sâmbătă, 2 februarie 2013

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Obamacare in Action: Retail Workweek Hits 3-Year Low

Posted: 02 Feb 2013 05:26 PM PST

Hooray! The economy is adding jobs (supposedly). However, few look at the quality of the jobs, and whether or not they are part-time.

Jed Graham has a nice post on Investor's Business Daily that describes what I have been saying for months: Obamacare has accelerated the trend towards part-time jobs. There are more jobs, but fewer hours in them.

Please consider Retail Workweek Hits 3-Year Low In ObamaCare Shift by Jed Graham.
The fly in the ointment of January's jobs report was the apparent shift to part-time work ahead of a key ObamaCare deadline.

Although retail payrolls grew by 32,600, total hours worked in the industry dipped, Labor Department data out Friday showed.

The explanation? Rank-and-file retail workers logged the shortest workweek since early 2010: just 30.1 hours, on average, vs. 30.4 in December.

Remarkably, aggregate hours worked in the retail sector fell below their January 2012 level, even though industry payrolls are up 200,000 over that period. A similar trend showed up in leisure and hospitality: January payrolls rose by 23,000 even as aggregate hours dipped 0.3%.
Not Unexpected

This Obamacare-sponsored shift toward part-time jobs is certainly not unexpected, at least in this corner.



Last Hurrah?

I challenge the notion the economy added 157,000 jobs last month. I also challenge 23,000 leisure and hospitality jobs, and I challenge the claim that retail payrolls grew by 32,600.

For three straight months the household survey is way out of line with the payroll survey. This past month the household survey showed a net gain of only 17,000 jobs (please see Last Hurrah for Jobs? for details)

Yes, many prior months were revised up. But where are we now, going forward?

If the economy really did add 157,000 jobs on the "strength" of part-time hiring, then this was the last hurrah. If not, then I expect those BLS revisions to be re-revised away and October or November was the last hurrah.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific.

Yum! The McRib is Back, Get Yours Today (After You Find Out What's In It); The Secret's in the Sauce!

Posted: 02 Feb 2013 07:48 AM PST

McDonald's does an excellent job at promoting sandwiches on its menu.

Top on the list is the "McRib" which comes and goes in "limited time" offers. You can even use a McRib Locator to find out which chains have the delicacy.

Before you rush out of your house to get one, you may be wondering "What's in a McRib".

That's a good question and the Natural Society has the answer in McDonald's McRib Sandwich a Franken Creation of GMOs, Toxic Ingredients, Banned Ingredients.
The McRib is the result of intensive marketing by McDonald's. Utilizing the basics of supply and demand through creating scarcity over the McRib by only unleashing the culinary abomination for a fraction of the year that is only known once it is released, McDonald's fans have been known to 'hoard' McRib sandwiches and eat them in extreme excess.

But what's really inside the McRib specifically that makes it such a food abomination? Containing over 70 ingredients, the McRib is full of surprises — including 'restructured meat' technology that includes traditionally-discarded animal parts brought together to create a rib-like substance. Here's some of the disturbing substances found within the McDonald's McRib sandwich:

A flour-bleaching agent used in yoga mats

Out of the 70 ingredients that make up the 'pork' sandwich, a little-known flour-bleaching agent known as azodicarbonamide lies among them. At first glance, this strange ingredient sounds concerning enough to look into. After a little research, you will find that even mainstream media outlets have generated content revealing how azodicarbonamide is actually used in the production of foamed plastics. Foamed plastics like yoga mats and more.

What's more? In Australia and Europe, the use of azodicarbonamide as a food additive is banned. In Singapore specifically, use of this substance in food can result in a $450,000 fine and 15 years in jail. Thank you McDonald's for supplying the nation with such healthful ingredients.

