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Smylelytics is specifically designed to take the fear out of data and replace it with a fun, new way to receive the most important results in a Google Analytics account Matt Weber, ROAR!s CEO and the inventor of Smylelytics

Altamonte Springs, Florida (PRWEB) March 27, 2017

Smylelytics, a new proprietary service designed to help business owners better understand and leverage their website performance data, is now available free online.

Smylelytics (https://www.smylelytics.com/) is a customizable, user-friendly, monthly review of a websites Google Analytics data that translates the numerical data into fun, personalized photos that tell businesses, at a glance, if their site is improving, holding steady, or requires attention to improve its contribution to their success. Data analysis is performed by ROAR! Internet Marketing, a 10-year old digital agency and Certified Google Partner.

Matt Weber, ROAR!s CEO and the inventor of Smylelytics, said, Big data doesnt have to be complex, and it doesnt have to be intimidating. I know many businesses are sitting on valuable data that could help strengthen their online presence, but they never looked at it. I created Smylelytics to put valuable data in a context that is simple to understand and enjoyable to use.

Universally regarded as the gold standard in website traffic analysis, Google Analytics provides raw data on website visitor demographics, behavior, technology, and mobile reach. According to W3Techs, as of 2015, Google Analytics is used by 52.9 percent of all Internet websites, more than 10 times the next most popular analytics option, Yandex Metrics.

Smylelytics is specifically designed to take the fear out of data and replace it with a fun, new way to receive the most important results in a Google Analytics account so the average business owner can leverage this information to improve their online presence, said Weber. Having the data doesnt do a business any good if they dont understand and use it.

About ROAR! Specializing in custom website design and direct marketing principles, ROAR! Internet Marketing converts the highest percentage of website visitors into measurable leads and sales for their clients. ROAR! offers digital marketing strategy development, data analysis, custom website design, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, content creation, and local search optimization.

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New Service Helps Businesses Use Internet Data to Improve Online ... - PR Web (press release)

A rebranded startup is today launching an AI-powered social marketing tool that it says can boost engagement, and even write the post.

Post Intelligence, based in San Francisco, was founded in 2015 as MyLikes by ex-Google execs Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan. The company is rebrandingtoday under the new name, as it unveils a beta of its new intelligent social marketing app for Web and Android, called Pi.

Pi tracks social trends and a users history of social posts to predict engagement (e.g., likes and shares), recommend content, learn what works, and even generate posts.

The company said it constructs a deep neural network for each users social media feed to build custom models of engagement prediction. The engagement is predicted as 0 to 10, with 0 showing little engagement, 5 a typical amount and 10 a boost.Reddy told me that Pi can accurately predict 85 percent of the time whether engagement will be less, typical or boosted, with an 80 confidence threshold.

A user can post to multiple pages on multiple platforms through Pi and schedule when the posts will run, for Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Support for Instagram and Snapchat ison the drawing board.

Pi can also recommend links to content that will increase engagement for that post, provide a list of suggested topics and suggest the best posting time to receive the most engagement. Heres a screen shot from the web version:

Over time, Post Intelligence said, the model learns the users posting patterns and can actually construct a short post on a given topic and send it out. Post Intelligence offers the following example of how a user interested in politics might communicate what she wants to send out:

Hi Pi, Post a tweet about how disappointed I am with the new healthcare bill and millions losing insurance. The AI would understand the meaning behind the sentence and in real-time find data about the healthcare bill and compose a tweet with a link to an article about healthcare.

example Totally bummed that 20+ million will be losing health care under the new GOP plan. http://healthcarelink

Pi also has a sponsored content functionality, based on a previous product from the companys days as MyLikes. It is designed to recommend content from more than 30 partnering publishers to social media influencers with more than 10,000 followers on the supported platforms, based on matches to the influencers best-performing content.

The recommended content from Huffington Post, Bored Panda, Simplemost and others can be posted by the influencer as a link with a blurb and image or video. When the influencers followers click on the link, or when they view a shared video, the influencer gets a referral fee.

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This new AI-powered social marketing tool can predict engagement or write the post for you - MarTech Today

Once upon a time, social medias greatest allure for marketers was its price tag. Businesses could engage eager audiences free of charge, boosting brand awareness with a Facebook post instead of dedicating thousands of dollars to costly print advertisement campaigns or television commercials.

Well, the good times rolled and rolled and rolled away.

Social media is now a pay-to-play space, just like those pesky publishing and TV markets it once helped undercut. Organic posting is still important, but heightened competition means marketers must put their money where their mouths are to break out from the crowd.

