INTELLIGENCE.CHECK

Screening of Big Miracle @ TriBeCa Theater by Aol, HuffPo & Movie Phone

2012-02-01T09:31:00.001-05:00

Explanation of the law SOPA

2012-01-18T14:09:00.001-05:00

#stopsopa from blacking out the internet

2012-01-18T13:24:00.001-05:00

https://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/www.google.com/en/us/landing/takeaction/takeaction.pdf

Michael Salafia // +1.305.942.8392 // MichaelSalafia.com

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#newmuseum #nyc

2012-01-12T21:50:00.001-05:00

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Best earbud headphones under $10

2012-01-04T12:35:00.001-05:00

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Beware: Locked out of your Google Docs

2012-01-04T10:44:00.001-05:00

Google has locked me out of one of my own very important business documents! Aviod being locked out my including email address and passwords in shared documents or forms.

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Google Will Change Web Marketing in 2012 - Harvard Business Review

2011-12-27T11:43:00.001-05:00

HBR Blog Network

Brian Whalley

Brian Whalley is a search marketer at HubSpot, a marketing software company in Cambridge, MA. He focuses on search engines and developing strategies for how businesses can get found online. You can follow him on Twitter at @bwhalley.

Google Will Change Web Marketing in 2012

4:48 PM Thursday December 22, 2011
by Brian Whalley | Comments (101)

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Google is poised to completely alter how websites market themselves over the next year. While easing users into changing search results pages, Google has also designed a new method for websites to structure data so that its crawler can better pull information. This is a tremendous strategy. Google doesn't need to own all of the information in the world, but does own the methods of accessing that information — as well as the ability to advertise to people who use that access.

Search results will include more direct information. Early in 2012, Google will expand how it incorporates data into its search results. For search queries that are direct questions, it will no longer be necessary to click through to a website. In Google's parlance, it's like getting both the search results and the immediate result of the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button at once. It's not hard to see how this is better for the average Google user. Questions will be answered faster and more simply. No parsing of information will be required. This change, however, will take value away from marketers who rely on visitors clicking through to deeper pages.

Google is looking to collect more data by providing ways for website owners to structure their information so that it can be easily read by a computer. Google's plans revolve around metadata (literally, special data encoded in the page) that will allow it to access more rich data about a topic, including hours of business, names of products, and virtually anything else that you can think of. Marketers will see better search rankings if they document information using this new format.

Google is entering new industries and markets. The expansion of data into search results pages is also breaking into markets where Google is not yet a force. Google acquired ITA Software in 2010, a software company that created airfare and travel management software for airlines and resellers. Since then, they have worked to become a powerful competitor in the travel industry by promoting their own offers and packages directly on the search results page ahead of other providers. To see this in action, try searching for "BOS to SFO" in Google. This is a tremendous advertising presence that others cannot match.

If you're a marketer working on making sure your site is visible in an area where Google is competitive, remember that you may need to do more than an organic search or paid advertising in order to be successful. Google has created a system where people must pay in order to compete against it. Regardless of whether the information and options available to searchers are free or paid for by marketers, people will continue to use Google in overwhelming numbers as long as Google continues to have the best results for a given search.

The data that Google makes available will be reduced. Google now sees its ownership of data as a competitive advantage to be protected from marketers and other advertising networks. In the latter half of 2011, Google began to roll out changes that have taken data away from marketers, specifically about how and where visitors found their website. Since October, between 10-15% of visits to websites from Google have no longer sent information to webmasters and marketers. It is safe to assume that Google will continue to expand these changes, further limiting the data available to marketers unless they're willing to pay.

Google's activity in the second half of 2011 represents just the beginning of the changes that it will be pushing throughout 2012 as it establishes even stronger relationships with its partners, affiliates, and advertisers. While this happens, every marketer on the web will need to carefully consider and revisit how they are positioned with the search giant and its interests.

More blog posts by Brian Whalley

via blogs.hbr.org

Required reading for all internet marketers.

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Oribe Dry Texture Hair Spray

2011-12-21T20:26:00.001-05:00

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China Gel

2011-12-21T20:19:00.001-05:00

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Oribe Super Shine

2011-12-21T20:18:00.001-05:00

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Must Have Hair Care: Oribe Supershine Moisturizing Cream

2011-12-20T10:12:00.001-05:00

How Many Hair Products Do You Use?

This morning as I was doing my hair, I felt decidedly low-maintenance for using only two products. Yes, "only." That's not because I'm a beauty product hoarder—it's because I have naturally unruly hair that requires three to four different products at a time. Maybe this is just a curly hair problem, since when I blow-dry and flat-iron my hair straight, I just use one product: a finishing shine spray (Kérastase Vernis Nutri Sculpt Shine Spray). But when I want to show off my natural hair, I go through a very unnatural process. First there's an anti-frizz serum I apply to my hair when it's wet. After it dries, I apply a leave-in conditioner to make it soft, like Oribe Supershine Moisturizing Cream. Then I spritz on the Kérastase, and then I use—depending on the weather, how recently I've washed my hair, and other ridiculously specific calculations—a mousse, gel, or pomade-ish wax to keep it that way; right now I'm obsessed with Shu Uemura Cotton Uzu Defining Flexible Cream. What about you—how many products are in your morning hair routine?

WHAT IT DOES:
Tames frizz and adds softness and shine to hair

KEY INGREDIENTS:
Kaempferia galanga root extract (provides natural UV protection); soy protein biopolymer (fights frizz); lychee extract (protects from oxidative stress); amber extract (strengthens and conditions); edelweiss flower extract (protects hair from drying, damaging, and color-depleting effects of the sun); watermelon extract (protects against deterioration of natural keratin); active keratin (fortifies and provides anti-aging protection and shine)

HOW IT FEELS/SMELLS/LOOKS:
It is a silky cream with a mild floral scent.

WHY WE LIKE IT:
It calms frizz and adds shine without weighing down hair or making it look greasy. It's also a good way to tame flyaways and smooth dry ends after a blowout.

AWARDS:
Best of Beauty 2010

VIA Allure BY SARAH WEXLER, WRITER, SEPTEMBER 23, 2010, 3:00:00 PM

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59 New Digital Media Resources You May Have Missed

2011-12-19T14:32:00.001-05:00

via mashable.com

good list for your bookmarks

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Five Things You Should Stop Doing in 2012 - Dorie Clark - Harvard Business Review

2011-12-19T10:21:00.001-05:00

via blogs.hbr.org

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7 Things Highly Productive People Do | LinkedIn

2011-12-19T08:45:00.001-05:00

Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity. Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.

Check out this website I found at linkedin.com

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Brad Burnham Explains Why SOPA Must Be Stopped | TechCrunch

2011-12-15T13:45:00.001-05:00

via techcrunch.com

Save the Internet. Stop SOPA.

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Facebook's Secret to High Emotional Engagement? Faces [STUDY]

2011-12-07T11:19:00.001-05:00

If you’re trying to understand why Facebook elicits such an emotional response, look no further than the name.

A study commissioned by Facebook examined how consumers’ brains responded to the site as well as to Yahoo’s and The New York Times‘s homepages. NeuroFocus, the Berkeley, Calif., firm that executed the study, found that of the three, Facebook scored highest on attention, emotional engagement and memory retention.

A.K. Pradeep, the CEO of NeuroFocus, says the presence of faces on Facebook are a major reason why. “As you can see, one of the dominant features of Facebook is the human face,” he says. “The face is a window to the emotions.” Pradeep says that since childhood we are trained to read people’s faces to discern emotion, and that such information is key to survival: Thus the stimulation we experience when scanning our newsfeeds.

In the study 84 adults, split evenly between men and women, were wired with EEG sensors, which measured their brainwave patterns as they visited the sites. All three sites scored better than average on the three areas. However, The New York Times did slightly better than the others on memory retention and Facebook was notably higher when it came to emotional engagement.

