Central Perk

luni, 15 septembrie 2014

The Medal of Honor: Behind the scenes

Today, President Obama awarded the Medal of Honor to two men -- Army Command Sergeant Major Bennie G. Adkins and Army Specialist Four Donald P. Sloat -- for their service in Vietnam.

"Nearly half a century after their acts of valor," the President said, "a grateful nation bestows upon these men our highest military decoration -- the Medal of Honor."

Most Americans know that the Medal of Honor is the highest military award that a member of the U.S. Armed Forces can receive. But have you ever wondered what goes into the preparation for an actual Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House?

In June, we went behind the scenes of the award ceremony for Corporal William "Kyle" Carpenter, a retired United States Marine, for his actions during combat operations in Afghanistan.

And at 1:15 in the video above, you can hear the phone call where President Obama tells Corporal Carpenter that he'll be receiving the Medal of Honor. It's an amazing moment.

Take a look here, and pass it on.

Inside the White House: The Medal of Honor

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Inside the White House: The Medal of Honor

This afternoon, the President awarded the Medal of Honor to Army Command Sergeant Major Bennie G. Adkins and Army Specialist Four Donald P. Sloat for their brave actions in Vietnam.

While you probably know that the Medal of Honor is the highest military award that a member of the U.S. armed forces can receive, have you ever wondered what goes into the actual award ceremony at the White House?

This past June, we took a look behind the scenes -- check it out here:

5 Hacks for Creating and Promoting the Right Content

Posted: 14 Sep 2014 05:16 PM PDT

Posted by Paddy_Moogan

In my last post on Moz a few weeks ago, I talked about the idea of paying to promote your content using social channels. Today I actually want to go a step backwards in the process and talk about content creation.

1. How to verify you have a good idea

I could write a whole post on this one topic, but maybe that's for another day! For now, I want to share a few ways you can make sure you're on the right track and increasing the likelihood that you have a content idea that is going to be well received.

Made to Stick principles

I really like the book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath. They go into detail about a framework that can be used to evaluate whether an idea is "sticky" or not. There are six core parts of this framework:

Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories

You'll notice that is spells "succes" (deliberately leaving off the s at the end!) which makes it sticky to remember. I encourage you to read the book but I'll quickly summarise each part of the framework so that you can get an idea of how it can help verify your content ideas.

Simple

Is the idea simple to understand and explain? A good way of testing this is to force yourself to explain the idea to someone who you previously haven't spoken to about it. If you can do this pretty quickly and they understand it, then it's probably simple enough.

The other thing to remember here is if you can't explain the idea quickly and easily, then you are probably also going to struggle when it comes to promoting the idea using email or the phone.

Unexpected

This doesn't mean that your whole idea needs to be totally unexpected, but there needs to be something unexpected about it. It may be the design, an interactive element or a new story that has been crafted from some data. If you're just doing something that has been done before and are not adding anything unexpected to it, then you may struggle to get coverage and interest.

Concrete

When doing client training, this is always one that provokes confusion. So I'm going to use an example from the book itself.

When JFK made this speech in 1961 about landing a man on the moon, his wording was very concrete. It had to be because he wanted to capture the imagination and support of congress and the US public. This is what he didn't say:

"We will win the space race."

If he had said this, he wouldn't have ben wrong. This is what they wanted to do right? However, it's not concrete. What does it actually mean?

Contrast this with what he actually said:

"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth"

This is really clear for anyone to understand, you can see what JFK intends to do and there is very little room for ambiguity.

Credible

There are two types of credible when it comes to content we may produce.

The first one is the credibility of the author themselves, what makes them qualified to write on this particular topic? Are they an expert? Are they respected in their field? It would make sense to say that someone like Phil Nottingham is qualified to write about video marketing or being a pirate. But Phil isn't qualified to talk about quantum physics or Python programming.

The other side of credibility is whether or not the brand behind the content is qualified to talk about a certain topic. This is a mistake I see made quite often and quite honestly, one I've made myself. Sometimes, you can produce a piece of content with the explicit purpose of getting links which means it can go off topic a bit. A car insurance company probably isn't qualified to publish an infographic about cats for example! Even if the infographic gets lots of links and social shares.