'Restructured Meat' from Pig Heart, Tongue, Stomach

McDonald's McRib is famous in some circles for utilizing what's known as 'restructured meat' technology. Since McDonald's knows you'd never eat a pig heart, tongue, or stomach on your plate, they decided instead to grind up these ingredients and put them into the form of a typical rib. That way, consumers won't know what they're putting into their mouths. As the Chicago Mag reported, the innovator of this technology back in 1995 said it best:

"Most people would be extremely unhappy if they were served heart or tongue on a plate… but flaked into a restructured product it loses its identity. Such products as tripe, heart, and scalded stomachs…"

So in other words, it's not actually a rib. Instead, it's a combination of unwanted animal scraps processed down in major facilities and 'restructured' into the form of a rib. Then, 70 additives, chemicals, fillers, and GMO ingredients later, you have a 'meat' product that tastes like ribs.
Whopper Horsemeat

Surely Burger King is not tainted with such tactics. Or is it? For the answer, let's take a look at another report from the Natural Society: Burger King Admits Burgers Contain Horsemeat
In a piece of highly disturbing news, Burger King has now admitted after continuous denial that it has actually been selling UK customers both burgers and Whoppers that contain horsemeat. This admission comes just after The Guardian reports that Burger King reps offered a round of 'absolute assurances' to customers that it did not ever use horsemeat in its products.

A series of tests done on the burger products now reveal that Burger King has been issuing completely phony statements, with burgers made for the fast food chain from the Irish company Silvercrest containing measurable levels of horsemeat. It's important to note this is the same company that processes meat for Tesco, Asda, and the Co-op. The managers at Silvercrest have been revealed to be utilizing non-approved ingredients within their burger assortment – even for 'household brands'.

Burger King Admits Error

The Guardian reports Burger King reveals its burgers were contaminated in horsemeat scandal.
Burger King has revealed that some of its burgers were contaminated in the horsemeat scare, as the tainted food crisis threatened to undermine the confidence of consumers, and major retailers tried to protect their reputations.

As governments in Ireland, the UK and Poland, where a supplier used by Silvercrest for a year is thought be the source of the contamination, continued their investigations, Burger King admitted that, contrary to previous assurances made to it by Silvercrest, it too had now been linked to the scandal. Authorities insist there is no health danger to consumers.

Meanwhile Aldi UK became the first major retailer to suspend its contract with a British plant, Dalepak Hambleton in North Yorkshire, which, like Silvercrest, is part of the ABP Food Group, pending further investigations into why three of nine newly tested burger samples had traces of horse and pork DNA. The products were from stock withdrawn in recent weeks as a precaution but made since October, the company said.

Burger King said: "Our independent DNA test results on product taken from restaurants were negative for any equine DNA. However, four samples recently taken from the Silvercrest plant have shown the presence of very small trace levels of equine DNA. Within the last 36 hours, we have established that Silvercrest used a small percentage of beef imported from a non-approved supplier in Poland. They promised to deliver 100% British and Irish beef patties and have not done so. This is a clear violation of our specifications, and we have terminated our relationship with them."

Diego Beamonte, vice-president for global quality at Burger King, said the company was "deeply troubled by the findings of our investigation and apologise to our guests, who trust us to source only the highest quality 100% beef burgers. Our supplier has failed us and in turn we have failed you".
Surprise? What Surprise?

Is anyone surprised by this? I certainly am not.

Indeed, after reporting on the "Extra-Value" Horse-Burger at grocery chains in the UK and Ireland, I would have been surprised to find out that burger chains were not contaminated as well.

Heck, even before reading articles on contamination I would have been surprised.

The Secret's in the Sauce!

Inquiring minds might wonder "Just how does McDonald's get the McRib to taste so yummy?" That's a good question too, and I have two answers.

Some simply like azodicarbonamide, bleaching agents, tripe, heart, scalded stomachs, tongues, and other unwanted animal scraps restructured into the form of a rib.

For everyone else, "The secret's in the sauce!" (Just don't ask what's in it).