Pradeep says that faces explain much of the emotional appeal of Facebook. He says if Yahoo or The New York Times have recognizable faces in their articles, the emotional levels even out more. Even though faces on those pages are likely to be public figures rather than friends of yours, they still spur an emotional response. (Facebook’s launch of Subscriptions in September ensures that more users will see both in their news feeds.)

Facebook commissioned the study to display its emotional connection with consumers to advertisers. Though the report didn’t look at how an ad might work in one or the other platforms, an earlier NeuroFocus study compared a Visa ad on Facebook to one that ran on TV. That study found that the Facebook ad scored higher for emotional engagement than the TV spot.

via mashable.com

Take away: Photos of smiling faces can be used to engage your audience on an emotional level.

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Central Park West / Columbus Circle #nyc

2011-12-04T13:56:00.001-05:00

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Rockefeller Center

2011-12-03T19:59:00.001-05:00

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jasonhawkes | Designcollector™ | Ariel Cityscape Photo

2011-11-28T13:51:00.001-05:00

via designcollector.net

Amazing timing and lighting!

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Local Online Ad Spend Set To Grow 300% In 2011, 60% Ex-Deals

2011-11-28T12:12:00.001-05:00

--Including deals/offers we expect local online ad revenue to grow over 300% in 2011, 60% when excluding offers/deals. We expect local to grow 100% in 2012, 40% when excluding deals/offers.

--We believe local search is materially increasing its share of overall search

--We estimate click-to-call spend from local/regional retailers will increase 200%-plus in 2011 with a particularly strong holiday season.

--Data indicates that small businesses are claiming pages on web publishers focused on the local market at over 100% annually setting the stage for continued rapid growth in local online.

Michael Salafia // +1.305.942.8392 // MichaelSalafia.com

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Social Proof Is The New Marketing | TechCrunch

2011-11-28T10:51:00.001-05:00

via techcrunch.com

Interesting article breaks down 5 classifications of social proof in regards to internet marketing. thx @aileenlee @techcrunch

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Traversing the Pennsylvania countryside

2011-11-25T14:58:00.001-05:00

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How to Set Up a Google+ Brand Page

2011-11-25T11:34:00.001-05:00

via mashable.com

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Filming new #Batman movie on Queens Bridge #nyc

2011-11-12T12:27:00.001-05:00

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Midtown East from Riverwalk Roof Deck

2011-11-11T21:19:00.001-05:00

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World's Worst Idea: Porn on Planes

2011-11-09T14:06:00.001-05:00

via gawker.com

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Kia Makarechi: Watch the Throne Tour Stuns at Madison Square Garden: A HuffPost Live Review

2011-11-09T13:56:00.001-05:00

High above the twenty thousand or so who gathered at Madison Square Garden on a fall Monday night in New York City, the jerseys of retired athletic giants stood motionless as a cavalcade of lights and shuddering bass entertained the eager audience.

But two names stand out.

Elton John and Billy Joel's banners also hang in the fabled Garden's rafters. Joel earned his for a record 12-night run, and John's number, 62, signals the record number of appearances by an artist at the venue.

If Monday night is any indication, it may soon be time to print up a couple more banners.

By now every media outlet has had its chance to deftly recount the events of a Watch The Throne show. Yes, they play "N****s in Paris" three times. Yes, they rap on top of giant, moving risers with LCD side panels. And yes, Kanye wears a leather skirt.

But Kanye West and Shawn Corey Carter's joint concert is not an act ready made for tweets and text messages. The thrust of the evening didn't come through in ways that could be captured on camera phone photos to be posted to Facebook by the night's end. The magic of the evening was in its uncomfortable, unexpected moments.

One such turning point occurred when the two performed "New Day" together. The song is easily the most genuine track on the album, a spare moment where RZA's nimble beat underscores Kanye and Jay-Z's somber ruminations on the reality of fatherhood in the limelight.

They sat next to each other on the stage. As Kanye ran through the list of regrets he wishes his unborn child would never repeat, Jay mouthed the verse. West, who is known to be overcome with emotion when rapping about his late mother, became visibly quiet and subdued as his verse ended: "And I'll never let his mom move to LA / Knowin' she couldn't take the pressure now we all pray" (West's mother died of complications from plastic surgery). Carter asked the crowd to put one finger up for "all the love ones we've lost," as West's distraught face shined from the gigantic screens behind them.

Jay's verse is also suddenly more poignant, as Beyoncé's pregnancy is already the gossip fodder he envisioned ("Sorry junior, I already ruined ya / 'Cause you ain't even alive yet, paparazzi pursuin' ya"). His verse ends with his pledge to not abandon his child, and again electricity swept around the Garden's hushed audience. The elder rapper paused, eyes glistening, and said, "All the guys out there taking care of your kids, make some noise." In his typically accessible way, he added softly, "That's the cool thing to do."

It was unexpected, if not awkward. We've come to expect West to get riled up, to go off on rants. The show even included a bit piece West practiced at New Jersey's Izod Center earlier in the week, in which he cuts the intro to "All of the Lights" off three times in mock horror at a lighting director's (staged) inability to "turn on all the lights we paid for." It's a savvy trick of performance art, in which West plays a caricature of the post-Katrina-telethon Kanye he finally realizes that he's partly appreciated for.

He pulls a similar, though more genuine, trick when he performs "Runaway," his ode to his "asshole" side. It's always an extended version, in which he urges his audience to love each other and bleats his simple, yet aching regrets ("If I said I don't like your shoes tonight, don't listen to me, because I'm an asshole, you're always fine. If I said I don't like your hair tonight, don't listen to me because I'm an asshole, you're always fine. The only part I fucked up is that I thought you'd always be mine.")

But if even if we cynically chalked up West's emotional displays to mere antics, we can't do the same for Jay-Z. The latter never even breaches the topic of his marriage in public. Witnessing two grown men on a planned free-fall from the fun-loving, cars/hotels/watches anthems of "H.A.M." and "Otis" to a teary-eyed "New Day" in an hour makes one wonder just how much they can control -- can handle.

Everything about these two men is different. Jay-Z's within-the-beat dancing made Kanye look like he's dancing to dubstep. West forgot the lyrics to "Get 'Em High" in the encore's medley, Jay tried to get him to keep rapping. Jay kept his advice to a neat minimum and spent more time thanking the crowd than admonishing it, West gave us his sermon on the LCD mount about love. Kanye screamed inaudible encouragement, Jay punctuated Kanye's verses with the standard call-outs that make him the best hypeman in hip hop.

And yet if their delivery is nearly antithetical, why does the show flow so seamlessly?

In the end, they're just different paths to the same emotions. The ethos of the show is not epic or even about bravado. It's fear of what you've done, and what may happen. It's about two voices coming together and magnifying these feelings in chorus until you're ready to throw your hands up and dance and cheers to the "Good Life." It's that whether you're a free-speaking, suburban producer or a careful, precocious young drug dealer, you can end up throwing a party for twenty thousand of your friends-for-one-night at the Garden.

"I came here [to New York] with some beats in my pocket and I was too scared to even talk to Jay-Z because he was my fucking idol," West later said. "Now I'm on a stage with him. That shows you that dreams can come true."

Carter, as usual, kept it simpler, and in song. You may be in the audience, shelling out hundreds of dollars for seats in a stadium, but like the dad-to-be says on "Murder to Excellence," when you see them, you see you.

Follow Kia Makarechi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Kia_Mak

via huffingtonpost.com

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#moma #nyc south perspective

2011-11-09T09:00:00.007-05:00

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#moma #nyc

2011-11-09T09:00:00.005-05:00

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#nycmarathon running on #queensbridge

2011-11-09T09:00:00.003-05:00

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Blood Red #rollsroyce in #gotham city

2011-11-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

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On The Brink: The Past, Present and Future of Connectivity

2011-11-04T09:40:00.001-04:00

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Bieb's Baby Mama Under Investigation for Statutory Rape

2011-11-04T08:43:00.001-04:00

via huffingtonpost.com

A back stage bathroom at the Staples Center? Classy!