Of course, determining how social media fits into your marketing budget is difficult to do when youre unsure how much spend is necessary. Allow us to lend a hand.

In order to illustrate best practices in social spending, Brafton tasked two of its brightest minds Associate Director of Social Media Allie Stone and Associate Social Media Manager Erin Hancock with creating an initial plan of attack for a fictional client.

The client in question is a B2B software provider. While the client doesnt have a huge marketing budget, theyre willing to make a reasonable investment in a social media marketing strategy.

Please allow Allie and Erin to walk us through how theyd help this client succeed.

Before any work can be done, objectives must be outlined.

The first step is to discuss what the clients goals are for this particular campaign, Erin said. Do they want to get leads or simply spread the word about their brand?

Furthermore, how is the client measuring the value of the campaign? What specific metrics are they focusing on?

For the sake of argument, well say this client wants leads.

Next up is audience. What are the clients buyer personas? Where are these individuals most active online?

Allie recommended researching which social platforms typically bring in the most traffic and conversions for the clients industry, as well studying any social media campaigns the client has run in the past to determine what worked and what didnt.

Since the client operates in the B2B space, LinkedIn and Twitter were obvious choices.

LinkedIn offers a qualified professional audience you cant get anywhere else, Allie said. It would allow us to target by specific job titles, skills and even groups. Twitter would be good to utilize because of its remarketing capabilities and ability to target by companies competitors.

That latter point means the client could advertise to the followers of other players in its space in addition to people who follow industry influencers.

There is constant change in the software industry, Allie said. Twitter allows your company to join the conversation about these changes as well as provide a level of customer service to current clients.

Cost per click on Twitter ranges from $0.10 to $3. LinkedIn, with its more qualified user base, features a CPC of between $5 and $12.

The team recommended starting with $500 a month on Twitter and $100 a day on LinkedIn. Changes should be made to this budget after analyzing results following the first few months of strategy implementation.

Choosing the platforms to focus on and how much to spend on them is one thing; knowing how to leverage them is another entirely. In this case, the ultimate objective is lead generation.

We would work to educate potential customers, then nurture them down the sales funnel, Allie said. On Twitter, we could promote blogs to educate the audience about the brand.

Using the Twitter pixel, a snippet of code used on website pages to assist with tracking, Braftons social strategists could then remarket to that audience using an asset that is more bottom of the funnel.

On LinkedIn, its best to have an asset highlighting a product or service and how it can provide value for the targeted audience, Allie said. Perhaps a case study or whitepaper. We want to be pushing people to a gated page to take advantage of the qualified audience in hopes of collecting their information. Blogs can also be thrown into the mix to introduce a brand to the audience. If you are promoting a blog, you want to include calls to action to bring readers further into your website and hopefully to product or service pages.

Arguably the most important factor for social media marketing spending is ad targeting. This allows the client to zero in on the most desirable sales prospects.

For LinkedIn, I would target first by by industry and job title, Erin said. Then I would look at different companies. On Twitter, I would target by followers and have the client provide a list of key influencers so we can then target their followers. Otherwise we would create our own list of influencers. A secondary option is to target by interests and keywords.

Next up is measuring results.

Showing return on investment depends on the clients goals and how ads are optimized, Erin said. For example, if the goal is whitepaper downloads that capture lead information, we can optimize the ad for that.

Ad conversions can be tracked in Google Analytics using UTM codes and Google Analytics goals.

If the client can attach a monetary value to a whitepaper download, we are better able to show if these downloads yielded profit, broke even, or worst, lost some money, Allie said. We evaluate the success of each campaign after its run and make adjustments, but often times we like to look at ROI after month three. If we havent hit a groove, then something must be off.

Its also important to remember that social ROI can be particularly difficult to track. While an ad on social media may assist in a conversion, it may not receive full credit depending on how a website visitor ultimately converts.

We still consider this a win, because if they never came across the social ad, they wouldnt have converted down the line, Allie continued. Its definitely worth looking at the path toward conversions in Google Analytics.

Budgets bring limitations, but there are still numerous organic opportunities within social media marketing.

Organic posting and having that presence is a good way to spread the word for free, Erin said. While we cant target like that, posting daily can show your followers youre engaged.

Allie recommended utilizing Twitter cards to collect users information organically. Its also smart to tag businesses in Twitter posts, send content assets to thought leaders through direct messages and generally work to increase engagement with social influencers.

Strike up conversations to get your brand presence out there, Allie said. By using a personal profile for LinkedIn Pulse and discussion posts, you can organically promote assets and get in touch with any connections you might have within your personal network.

