seen too much gun violence as a country. And if there's even one thing we can do to save a life, it is our most sacred duty to try.

That's where I stand. And you have my word that the President and I are doing everything we can to make sure no parent loses their child to gun violence.

Take a look at the progress we've made:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/Reducing-Gun-Violence

Thank you,

Joe

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World AIDS Day: Sharing Responsibility, Strengthening Results

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World AIDS Day: Sharing Responsibility, Strengthening Results

The theme of this year’s World AIDS Day is “Shared Responsibility: Strengthening Results for an AIDS-Free Generation.” Now more than ever, it is a fitting theme as the United States focuses, both on the domestic and global fronts, on building partnerships that strengthen our response to HIV and AIDS.

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Treat Your Channels like a Soccer Team

Posted: 01 Dec 2013 03:14 PM PST

Posted by CraigBradford

If you're like a lot of people (myself included) it's very easy to go into an analytics package and focus only on conversion rate. We look at reports like the one below and make short-sighted decisions:

Looking at only the information above, we might decide that "Organic Search" is a bad channel. Making decisions on how successful a channel is based only on conversion rate is short-sighted and will cost you money. Instead, I urge you to think of your channels like a soccer team.

A sensible soccer formation looks something like the image below:

You have one goalkeeper, defenders, midfielders and attackers. You would never think of creating a team of only 11 strikers. But that's exactly what we do with our channels all the time. We create a team that looks like this:

We have a team of channels that are all being graded on their ability to "score goals"â€"please don't make this mistake. I'm okay with the fact that some of my channels have a low "e-commerce" conversion rate; that may not be what they're designed to do.

Channels aren't binary

The one thing that I want you to take from this blog post is that channels are not binary. It isn't that they either drive sales or do nothing; there's lot's of value in between if you know what to look for.

In a report "The Customer Journey to Online Purchase" Google showed this to be the case by looking at the relationship that each channel is likely to play in the customer journey. The idea is to show on a very simple scale whether a channel plays an "awareness role" or more of a "decision making" role.This is an interactive piece so please have a look and play around in it. You can segment by industry or by country.

Let's take the US market as an example:

US â€" All Industries

It shows that in general, Display and Social are more of awareness channels, while Organic search and Paid search tend to be last interaction/decision making channels. I'm not surprised by that, but if that's trueâ€"if social is best used as a tool for driving awareness of my brandâ€"why would I ever use e-commerce conversion rate as a metric of success? The answer, of course, is that I shouldn't. Better metrics would perhaps be things like:

How many new visitors did social bring this month?
Brand awareness - how many people have heard of my business?
How many people interacted with my brand in some way?

These are just a couple of examples, but if you want more specifics I recommend you read this post by Hannah Smith on the Distilled Blog: Calculating ROI from Social Media - Problems, Pitfalls & Breaking all the thingsâ€¦

If you dig a little further, it gets more interesting. Let's look at the health industry in particular:

US â€" Health

Social is still an awareness channel, but look at display. It's now playing more of a decision-making role. Email has also moved from an awareness role to a decision-making role.

So what does this mean?

The data above shows that different channels play different roles depending on country and industry, so don't assume anything. Don't assume that social will be an awareness channel, don't assume that email will be a decision making channel, and whatever you do, don't assume that all channels are designed to only drive sales. Next time you're accessing your channels, try two things:

1. Assign attributes to channels

As mentioned above, not all channels have the same strengths, but that's okay as long as they are pulling their weight somewhere else. To see if that's the case, try assigning them some attributes other than sales. Avinash Kaushik gave an excellent presentation at MozCon 2013 (if you weren't there, the video can be purchased from Moz), in which he said that channels should solve for performance and relationships. This is shown in the table below (the example is for ModCloth):

As you can see, if we were to only solve for the line with red text ("Orders") we would ignore all of the other good that some channels are doing. Social, in this example, is terrible at everything except "Be the Buyer." I encourage you to do the same for your channels; add in all the metrics that are important for relationship-building, not just sales, and take a step back to see what else your channels might be contributing to that isn't immediately obvious when you simply look at sales.

Create SMART goals

Just about anyone who's ever read about goal-setting will have seen the theory of creating SMART goals:

I think most people are good at thinking about goals that are specific, attainable, and realistic. We think we're good at measurable, and we seem to often forget about time-bound. Since the rest could easily be a post on their own, I'll just focus on time-bound here.

When we look at tables like the one below, If we are going to make bad decisions like declaring channels "good" or "bad" from just one metric, at least remember to consider time.

If we say organic search is a bad channel, what you actually mean is organic is a bad channel at driving sales in the last X days. That's an important difference, because it has an impact on where the channel is placed on the scale of "awareness" to "decision-making."

In summary

Build a team of channels, not just strikers.
Don't assume channels work in the same way across all markets.
Assign attributes to channels (performance- and relationship-based).
Remember to create time-bound goals.
Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Seth's Blog : Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear

Speaking in public: two errors that lead to fear

1. You believe that you are being actively judged

2. You believe that the subject of the talk is you

When you stand up to give a speech, there's a temptation to believe that the audience is actually interested in you.

This just isn't true. (Or if it is, it doesn't benefit you to think that it is).

You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged. The topic of the talk isn't you, the topic of the talk is the audience, and specifically, how they can use your experience and knowledge to achieve their objectives.

When a professional singer sings a song of heartbreak, his heart is not breaking in that moment. His performance is for you, not for him. (The infinite self-reference loop here is that the professional singer finds what he needs when you find what you need.)

The members of the audience are interested in themselves. The audience wants to know what they can use, what they can learn, or at the very least, how they can be entertained.

If you dive into your (irrelevant to the listener) personal hurdles, if you try to justify what you've done, if you find yourself aswirl in a whirlpool of the resistance, all you're providing is a little schadenfreude as a form of entertainment.

On the other hand, if you realize that you have a chance to be generous in this moment, to teach and to lead, you can leave the self-doubt behind and speak a truth that the audience needs to hear. When you bring that to people who need it, your fear pales in comparison.

Media you choose to do is always about the audience. That's why you're doing it. The faster we get over ourselves, the sooner we can do a good job for those tuning in.