Archive for July, 2017

Hulu Hires Google Exec Kelly Campbell as Chief Marketing Officer – Variety

Kelly Campbell, a longtime Google marketing executive, has joined Hulu as the companys chief marketing officer.

Campbell reports to CEO Mike Hopkins and will start at Hulu later this summer. She assumes the CMO spot after the departure of Jenny Wall, who left Hulu in May.

Hulu is getting a new leader at the marketing helm at a critical juncture: The company just two months ago launched its $40 monthly live-TV subscription service, entering the burgeoning and competitive market for internet-delivered pay TV. Another priority for Hulu is to drive momentum behind its original series after The Handmaids Tale popped earlier this year and licensed content as it faces the Netflix juggernaut and other rivals.

Kelly is a respected, data-driven marketing expert who has consistently proven her ability to develop effective strategies and build strong, high-performing teams, Hopkins said in announcing her hire. With her deep background in performance marketing and in building strong connections between brands and their consumers, shes going to be an invaluable addition to Hulu as we enter the next chapter of our business.

As Hulus CMO, Campbell will oversee brand marketing, performance marketing, media, content marketing, creative, entertainment publicity and consumer research teams.Shes also responsible for developing the strategic vision and voice for Hulus consumer marketing campaigns, the company said.

At Google, where she worked since 2005, Campbell most recently was managing director of global growth marketing for Google Cloud, where she led a global rebranding effort for G Suite, which includes Gmail, Google Docs and Google Drive. Before that, she held multiple senior marketing roles within the company, after leading Googles dedicated client services team for North America and spending a year in Tokyo building out its online sales and operations team there. Prior to joining Google, Campbell worked as an investment banking analyst for JPMorgan Chase and FleetBoston Financial.

Campbell has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of science degree from Vanderbilt University. She live in Manhattan Beach, Calif., with her husband and two sons.

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Hulu Hires Google Exec Kelly Campbell as Chief Marketing Officer - Variety

How to Use Social Media to Increase Brand Loyalty – Search Engine Journal

If you want your social media marketing to be effective, you need active, engaged, and loyal followers.

Social media follower counts are a distraction. Dont focus on this.

Brand loyalty is what really matters. This will naturally ensure long-term engagement on social media.

Fortunately, there are several strategies that can help you build customer loyalty and enhance your brands online image.

Loyalty matters more than follower numbers. Here are a few reasons why:

If your aim is to aggressively cultivate loyal social media followers who will advocate your brand on your behalf, the first thing to consider is your content and social media management strategy.

You cant rely only on your advertising, marketing, and sales strategies to carry you through social media because each platform comes with its unique opportunities and intricacies.

Social media marketing has moved beyond the simple acts of posting and interaction to include advertising, marketing, lead generation, selling, and support combined.

Its essential to create a social media strategy that includes a cohesive plan for PR, SEO, and link building and prospect mining to keep up with your competition.

When focusing on brand loyalty, ask what value you can create for your fans on social media. The answer you come up with needs to be powerful enough to inspire your fans to be loyal. Its a good idea to research your competition when creating your social media strategy.

To inspire brand loyalty on social media, you need to share valuable content or useful content with your followers.

The way you present your content and the formats you choose also matter. In terms of metrics, quality content is what will give you the most ROI shares, likes, comments, and click-throughs.

Visual content gets noticed and shared more via social networks, so its important to factor them in when planning your social media content. Use infographics, videos, screenshots, graphs and visual aids where possible, to make your content more striking and memorable.

Also, ensure that your content is branded, with your logo, colors and chosen typography consistently used on everything you share.

Followers want to interact with real people, not bots or automated content. Ensure that you dont sideline personal interactions as something to do when you have time.

Prioritize personal interactions and use them to show fans your personality. The warmth will keep your followers coming back for more interactions with you.

Some brands use common values and interests to connect with people. For instance, if you enjoy baseball, you can make the occasional baseball reference on your social posts, or talk about current events, news related to it.

Cause based social campaigns are another way to connect with your audience and their values.

People associate others with their strongest personality traits. Thats what you remember about people and thats what lingers on your mind. As a brand, its important to create and consistently display favorable personality traits to build familiarity among people.

These traits can be expressed through content sharing and conversations you have with people. If your routine includes blog content promotion, answering questions related to your industry and commenting on other peoples shares, each of those tasks should be completed in the same voice.

For instance, Life Is A Game blogger Oliver Emberton, rose to fame through his Quora answers, his distinct style of answering questions, with great visuals.

People want to be acknowledged. If you consistently respond to their queries with useful, detailed answers, you can earn their respect. This is probably what you will notice if you look at the historic footprint left by any social media influencer.

