Central Perk

miercuri, 26 februarie 2014

Keeping America on the cutting edge

Wednesday, February 26, 2014

Keeping America on the cutting edge

President Obama is making sure America stays at the forefront of innovation.

Yesterday, the President announced two new public-private manufacturing innovation institutes -- one in Chicago and one in the Detroit area -- and a competition for the first of four additional institutes that will boost advanced manufacturing in the United States.

American manufacturers have created 622,000 jobs since early 2010, and President Obama is committed to building on that progress.

"If we want to attract more good manufacturing jobs to America," he said, "we've got to make sure we're on the cutting edge of new manufacturing techniques and technologies."

Just this afternoon, the President announced that the Department of Transportation is making available $600 million in Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants, a tremendously successful program investing in our nation's infrastructure.

Those grants won't just help repair our crumbling roads and bridges -- they'll create more jobs in the process.

Learn more about how the President is keeping America on the cutting edge of innovation -- and other ways he's making 2014 a year of action.

President Barack Obama delivers remarks announcing two new public-private Manufacturing Innovation Institutes, and launches the first of four new Manufacturing Innovation Institute Competitions, in the East Room of the White House, Feb. 25, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

Stay Connected

This email was sent to e0nstar1.blog@gmail.com
Sign Up for Updates from the White House
Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy
Please do not reply to this email. Contact the White House

The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW • Washington, DC 20500 • 202-456-1111

We Might Be Building Iron Man

Featured

We Might Be Building Iron Man

Yesterday, President Obama announced new public-private manufacturing innovation institutes -- one in Chicago and one in the Detroit area -- that will help attract the types of high-quality jobs that a growing middle class requires.

But the President had another announcement, too:

I'm here to announce that we're building Iron Man. I'm going to blast off in a second... this has been a secret project we've been working on for a long time. Not really. Maybe. It's classified.

Find out more about yesterday's announcement and Iron Man. Maybe.

New Study Shows Original Content Reaches More People on Facebook

Posted: 25 Feb 2014 03:14 PM PST

Posted by Chad_Wittman

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Facebook continues to make significant changes in the news feed. This time Facebook has decreased the importance (technically the "weight") of status updates. With these changes occurring so rapidly in the news feed, many brand managers want to know how to stay on top of it all.

We dug deep into the data to see what the latest change was and wanted to introduce a philosophy to stay ahead of the constant changes. We analyze and monitor this type of data for thousands of Facebook pages with a tool called EdgeRank Checker.

On Jan. 21, Facebook released a blog post explaining that status updates from pages are less engaging than status updates from friends. In other words, status updates were going to lose exposure in the news feed.

The change was implemented nearly immediately, as we saw organic reach begin to dip rapidly. In the graph below, you'll see a ~40% decrease from the two weeks after Jan. 21, as compared to the two weeks before:

While frustrating for many brands, status updates aren't displayed nearly as often as links and photos, as they typically don't provide as much value to the business. Status updates are typically used for gathering general opinions or quick message updates, whereas links can drive actual traffic.

During this change, the other content types were not significantly impacted. Most experienced a very moderate decrease, which is most likely due to normal fluctuations. Interestingly, videos have now become the strongest performer in the news feed. Our sample size for posts with videos is less than optimal, but our historical data shows a similar pattern. For brands that have the capability to deliver engaging videos, it should be considered as an interesting content outlet in the future.

How does a brand stay ahead?

As we study each change in the news feed, a common theme begins to appear. Content that creates value tends to bubble to the top. Google has a similar approach with search results. We see Facebook slowly becoming similar to Google in that capacity. When we examine the brands that are less impacted by negative changes, they tend to have strong engagementâ€"specifically shares. Why is this? We think we can explain this phenomenon with a concept called Content Originator.

Content Originator

Brands that actually create the content (thus, Content Originators) are the ones that experience the most value in the news feed. We've seen Google take a similar approach with examining inbound links. Content Originators actually have less to do with Facebook specifically, as compared to the maturation of any social network. Twitter most likely experiences similar results, which you can see as a Tweet propagates across the worldâ€"the Content Originator gets more exposure.

