Mediaboss Marketing

Every year, someone writes an article proclaiming that email marketing is dead -- and every year they are proven wrong.

Mobile data traffic is expected to increase sevenfold by 2021, according to Cisco's Visual Networking Index (VNI).

This smartphone usage expansion is due to improvements in network speeds and increasing availability of mobile applications, and the significant consumption of mobile video will all contribute to this growth.

So, how do marketers deliver the right messages to their customers to deliver the best ROI for their campaigns?

A recent report by technology adviser Analysys Mason shows that entertainment is the dominant activity on our smartphones -- accounting for 57 percent of our data usage and almost a third of overall time spent on the device. It analysed real-world usage from over 8,000 smartphones in Germany, India, UK, and US.

But if you are a marketer this might not be good news. It takes significant time and resources to create world-leading entertainment content to post across social channels. How do marketers connect with their audience and get a good return for their efforts?

A report from email marketing platform Emma shows that marketers are already overwhelmed and unable to meet expectations. Over 64 percent of marketers do not have the time or personnel to carry out the marketing activities that they would like to.

There are too many channels to focus on and not enough return for their efforts. It is easy to get side-tracked by flashier social channels, and marketers feel like they have to master every new thing that comes along

A look at customer data and response metrics will show which what channels are most successful for reaching the target audience so that marketers can focus their efforts there. And it is often email -- not social -- that is overlooked.

Now marketers are turning to email marketing to simplify their activities. Every year, someone writes an article proclaiming that email marketing is dead -- and every year they are proven wrong.

Although 'batch-and-blast email marketing' may be dead, timely email marketing campaigns could become key to successful digital marketing programs.

According to Emma, 47 percent of marketers said that email generates the most ROI for their organisation, and 58 percent of them are planning to increase their spending on email marketing in 2018.

With new channels seemingly popping up every day, marketers often feel like they have to be on all social channels all the time. But with the other half of our mobile data usage, we are very likely looking at -- and responding to -- a well-crafted email campaign.

Publishers say affiliates generate more revenue than other types of marketing

A recent survey points to a bright future for affiliate marketing and social engagement.

Why brands can't thrive without a good influencer marketing campaign

Brands are building deeper relationships with influencers using instant social platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.

New report shows top brands outperform their peers by maximising engagement

Revisit your online-only engagement strategy. Social influence leaders dominate the offline and online word-of-mouth consumer conversation, according to a new report.

Crimson Hexagon stores one trillion social media posts for customer analytics

If you posted one public social media post per second, it would take you 31,000 years to reach one trillion posts. That's the number of posts stored in Crimson Hexagon's data repository.

Link:
Social networking and video dominate smartphone use, but email generates the most ROI - ZDNet

China is going to be the second largest spender on social media ads in the next five years. But, according to Forrester, it will not overtake the US anytime soon.

According to the report Chinas Social Networks Have Room to Generate Higher Advertising Revenue, the analyst firm noted significant challenges.

First, Chinas per-capita income is still relatively small. According to the report, China's 2015 GDP per capita was US$6,498 or 13% of the US figures. Meanwhile, China's social ad spending per social user was only US$3.14, a mere 6% of the social ad spending seen in the US. It means that social media growth is not bringing in the ad spend that many hoped.

Another factor is the lower advertising revenue per user for mobile messaging. While WeChat dominates the mobile social networking market in China, the platform is lagging regarding monetizing users. The report noted that WeChat's per use social ad spending is US$3, which is far below China's online display ad spending per online user of US$18. Facebook and Twitter also fare better regarding monetizing users, according to Forrester, especially in matured markets like US, Japan, and South Korea.

Sina Weibo is not doing any better. The report noted that while Weibo is one of the largest social networks in China, it only generated US$567 million in revenue from its 313 million monthly active users in 2016. While Weibos revenues grew by 41%, it was largely from a small base.

Forrester noted that it is still early days. It pointed out that China's social networks are relatively young. Facebook went live in 2004, but WeChat only went online in 2011. It could be that WeChat may be more concerned about growing its base and consolidate its market position before looking to generate more ad revenues.

Also, Tencent, WeChats owner, has other revenue streams. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, they are not under immense pressure to build ad revenues. For example, a large proportion of the firms revenues came from value-added services.

Lastly, China social networks are beginning to monetize video ads. The report noted that it would provide a "meaningful" future boost. For example, Weibo video ads, launched in only Q2 2016, "accounted for 10% of Weibo's advertising revenue in the second half of 2016," it said.

Further reading:

Online ad spend in China impacts the region

Fake news costing advertisers reputation, ad dollars

US ad market shift from mobile-first to mobile-only

More here:
Report: China set to become second largest social ad spender in 5 years - Enterprise Innovation

Most of the research on phone addiction and deprivation is done on students. It's not just the "kids these days," though. At 45, I'm a recovering addict. It's been four months since I uninstalled social networking apps, three months since I last posted on Facebook, and two months since I turned off all notifications on my smartphone. Before I started the detox program, I checked my phone about five times an hour. That's about half as often as the average millennial but about three times as often as most people of my generation in the U.S. Now, I'm down to once an hour.