Emotional

How can you trigger an emotional response through your content? Ultimately, forcing some kind of emotional response is very difficult but can be one of the most powerful elements of this framework. I'd be careful here though because provoking a negative reaction can be dangerous and lead to bad feeling towards your brand. I'm not a believer in "all PR is good PR" - even if it generates links as a result!

Stories

The final element of the framework is whether your content tells a story. A story can inspire people to take action and a story can make people remember something. We always remember a great story, it's programmed into us from when we were kids and not a lot changes, even as we get older!

Chip and Dan Heath recommend that an idea ticks a couple of these boxes but remind us that it's very, very rare for an idea to tick all of them. There can also be times when an idea or piece of content performs very well and becomes sticky without any of these elements! However if you use this framework, it can help reduce the chance of your idea failing.

2. Use FullContact for audience research

It took me a while to start using FullContact but once I did, I really liked it and it has a range of uses. The use I want to talk about in the context of content creation is audience research.

For those of you that aren't familiar, there is a feature of FullContact called person enrichment which allows you to gather more information about someone based on various inputs. These inputs currently are:

Email address
Phone number
Twitter handle
Facebook ID

In the Excel template mentioned below, it looks something like this:

So you could upload a list of email addresses and FullContact try to find associated pieces of information such as:

Twitter account
Facebook account
LinkedIn profile
Klout score
Twitter bio
Location
Gender
Job title

You can download their Excel template here which allows you to do this kind of report without having to use the API yourself. To use the Excel template, you'll need to go get an API key too. Once you have that, you can upload your data and start to enrich it.

So where does audience research fit in?

As you may have noticed above, one of the data points that FullContact tries to find is job title. Another data point is Twitter bio. You can use these points to get insight into your audience and tailor your content accordingly.

You can with uploading your information to FullContact, let's say this is a list of Twitter handles. These Twitter handles are your followers on Twitter which you've exported using a tool like Followerwonk. Once it's finished running, you'll have a list of these handles with related information if FullContact has been able to find it. Here is a snippet of one of my outputs to give you an idea what you'll get back:

If you take the column for "Occupation" and paste the entire column into a word cloud tool such as Wordle, you'll get something like this:

This gives you a really good, quick snapshot of the type of people who follow you on Twitter. If you're looking to create content that will appeal to these people, you can immediately see where you may choose to pitch it. In the case above, this may mean we want to create content that appeals to senior management / marketing people and perhaps we should promote this content using something like LinkedIn where these people may be active.

3. Pay to promote your top content

With the right tracking setup in your analytics, it's possible to see how content has contributed to conversions. Most content created outside of product / category pages is unlikely to lead to direct conversions, but it is perfectly possible for them to play a part in the process somewhere.

If you use Google Analytics, then you can do to the assisted conversions report and then set the report to include the landing page URL for your content piece. This looks something like this:

Once you've done this, you'll be able to see if any of your content pieces contribute to the conversion process:

Assuming they have contributed to conversions as the example above did, you can make a decision to try and send more traffic to this piece of content, knowing that it may help send more conversions. There are obviously a few ways to do this including usual organic outreach to try and get links. But you should also consider using some budget to send paid traffic to the content piece too. You wouldn't want to spend loads of money on this because the conversion rate for the page is likely to be pretty low in comparison to product and category pages.

Having said that, using something like Twitter, LinkedIn, Outbrain, Taboola or Facebook advertising as outlined in my previous post could be a good way to send more traffic and more assisted conversions.

4. Find your content competitors and learn from them

Most of us have done competitor analysis at some point or another. The goal is usually to get an idea of where your website sits in the industry landscape and know what you're up against. The problem with the usual type of competitive analysis that we do is that it tends to show us pure search competitors - based on similar product or service offerings.

Your competitors in terms of products and services can be very different to those who publish content which competes with you.

Let's use an example to illustrate the point.