The reason that Content Originators are able to succeed with an onslaught of changes is that they are able to utilize natural distribution networks such as shares. While Facebook's algorithms may not weigh their initial post as heavily as before, strong engagement and shares are strong signals to distribute the content further.

The news feed is filled with increasing competition that boasts larger and larger budgets to gain exposure within the feed. Being a Content Originator helps slice through the noise created by so many pages re-reporting news. The re-reporting of news is something that Facebook is attempting to decrease through these changes. It is also possible that brands will begin to gain additional exposure through the "Trending" section if they're the Content Originator of a new and trending topic.

In an example below, you can see the local value that Facebook provides in the trending result. A story that was shared on Facebook 2,000+ times from CarolinaLive (not quite a Content Originator, but as close as you can get in a situation like this, as compared to a CNN-type news source) is given the extra exposure. The next object listed is from Fox Carolina News, again more of a Content Originator than the national brand of Fox News.

The example above is meant to illustrate how Facebook perceives Content Originators elsewhere in their platform. We use things like this as clues to better understand how the news feed works.

Conclusion

Facebook decreased organic reach of status updates by ~40% on Jan. 21. For most brands, this doesn't have a large impact on their strategy, as they are mostly using links and photos to further increase their brand. Using a concept called Content Originator might help craft a content strategy that stays ahead of news feed changes. Facebook may be placing additional value on content originators in the news feed, and is surely valuing brands with strong engagementâ€"especially ones with high share levels.

Methodology

We studied roughly 50,000 posts from 800 different pages for the two weeks before and after Jan. 21. For most metrics, we examined the median of each page's average performance over the time period analyzed. Engagement is defined as likes + comments + shares for this study.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Learning To Use Excel Macros For PPC

Posted: 26 Feb 2014 02:48 AM PST

If you're good with Excel's formulae and pivot tablets you may want to go to the next level and start making your own macros.

A macro is a short program that tells Excel to do a series of actions. You can get a macro to do just about anything you could do manually, which means macros are great tools for automating your work.

Why Use Macros?

1. Because you're doing the same thing over and over again.

2. Because you want to make your own keyboard shortcut.

3. Because you're doing the same thing over and over and over again.

4. Because you want to do something with a lot of data, and the processor can't take it.

5. Because you're doing the same thing over and over and over and over again.

How Do I Use Macros?

The easiest way, hands down, is to record them.

First you need the Developer tab on the ribbon (i.e. the toolbar thing at the top).

On Windows, right click on the ribbon and click 'Customize the ribbon'. You'll see a list of Main Tabs – check the box next to 'Developer' and click 'OK'.

The Developer tab in Excel 2013 – other Excels will look similar, but less flat.

Click 'Record Macro'. Type in a name (but note the name can't contain spaces). If you want, give it a shortcut key (choosing L, Q or T means you won't overwrite an existing shortcut). Press 'OK'. Do whatever it is you want Excel to learn. Click 'Stop Recording'.

This has the problem that it will precisely copy what you do and can only change the cells affected in a certain way. If you click 'Use Relative References' then you can record a macro that affects different cells according to where the cell you initially selected is, but you can't do anything like copying the selected data and pasting onto the end of a list in another worksheet.

Something More Powerful

The next easiest way to use macros is to record what you can and then look at the code Excel has generated and alter it yourself. This requires a little coding knowledge but, as you've got the fall-back of recording actions when you don't know how to code something, you only need the basics.

If you want to edit a recorded macro, click on the 'Macros' button on the Developer tab, select the macro and click 'Edit'. This will open a 'Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications' window with the macro's code in.

I suggest reading a simple guide to macros such as Excel-Easy's tutorial, so you know how to do the basics. Then play around, recording your actions in Excel and modifying the code to make it more flexible.

Also, remember that if you have a question, odds are that someone else has asked it before. This probably goes without saying, but searching for what you need is usually the quickest way to find a solution. For example, I wanted to check if a worksheet of a certain name already existed, and a search for "check worksheet exists macro" took to me some pre-coded solutions at the MrExcel message board.

