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luni, 18 august 2014

Chart of the Week:

Featured

Chart of the Week: Job Openings Hit a New High

Each day, American businesses are firing on all cylinders to create jobs and drive America's economic growth. Just last month, our private sector added jobs for the 53rd straight month, the longest streak on record. In total, American businesses have added 9.9 million jobs since early 2010. Last week, we saw another sign of progress, as the number of available jobs rose to the highest level in more than 13 years.

American business owners advertised 4.67 million jobs in June, the highest number of openings since February 2001 -- a clear signal that the economy is strengthening.

See how we went from record-low job openings during the Great Recession to a new high this summer:

How to Use Facebook for Targeted Content Promotion

Posted: 17 Aug 2014 05:16 PM PDT

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

As much as content and advertising agencies would like you to believe it, content produced by a business doesn't just go viral on it's own. There is often something that pushes it really, really hard when it first goes live which gains momentum, and eventually the content is spread far and wide enough that it doesn't need you to push it anymore. Those of you who have read Good to Great may be making associations with the flywheel principle, but that's a post for another day!

In this post I want to talk about one of the ways you can give your content a nudge in the right direction and get more people looking at it: Facebook advertising.

I won't go into too much detail on the basics of Facebook advertising; there are lots of resources and posts out there which do this. Instead, I want to dive straight into the methods you can use to promote your content to an audience on Facebook.

One of the advantages of using Facebook is the fine level of detail you can go to in terms of targeting an audience. In my opinion, this is one of the areas where Facebook is actually better than Google when it comes to advertising. They have so many options when it comes to targeting your audience:

You can go much deeper

What isn't as well known, however, is that you can define your own audiences on Facebook and advertise to them directly. There are two core ways that you can do this which I'll explain in this post:

Custom audiences
Lookalike audiences

These methods allow you to push your content to a wider audience, but in a very targeted way. Yes, you are paying to advertise your content, which may feel a bit strange. However, it can be a great way of supporting your outreach and PR efforts.

Let's explore each one.

Custom audiences

You can use a feature called custom audiences to define exactly who it is that you'd like to advertising your content to.

Why this is useful for content promotion

When it comes to promoting your content, getting a lot of traffic to the content is good, but ideally you don't just want random visitors, you want targeted visitors. Whilst it is unlikely that you'll generate loads of direct conversions from a piece of content, you still want to attract visitors who you stand a chance of converting to customers at some point in the future.

As you can see above, you can get very granular with standard Facebook targeting. Custom audiences allow you to do even more and mix in data from your existing, non-Facebook customer lists too. This means that you can promote your content to an audience that is already somewhat engaged with your brand and is a little bit more likely to be interested in it. This is far better than a scatter-gun approach where you just try and get as many eyes on a piece of content as possible - regardless of how targeted they are.

Facebook gives you a number of ways to define your custom audience:

Let's go through each of these in turn and look at what they can do.

Data file custom audience

This option allows you to upload a CSV file which Facebook will then process to try and find matches with people who are already on Facebook. There are a few options in terms of what data you can upload and use to match people against:

Email address
Facebook User ID
Phone number
Mobile advertiser ID (such as Android or Apple user ID)

Once you've uploaded the file, it shouldn't take Facebook more than an hour or so to process the file and find matches from its users. Note that you need to upload a decent number of records in order to target them, Facebook recommends at least 100 people. Otherwise, the audience is likely to be too small to have any kind of impact or reach.

After processing, you'll see that the audience you've just created will be available to advertise to when you create a new ad:

From here, you can just create an ad as normal but it will be targeted just at this list of people.

MailChimp custom audience

I love MailChimp, we use it all the time at Distilled. Facebook makes it super easy to connect to your MailChimp account and target your email list.

If you have a list of customers or newsletter subscribers, then they are already familiar with your brand. So targeting them and showing off your awesome content could help bring them back to your website in a way that isn't directly sales / conversion focused. This can also work well to try and drive more traffic to your Facebook page or to generate likes, etc.

Custom audience from your mobile app

I haven't had the opportunity to try this one yet, but it's clear that it could be pretty powerful if you have a mobile app and are able to integrate the Facebook SDK for iOS or Android.

Basically, you can record user interactions with your app and choose to bucket people who take certain actions into a custom audience.

Custom audience from your website

This feature allows you to track visitors to your website using a Facebook remarketing pixel. Once you've installed the pixel, Facebook will begin building a list of visitors to your page who are also logged into Facebook and push these people into a custom audience. There are loads of ways to use this, but I'll come onto a very specific way you can use this shortly.