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Lindsay Will Go to Jail After Playboy Finishes Photographing Her Vagina

2011-11-03T15:45:00.001-04:00

via gawker.com

30 day sentence pushed back for a playboy shoot? That's pretty gangster.

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Blogging Tips: Drive traffic by commenting

2011-11-03T12:05:00.001-04:00

Comments

I began commenting on several blogs. Initially I commented on any blog I could find, and paid extra attention on “do-follow” blogs—those that do not use the “no-follow” tag to prevent search engines from following comment links.

After a month of reviewing the analytics, I discovered something very important about commenting. It’s difficult to track the exact SEO benefit of each comment, but my best traffic has come from my most thought-out comments on other blogs.

I did not plan this, but when I ignored whether a blog was a do-follow or not, and instead commented when I was passionate about a topic, my visitors from those blogs spent on average four or five minutes on my on my site. That is a very long time on a website—especially when compared to traffic from other sources, which averages well under a minute.

via problogger.net

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At a glance, what recent earnings reports have revealed about the state of spending on ads - The Washington Post

2011-11-03T09:03:00.001-04:00

At a glance, what recent earnings reports have revealed about the state of spending on ads
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By Associated Press, Published: November 2

Here are highlights of recent quarterly earnings reports from selected Internet and media companies and what they say about the state of spending on advertising:

Oct. 13: Google Inc. says advertising revenue grew 33 percent to $9.3 billion during the third quarter, thanks to the reach of its search engine and the effectiveness of its ads. After subtracting commissions, net revenue growth was 37 percent. The growth comes despite mounting worries about the economy. Google got 96 percent of its revenue from advertising that quarter.

via washingtonpost.com

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KANYE'D BY THE BELL @gregnuef

2011-11-02T14:31:00.001-04:00

via kanyedbythebell.tumblr.com

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Study: Mobile becoming integral to shopping habits

2011-11-02T13:06:00.003-04:00

According to a recent report from Experian Simmons, mobile technology is becoming an indispensable aspect of American shopping habits. As this trend continues, it will be imperative that businesses cater their content marketing campaigns to mobile devices to stay ahead of the curve.
The report noted that the most common mobile shopping activity is research. Rather than making purchases on the fly, 15 percent of surveyed consumers are more likely to use their smartphones and tablets to explore their options so they can make informed decisions.
In contrast, only 7 percent of consumers said they have used their mobile devices to make a purchase within 30 days of the survey.
This highlights the importance of content marketing as a means of reaching mobile consumers. By utilizing local SEO and strong mobile web content, businesses are better positioned to connect with potential customers and encourage them to explore their products and services further.
As Brafton recently reported, a new IBM study found that mobility creates new search marketing opportunities for businesses. According to the report, more consumers are expected to use their mobile devices to research information and make purchase decisions this year as the adoption of internet-enabled mobile devices continues to rise.

via brafton.com

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Study: Mobile becoming integral to shopping habits

2011-11-02T13:06:00.001-04:00

via brafton.com

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http://twitter.com/#!/KARDASHlANS/status/131722670097186816

2011-11-02T12:53:00.001-04:00

http://twitter.com/#!/KARDASHlANS/status/131722670097186816

Too much?

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Need a group task list / project management solution? Asana #free

2011-11-02T09:29:00.001-04:00

Cut down on email chains, group meetings and task tracking. Asana let's you easily create tasks, assign them to users and organize them by project. As an manager of an digital agency, this is something so important to our organization that we have developed our own proprietary system for it. Although we will still use our system, we will entertain using Asana as a suplement tool for task management and internal communication. Asana was actually developed for internal use at Facebook by co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein. I'm just watched the video and it looks great, so I'll sign up now and report back with my recomendation.

via mashable

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Four Points Park, Roosevelt Island #nyc

2011-11-01T18:35:00.001-04:00

by @michaelsalafia

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Should Student Loan Debt Be a Crime? Yes ⎯ says @michaelsalafia

2011-11-01T09:41:00.001-04:00

by @keligoff via @huffingtonpost

An 18 year-old with no credit history and no job walks into a bank and requests a loan to buy a $100,000 condo. What is the loan officer most likely to say?

A) Sure! Let's get that paperwork started.

B) Actually, why not go for a $150,000 condo?

C) Is this a joke? No way. No how.

I think we can all agree that in most cases the answer would be C. Yet year, after year millions of 18-year-olds essentially do just that -- take out tens of thousands of dollars in debt to buy something that they cannot afford, and will likely be unable to pay off in the near future or, in their lifetimes: an overpriced college degree.

Just to be clear, I am not calling college degrees worthless -- at least not all of them. But I am calling a system that allows people who are not legally old enough to drink, to incur endless amounts of debt on a choice that they may have second thoughts about shortly after making it, questionable, and borderline criminal.

By now we all know that the American student loan crisis is just that: a crisis. It's just a shame that it took those in power so long to wake up to this fact. Days ago President Obama announced executive action to provide relief to more than one million Americans struggling with student loan debt. The so-called "Pay As You Earn" proposal will allow 1.6 million students to cap their student loan payments to ten percent of their discretionary income, and to forgive the balance of their debt after 20 years of payments. This proposal comes on the heel of reports that for the first time ever, Americans owe more on student loans -- nearly 1 trillion dollars -- than they do on credit cards.

As I have written about extensively, I consider education the gateway to the American Dream. I am someone who is far from wealthy, but I've enjoyed greater opportunities for success than my grandparents (whom as I have previously written worked in cotton fields), because I have enjoyed educational opportunities that they did not. But increasingly education is becoming a luxury commodity in this country, much like a summer home or a really great vacation. Those who can afford it, enjoy it. Those who cannot, don't. Only the repercussions for limited educational opportunity are much more dire than going without that summer home. Financial aid, in the form of scholarships, grants and eventually loans, were supposed to even the playing field allowing those of us born without a silver spoon (or a spoon at all) to have a shot at the same American Dream that those born with a full set of silver utensils, were able to enjoy. There's just one problem, of course.

As we've come to learn, student loan debt has essentially insured that the rest of us could only rent the American Dream temporarily, but never really buy it in full. Like credit cards, student loans have allowed many of us to merely look like we were keeping up with the Joneses, but when that bill finally comes, the reality that you weren't ever really keeping up at all but merely pretending that you were, sets in -- often with disastrous results. Nearly a trillion dollars later and that bill is coming in full for our nation as an entire generation struggles to dig out of what's becoming a modern day version of indentured servitude.

So who's to blame? Well much like the mortgage crisis, there's blame to go around. Speaking as someone who has two costly degrees, both of which could be viewed as non-necessity degrees (as in I didn't major in pre-med or some other field of study in which my degree was an absolute prerequisite to pursue my eventual profession) I acknowledge that adults have to take responsibility for the financial choices that we make. Just like a person who buys a house that they know deep down inside they really can't afford, a person who takes out significant debt for a degree they are not sure they plan to use also bears responsibility.

But similarly, if we hold predatory lenders accountable for targeting low-income people for mortgages they cannot afford, then why are we not holding private lenders accountable for targeting students who take out loans that any reasonable person can recognize they cannot afford, and will likely never be able to? For instance, if there are only a handful of jobs nationwide in a field like Medieval Studies, then how is a lender who signs an 18-year-old to a $50,000 loan to pursue a degree in that subject, really any different than a predatory lender who targets a low-income widow? (Click here to see the 5 highest paying college majors.)