Avoiding Excel Meltdown

You might find (especially with an older computer) that trying to do a bunch of VLOOKUPs or SUMIFs over a lot of data leaves Excel floundering, all processor cores whirring, and your work grinding to a standstill. You can speed things up a bit by splitting up the formulae to automatically look to smaller bits of the spreadsheet.

For example, I was trying to see if an ad group level negative keyword was in all ad groups of a campaign, so the negative could be moved to campaign level. The negative keywords came copied out of AdWords Editor, in columns A to D.

I was using a COUNTIFS, so it looks at everything and then counts what has a matching campaign, a matching keyword and a matching criterion type.

=COUNTIFS($A:$A,$A2,$C:$C,$C2,$D:$D,$D2)

The problem is this doesn't work very well if there are lots of negative keywords to count through.

So, instead of including the campaign within the COUNTIFS, I used a macro to produce COUNTIFS statements with a different range for each campaign – there were still the same number of COUNTIFS, but instead of counting through over 100 000 negatives each time Excel just had to check one campaign's worth.

First, we use an AUTOFILTER to order the negatives in (columns A to D) by campaign (column A). To do this, I recorded a macro of me adding a filter and sorting the relevant columns, and then added a comment to explain what the code does:

'Sorts by campaign name Range("A1:D1").Select Selection.AutoFilter ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets("Neg KWs").AutoFilter.Sort.SortFields.Clear ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets("Neg KWs").AutoFilter.Sort.SortFields.Add Key:= _ Range("A1"), SortOn:=xlSortOnValues, Order:=xlAscending, DataOption:= _ xlSortNormal With ActiveWorkbook.Worksheets("Neg KWs").AutoFilter.Sort .Header = xlYes .MatchCase = False .Orientation = xlTopToBottom .SortMethod = xlPinYin .Apply End With Selection.AutoFilter

Then we declare two variables – these will record where the current campaign starts and ends. Row 1 has headers, so row 2 has the first cell of the first campaign – so we initially set the start number to 2.

Dim startRow As Long, endRow As Long startRow = 2

And we add cell values to give titles to the new columns.

Range("E1").Value = "Repeats in campaign"

Now we get to the bit that will have to repeat for every campaign.

As the campaign names are in alphabetic order we know that if the first campaign name appears (say) 17 times, then all of these 17 appearances will be clumped together, starting with startRow. If the first appearance is in row 2 then the last in row 18. So the endRow should be the number of times the campaign name appears, plus the start row, minus one.

How do we find out how many times the campaign name appears? Application.WorksheetFunction contains all the regular Excel functions, so you can use them within your macro. So we can use Application.WorksheetFunction.CountIf like a normal COUNTIF formula, to count the number of times the campaign name appears.

endRow = Application.WorksheetFunction.CountIf(Range("A:A"), Range("A" & startRow)) + startRow - 1

Now that we know what range we have, we can write a COUNTIFS formula to just cover the current campaign.

'The formula Range("E" & startRow).Value = "=COUNTIFS($C$" & startRow & ":$C$" & endRow & ",C" & startRow & ",$D$" & startRow & ":$D$" & endRow & ",D" & startRow & ")"

When we have the formula in the first cell of the campaign, we can select the cells

'Copies the formula in the cells for the same campaigns Range("E" & startRow & ":E" & endRow).Select Selection.FillDown

(Selection.FillDown is the equivalent of pressing CTRL + D – it duplicates whatever's in the top cell.)

We then copy the COUNTIFS and paste them as values – this means the values will be saved, and they won't be recalculated whenever calculations happen.

Selection.Copy Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _ :=False, Transpose:=False

We then want to do this all again with the next campaign, and the next campaign's startRow will be just underneath the endRow of the current campaign

startRow = endRow + 1

We then put the code into a While loop, so it will keep going until it runs out of campaigns.

Do While startRow <= Application.WorksheetFunction.CountA(Range("A:A")) 'insert the code to be repeated here Loop

Here we're using a COUNTA function to count the total number of entries in the campaign column, as this is the number of the last row. When the startRow is less than or equal to this number, there is at least one campaign left to go so the loop fires again.