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com
Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific.
Publicat de 1 la 23:10 0 comentarii

SEO Blog

SEO Blog

Managing Your Online Reputation Is Critical In Protecting Your Brand

Posted: 02 Feb 2013 01:41 PM PST

One of the most important assets that your company has it the brands. It is what connects the your company with consumers. It can be as simple as a symbol, sign, term or a phrase  with which the business enitity or person is connected. It is much more than the...
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How PPC Management can significantly reduce marketing costs

Posted: 02 Feb 2013 01:12 PM PST

Conventional marketing techniques are slowly but progressively getting obsolete for the simple reason that people are looking elsewhere and are no longer attracted to traditional commercials, posters, banners etc. Majority of the customers and consumers now purchase things online, making the Internet one of the best platforms; in fact we...
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Top paid iPhone apps on App Storethat you should have

Posted: 02 Feb 2013 12:47 AM PST

With new iPhone, Application market got new interest among users and many developers came forward with advance functions and technological applications for iOS platform. Here we are discussing top applications straight from apple application store that you should have with your iPhone. Most of application covers new technologies and innovative...
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Net Worth of Facebook

Posted: 02 Feb 2013 12:00 AM PST

What Is Facebook? Facebook was launched officially in 2004 and it came to be known as the most celebrated and popular social networking website. It is owned and operated by Facebook, Inc. It rose to fame in some years as in 2012; over one billion active users were reported to...
Read more »
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Seth's Blog : A diet for your mind

 

A diet for your mind

It's Groundhog Day, which means that January is over. January, of course, is official diet book month, the time of year that formerly young, formerly thin people buy books in the hopes that by osmosis, they will magically become post-holiday skinny.

Now that this madness is over, perhaps it's time to invest in something you can change: the way you think. Here are a bunch of books, ebooks and recordings that can help with that: Diet books for the mind.

Controlling what you eat is an interesting challenge, but not nearly as important as controlling how you think.


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Using Google Analytics to Power an Effective Q&A Strategy

Using Google Analytics to Power an Effective Q&A Strategy

Using Google Analytics to Power an Effective Q&A Strategy

Posted: 01 Feb 2013 02:42 AM PST

Posted by junseth

Alarm Grid's Executive Team - from L to R: Eric, Sterling, Joshua (me)When we started Alarm Grid we struggled with how we were going to stand out in a world of like a trillion other security companies. We were late to the game, no doubt, and in a world with as much competition as there is in an old industry like home security, it seems like there isn't much you could do to compete with the million minds that have come before you. Since then, we've done a lot of fun things that have helped us to gain traction, but my favorite strategy we've executed on thus far is our security FAQs strategy. We have built an amazingly large database of super relevant Questions and Answers, and our users love them. Before we begin, let me introduce you to our executive team: Eric is on the left, Sterling is in the middle and I'm the guy on the right.

Like anything done in marketing, there aren't a whole lot of "new" ideas per se. But the question needs to be how to execute it based on what's available to you. As I've seen Q&A strategies executed previously, I think there are two main ways to put them together. The first is the way companies like SEOmoz or Trulia have done it. Both use their base of strong, engaged communities to answer questions. Trulia relies on users looking for homes to ask, and realtors looking for business to answer. SEOmoz is generally relying on its community members who are interested in seeking experts or being experts to answer and ask questions. This model works really really well. I can't tell you how many times I've had an SEO question or an analytics question and ended up on one of the SEOmoz pages with a good answer from some person I've never heard of or met. Very helpful, extremely engaging. The other method is what sites without much of a community do: a bunch of old guys who know their product too well get together in a room and think of 100 questions about their products. Then they answer the questions in 30 words or less, brush off their hands, and call it a day.

When you know too much about your product, you can't know what questions users will ACTUALLY find useful

So we needed a method that sat between the community approach and the stodgy old-men-in-a-room approach. Since we don't have an engaged set of users and we're not that old, we needed to figure out a method of populating the database that sat in between the two approaches, and I'm proud to say, I think we figured out a great way to accomplish this.

If you're a business owner, you're probably wondering if this FAQ business is a good idea for you. When we gave the strategy a try on Alarm Grid, we had the same question. I poured through Google Analytics (GA) data and saw that users had already started coming into the site with questions. They weren't getting them answered, but they were asking them.

So, what I did was I used GA to power our entire Q&A engine. When we started, we honestly thought we'd be able to keep up with the questions that came in. We now have a backlog of over 10,000 questions we want to get to... and that's with just Honeywell products in our catalog. Our goal is to get 80% of these questions answered before we add more brands to the catalog. Wish us luck.