I'm not suggesting that no one should be allowed to receive loans to pursue higher education, or even to pursue subjects of their interest. I am, however saying that we have got to reform the system, and put standards in place so that just as not just anyone can walk in and get a loan for a mansion, not everyone can get a loan for any degree.

Perhaps a start would be requiring colleges and universities to be upfront about the job prospects of those who leave their institutions with degrees. There is already growing criticism of how colleges rig alumni employment data, but what if the government required schools to be more transparent? Instead of simply allowing colleges and universities to report general employment statistics on their graduates (which are notoriously deceptive because they rarely reveal whether that graduate with a PhD is waiting tables or that law school graduate is tending bar) what if schools were required to list the statistical likelihood of a new student at that school receiving employment in a particular field of study upon graduation? Think about it. If a potential college student were to go to the homepage of a particular department of a particular college and see that only 1% of graduates are working in his or her chosen field, he might think twice (or three times) before signing his financial future away for that degree. And you know, what? If he pursues that degree anyway? That's on him. At least he will have made a decision with eyes wide open, something too many young people and their families are not doing, because they are not being provided with the information necessary to do so.

To insure the responsibility is shared equally, what if when signing loan documents the aspiring student was asked to sign letter of acknowledgment that he or she is aware of the employment prospects related to pursuing this degree with this institution. Might make everyone involved think more carefully before embarking on a potential lifetime of debt.

As wacky as these calls for transparency may sound, just remember. Years ago people thought slapping health warnings on cigarettes sounded wacky too. But something has got to be done to stop the student loan crisis from demolishing the financial health of a generation, and with it the financial future of our nation.

Keli Goff is the author of The GQ Candidate and a Contributing Editor for Loop21.com where this post originally appeared. Visit Keli's website here.

Follow Keli Goff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/keligoff

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NYTimes: Regulators Investigating MF Global

2011-10-31T19:51:00.001-04:00

Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the company's operations. http://nyti.ms/uHzk8C

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From HBS Case to $.87 a share, will Kodak ever learn?

2011-10-31T18:28:00.001-04:00

		Kodak Faces Worst Crisis In 131-Year History
	ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- Picture this: Kodak – the company that invented the first digital camera in 1975, and developed the photo technology inside most cellphones...

via huffingtonpost

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Celebrity Halloween Costume Time Has Begun

2011-10-31T09:42:00.001-04:00

via gawker.com

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Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

2011-10-31T09:28:00.001-04:00

via mashable.com

Inbound Marketing is on the rise! @michaelsalafia #digimix

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Zuckerberg likes Boston over Silicon Valley for tech startups!

2011-10-31T09:24:00.001-04:00

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston "If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me."

Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Y Combinator’s Startup School in a candid interview with Y Combinator Partner Jessica Livingston. You can watch the full interview here, and it starts around the 43 minute mark, and lasts for roughly 40 minutes. If you have some time to spare, it’s well worth a look.

Zuck revealed a number of fascinating things about entrepreneurship, founding Facebook, and product development, but one of the more interesting (and surprising points) came at the end of the interview when Livingston asked him what he would do different if he could go back in time. Zuck replied: If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.

He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. “There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he explains. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”

“There’s this culture in the Valley of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet…you need to do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.”

Zuckerberg also talked about the early days, when he was at Harvard, thinking of the idea for what would become Facebook. I was in denial that we were going to make a company early on. When I was in college, I had a lot of conversations with my friends about the direction the world was going to go to and we cared more about seeing this happen. We built it and we didn’t expect it to be a company, we were just building this because we thought it was awesome, he explained

When Zuck moved out to Silicon Valley in his sophomore summer, he thought that maybe one day he and his team would develop a startup, but didn’t think Facebook was that startup. “It was not like in the movie, there was no drinking. We all just lived in a house, iterated, kept going,” he said candidly. “It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.” But a company is the best vehicle in the world to align a lot of people to achieve a mission, he said.

Livingston asked Zuckerberg about how he pitched Facebook when he first pitched the business to Battery Ventures in Boston in 2004. “I barely remember that but I agree that it happened,” he recalled. “I don’t think I said anything and Eduardo said some things but it was fine because I didn’t want to do that anyway.”

Zuckerberg said that Eduardo early on said that Facebook needed to raise money, and he was skeptical of VCs. “That was one of the reasons that we accepted from Peter Thiel, because he could relate to us on a founder level,” he explained, referring to Thiel co-founding his own companies, including PayPal. Zuck said that in Silicon Valley, everyone was talking about flipping companies and he found that to be unattractive. Another potential investor Zuck really was passionate about was Donald Graham, CEO and chairman of The Washington Post. He explained that he came close to taking money from Graham, but Graham actually encouraged Zuckerberg to take money from Jim Breyer at Accel Partners. Zuck saw this as the “best of both worlds.”

He also gave startup founders advice how to guide on how to handle acquisition offers, and gave interesting insight on how he look at Facebook’s own acquisition offers. We really had one phase of this and the only reason why its’ this big story that everyone knows about us turning down a lot of money is because I messed up the process. It’s one of the biggest management mistakes I made through Facebook’s whole history. I learned a lot about the team at that time, and ended turning over a lot of that same team. I wasn’t in it for the acquisitions, and I wanted people around me who were in it for the long-term, he said.

It’s not clear that you should turn down offers, he explained but you should take it if it means the company can go in the direction you want it to go on. “If you go through some big corporate change, it’s just not going to be the same,” Zuck said.”If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different, if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don’t sell because there’s inevitably going to be some change.”

One of the key parts of operations is a ‘growth team,’ which is a centralized team Facebook set up to help its users stay connected an engaged. For example, Zuck said that through this team, the company found that members need to have at least ten friends to have enough content in the news feed to come back to the site. So Facebook reengineered the whole flow of the site when someone signs in to focus on having people find other people to connect with, so that people can get connected with friends (and meet that minimum) right away. Zuckerberg said that the company has exported this idea to another startups, including Dropbox. “Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.”

When Livingston asked what surprised Zuck most in the history of building Facebook, he replied honestly, “most things were surprising.” “I don’t pretend that I had any idea that I was doing. I always felt like we were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long it took for them to build our product,” he said laughing, referring to Google’s newly launched social product Google+. “You are going to make a ton of mistakes, you don’t get judged by that.”

As for what Facebook’s future is, Zuck shed some light on his vision for the network. “I think the story that we look back will be the apps and things that are built on top of Facebook. The past five years have been about being connecting people and the next five to ten years are about what are all the things that can be built now that these connections are in place.”

And I’ll leave you with one of Zuck’s more memorable quotes from the talk, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.”

Crunchbase

Y COMBINATOR

FACEBOOK

Company: Y Combinator

Website: ycombinator.com

Launch Date: January 4, 2005

Funding: $10.3M

Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with “good” ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in...

Learn more

Company: Facebook

Website: facebook.com

Launch Date: January 2, 2004

Funding: $2.34B

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term...

Learn more

via techcrunch.com

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Happy Halloween WT Style #lol

2011-10-30T11:59:00.001-04:00

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Social Networking Startup Unthink... Sounds boring

2011-10-27T13:39:00.001-04:00

First of all, they have a negative marketing campaign. "Taking down Facebook". Really? GFY! If they were so much better than Facebook, then they would not have to mention them to get attention. Second, Natasha Dedis, has the lamest story ever. Natash, I don't care about you turning your kid into a social outcast by not letting him join Facebook. Get over yourself. Third, Unthink's value proposition. You can decide which brands you want to let advertise to you? Or you can pay monthly to be ad free? Does anyone really dislike ads that much? Yes they are mostly annoying, but ad can be answers. Ads are how you find out about new products or services that are relevant to you. Personally, I like that Facebook sells my data to advertisers so they can spend the time to curate a mix of ads that I will likely find interesting or useful. I would demo the site to see if it does have any new functionality or ux, but I don't want to give them the hit. Here's the article:

via pcmag.com

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Marketing Strategy Tips: Social Media Campaigns for Millennials

2011-10-27T11:51:00.001-04:00

Takeaway: You campagin must have the following: Utilitly, Entertainment, Rewards, Recogonition.