Obviously every social media marketing strategy will be different, changing based on goals and overall marketing budget. However, some things remain the same, including the need for careful planning, strategic platform usage and ROI analysis.

The days of making a marketing splash on social for free may be over, but with the right gameplan and experienced strategists, its still very much possible to see socials benefits on a budget.

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Spend smart: Learn how to budget your social marketing - Brafton (blog)

By Justus Leicht 24 March 2017

Under the pretext of combatting fake news and hate speech on the internet, Justice Minister Heiko Maas (Social Democratic Party, SPD) is planning a massive attack on free speech.

On March 14, Maas presented a draft of a so-called network enforcement law (NetzDG), which imposes extensive surveillance and censorship responsibilities on commercial social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. If the draft becomes law, such sites will be required to react immediately to complaints and block obviously illegal content within 24 hours. Other illegal content must be erased within seven days.

The corporations will have to decide on their own what is illegal and, to this end, they will have to set up a contact office in Germany. The law would turn them into investigators, judges and executioners over free speech, as the platform Netzpolitik.org writes.

If they do not live up to their duty to delete content, they are threatened with draconian fines of up to 50 million. These fines are left to the discretion of the Federal Office of Justice and can be imposed even in the case of a single offense, regardless of whether it is intentional or the result of negligence.

The law would apply to social networks that have at least 2 million users registered in Germany. However, the definition of a social network is so broadly formulated that, in addition to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, other services such as Whatsapp and Skype, and even larger email providers and file hosting sites, could fall under its purview.

The providers would be required not only to delete content, but also all copies of it, and would have to prevent it from being uploaded once again. At the same time, the content would have to be saved, possibly indefinitely, for evidentiary purposes.

The provider would be required to inform the user about the deletion and would be required to justify the decision, but a multiple choice justification form would suffice. If the user does not agree with the deletion, he would have to spend months, or even years, on costly legal proceedings. During this time, the deletion would remain in force.

The draft legislation includes more than a dozen clauses whose violation would lead to deletion. In addition to open calls to commit crimes and related offenses, it lists libel, defamation, slander, disparagement of the German president, and insults to religious communities.

As the Berlin law professor Niko Hrting remarked, the law is about unlawful and not punishable content. He insists that this is an important difference. Hrting fears that the law will lead to a situation in which the scope of criminal prohibitions will be expanded considerably, and that the new law will make it much easier to forbid certain statements.

Whether a statement is insulting, disparaging or defamatory has often been the object of a lengthy process of legal dispute. Not infrequently, charges and court actions have been employed in an effort to criminalize and silence personal and political opponents. The Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe has repeatedly, though not always consistently, come to decisions that emphasized the value of free speech.

A well-known example is a decision of the Federal Constitutional Court in 1995. It decided that the statement by the German-Jewish journalist, satirist and writer that soldiers are murderers does not constitute libel, and it authored a decision to this effect. The legal dispute over the poem by the satirist Jan Bhmermann about Turkish President Erdogan is ongoing.

The extremely short inspection period combined with the threat of draconian fines makes it likely that corporations like Facebook or Google will react to reports of supposedly criminal content by erring on the side of caution and deleting it. Every sharp, critical, polemic, ironic or satirical post on a social network would vanish in no time.

The internet and the social networks on which people publicly voice and exchange views independently of the official political institutions, parties and media, have long been a thorn in the side of the ruling elite, which views the right to freedom of speech as a threat.

The draft legislation addresses this quite openly. Hate criminalityaccording to this law almost everythingthat cannot be combatted and pursued effectively, threatens peaceful coexistence in a free, open and democratic society, it says. Then the American election is openly invoked as an example: After the experience in the US election, the combatting of punishable false reports (fake news) has also won high priority in Germany.

To this end, corporations valued in the billions will be tasked with suppressing disagreeable statements and opinions. A lengthy court process, in which a decision in favour of free speech might be reached once again, will be replaced with a short process: a report, followed by deletion and justification by multiple choice.

Several critical journalists have also noted that the real concern of the Justice Minister is the suppression of free speech and criticism. Harald Martenstein wrote an article for Tagesspiegel, Where the government decides what is truth and what is fake, we are in despotism. But precisely now, while we are still excited about Erdogan, Erdogan methods are being prepared here in this country. Justice Minister Heiko Maas has presented draft legislation that reads as though it came from the novel 1984.

On the other hand, representatives of the two ruling parties, the SPD and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), welcomed the planned legislation. Moreover, in the view of the Green Party, which is an opposition party to the government, the law does not go far enough.