A while ago at Distilled, we published a guide to social media for Simply Business. If we'd limited our competitor research to their direct competitor - websites that sell business insurance - then we wouldn't have come across this guide from Mashable.

Clearly, Mashable don't sell business insurance!

By looking outside their immediate competition, we could see that the content idea had been done before. This meant that we could take a look at how successful the piece was and see what we had to do in order to be successful too. It also meant that we had to ask ourselves questions around whether we could do a better or different job on it. Remember the Made to Stick principles above? Those applied to us and we had to try and do a better job than Mashable.

There are a number of ways to find your content competitors but the simplest way is to use Google!

In the example above, it was simply a case of searching for "social media guide" and searching through the results. If you want to go a bit further, you can use the Moz keyword difficultly tool which gives you all sorts of metrics alongside each result too:

Whilst a goal of your content may not be to rank for many keywords (although it very well could be), these metrics are useful because it gives you an idea of how linkable this kind of content is. This is valuable to know if goal of your content is links!

5. Find positive or negative sentiment from your target audience

When it comes to generating content ideas, one of the things you should think about is the mindset of your target audience. What causes them problems when it comes to your product, service, brand, competitor or industry? Going back to Made to Stick, this would sit in the emotional part of the framework.

Once you can find something that causes them pain or causes them to be positive, you can use this to drive your content ideas forward.

One hack for this which I've stolen from Mark, our VP Creative, is to use the following searches to reveal these kind of things:

These can reveal discussions from your target audience that are emotional in nature. The words love and hate are pretty strong, especially when being typed! So if you can find discussions that mention these words, it could lead you towards content ideas that your target audience feel emotional about in some form or another.

To wrap up, I'd encourage you to also take a look at this slide deck from Mark which steps through his process for producing ideas, as it gives lots of examples of the things I've described above.

How to Produce Better Content Ideas from Mark Johnstone

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Seth's Blog : The most important thing

The most important thing

The next thing you do today will be the most important thing on your agenda, because, after all, you're doing it next.

Well, perhaps it will be the most urgent thing. Or the easiest.

In fact, the most important thing probably isn't even on your agenda.

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duminică, 14 septembrie 2014

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

47% of Chinese Billionaires Want to Leave China Within 5 Years, Only 6% of US Billionaires Seek to Leave US
Stiglitz vs. Krugman on Scotland; Polls Diverge; New Fearmongering Tactics in Waning Moments of Campaign
Toothless Barking Dogs; Don't Like the Rules? Then Ignore Them: French Style

47% of Chinese Billionaires Want to Leave China Within 5 Years, Only 6% of US Billionaires Seek to Leave US

Posted: 14 Sep 2014 10:36 PM PDT

A Barclays' survey of over 2,000 individuals with a net worth over $1.5 billion contains some pretty interesting results.

Those in China and Singapore are most likely to leave their country, while those in the US and India were most likely to stay.

Please consider Almost Half of Wealthy Chinese Want to Leave.

Nearly half of wealthy Chinese are planning to move to another country within the next five years, according to a new Barclays survey.

Singaporeans were the second-most eager to flee home, with 23% planning to relocate in five years, followed by 20% for the U.K. and 16% for Hong Kong. Indian and American rich are the least likely to move, with only 5% and 6% of respondents saying they would relocate.

The top reasons Chinese cite for moving abroad are better educational and employment opportunities for children (78%), economic security and desirable climate (73%), and better health care and social services (18%). Hong Kong is their top destination (30%), followed by Canada (23%).

I am not surprised that a large percentage of extremely wealthy Chinese hope to relocate to another country within 5 years. However, I am surprised by the reasons given.

I would have expected air and water pollution to be a one of the top reasons. Instead, education, employment opportunities, and economic security headed up the list.

For health reasons alone (air and water pollution), I could never live in China. Politics, freedom of expression, food, and the sheer number of people living in the country add to my list of reasons.

Curiously, China was the top choice of 30% of those who would leave Singapore.