6 Pro Tips for Marketing to Digital Natives

by Lauren Drell

The Behind the Social Media Campaign Series is supported by Oneupweb, a relentless digital marketing agency focused on search, social, and design for mid-to-enterprise level brands. Download our free digital marketing magazine, The Merge, and our bonus one-of-a-kind cookbook.

Are you trying to reach an audience of 17 to 34-year-olds? They’re “Millennials” — those who came of age in a post-Internet world — and they’re unlike the consumers that came before them. Millennials can sniff the hard sell, and they won’t buy it. The way to win over these digital natives is to add some value, provide utility, entertain, acknowledge their individuality and get friends involved.

Most importantly, be mobile — it’s less a tip than it is a must. Millennials grew up on the Internet, and they’re extremely connected. On average, they have 2.4 devices, between smartphones, tablets, laptops and Wi-Fi music players. They’re more likely to research a product on their mobile device than Gen X, and they’re pretty much always connected. Intent to purchase desktop computers is falling, and smartphone penetration is on the rise, expected to hit 38% by the end of 2011, making mobile even more of a priority for this demographic.

So, if you want to market to millennials, here are six tips for reaching and converting them.

1. Cater to Their Needs

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According to Matt Britton, the founder and CEO of millennial marketing agency Mr Youth, the key to appealing to this demographic is driven by five major needs:

Utility: Millennials are multitaskers. They have 15 tabs open in their Chrome browser while their iPhones push Twitter alerts and their Facebook feeds are blowing up. They don’t want their time to be wasted, so you’re best suited by offering tools to help streamline their day, as opposed to adding one more thing to check. Britton cites the Urban Daddy app as a great tool — it’s a branded app that helps millennials figure out their “next move” by inputting various factors like location, day of the week and desired “scene.” This functional app positions Urban Daddy as a useful tastemaker for the millennial lifestyle.

Entertainment: The average YouTube user spends 15 to 25 minutes per day on the site — we like being entertained. And since traditional media consumption is being turned on its head by streaming services, brands need to find a new way to get in front of their audiences and entertain them. Britton says Intel’s Museum of Me App is a great example of branded content that’s entertaining and interesting, all while appealing to the narcissism of the “me generation.”

Information: The Internet has put a ridiculous amount of information at our fingertips, and one huge reason we use the web is to find more of it. Therefore, brands can play a huge role in content creation, using platforms likeTumblr to build a brand and publish content, as if it were a media company. Britton cites the French Connection YouTube channel‘s webisodes as a stellar content series. The webisodes features videos “as told by” French Connection apparel — the magic dress (above), the jumper, the blouse — to show off the season’s pieces. The videos are quirky and entertaining, but most of all, they position French Connection as a fashion-forward and digital-savvy brand.

Rewards: Who doesn’t love swag? For millennials — who are either in school or haven’t amassed much savings yet since they’re relatively new to the workforce — swag is valued social currency. But rewarding is most effective as a retention tool, and not an acquisition tool, Britton says. Offering a prize to your 10,000th follower might get you a few more fans, but they’re only there for the free stuff and not because they love and live your brand. On the other hand, rewarding your existing fans is a great way to bolster their connection to your company. Whether you’re offering first-to-know content, an exclusive coupon or a prize, be sure to reward the existing fans who got you where you are today. These are your loyal fans who are most likely to stick with you, unlike a fair-weather swag junkie.

Recognition: Be appreciative of your fans’ interest and support of your brand (it doesn’t have to be monetary — even a “thank you” will go a long way). Branding isn’t just important for companies — millennials are all building their own personal brands, too. If they get a shout-out or their work is selected in a UGC campaign, that’s going to help them build their brand. Getting a nod from a well-respected brand — like when Honda mowed a fan’s name into the lawn at headquarters as part of its “We’re fans of you, too” campaign — goes a long way toward fan retention. Britton says recognition of this nature is “a longer path” that will lead to more brand loyalty over time as deeper relationships are formed between consumers and brands.

2. Don’t Be Conventional

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That 30-second spot during primetime TV isn’t going to get you many millennial eyeballs. This demographic is increasingly reliant on DVR (if they even have a TV) and streaming services, like Hulu and Netflix (well, less now than before). With a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet, digital natives won’t be paying much attention to traditional commercials.

Millennials have grown up in an ad-infested world. They know when they’re being marketed to, and they don’t like it. Your marketing has to be clever. It has to evoke emotions. Google held out to do commercials until the2010 Super Bowl, but once it did, the company nailed it with spots like “It Gets Better,” “Dear Sophie,” “Justin Bieber” and “Lady Gaga,” all of which have millions of views online and are chill-inducing and emotional accounts of the power of the web. They’re part of Google’s largest-ever offline ad campaign, and they’re at once entertaining, inspiring and beautiful, especially to the always-connected millennials who don’t even know what the world was like before the Internet.

3. Gamify With Friends

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In the 1990s, gamers were stereotyped as basement-dwelling, anti-social types. Then games like World of Warcraft let gamers play with others — though they couldn’t see them and didn’t know them personally. But Zynga and games like Words With Friends (see the tribute above for proof that people really like this game) let you play with your friends, serving to strengthen bonds, foster friendly competition and help people keep in touch. Gaming has evolved from a solo activity to a fun and engaging group activity, and game mechanics are key to capturing — and keeping — the attention of digital natives.

It’s important to realize that there are “game-y” games, like FarmVille, and there are real-life games, which add game mechanics to the real world. All it takes to gamify is to offer points or pit friends against one another with a leaderboard, like with SCVNGR and its spinoff, LevelUp. Through LevelUp, brands can offer the “$10 for $20 worth of food” kind of rewards that, when redeemed, unlock the next “level” of even more savings, thereby enticing the consumer to become a repeat customer — it’s a “the more you play, the more you win” model that can quickly become addicting.

“LevelUp turns the daily deal space on its face, turning value to the consumer immediately, which is very much a millennial characteristic — now, now, now,” says Chris Mahl, chief brand alchemist at SCVNGR.

Millennials love competition and crave higher levels of engagement, so if you throw some competition in the mix — look at fantasy football engagement — you’ll get a highly interested and focused audience.

4. Give Them Ownership

Popout

Millennials tend to be brand-loyal, and they want to have a stake in the company as a sort of reward for their loyalty. They don’t want to just consume content, they want to participate and create content. Just look at Doritos’ user-generated Super Bowl ad and SCVNGR‘s create-your-own-challenge aspect, which Mahl says is a great way to engage millennials and lets them become authors of the game.

“Millennials are creators, not followers,” says Mahl. “They’re not about being told to do something — they’re about creating it themselves.”

5. Let Them Discover

Popout

Digital natives have big egos — they want to be the first person to talk about something, which might explain the generation’s propensity to share on social sites. This inclination toward early adoption and discovery is part of why sites like Pandora and Spotify are so successful. Spotify’s Facebook integration is seamless — you can play and pause songs on Spotify through Facebook — which makes it easy to use, but the coolest part is that you can also see what your friends are listening to at that very moment. Want a listen? Press play in Facebook and the song will start in your Spotify. Spotify spots trend amongst your friends, basically saying “Look, this college friend and this high school friend have both been listening to Portugal. The Man.” It’s a noninvasive and seamless way to share your music library with your friends and to discover new bands from your friends’ libraries, not to mention promote Spotify.