It would be useful to know how many ad groups are in each campaign as well – the easiest way I've found to do this is to copy columns A and B (the columns and ad groups) somewhere else in the sheet (L and M, for example) and then remove duplicates. This is something you can record a macro for easily!

'Copy just the campaign and ad group names for counting Columns("A:B").Select Range("B1").Activate Selection.Copy Columns("L:L").Select ActiveSheet.Paste Application.CutCopyMode = False ActiveSheet.Range("$L$1:$M$91").RemoveDuplicates Columns:=Array(1, 2), Header _ :=xlNo

Then the number of ad groups in a campaign is the number of times that campaign's name appears in column L where column M isn't blank. (M is blank where there are campaign level negatives.)

Add into your program before the loop:

Range("F1").Value = "Ad groups in campaign"

And in the loop, next to the other COUNTIFS function, add in:

Range("F" & startRow).Value = "=COUNTIFS($L:$L,A" & startRow & ",$M:$M,""*"")"

(The double double quotes, "", will be treated as part of the text by the macro, and be treated as " when it's made into a formula in the spreadsheet.)

We then need to adjust the next bit of loop so it copies down the new COUNTIFS in column F as well as the ones in column E.

'Copies the formulae for the cells for the same campaigns Range("E" & startRow & ":F" & endRow).Select

Then at the end, after the loops, we don't need the stuff in L or M anymore so we can delete it.

Columns("L:M").Select Selection.Delete Shift:=xlToLeft

So now the program looks like:

  'Copy just the campaign and ad group names for counting
  Columns("A:B").Select
  Range("B1").Activate
  Selection.Copy
  Columns("L:L").Select
  ActiveSheet.Paste
  Application.CutCopyMode = False
  ActiveSheet.Range("$L$1:$M$91").RemoveDuplicates Columns:=Array(1, 2), Header _
  :=xlNo
  'Declare variables and label headers
  Dim startRow As Long, endRow As Long
  startRow = 2
  Range("E1").Value = "Repeats in campaign"
  Range("F1").Value = "Ad groups in campaign"
  Do While startRow <= Application.WorksheetFunction.CountA(Range("A:A"))
  endRow = Application.WorksheetFunction.CountIf(Range("A:A"), Range("A" & startRow)) + startRow - 1
  'The formulea
  Range("E" & startRow).Value = "=COUNTIFS($C$" & startRow & ":$C$" & endRow & ",C" & startRow & ",$D$" & startRow & ":$D$" & endRow & ",D" & startRow & ")"
  Range("F" & startRow).Value = "=COUNTIFS($L:$L,A" & startRow & ",$M:$M,""*"")"
  'Copies the formulea for the cells for the same campaigns
  Range("E" & startRow & ":F" & endRow).Select
  Selection.FillDown
  Selection.Copy
  Selection.PasteSpecial Paste:=xlPasteValues, Operation:=xlNone, SkipBlanks _
  :=False, Transpose:=False
  startRow = endRow + 1
  Loop

Columns("L:M").Select Selection.Delete Shift:=xlToLeft

The Results

Once it has run through you should see something like this:

It turns out in this example that 'never gonna' is in all ad groups in the Chorus campaign, so it could be moved to campaign level. 'You' is in 5 out of 6, so it might be worth seeing if it should be campaign level as well (although there could be a reason it's not in one ad group so you would have to use your judgement.)

You download a spreadsheet with this macro in here.

Was this useful? Do you have any tips of your own when starting with macros? Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: macro (get it?) photography of clockwork by Acid Pix

The post Learning To Use Excel Macros For PPC appeared first on White Noise.

Seth's Blog : The opposite of why is now

The opposite of why is now

Questions are good. A legitimate, "why?" is enough to change the world.

But stalling, stalling is the last thing you need. And why is often an escape hatch for people who know what they should do, but fear doing it. It's easier to ponder, to question the meaning of this or our role in where we go next.

The best answer for the stalling why is: Go.

[and of course, the best response to the impestuous, status-quo driven 'Go' is to ask, "why?"]