You dont have to limit answers to your fans. You can expand your exposure by finding questions asked by anyone, and answering them.

Use keywords related to your industry as search queries to find questions and respond to them with precise and concise answers. Remember to acknowledge any responses you receive and see the conversations through.

Narrow is one Twitter automation tool you can use to find the right people to interact with.

Your followers are most certainly creating content of their own and participating in conversations, possibly related to your industry. You can use social media monitoring to find them and share them, if they are share-worthy. By doing this, you not only earn the loyalty of those followers but encourage other followers to share content related to your brand.

Another great way of managing relationships with followers is through Twitter lists. Add followers who have similar levels of engagement with your brand in Twitter lists, and visit your lists once a week to interact with them.

Finally, dont forget rewards. The right rewards for the best of your followers can be powerful in earning their loyalty. Many brands have loyalty programs to extend to the best of their fans.

You need to be human to connect with your fans.

Simply pushing content doesnt suffice. You have to move beyond that effort to make a lasting impression on your customers and social media followers.

Brand loyalty is an invaluable reward that you earn by truly caring for your followers.

Featured image: Freestocks.org/Unsplash.com Screenshots taken by Jessica Davis, July 2017

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How to Use Social Media to Increase Brand Loyalty - Search Engine Journal

How brands are using AI to close the social commerce loop – Digiday

At Davids Bridal, senior director of global marketing Callie Canfield faced a pressing problem when trying to drive people from the brands social channels to its online store. When the brand would post an imageof new bridesmaid dresses to its Facebook or Instagram, for instance, customers who clicked on it would be dumped into the full online catalog for the bridesmaid dress category. Finding the stylesthey saw in the Facebook photo would require sifting through hundreds of dresses.

We want the customer to click through from Facebook or another social channel to our site, and get to a landing page that shows exactly what they clicked on, said Canfield. But its almost impossible to customize your site that way it would take a major backend overhaul, and were a big, pretty slow-moving company.

To solve this, Davids Bridal has been working with visual commerce platform Curalate in the beta stage of its new Showroom feature, a tool that uses artificial intelligence to create pop-up landing pages for brands to link to on social media. The landing pages pull the exact items promoted on social media, as well as a collection of related items that are populated by Curalates algorithms.

Davids Bridal has tested the Curalate Showroom on Facebook and on its online blog, and Canfield said that in the time since, Davids Bridal has seen 13 times more click-throughs across those platforms and a 40 percent decrease in bounce rate. Other brands testing the feature, including Banana Republic, Forever 21 and Guess, saw an average decrease in bounce rate of 53 percent and a 45 percent increase in time spent on site for shoppers enteringthroughsocial media.

For Davids Bridal, Curalates tools also offer an appealing set of independent data that isnt owned by the platforms theyre working with. Canfield said the brand is part of the beta test forInstagrams shopping tags featureand also uses Curalates Like2Buy platform, which is a third-party shoppable feed accessible to followers through the link in bio on branded Instagram accounts.

Curalate knows whats in the pipeline on the platform side, so they change their platform to make it beneficial for brands, said Canfield. For us, its great to have the analytics. When working with Instagram, you dont really have a good idea about whats working, and its in their interest for you to think something is performing well. Its nice to have a set of independent analytics.

As Instagram has made more progress in developing tools that will help brands drive conversions on the platform, companies that have popped up as intermediaries, like Curalate, have been forced to evolve. Showroom stems from the disconnect between products promoted on social and what customers ultimately are linked to.

Canfield pointed out that this problem is especially persistent in its email marketing, which typically focuses on items related to popular weddingtrends. But, there was no way for the team to send customers who clicked through the email to find all the featured items in one place. Canfield said in the future, she plans to use the Showroom tool for email marketing, as well as on paid Facebook posts, where the brand needs to get the most out of the limited resources it can put into social.

For brands, selling on social media has largely resulted inforfeiting controlto the platform. Curalate CEO Apu Gupta said that makes brands nervous.

Brands have come to realize that they are seeding a lot of information to the various networks, and when customers are making transactions through channels, you worry as a brand who owns that customer, said Gupta. If I start seeding a lot of information about my customer to this third party, what can they do with it? Can they redirect my customer to someone else, the next highest bidder? These are real concerns.

When working with a platform like Curalate, brands are still forfeiting some control. Curalate needs full access to a brands inventory in order to use artificial intelligence to place items in a social-driven showroom. But essentially, Curalates data can corroborate the data coming from a social channel like Facebook.

We have partnerships with Facebook and Pinterest, and theyre really helpful at giving us insight. When we talk with them about whats working best, we can see whether or not thats backed up by Curalates analytics, said Canfield. They all play together.