As mentioned above, Pepsi could get away with Britney Spears sipping from a can in front of a massive Pepsi sign ten years ago. But for Pepsi’s millennial sibling, Mountain Dew, that unabashed advertising just wouldn’t fly. Piggybacking off the notion that millennials crave finding things first, Mountain Dew created an in-house record label, Green Label Sound, to simultaneously market the drink and help up-and-coming artists break through.

“We don’t want to be on what’s hot right now, we want to be on what’s next,” says Hudson Sullivan, the GLS brand manager. GLS broke Matt & Kim, the Cool Kids and Chromeo, and the label prides itself on finding peoplefirst so GLS and its audience can “discover” the artist and become a part of the early journey to fame, says Sullivan. GLS fans get sneak peaks, first listens and the aforementioned sense of ownership that comes with being a part of something; in this case, it’s embracing the unknown indie artist on his path to success. Mountain Dew doesn’t hide its association with GLS, but GLS events are more GLS-branded than Dew-branded, helping GLS seem less corporate and more indie — the attendees often don’t even realize they’re at a Pepsi event. And unlike a lot of corporate marketing, there seems to be a deeper, more genuine relationship between GLS and the artists (whom Sullivan says have come back to GLS for more partnerships) than in the traditional brand-spokesperson relationship. And because GLS music is not an overt advertisement for the soda and offers entertainment, millennials respond better.

6. Be Everywhere

A photo on the Threadless Instagram feed

New research shows that when consumers are contemplating buying a product, search is the most important factor. Make sure your SEO strategy is well executed, and make your website pop — it should embody the personality of the brand and house all relevant brand information, including links to social pages. As with all marketing, it’s important to have a presence on major players, like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, but you should experiment based on where your segment of millennials are spending time and where you want to go as a brand. Fashion brands, for instance, are experiencing great success with Tumblr and Instagram. Just remember that no one platform holds the key to millennial success — “the channels are only as good as the ideas,” says Britton.

What other tips do you have for marketing to millennials? Stay tuned for our upcoming posts on marketing to baby boomers and kids.

via Mashable

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NYTimes: U.S. Economy Shows Modest Growth

2011-10-27T09:16:00.001-04:00

G.D.P. grew at a 2.5 percent rate, an improvement but not enough to recover ground lost during the recession. http://nyti.ms/sJ9qTu

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How To Generate Inbound Phone Leads: Google Bid-Per-Call

2011-10-26T09:53:00.001-04:00

See the full gallery on Posterous

Google Ad Innovations Page

Bid-Per-Call

Status: Limited Release Availability: US and UK

What It Does

The bid-per-call feature allows you to bid for phone calls, in addition to bidding for clicks, when you show Google search ads on computers and tablets. Now, both your max bid per click (max CPC bid) and max cost-per-call bid (max CPP bid) can influence your ad’s position on the results page. You can increase your ad position and drive more phone calls to your business by setting a bid that is equal to or greater than the $1 minimum call fee.

Bid-per-call requires you to use a Google forwarding number when you activate call extensions. It provides detailed call reporting, so you can have a better sense of the value of calls and clicks your campaigns are generating. Reporting includes:

Cost, completed calls, and phone-through-rate (PTR) summaries at the ad group and campaign level
Call-by-call detail including call time, duration, and caller area code

Why You’d Use It

With bid-per-call, the maximum cost-per-call (CPP) and your call Quality Score will be factored into your Ad Rank. This means that you’ll automatically be rewarded with higher ad position and lower cost per call when your phone number is useful to users. And you’ll have increased control over the position of your ads and your call volume by adjusting your bid. As always, you’ll never pay more than you’re willing to for either a phone call or a click.

MediaPost: Google Bid-Per-Call Launches In AdWords

By Laurie Sullivan | October 25, 2011

Advertisers that see phone calls as a valuable source for leads will now have an option to bid for phone calls alongside clicks when targeting paid-search ads to searchers across computers and tablets. Google plans to roll out the feature in the United States and United Kingdom during the next few weeks.

The bid for phone calls will directly factor into the ranking of ads that return with search results. Higher-ranked ads are more likely to be seen and read by searchers, and can generate more phone calls and clicks. Today, only maximum cost-per-click bids are calculated in Ad Rank, which determines the ad's position.

Marketers that want to use bid-per-call need to select the option to use forwarding numbers from Google when setting up Call Extensions, so that Google's system can measure when a call to the business occurs. This also provides advertisers with summaries of completed calls, phone-through rates, duration of the call, and other metrics directly in AdWords reports.

Equipped with the option, marketers should decide when to consider a call to a click metric. Insurance agents, for example, might find it advantageous to speak with someone on the phone and walk them through the process, rather than ask consumers to fill out a form online.

Havas Digital EVP Rob Griffin said it's more useful to have a lead from a call, compared with a click, when the paid-search ad focuses on local and expects an immediate response, often found in mobile paid search ads.

George Michie, CEO at Rimm Kaufman Group, believes the preference on when to use click vs. call metrics depends on the expected conversion rate, and the conversion rate difference between a caller and a paid-search visitor to a company's Web site. "The call center can lose money unless the conversion rate of a call to the call center is above a threshold. That threshold depends on the industry and the value of a conversion."

Michie also suggests that marketers determine the keyword searches the call center reps can most likely close for that ratio of conversations. For example, marketers might determine the call center reps need to close 25% of their calls to become cost-effective. Marketers might measure or surmise that the call center reps can become twice as effective as the passive Web site at closing calls. For it to make sense to send visitors to the call center, rather than the Web site, the Web conversion rate for those keywords would need to be more than or equal to 12.5% to translate to a 25% conversion rate on the phones, he explains.

"It may be the case that only brand keywords convert at that rate, or it may be that a number of other non-brand keywords convert at that rate as well," Michie said. "Whatever the case, those are the keywords to test pushing toward the call center." Link to Original

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Social Consumers and the Science of Sharing [INFOGRAPHIC]

2011-10-25T22:23:00.001-04:00

via mashable.com by mbooth

Takeaway: Identify opinion leaders and engage them with shareable content.

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North Dakota Strippers Make More Money Than You Do

2011-10-25T16:39:00.001-04:00

via gawker.com

Who would think strippers in North Dakota make as much as they do in Vegas?

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Post PC Computing: Exponential Growth Wave - DigiMix

2011-10-25T12:42:00.001-04:00

via digimix.posterous.com

Lifestyle integration is critical to the growth of emerging technology.

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How To Make Your Apartment Buzzer Ring Every Phone in Your Home - super easy

2011-10-25T12:28:00.001-04:00

via gizmodo.com

Can someone please try this? It's so simple to set up. (I would but I don't have this type of buzzer).

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How Link Placement Affects Clicks on Twitter

2011-10-25T10:45:00.001-04:00

Takeaway: Put your link between the beginning and the middle of the tweet.

How Link Placement Affects Clicks on Twitter

via ReadWriteWeb by John Paul Titlow on 10/24/11

When it comes to crafting social status updates to ensure maximum exposure and click-throughs, many of the tried-and-true methods seem somewhat obvious. Posting at certain times of day, for example, can have a dramatic impact on performance. Makes perfect sense.

Sometimes, effective optimization can come from places you didn't expect, and the only way to find out is by analyzing a large set of cold, hard data.

Sponsor

That's exactly what Dan Zarrella does for a living. The self-proclaimed "social media scientist" at HubSpot examines large datasets from sources like Twitter and Bit.ly and then publishes some of his findings.

Recently, Zarrella discovered that where the link is located in a given tweet can actually have a big impact on how many people click on it. Tweets that included the link about a quarter of the way through the tweet got clicked the most, even though it's common practice to include the link at the tail end of a tweet.

To figure this out, Zarrella took a random sample of 200,000 tweets and used the Bit.ly API to figure out the click-through rate on each one. He cross-referenced that with where the link was located in each tweet and came up with the heat map below.

Discuss

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Is Occupy Wall Street turning into a Phish Fest?