I'm presuming that you already have GA installed on your site, and that you know anything about how to log in to your account... so here we go:

1) Click on Advanced Segments in the standard reporting section of your Google Analytics.

Click on Advanced Segments

2) Select the button on the bottom right side of the drop down entitled "New Custom Segment"

This button unveils a glorious land of powerful analytics possibilities wherein you can create enormous value. The first thing you're going to want to do here is to make sure that you select "include" on the rule.

Click on Include under Advanced Segments

3) Select Keyword from the list of variable segment.

Select Keyword from the list of variables

4) Then select "Matching RegExp"

Select Matching Regexp

5) Put this cute little chunk of code into the text box

(It's different looking than it is in the pictures above because I cleaned it up for this post so I didn't have to be so embarrassed about posting it).

\b(adding|does|do|who|what|where|when|why|how|will|can|\?|am|is|are|was|were|be|being|been|versus|vs|vs\.|best)\b

Now I ain't no RegExpert. I am terrible at Regex. And most of you probably don't even know what Regex is, so I'm sure there are more efficient ways to write this. But so you understand what you've done, let me clue you in. You're filtering for anyone who comes to your site using the keywords within the parentheses including any query that a user makes that contains a question mark. The regex idiot proofs it so that you anyone can add weird capitalizations and still have their search filtered (at least that's supposed to be how it works). If you want to clean up the regex, feel free. I would love to see it done, it just doesn't matter that much since this works pretty darn well.

6) Give your filter a cute name. We call ours "Add to FAQ" since that's what is supposed to happen.

Give your filter a cute name

7) Save your segment and turn it on.

8) In the left-hand column click on "traffic sources" then "sources" then "search" then "organic".

Select Traffic Sources, Sources, Search, Organic

8) Now, set the date range to show only one day - yesterday.

Select Yesterday in the calendar

9) Scroll to the very bottom of the page and select the dropdown next to the words "Show rows" and select 500.

Select Show Rows

Now this is a bit optimistic. You really only need the maximum possible number of results from each day. The number starts small, but if you execute this strategy correctly, you may be seeing 500+ visitors each day asking questions and getting to your site.

10) Go back to the top of the page, and select "Email," and fill the email(s) you want the daily spreadsheet to go to in the pop-up.

Click on Email

Also make sure to change the "Frequency" to "Daily." You can actually make it as frequent or infrequent as you want. I recommend daily, because, particularly when you are only seeing a few FAQs a day, it's better that everyone gets a few FAQs in the morning before things get hopping. Think about it, if you have two employees pumping out two FAQs every morning, first thing, you will have 1460 FAQs in by the end of the year. The average FAQ, in our case, bumps our average daily uniques by 1/3 of an user. Each FAQ takes an average of 15 minutes to write. At the end of the year, we'll have used about 730 hours of our employees' time to grab an extra 5,000 unique visitors each and every month. That's a huge boon for an ecommerce site.

Set frequency to Daily

And that's that.

What I like to do is once a month, dump the spreadsheets into a big, master list. Then I can filter on the spreadsheet by keywords within the questions, which allows us to manage our more than 10,0000 outstanding questions. We generally attack them by subject. So, for example, we do a week of Vista 20P (which is a Honeywell product we carry) questions only or some weeks we answer all the questions people have asked about Alarm Grid's alarm monitoring. This is the most effective kind of inter-linking we could possibly put together. The Q&As are relevant, and the anchor texts are surrounded by perfect semantically relevant writing. We require all articles contain 300 to 500 words, even if it's just a simple answer. We also find that it's best not to bury the lead. So when a user lands on a page, start by answering the question, then put more text below it that will expound and further explain why the answer is "yes" or "no."

You can do a lot of other fun stuff as well with this strategy. For example, to root out duplicates, you could only have questions where the user doesn't land on a URL with /faq in it. Our system is accurate up to about 87% when we do this, meaning this uproots 87% of all duplicates. There are a ton of other fun ways you could run this engine, but there isn't enough time in a day. If you do something fun that is hugely helpful for you, I'd love to know about it.

So give this all a try! And then report back, Let me know and the rest of the Alarm Grid team know how it works for you!


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