Lookalike audiences

There is a lot of power in the lookalike audiences feature on Facebook, I'll talk through a few examples, but first, let me briefly explain what lookalike audiences are in case you're not familiar.

Facebook allows you to say, "hey, here is a list of my existing customers, go find me people on Facebook who are similar to them and put those people into a new list."

I don't know the secret sauce or methodology that Facebook uses here, but I'd imagine it's a case of mashing together things like:

Demographic data
Interests
What someone has liked
Location

Once they've discovered the trends in this data, they find other people on Facebook who share these trends and put them into a new list. You can then push adverts for your content towards this list of people.

Why this is useful for content promotion

The beauty of this method is that you're reaching a brand new audience in a very, very targeted way. Again, it's not a scatter-gun approach of just trying to target as many people as possible. Instead, you're targeting people who look very similar to your existing audience.

How to create a lookalike audience

Facebook makes it really easy, you go to Facebook Ads and click on the following:

Then click on:

You will then see something like this:

You can choose the source of your lookalike audience which, as you can see, can be either:

An existing custom audience
A conversion tracking pixel
A Facebook page

I'll go into detail on these shortly and give some examples of what you can do here.

Next, you need to choose a country for your audience. Currently, Facebook only allows you to select one country at a time. So if you wanted to create lookalike audiences across lots of countries, you'll need to create a lookalike list for each country.

The final option is to tell Facebook what balance you want between a new audience that is similar to your existing audience vs. the reach of the new audience. If you're starting off with a pretty small audience, then you may have to move the needle more towards reach, but I'd generally try and keep things as closely related to your existing audience as possible. Otherwise you're losing the benefits that a lookalike audience gives you.

Once you've created your audience, it will be available to you in the dropdown menu when you create a new ad:

Next, let's get into some examples of how you can use lookalike audiences to get more relevant eyes on your content.

Create a lookalike audience based on your email list

Above, we talked about how you can create a custom audience by uploading a list of customer email addresses or syncing Facebook with your MailChimp account. This alone is pretty powerful, but you can also use your email list as a source of a lookalike audience. You'll need to create a custom audience first, but once you do, you can use this as a source and tell Facebook to find you a whole new audience who look like your existing email list.

This is really useful if you have:

A list of customer email addresses
A list of subscribers to your blog content
A list of newsletter subscribers

Create a lookalike audience based on visitors to your content

You can't really do this one in advance of launching your content, but I think it can be a very powerful method of extending the reach of your content in a very targeted way. What we're going to do is track all the people who view our content, then ask Facebook to find us a new audience who look like those people. Let me illustrate with an example using this piece of content we created at Distilled:

It stands to reason that people who click through to this piece of content are probably going to share a few things:

An interest in music
An interest in one or more of the singers mentioned in the list
Probably someone who attends live music from time to time

If we placed a Facebook conversion pixel on this page, Facebook will detect those people who view the content and are logged into Facebook at the same time. This means that when grouping all those people together, Facebook will probably find shared interests, demographics and likes which they can use to define a new lookalike audience. In this example, the new audience is likely to be interested in music and gigs.

If we then advertise this content to this new audience, it's likely to get their attention because they will be similar to the existing audience who are already viewing the content. This is super, super targeted.

So how do you do this?

The first step is to place a Facebook conversion pixel on your piece of content. You can do this by following these steps.

Click on conversion tracking:

Click on create pixel:

Now you have some options to select:

Next, Facebook will give you some tracking code which you need to paste it into the <head> section of your page.

Once you've done this, Facebook will start tracking the pixel and you'll see a new row in your conversion tracking report:

It will take a bit of time for data to start coming in, but when it does and you've reach a good amount of views, you can create a lookalike audience by clicking on:

That's it! You can then select this new lookalike audience when you create an ad and push adverts for your content towards people who share the same attributes of people already viewing your content.

To wrap things up

Hopefully you can see the power of Facebook ads, in particular the custom and lookalike audience features to help you promote your content in a very, very targeted way. It may feel a bit unnatural to pay to promote content (and not your product) but this is a very cost-effective way of reaching a big audience and it can really help support your regular outreach efforts.

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Seth's Blog : Who named the colors?

Who named the colors?

We did.

It's not a silly question. It has a lot to do with culture and crowds and the way we decide, as a group, what's right and what's not.

A quick look at some colors confirms that there is no algorithm, no accepted pattern for color names. They range from short and obscure (puce) to long and obvious references, like cotton candy.

No color has a name until a significant group accepts that name. You can start calling the sky, "gluten," but it's not going to be useful until others do as well.