Green Party parliamentary representative, Renate Knast, who is the president of the Parliamentary Committee for Law and Consumer Protection, told the German radio station Deutschlandfunk that it is a problem that the draft legislation only covers punishable content! She also wants to suppress free speech that is explicitly not punishable.

Knast left no room for doubt that for her the point of the law is to silence oppositional voices in the population: With 30 million Facebook users in Germany, all of this vulgar behaviour, even when it is not punishable, has an impact on real and virtual life. It has an influence. Even mayors are resigning because they are being molested.

In addition, she advocated viewing social media providers like newspapers and radio stations, which are made directly responsible for the content they bring to the public. This would lead in effect to a comprehensive review of all content and self-censorship in advance of publication rather than afterwards.

The legislation proposed by Justice Minister Maas and the criticism of it by former Green Party Minister of the Environment Knast are indicative of the attitude to basic democratic rights of a future red-red-green federal coalition government. Such a government would not have the slightest interest in defending democratic principles.

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German justice minister proposes internet censorship legislation ... - World Socialist Web Site

OPINION Local messages require a high level of interest before ever becoming national news stories by Carly Mulvihill | Mar 27 2017 | 13 hours ago | Updated 14 hours ago

Last week, The Cavalier Dailys Editorial Board argued in favor of social media as a way to make causes visible for social activism. The board asserted that social media expediently disseminates information and effectively unites people for a single cause. This argument is valid, but the board greatly overestimates the impact of social media as a singular tool for change. Though it is a tool that can bring citizens together, it is not an omnipresent way to automatically start a social movement. Additionally, the board championed social media as a way to turn local news into global news. By presenting an overly broad argument about the effects of social media on activist movements, the board undercut the complexity of activist movements and overestimated the ability of the average person to make change using social media.

The assertion that social media can turn local news into global stories, while valid, is grossly overestimated. Social media websites can reach large groups of people particularly when posts are actively spread but they can also be a wasteland where interesting news and important issues are hidden amongst memes and cat videos. Social media is also rendered ineffective without active users sharing posts from person to person. Though the platforms represent a way for citizens to assert their beliefs and advertise for events, movements can be stunted before they get off the ground if they do not inspire immediate interest from users. One of the biggest misconceptions about social media platforms is that they reach all users around the world and are the easiest way to unite all citizens for social movements.

The board uses recent social protests in the Charlottesville community as evidence of social medias influence, but they ignore the relatively small scope of that success. Given the connections between University students and Charlottesville residents including news organizations, social media platforms and social groups social media platforms do not represent the sole method of organizing. Additionally, though this example demonstrates the positive effects of social media on protesting and activism, the success is contained in a very small area. The organizing power in a small community is certainly commendable but, on a national or international scale, social media is not always as effective as the board asserts.

Social media sites have been given credit for much of the success of the Arab Spring revolutions in the Middle East but, in truth, few of the citizens of these countries had access to social media platforms. In Western countries, there is often an assumption that social media sites are as widely available around the world as they are in the United States and Europe, but in countries with repressive governmental structures, social media platforms are frequently either banned or out of reach to citizens financially. In an interview with protesters years after the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, most cited community groups and mosques as major organizing vehicles for the demonstrations, rather than social media sites. Average citizens did not have the connections to social media which Americans believe they did.

Additionally, social media activism has given rise to the hashtag activism movement, which falls prey to many of the same issues plaguing generic social media activism. Hashtags do represent a uniting factor and a method through which people can communicate with others who have similar interests, but as some activists have noted, nothing is accomplished with just a hashtag. The hashtag must be powerful enough to mobilize large groups of people and, without other resources, it can be difficult to make change. The influence of social media relies heavily on the existence of outside organizational factors, which are ignored by the board. Change does not come with a single keystroke.

Based on the Editorial Boards argument, it seems any college student could start a social movement through the use of social media. Ultimately, though, social media platforms have little reach without preexisting networks of motivated people who want to make change. Especially in countries where repressive governments control media systems, social media lacks the impact which Western leaders assert it has. Furthermore, without a high initial level of interest, local messages can never become international news stories. Social media platforms represent a tool for people to create change but the change is highly overestimated. Though these platforms are a simple way to transmit messages, the ability to reach large, diverse audiences is limited and many more tools are needed to create a successful social movement.

Carly Mulvihill is the Senior Associate Opinion Editor for The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at c.mulvihill@cavalierdaily.com.

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MULVIHILL: The reality of social media activism - University of Virginia The Cavalier Daily