2011-10-25T08:58:00.001-04:00

via gawker.com

Is the Drum Circle About to Kill Occupy Wall Street? Anyone who's been to Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan to check out the Occupy Wall Street encampment leaves thinking one thing: Jesus Christ those drummers are annoying. And now, those drummers—whose constant, irritating presence has earned the wrath of the local community board, as well as most of the occupiers—may bring down the movement itself. Such is the claim of a letter sent to literary magazine n+1, which is putting together an issue devoted to Occupy Wall Street. According to the letter-writer, "[a] trusted friend and respected activist,"

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#rooseveltisland #nyc

2011-10-24T23:46:00.001-04:00

by @michaelsalafia

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#nyc #midtowneast

2011-10-24T20:13:00.001-04:00

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Roosevelt Island Tram Inbound to Manhattan

2011-10-24T16:31:00.001-04:00

by @michaelsalafia

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Top Headlines in Computer Software, Internet

2011-10-24T14:52:00.001-04:00

Computer Software

The Perks of Working at Google, Facebook, Twitter and More - mashable.com

See what perks you get as an employee of Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Eventbrite, Tagged and Gaia.

1525 shares • Read full story • Share

Microsoft’s Augmented Reality 3D HoloDesk Lets You Manipulate 3-D Virtual Images With Your Hands - techcrunch.com

Do you mind if Microsoft drops a little future on you like a ton of bricks? This HoloDesk uses a half-silvered mirror and a Kinect sensor to "see" your hands in 3D space then project visible objects on and around them, allowing...

272 shares • Read full story • Share

Microsoft’s New Patent Agreement with Compal: A New Milestone for Our Android Licensing Program - blogs.technet.com

Microsoft On the Issues is the Microsoft blog on technology policy and corporate affars. On this blog, Microsoft shares thoughts on how thecomputing revolution can accelerate economic growth by enabling companies and...

33 shares • Read full story • Share

Internet

Google Puts A Price On Privacy - searchengineland.com

Earlier this week, Google made a significant change purportedly to better protect the search privacy of users. In reality, it specifically — and deliberately — left a gaping hole open to benefit its bottom line. If you...

408 shares • Read full story • Share

What Google+ Brand Pages Could Look Like [PICS] - mashable.com

Mashable asked some ad agencies to imagine what Google+ brand pages could look like. Here are some examples.

1168 shares • Read full story • Share

Steve’s Final “One More Thing…” - techcrunch.com

Steve Jobs was the ultimate showman. As such, it should be no surprise that he realized the power of following up a great performance with an encore. But unlike many musicians who treat encores as a given add-on for each show,...

485 shares • Read full story • Share

See the Latest Headlines »

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Decibal 2 am

2011-10-22T16:52:00.001-04:00

Posted via email from Lifestyle Innovation Technology

#techdesigntrends

2011-10-20T15:22:00.001-04:00

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Libyan Official Claims Qaddafi Dead After Fall of Stronghold

2011-10-20T08:51:00.001-04:00

VIA NYTIMES.COM

"WHAAAT???"

TRIPOLI, Libya — Libyan fighters said on Thursday that they had routed the last remaining forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafifrom the coastal town of Surt, ending weeks of fierce fighting that had prevented Libya’s interim rulers from declaring the country liberated and starting the transition to an elected government.

Multimedia

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Battle for Libya

The New York Times

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A military spokesman for the interim government, Abdel Rahman Busin, said “Surt is fully liberated.”

Libya’s interim leaders had said they believed that some Qaddafi family members — possibly including Colonel Qaddafi and several of his sons — were hiding in Surt or in Bani Walid, another loyalist bastion that the anti-Qaddafi forces captured several days ago.

Al Jazeera, citing Libyan television, said that the Libyan leader had been captured as fighters seized Surt on Thursday. But previous reports of the capture of high-level Qaddafi officials have proven false, and there was no confirmation from the interim government. Reuters reported that Colonel Qaddafi had been killed. That report, too, was not confirmed by officials.

As rumor of his capture spread in the capital, Tripoli, car horns blared as many celebrated in the streets.

Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, traveling with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Afghanistan, said the department was aware of the reports “on the capture or killing of Muammar Qaddafi” but could not confirm them “at this time.”

Gunfire could still be heard in Surt on Thursday, as former rebel fighters searched houses and chased fleeing loyalist fighters. The anti-Qaddafi fighters killed at least 20 loyalist soldiers trying to escape down the coastal highway, and captured at least 16, The A.P. reported.

There was no immediate comment from Mustapha Abdul Jalil, the interim government’s top official. If confirmed, the capture or killing of Colonel Qaddafi — along with the fall of Surt — would allow Mr. Abdul Jalil to declare the country liberated and in control of its borders, and to start a process that would lead to a general election for a national council within eight months.

The battle for Surt was supposed to have been a postscript to the Libyan conflict, but for weeks soldiers loyal to Colonel Qaddafi, Libya’s deposed leader, fiercely defended the city, first weathering NATO airstrikes and then repeated assaults by anti-Qaddafi fighters. Former rebel leaders were caught off guard by the depth of the divisions in western Libya, where the colonel’s policy of playing favorites and stoking rivalries has resulted in a series of violent confrontations.

Surt emerged as the stage for one of the war’s bloodiest fights, killing and injuring scores on both sides, decimating the city and leading to fears that the weak transitional leaders would not be able to unify the country.

The battle turned nearly two weeks ago, after a prolonged stalemate, when the anti-Qaddafi fighters laid siege to an enormous convention center that the pro-Qaddafi troops had used as a base.

The interim leaders had claimed that the ongoing fighting had prevented them from focusing on other pressing concerns, including the proliferation of armed militias that answered to no central authority.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan, and J. David Goodman from New York.

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Google Updates Presentations in Google Docs

2011-10-19T11:02:00.001-04:00

It's about time. Google Docs collaboration and could functionality is great, but its design features have always been lacking. At the end of the day, these updates are not enough to convince me to switch from Keynote as my primary slideshow production software. What do you think?

An article from PC Magazine has been sent to you. Follow this link to view the article: Google Updates Presentations in Google Docs

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Steve Wozniak Is “A Little Afraid” About The Future Of Apple (TCTV)

2011-10-14T12:52:00.001-04:00

http://tcrn.ch/nxurJ9

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mike.salafia@gmail.com has shared: Facebook Launches New Metric:

2011-10-03T11:21:00.001-04:00

How will you use Facebook's new "People Talking About" metric in your social media strategy?
Facebook Launches New Metric: Source: mashable.com Facebook has introduced a new metric: "People Talking About," in its overhaul of its Pages Insights tool.

mike.salafia@gmail.com sent this using ShareThis.

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Great stats on local ads from Google

2011-10-03T11:06:00.001-04:00

Local. More than 20 percent of desktop searches on Google are related to location. On mobile, this climbs to 40 percent. Location-aware search ads can help you find what you’re looking for more easily by putting thousands of local businesses on the map—literally. More than 270,000 of our advertisers use Location Extensions to attach a business address on at least one ad campaign, connecting more than 1.4 million locations in the U.S. via ads. And, with our mobile ad formats, not only can you call a restaurant directly from the ad, you can also find out how far away the restaurant is located and view a map with directions.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/10/ads-are-just-answers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29

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New study on how Americans share local news

2011-09-26T09:32:00.001-04:00

http://searchengineland.com/pew-internet-diving-into-how-we-access-local-news-94264?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main

Posted by Michael Salafia
http://michaelsalafia.com

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Tumblr score 8x more page views than Wordpress

2011-09-12T15:36:00.001-04:00

Is Tumblr better than Posterous for light blogging?

I need to re-evaluate!

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LetsDrinkTonight.com @Techcrunch Disrupt

2011-09-12T15:32:00.001-04:00

Let's Drink Tonight is an app that helps you find people around you to drink with. Search for new people or only your Facebook friends.