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

Stiglitz vs. Krugman on Scotland; Polls Diverge; New Fearmongering Tactics in Waning Moments of Campaign

Posted: 14 Sep 2014 10:12 AM PDT

New Fearmongering Tactics

In the waning moments UK prime Minister David Cameron warns Scots "Leave and You Go Forever".

Actually, the warning probably should be "Stay and you stay forever" because the UK will never allow such a vote again.

Regardless, no country should want to be under the thumb of another.

Polls Diverge

The vote for Scottish independence is now too close to call. In a Scottish Poll Roundup one new poll over the weekend shows the "Yes" vote with a substantial 54-46 lead, but most polls show the "No" vote with a tiny lead.

ICM (online) 54%
Panelbase (online) 49%
ICM (phone) 49%
TNS (face to face) 49%
YouGov (online) 48%
Opinium (online) 47%
Survation (online) 47%
Survation (phone) 46%

If we ignore undecided voters, then judging from the last US presidential election when Nate Silver proved preponderance and clustering more important than margins-of-error which purportedly showed the election "too close to call", one might assume the "No" vote will carry the day.

I sided with Silver and called for an easy electoral college blowout, and that is precisely what happened.

But this is Scotland not the US, the undecided voters are many, and this is an overall vote not a state-by-state electoral college total.

Which way the undecideds break will determine the outcome.

Stiglitz vs. Krugman on Scotland

Bloomberg reports Scots Independence Campaign Nears Climax as Polls Diverge.

Activists were out in force across Scotland during the final weekend before the Sept. 18 ballot that might trigger the breakup of the union after more than three centuries. With opinion polls showing contradictory findings, both the "yes" and "no" campaigns said they were poised to win, introducing further uncertainty to financial markets fixed on Scotland.

Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond, the head of the pro-independence campaign, and Alistair Darling, the former U.K. chancellor of the exchequer who fronts the Better Together group, reprised arguments today over the economy, the pound and state-funded health care if Scots back independence. With the debate increasingly polarized, the focus now is on appealing to undecided voters in the final three days of the campaign.

"Independence may have its costs, although these have yet to be demonstrated convincingly; but it will also have its benefits," Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist who was part of a panel that advised Salmond, said in an op-ed published in the Glasgow-based Sunday Herald newspaper.

Stiglitz, in his op-ed, cast doubt on the assertions made about Scotland post-independence, singling out fellow Nobel laureate Paul Krugman's comments about economies of scale.

"By an order of magnitude, far more important than size is the pursuit of the right policies," said Stiglitz. "There is, in fact, little basis for any of the forms of fear-mongering that have been advanced."

Stiglitz or Krugman?

Both Stiglitz and Krugman are Nobel Prize winning economists. I seldom side with either of them. In this case they take opposite views, so one of them must have the better argument.

Stiglitsz is the clear winner. Economies of scale don't matter if the underlying policies are inefficient.

Scotland would have the chance to come up with its own corporate tax policies that would eventually attract far more businesses and jobs than the alleged financial jobs it would lose if it votes for independence.

That said, given the Labour party dominates Scotland, it is highly debatable whether Scotland would make the right corporate tax policies (but at least they would have a chance). And over time, voting preference can change.

Cameron Scared, UKIP Delighted

Moreover, and what probably has Cameron and Labour scared half to death, is that a "Yes" vote strongly increases the odds the UK leaves the EU.

Why?

This has not been widely discussed in mainstream media, but those Labour votes vanish from UK parliament and from UK in general. As a result UKIP and the anti-EU vote would get a big boost. That would be a good thing.

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

Toothless Barking Dogs; Don't Like the Rules? Then Ignore Them: French Style

Posted: 14 Sep 2014 12:05 AM PDT

Don't Like the Rules? Then Ignore Them: French Style

When it comes to fiscal policy in the EU, you can break whatever fiscal rules you want, provided you are big enough.

France qualifies, so does Germany. If you are small like Greece and Cyprus, then you may find yourself in bed with the Troika.

For the third time France Warns of Budget Overshoot

France has declared it will heavily overshoot its already twice-delayed budget deficit target next year, setting up tough negotiations with European partners previously reluctant to grant Paris more time to bring its public finances within EU limits.