That's what mass, cultural-shifting marketing does. It creates an idea or a label or a habit or a discussion and enables it to become a building block of our culture.

No one who invents a name for a color is applauded or instantly successful. It never works right away. And then, person by person, it starts to stick. The first person leaps, and leaps again, and persists, inventing something we sooner or later all decided we needed all along.

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duminică, 17 august 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

What States are the Biggest Job Winners and Losers in the Recovery?

Posted: 17 Aug 2014 09:01 PM PDT

The Deloitte University Press has a very interesting, and comprehensive study on job gains and losses, by type of job, and state by state.

The biggest winners are states involved in energy production, finance, or healthcare. The biggest losers are states that did not recover from the real estate bust, or lost population due to emigration.

With that overview, let's dive deeper into the Geography of Jobs.

Only now, as we reach the fifth anniversary of the end of the recession, has employment in the United States finally regained its pre-recession peak. The national story of slow recovery obscures the more complicated regional picture: As is the case during most business cycles, the pace of recovery has been very uneven among the states. At present, only 16 states plus the District of Columbia have employment rates at least one percent higher than they had prior to the start of the recession.

Among the states that have experienced the highest overall employment gains are the beneficiaries of expanding energy production. Among the states where employment remains substantially below pre-recession levels are those states most affected by the bursting of the housing bubble and those with declining manufacturing employment.

click on chart for sharper image

Only 16 states and the District of Columbia are at least one percent above their pre-recession employment levels. For more than half of these states (North Dakota, Texas, Alaska, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Montana, West Virginia, and Louisiana), expanding energy production has played a key role in driving employment growth. The District of Columbia and the other employment-gaining states can attribute their total employment growth to increases in a variety of sectors, most notably health services and leisure and hospitality.

Four of these states (North Dakota, Colorado, Texas, and South Dakota) and the District of Columbia also had among the highest proportional increases in population due to inflows of people from other states between 2010 and 2013 (net domestic migration) as people moved to where the jobs were. Texas alone added more than 400,000 people from other states (1.5 percent of its 2013 population) during this period.

The recession was significantly more severe for the states that fall at the bottom of the job recovery rankings; these states continued to lose jobs well after the end of the recession. Job creation did not pick up in Nevada and New Jersey until the beginning of 2011 and did not pick up in Alabama and Maine until the middle of 2011. It took until the middle of 2012 for employment to begin to grow in New Mexico.

Population also migrated away from the states at the bottom of the job recovery rankings: Of those in the bottom 10, New Jersey, Maine, New Mexico, Connecticut, Michigan, Rhode Island, and Illinois all lost population to domestic migration.

Currently only North Dakota, the District of Columbia, and Oklahoma have more construction workers than they did in December 2007. Two of the states in the bottom 10 for employment recovery, Nevada and Arizona, were the hardest hit by the bursting of the housing bubble: At present, construction employment in Nevada is 51 percent below, and in Arizona is 42 percent below, their December 2007 construction employment levels. The other three states that remain at the bottom in terms of employment recovery—Alabama, New Mexico, and New Jersey—all have construction employment losses at least five percentage points higher than the national average.

The report takes a detailed look at mining, construction, and manufacturing gains and losses.

Mining is of course a net overall gain, while hard-hit manufacturing states were slow to recover.

Here are a few of my own conclusions, not from the report:

California no doubt benefited from Silicon Valley in spite of an overall hostile business environment and tax setup
Illinois was hit with a series of misguided tax hikes to the point Caterpillar threatened to leave the state. Illinois has no redeeming features to offset high taxes and other mistakes.
D.C. benefited from national politics and lobbying.
In general, red vs. blue is not the name of the game, but rather "what have you done for me lately".

It's a nice report. Inquiring minds may wish to take a closer look.

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

Brain Drain and Capital Flight: 64% of Wealthy Chinese Plan to Leave China

Posted: 17 Aug 2014 11:55 AM PDT

Massive pollution, especially unbreathable air, lack of educational opportunities, food, safety, and corruption are some of the reasons behind a recent poll that shows a whopping 64% of wealthy Chinese plan to leave the country.

The Wall Street Journal calls it The Great Chinese Exodus.

Today, China's borders are wide open. Almost anybody who wants a passport can get one. And Chinese nationals are leaving in vast waves: Last year, more than 100 million outbound travelers crossed the frontiers.

Most are tourists who come home. But rapidly growing numbers are college students and the wealthy, and many of them stay away for good. A survey by the Shanghai research firm Hurun Report shows that 64% of China's rich—defined as those with assets of more than $1.6 million—are either emigrating or planning to.