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How brands are using AI to close the social commerce loop - Digiday

The best free overclocking software 2017 – TechRadar

Its all well and good splashing out for a pre-built PC or putting together a bespoke tower yourself, but whats the point of sinking all that money into it if youre not getting the very best performance out of each component? Thats where overclocking comes in.

Once thought the pastime of acne-ridden, basement-dwelling tech nerds, overclocking has now become one of the most widely used avenues for getting your PC firing on all cylinders.

Weve included some of the best free pieces of overclocking programs available right now, from mainstream utilities that anyone can pick up and use to complicated tools that enable you to tweak even the smallest of elements in pursuit of even more gaming performance.

Intimidated by overclocking? MSI Afterburner makes it easy for even complete beginners to wring extra power from their hardware

One of the oldest overclocking tools out, but still one of the best, MSI Afterburner has become a mainstay on the PC overclock scene. So why is it still so popular?

Well, for a start its very easy to use, making it ideal for newbies and those with an intermediate level of knowledge to push your graphics to their designed limit. Also, unlike EVGA PrecisionX (mentioned below), it supports both Nvidia and AMD processors.

The current version of MSI Afterburner includes a still decent number of utilities, including GPU/shader/memory clock adjustment, the power to adjust advanced fan speed, and the ability to tweak GPU voltage control.

We also like the bespoke hardware monitor included as part of the interface, which effectively tracks the performance of your rig and shows frame rates, etc while youre playing a game.

Sure, its not the most comprehensive of packages, and certainly wont appeal to the hardcore among us, but its still a robust suite that will help transform your games if youre relatively new to the scene.

Download here: MSI Afterburner

If you have an AMD GPU, this is the only overclocking software you need

Unlike MSI Afterburner, AMD Overdrive only supports AMD's own branded GPUs, but it still manages to offer one of the most impressive ways to get your PC running at an invigorated pace. As long as your CPU is of AMD origin (including its chipset), you can start pushing those components like theyve never been tested before. Best of all, the attractive interface provides convenient access to an impressively in-depth set of tools to make this ideal for both relative newcomers and seasoned overclockers.

So what does this brilliant little free overclocking tool offer? For a start, AMD Overdrive enables you to change the clock speed of your RAM and adjust the overall speed of your fans (an incredibly useful utility, especially if youre currently having overheating issues).

The built in status monitor lets you see the state of your processor in real time as you overclock it to the hilt, and with streamlined interface (one thats markedly improved over the years), you can easily and confidently tweak the voltage or clock speeds by simply moving a slider.

Okay, theres a little more to it than that, but we like how cleanly it can distill its utilities down to simple actions.

Download here: AMD Overdrive

Free, convenient overclocking software for Nvidia graphics card owners, with support for up to 10 custom user profiles

Easily one of the most popular overclocking tools on the market today, EVGA PrecisionX has become a must for gamers looking to give their rig or gaming laptop a decent push in the hardware performance stakes.

Unfortunately, EVGA PrecisionX only works with Nvidia graphics cards (sorry, AMD users) so youll need to have something like a GeForce GTX TITAN, 900, 700 or 600 installed.

The latest version supports Microsoft DirectX 12 API, as well as enabling you to change your GPUs clock offset and its memory clock offset. As if that wasnt good enough, EVGA PrecisionX also presents you with the power to overclock your refresh rate and establish up to 10 individual overclocking setups. You can even seamlessly switch between them at will!

This being a free overclocking tool aimed at gamers who want better performance with the minimum of hassle, the freeware offers an easily navigable interface that wont drown you in too many options or utilities.

It might not be as comprehensive as some of the more advanced tools out there, but if youre looking to squeeze out better clock speeds overall, EVGA PrecisionX is an ideal addition to your machine.

Download here: EVGA PrecisionX

Two free programs that will give you an in-depth look at your hardware, helping you see where there's room for improvement

Not all free overclocking tools give you the kind of data you really need to see where you machine can be tweaked or adjusted. Thats where tools like CPU-Z and GPU-Z come in, offering an in-depth look into exactly how your PC or laptop is performing.

CPU-Z enables you to track processor name and number details, determine codenames, identify processes, packages, cache levels and more. It can test the performance of your mainboard and chipset, as well as instantly bringing up memory types, sizes, timings and module specifications (SPD). It can even offer real-time measurements of each core's internal frequency and memory frequency.

Then theres GPU-Z, which supports Nvidia, AMD, ATI and Intel GPUs (so youll definitely have a card thats compatible). The free tool displays adapter, GPU and display information, and provides all the information youll need for overclock, default clocks and 3D clock shenanigans.