Michel Sapin, finance minister, announced that the required deficit target of 3 per cent of national output was being pushed back a further two years to 2017 in the latest sign of the deep-seated economic problems confronting President François Hollande and his socialist government.

Mr Sapin said the deficit would reach 4.3 per cent of gross domestic product in 2015 after a level of 4.4 per cent this year – the latter also a big overshoot of earlier estimates and the first annual rise in the deficit for several years.

He blamed the situation on the slow rate of economic growth and low inflation, saying France demanded that the EU "collectively take into account" an economic slump "unprecedented in recent European history".

Joke of the Day

The German finance ministry said: "We assume that all member countries of the eurozone stick to the rules. Otherwise we risk our credibility."

Credibility? What credibility? How can anyone speak about credibility when France , Spain, and Italy miss deficit targets over and over and over again?

Toothless Howling Dogs

Like toothless howling dogs, Eurozone Leaders Warn on Fiscal Rules, shortly after the French budget announcement.

Eurozone leaders warned the currency bloc risks facing a new market backlash if it strays from its fiscal rules, an apparent message to France and Italy that their push for more flexibility will be viewed sceptically when they submit their budgets to Brussels next month.

The admonition, from leaders of the European Commission, European Central Bank and eurozone finance ministers, came just 48 hours after the French government announced it would blow through the EU's budget deficit limit of 3 per cent of economic output next year. Instead, Paris projected a 4.3 per cent deficit.

EU officials said ministers from smaller countries who have already implemented tough reforms complained during a closed-door session that any loosening of the rules now would be seen as double standards.

The debate over how much flexibility the European Commission will allow Paris and Rome threatens to become one of the most contentious political issues facing the EU. An Italian-led group of struggling economies has pushed for the rules to be interpreted leniently, arguing the lack of public spending is exacerbating what is threatening to become a triple-dip recession.

In a tweet on Thursday, Matteo Renzi, Italy's prime minister, said his country did not "expect to be lectured by EU," calling for a swift implementation of a €300bn investment plan mooted by the new European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

As part of a push to stimulate growth, Mr Draghi last week announced a plan to purchase asset-backed securities held by eurozone banks. He also urged national governments to guarantee the riskier portions of the securities to free up cash for loans to consumers and businesses.

Both France and Germany have indicated they oppose such government guarantees, however, and Mr Dijsselbloem said the Netherlands, where banks hold significant quantities of mortgage debt, would also not guarantee such purchases.

Expect Nothing But Howls

Will the EU do anything about France? Other than yapping and shifting deficit timelines "for the last time" the answer is the same as always: Of course not.

And will France, Germany, and the Netherlands do what the ECB wants in regards to guaranteeing debt? Apparently not, and they would be foolish to do so.

Will there be any major stimulus efforts like France and Italy want? No again. Germany and the Netherlands won't go along.

Instead, expect all the dogs to remain seated in a big circle, howling at each other as well as the moon, without giving the slightest look at one of the basic problems, the euro itself.

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

Seth's Blog : Without a keyboard

Without a keyboard

When the masses only connect to the net without a keyboard, who will be left to change the world?

It is possible but unlikely that someone will write a great novel on a tablet.

You can't create the spreadsheet that changes an industry on a smart phone.

And professional programmers don't sit down to do their programming with a swipe.

Many people are quietly giving away one of the most powerful tools ever created—the ability to craft and spread revolutionary ideas. Coding, writing, persuading, calculating—they still matter. Yes, of course the media that's being created on the spot, the live, the intuitive, this matters. But that doesn't mean we don't desperately need people like you to dig in and type.

The trendy thing to do is say that whatever technology and the masses want must be a good thing. But sometimes, what technology wants isn't what's going to change our lives for the better.

The public square is more public than ever, but minds are rarely changed in 140 character bursts and by selfies.

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luni, 15 septembrie 2014

The Medal of Honor: Behind the scenes

Inside the White House: The Medal of Honor

5 Hacks for Creating and Promoting the Right Content

5 Hacks for Creating and Promoting the Right Content