I think I got hooked because of my job. When I started out as a reporter in the late 1980s, you used your legs to get a story and teletype or dictation to file it from a remote location. It got progressively easier with email, the internet, search engines, social networks, and mobile communication. I could follow developments in several countries through a network of Facebook friends; in Ukraine, politicians became so addicted to Facebook that it became almost pointless to talk to them. In the U.S., much of the high-level political debate occurs on Twitter thanks in no small part to its tweeter in chief. I told myself that maintaining accounts on every social network was necessary for work, but that was absurd: most of these posts and videos were useless to me as a journalist.

I was submerged in the cozy haze of smartphone addiction, and it's hard to say how it differed from substance abuse. "Comfort kills, discomfort creates," wrote Jean Cocteau in his personal account of opium detoxication.

So, like someone trying to wean himself off a substance, I started experimenting with discomfort. That's when I lost the Facebook and Twitter apps, which were eating up most of my screen time. I figured that out from battery use statistics. At first, I felt such acute deprivation that I had to open Facebook and Twitter in a browser. That was less convenient, and my phone use dropped a little, but I wasn't able to completely swear off Facebook for a few more weeks. FOMO -- the fear of missing out -- ruined several mornings; I reverted to peeking for a couple of days, then forced myself to stop.

As Cocteau wrote, "I am not a detoxicated person proud of his effort. I am ashamed of having been chased out of this supernatural world after which health resembled a bad movie in which ministers inaugurate a statue." After having kicked opium, Cocteau still had alcohol and cocaine. I kept updating and reading Twitter, although I gradually cut down on arguing with people on it -- that had been time-consuming and sometimes emotionally draining. Now, I'm down to 30 minutes of Twitter a day: That's enough for work.

We touch our smartphones -- tap, click, swipe -- more than 2,500 times a day. That's probably 100 times more often than we touch our partner. The reason we do it is that the phone constantly demands attention by sending us notifications. It does so every time someone wants to connect with us, every time something changes in an app, every time an artificially intelligent entity decides we need information. Notifications have a barely veiled commercial purpose: Once we start playing with the phone, we're likely to open more apps, see more ads, buy more stuff.

It's relatively easy to retake control; I went into my phone's settings and banned every one of the 112 apps from sending notifications. Now, I only check my personal and corporate email accounts, as well as two messenger apps, when I want to, not when my device wants me to. That means my friends must wait longer than they used to for a response. They haven't noticed -- or at least they haven't commented on it. We overestimate the need for immediacy in communication; perhaps our kids don't because they live their addiction to a greater extent than we do, but an adult finds it easy to wait for a response.

Recovering addicts know it's impossible to be perfectly clean: Even if you don't use your favorite substance, you miss it. At the end of his opium essay, Cocteau wrote wistfully that perhaps "the young" might someday discover "a regime that would allow one to keep the benefits of the poppy" without getting addicted. That remains impossible for drugs but maybe not for smartphones.

After reasserting control over my digital life, I'm nearly ready to take further steps. My next goal is to be able to use it as an electronic book reader without ever switching from the Kindle app to the browser or the email and messenger apps. I expect a boost in reading speed, another way to battle my FOMO. A forced experiment during a two-week holiday in the south of France without high-speed internet produced hopeful results.

As I stood in a chapel Cocteau designed in the hills above Frejus, I felt healthier, able to breathe easier, almost capable of relearning how to lose myself in the company of my beloved wife and children, who are, of course, fighting their own battles with gadget addiction. Perhaps our lives can be a little more like their pre-iPhone versions. If Cocteau could kick his habit, so can we.

This column was originally published on Bloomberg and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

More:
How I'm Beating My Smartphone Addiction - Money Magazine

How did Mark Zuckerberg change the world? He built a global community that brings people closer together. The origins of Facebook are available to the general public. Everyone is familiar with the story of building social network platform that will greatly impact human relations and economy. Mark's vision of community opened a door to many variations of social media network platforms that today exist. Jack Dorsey created Twitter in March 2006. Rome may not have been built in a day, but Twitter was built in just two weeks, says Jack.

A few years later Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger built a pared - down photo app today known as Instagram.

Facebook has now 2 billion monthly users, Twitter 328 million and Instagram 700 million worldwide users.

Mark did pave the way for many new social media networks. He got one brilliant idea that greatly impacted the humanity. However, other social media channels were created only because their CEOs were smart enough to recognize good opportunity at the right time. Facebook did all of the hard work and now building a social network website from scratch is a lot easier process than before. Nowadays, creating a social media network can be done quick by following certain unwritten rules and regulations.

How to build a social media network/community website from scratch? What does this mean from business and development point of view?

I've compiled a list of 8 steps that you need to follow in the process:

1. Identify your community

If you don't want to shoot in a dark and have financial losses you need to identify your community. The process of identification needs to be done in the brainstorming stage. Social network platform is created to meet certain needs of the population. Identifying preferences and dislikes of your community will help you in better understanding the psychological factors that affect them as a consumer and what you can do to get their attention. Sometimes the need for what you are offering won't exist on the market, that's why gathered demographics and psychographics data will give you the power to trigger and create that need.