The decision to go is often a mix of push and pull. The elite are discovering that they can buy a comfortable lifestyle at surprisingly affordable prices in places such as California and the Australian Gold Coast, while no amount of money can purchase an escape in China from the immense problems afflicting its urban society: pollution, food safety, a broken education system. The new political era of President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, has created as much anxiety as hope.

First-generation businessmen—the ones who powered China's economic rise—now dream of a secure retirement. That means legal safety in places like the U.S. and Canada.

Last year, the U.S. issued 6,895 visas to Chinese nationals under the EB-5 program, which allows foreigners to live in America if they invest a minimum of $500,000. South Koreans, the next largest group, got only 364 such visas. Canada this year closed down a similar program that had been swamped by Chinese demand.

Beijing makes a crucial distinction between ethnic Chinese who have acquired foreign nationality and those who remain Chinese citizens. The latter category is officially called huaqiao—sojourners. Together, they are viewed as an immensely valuable asset: the students as ambassadors for China, the scientists, engineers, researchers and others as conduits for technology and industrial know-how from the West to propel China's economic modernization.

In 1989, when the Tiananmen Square massacre triggered an outflow of traumatized students and shattered the Party's image among overseas Chinese communities, the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office kicked into high gear with a propaganda campaign to repair the damage. It proved highly successful.

But China's cross-border political activities are creating unease. Consider Australia—one of the most popular destinations for Chinese students, emigrants and tourists, and a country where Mandarin Chinese is now the second-most widely spoken language after English.

"Chinese Australians are being lectured, monitored, organized and policed in Australia on instruction from Beijing as never before," wrote John Fitzgerald of Swinburne University of Technology, one of the country's foremost China experts, in an article published by the Asan Forum, a South Korean think tank.

In the U.S., a vigorous debate has broken out in academic circles about the role on American campuses of Confucius Institutes, which are sponsored by the Chinese government and offer Mandarin-language classes, along with rosy cultural views of China.

China must be exceedingly careful not to leave too many fingerprints on its political activities offshore. For a start, it has an official policy of noninterference in the internal affairs of other countries. But it also puts established overseas Chinese communities at risk by raising the issue of their national loyalties. That is particularly true in Southeast Asia, where the Chinese of a previous era were often viewed with suspicion as a communist fifth column.

Still, the sheer volume of China's outbound travel these days, and its massive economic impact, gives it new leverage. In the global market for high-end real estate, Chinese buying has become a key driver of prices. According to the U.S. National Association of Realtors, Chinese buyers snapped up homes worth $22 billion in the year ending in March.

Australia called a parliamentary inquiry to find out whether local households were being priced out of the market by Chinese money. (The conclusion: not yet.)

The Chinese government has no desire to slow the flow of students. Its attitude is simple: Why not have the Americans or Europeans train our brightest minds if they want to? President Xi's own daughter went to Harvard.

As always with China, the numbers awe. In his memoirs, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, recalls a meeting between President Jimmy Carter and Deng. Human rights were on Mr. Carter's agenda, and he started needling the Chinese leader about Beijing's tight emigration policies. "Fine. We'll let them go," Deng snapped. "Are you prepared to accept 10 million?"

Not even Deng could have imagined the human torrent his "open door" reforms would eventually unleash. Try 100 million—and counting.

There is much more in the article including a video interview of political scientist James Jiann Hua To by WSJ's Deborah Kan. James To is author of 'Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese', a book on how the Chinese government is using propaganda campaigns abroad to ensure loyalty from overseas Chinese.

At $146, I doubt he sells many copies. Instead, inquiring minds may wish to consider a Q&A on Qiaowu Writing China: James Jiann Hua To, 'Qiaowu: Extra-Territorial Policies for the Overseas Chinese'.

For a discussion of the impact of Chinese capital flight on the US housing market, please consider $22 Billion in California Homes Sold to Chinese All-Cash Buyers; "Beginning of Tidal Wave" says NAR Chief Economist.

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

Seth's Blog : Escalators, elevators and the ferry

Escalators, elevators and the ferry

Escalators make people happy. They're ready when you are, there is almost never a line, and you can see progress happening the entire time.

Elevators are faster, particularly for long distances, but we get frustrated when we just miss one, and we often wonder when the next one is coming, even after a few seconds. (That's why lobbies have mirrors, to give you something to do when you're waiting).

The ferry schedule, invented by Cornelius Vanderbilt, is a third way to deal with transport. Instead of having each boat turn around the minute it arrived, he guaranteed when it would leave. We can build our day around a schedule...

What do you offer your clients?

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luni, 18 august 2014

Chart of the Week:

How to Use Facebook for Targeted Content Promotion