Both GPU-Z and CPU-Z work brilliantly alongside all of the overclocking tools in this list, so grab them both and take a peek deep inside your PC.

Download here: CPU-Z Download here: GPU-Z

One for the experts, SetFSB lets you tinker with your PC's front side bus

Weve shown you some of the most popular tools and utilities in the world of overclocking, but what if youre a seasoned PC builder who wants to squeeze every ounce of juice your machine has to offer? Sounds like you need something in-depth and comprehensive thats been designed with overclocking pros in mind say hello to the brilliant little tool that is SetFSB.

Unlike some other overclocking tools, SetFSB is all about making adjustments to your system's front-side bus (FSB), which connects the CPU to the main memory. Its speed is measured in MHz and can vary from 60 to 400 (it can go higher if youre lucky/slightly mad), so the higher the speed, the better the performance. Think of it as plugging yourself directly into the Matrix.

One quick word of warning, though. SetFSB is not for the faint of heart and should only really be used if youre an experienced PC tinkerer and overclock pro. Youll need a strong knowledge of the limits of your motherboard and CPU before tinkering with its settings, otherwise you could end up cooking your machine due to the unbridled precision at your fingertips.

Download here: SetFSB

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The best free overclocking software 2017 - TechRadar

Go on, click here to accept our T&Cs – TechCentral

How often do you see this when youre online, whether downloading a new app or software or signing up for some new service?

Click Agree to Accept our Terms and Conditions

You click on it, but then discover youve just agreed to give up your future first-born child or clean public toilets for a thousand hours.

This is what happened recently to more than 20000 people in the UK when they accepted the terms and conditions for free Wi-Fi that included a commitment to clean public toilets, hug stray dogs and paint snails shells to brighten up their existence.

Thankfully, the Wi-Fi provider, Purple, says it is not going to enforce its community service clause.

But it makes a good point. Purple says it added the spoof clause to its terms and conditions for a two-week period to see if anyone would notice. It said in a statement: The real reason behind our experiment is to highlight the lack of consumer awareness when signing up to use free Wi-Fi.

All users were given the chance to flag up the questionable clause in return for a prize, but remarkably only one individual, which is 0.000045% of all Wi-Fi users throughout the whole two weeks, managed to spot it.

We want free online service and free software, and we want it now. So we readily agree to the terms and conditions despite having little idea what we are agreeing to, and the service provider is in no hurry to tell us.

Thats a concern for everyone who readily accepts free Wi-Fi connections in places such as shopping centres, cafes, restaurants, hotels, bars or any other public Wi-Fi hotspots.

The same concerns apply when it comes to downloading free software and apps which can sometimes come bundled with other software or extensions. If people dont read the terms and conditions, then they wont know what else they are agreeing to install.

We have been warned about these problems for years and yet the recent Purple example shows that people still havent learnt.

Earlier this year, the Australian consumer group Choice raised the issue of licence agreements, terms-of-use agreements, and terms and conditions that people never read.

It gave the example Amazons Kindle Voyage e-reader, which it said had a minimum of eight documents that needed to be read and agreed to when buying the device, as well as documents to be read to use any subscription service.

The total word count is more than 73000, which Choice said would take about nine hours to read. It even tasked someone to read the lot, but heres the abridged version.

While the great majority of tech companies operate lawfully, if not ethically, the process of getting actual informed consent remains problematic. At present, just clicking Agree will do, regardless of what lies buried deep in the many words of those terms and conditions.

One survey in Britain found that only 7% of people read the terms and conditions carefully when signing up for an online service or product.

These documents are typically written in legalese, meaning that only a trained lawyer would be able to understand them properly. Yet the simple act of clicking on a check-box constitutes informed consent in the legal sense.

That same survey found that one in five people said they had suffered as a result of agreeing to terms and conditions without having read them carefully. One in 10 had been locked into a contract for longer than expected because they didnt read the small print.

Choice says lengthy and overly complex contracts should be considered unfair and has called for reform of the law to protect people from such agreements.

With billions of dollars at stake, IT companies need to make it clearer just what the consequences of using that product or service will be, including any potential dangers. If users can give genuinely informed consent, its a win-win situation.

For example, if we know were agreeing that an online product can use some of our personal information and we know what that information is we could receive targeted advertising that might be useful to us, and even be a good fit for our lifestyle.

So, how can we do to make sure people are properly informed in plain language about the consequences of using a product or service?

One solution that already works well is the way Creative Commons includes a human readable summary of its licensing conditions. It breaks it down to the basics then highlights anything out of the ordinary.

Its not difficult to do this, and if you have nothing to hide, the user is unlikely to be scared off by it.

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Go on, click here to accept our T&Cs - TechCentral