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Felt earth quake at Comm Ave & Dartmouth St Boston MA @msnbc

2011-08-23T14:15:00.001-04:00

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Foursquare let's you check-in to events!

2011-08-19T12:49:00.001-04:00

Foursquare now lets users check into specific events like movies, concerts, and sports games in addition to locations. (Foursquare Blog)

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Amy Winehouse Dead

2011-07-23T12:51:00.001-04:00

via tmz.com

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Summer Office @ Watch Hill Beach

2011-07-13T00:54:00.001-04:00

Sunset in the harbor after a long day of consulting, working out of my summer office on #WatchHill Beach. Six foot breakers. Crystal clear water with strippers swimming through my feet. Surfboards and Tom Fords.

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RunKeeper Adds New Integration To Its Health Graph In Hopes Of Building ‘The Facebook Of Fitness’

2011-06-27T12:51:00.001-04:00

You may have heard about the social graph and the interest graph, but what about the health graph? Thanks to RunKeeper, this term may soon become an oft-used part of your vocabulary. RunKeeper, for those unfamiliar, was founded three years ago as a simple iPhone app and a small online fitness community designed to help runners and other fitness enthusiasts employ smartphone technology to better track, measure, and improve their fitness. Since then, RunKeeper has expanded across mobile platforms, growing into a community of 6 million strong.

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ICANN Approves New Top-Level Domains, Prepare For .whatever

2011-06-20T13:32:00.001-04:00

A handful of not very descriptive top-level domains, such as .com, .net, .org, as well as country-specific TLDs are what the web is currently made of, but this is about to change drastically. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the international authority over top-level domain names, has approved the expansion of generic TLDs which will allow companies and organizations to create domains for their branda (such as .coke) or simply create generic names (such as .car or .green). The option won’t come cheap, though: The application fee alone is $185,000, and the annual fee is $25,000. Still, we can imagine large corporations spending millions on these very soon. If you’re in the business of making phones, owning a “.phone” TLD sounds like a great idea — if you can afford outbidding other phone manufacturers.

Read the full article from Mashable found on linkedin.com

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Scrollability: New Mobile Web UI Framework

2011-06-20T09:50:00.001-04:00

Check out this website I found at joehewitt.github.com

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Gossip Girl Star Blake Lively Rocked By Naked Photos Leak! | PerezHilton.com

2011-05-31T23:22:00.001-04:00

Gossip Girl Star Blake Lively Rocked By Naked Photos Leak!

Filed under: Oops! > Leonardo DiCaprio > Blake Lively > Gossip Girl

via perezhilton.com

future classic

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The Top 10 VC Firms, According To InvestorRank

2011-05-25T10:10:00.001-04:00

via techcrunch.com

Boston has a great tech entrepreneurship community!

*This list is based on "network centrality" and not on actual returns.

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Facebook is a Failure - Gawker

2011-05-19T18:00:00.001-04:00

Facebook wants to be your life. They want you to chat, exchange messages and publish your photos using their services. That's ok. It's a good concept. Too bad Facebook's technology sucks to the point of being unusable at times. [Gizmodo]

via gawker.com

Who doesn't agree?

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NFC payment methods are coming your way.

2011-05-19T17:56:00.001-04:00

MasterCard Study: Youngsters Will Be The Catalyst Of Mobile Payment Adoption

by Jordan Crook on May 19, 2011
NFC payments have already become somewhat of the norm over in Japan, but here in the States, near field communication technology hasn’t quite taken off yet. However, that’s not to say that U.S. Americans aren’t ready to use their cell phone as a wallet, as shown by a study conducted by MasterCard.

via mobilecrunch.com

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Blip.tv is becoming a discovery platform for online video (like original web series)

2011-05-17T18:25:00.001-04:00

via techcrunch.com

Very cool. Blip CEO Mike Hudack admits that the site design is not very good, and explains how they plan to improve it while solving a problem for consumers.

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Social Hiring App

2011-05-17T18:19:00.001-04:00

via techcrunch.com

Exclusive: Jobvite Recruits $15 Million In Funding For Social Hiring Applications

Timely.

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A Little Augmented Reality Check From Metaio

2011-05-17T18:15:00.003-04:00

Anyway, check out the video below and let your imagination run wild for a bit. Let us know what you think is next for Augmented Reality?

via crunchgear.com

So much potential!

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A Little Augmented Reality Check From Metaio

2011-05-17T18:15:00.001-04:00

Anyway, check out the video below and let your imagination run wild for a bit. Let us know what you think is next for Augmented Reality?

via crunchgear.com

So much potential!

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The Most Powerful Man On The Web | LinkedIn

2011-05-16T15:33:00.001-04:00

Check out this website I found at linkedin.com

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Could this be the iPhone 5? | ZDNet

2011-05-16T14:40:00.001-04:00

via zdnet.com

It looks like you can already order a production of iPhone 5 cases from some manufacturers on Alibaba.

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PageLime - Simple CMS for Web Designers

2011-05-11T14:58:00.001-04:00

via pagelime.com

I'm thinking about using this for a client who wants CMS capabilities but doesn't want to be stuck inside of Wordpress or Drupal. Is anyone using this already? What do you think? Have you tried the iPhone app?

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Obama go and brush your shoulders off: I got 99 problems but Bin Laden ain't one!

2011-05-05T18:40:00.001-04:00

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Sircuit Skin Suggah Anti-Aging Lip Plumper

2011-05-04T01:35:00.001-04:00

Posted via email from Style Check

@ReallyVirtual accidentally blogged the OBL takedown as it was happening on Twitter

2011-05-02T15:46:00.001-04:00

ReallyVirtual

via twitter.com

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On Track To Make $8 Million This Year, Refinery29 Invades San Francisco

2011-04-29T11:17:00.001-04:00

CEO Philippe von Borries tells me the company’s is on track to do $8 million in revenues this year, based on the first quarter run-rate. It ended 2010 with $2 million in sales, up from %600,000 in 2009. “Our formula is to engage users with content and convert them into shoppers,” he says. Still, he expects advertising to make up 75 percent of his revenues this year, and the commerce business to make up another 25 percent. The Reserve business is only in New York right now, but will soon launch in San Francisco as well

via techcrunch.com

Interesting hyper-local strategy.

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IntoNow: $0 to$30M in 12 months

2011-04-26T10:01:00.003-04:00

via techcrunch.com

There are some good benchmarks for valuations in the article. IntoNow is rumored to have between $500,000 to a million users.

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IntoNow: $0 to$30M in 12 months

2011-04-26T10:01:00.001-04:00

via techcrunch.com

There are some good benchmarks for valuations in the article. IntoNow is rumored to have between $500,000 to a million users.

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IntoNow: $0 to $30M in 12 month

2011-04-26T09:56:00.001-04:00

Now the big question: what will Yahoo do with IntoNow?

via techcrunch.com

It's rumored they have between 500,000 to a million users. This article has a few good benchmarks for potential valuations and modeling.

Posted via email from Lifestyle Innovation Technology

iPhone Found to Track Users’ Movement

2011-04-21T14:09:00.001-04:00

iPhone Found to Track Users’ Movement
TAXI DAILY NEWS | APRIL 21, 2011
http://pulsene.ws/1mVcI

Two security researchers have uncovered a startling find: that the Apple iPhone secretly keeps track of wherever a user goes, ... Read more

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Over 3 Million Checked-in on ‘Foursquare Day’

2011-04-21T13:57:00.001-04:00

Over 3 Million Checked-in on ‘Foursquare Day’
TAXI DAILY NEWS | APRIL 21, 2011
http://pulsene.ws/1npVV

Over three million people checked-in on Foursquare on its second ever ‘4sqDay’ held on 16 April, the location-based social ... Read more

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