2. Define the features and functions

The definition of the features and functions is tightly related to the quality of the identification of your community. Your community wants and needs will shape and outline the features of developing a social network website. What do you want your users to do? How will you define the privacy of the data?

The overall vision of your website is crucial. Macro scan that will break things down into categories such as user functions, administrative functions, and advertising is a must thing to do.

Defining the type of data that will circulate, what they can post, how they will register and what automation you should use is only the beginning. There are a lot of things to be considered at this phase.

3. Choose the right technology

Identifying the features and functions of your social media network will determine the platform and the company where you can create your own network. The biggest issue at this stage is the doubt about what method will be effective and efficient for your social media network. Evaluating technology is something that must be done by professionals. Hiring a consultant to help you compare technologies is a great solution. It will save you time and money.

If you choose to do it by yourself then you need to prepare list of relevant questions to ask. You can apply different CMS such as Ning, Drupal, Ruby on Rails, or .Net

The questions will allow you to see if their technology and solutions completely support your idea.

The last thing you can do is analyze existent social networking platforms and what building technologies they have used. This learning process will help you figure out various issues and opportunities for your social media network. Here's a few other useful tips when choosing which social network is right for you.

4. A must have structure

Once the user-specific features are listed, you must prepare the growth environment. Certain general rules apply for building all web pages and are out of huge importance for your social media networking platform since you are trying to engage users in social activity and keep them longer on your site. There are three must have pillars that you need to incorporate if you want your social media network to be successful and profitable.

Customer service - Partnering with a hosting company can change your life. They will deal with technical issues and any other issue related to your platform.

Security - Use reliable security systems that will make your users feel like they can do everything on your social media platform without worrying about privacy intrusion and data leaks.

Scalability - When you start building a social network from scratch you have to consider growth. Facebook was not familiar with the fact that it will grow to this extent. Mark was prepared for growth even when he wasn't sure that he will achieve global success. Your social media platform has to be able to expand easily and quickly so it can follow the pace of your growth.

5. Design Activity Stream

What is a social network site without activity stream? Nothing. Nowadays, activity streams are the core of every social media website. Facebook introduced this feature first and since he sets the standards on the market, the concept went mainstream and affected everyone. The fascination people have with their friend's activity is real. We want to know what they are doing, how they are feeling every moment of the day. Failing to develop quality activity stream can affect the attractiveness of your social media network. This is the focal point and the driving force behind the success of launching a social network. You can use Joomla 's plug ins or Drupal's activity stream module that accomplishes this very well

For example, activity feed of Ning allows you to connect your network to Facebook, Twitter or to add RSS feed. Stay always tuned with the comments, likes and shares, which are shown in your news feed. You can make publications in the form of tweet or post, and decide what to show in your activity feed, and who can see your updates. These features let you highly customize your network.

6. Create Status Update Features

Status updates are crucial. Every social media user wants to express their feelings and thoughts freely anytime of the day. You need to design the perfect tools that will make the status updates pleasurable and easy experience. Even though Facebook popularized the activity stream, Twitter made the status update another mainstream aspect of social media sites. Status updates are incredibly addicting. People are immediately hooked. If this feature is not user-friendly and easy to use they will abandon your social media platform immediately. What can you do to design the perfect status updated tool?

It really depends on the values your social media is built. Twitter made an amazing move by limiting status updates to 140 characters. The developers were grateful for that decision. It made their work so much easier. Of course, you have to make sure to add comment adding options on the status updates. In other words, interaction with other users is everything.

There are a lot of open-source microblogging platforms you can use for developing quality status update features. Laconi.ca or Identi.ca are perfect for it. If you are using content management system like Joomla, it is easy to make a content type that has a limited number of characters.

7. Quality Viewing Data options

How to increase the engagement level and clicks on the site? You need to create multiple data viewing features that will increase the visibility of the content on your social media platform. Remember, users will see only what you allow them to see. Do you have enough data viewing options available? If the answer is no, then check the list of features you need to make available for your users:

- Popular Upcoming Stories

- Popular Stories in the last 24 hours

- Popular Stories in the last 7 days

- Popular Stories in the last 30 days

- Popular Stories in the last year

Remember when Facebook launched their timeline features? How fascinated everyone was by the fact that they can access history data so easily, with just one click. Users get excited a lot of social data.

The data viewing features must have user - centric design. It must be easy to use and accessible. Everyone has different preferences. Allowing people to access and tailor their experience is a big plus and will keep them coming back again and again to your social network platform.

8. You need to attract the right users

After everything is said and done, in terms of defining the target audience and developing the right features the next step is attracting the right users. There are a lot of tools that will help you create awareness on the market. Facebook was created in a college environment and it was a pioneer in the social media industry. What helped Mark the most is the good old word of mouth. Even though this is a traditional marketing tool is still effective. Before people start talking about your social media they need to be aware of it. Digital marketing has tools to increase awareness. It has the right set of available options that will help you reach your goals and it's cost effective too. Here's how to do it:

1. Email Marketing - Do you have an email database? If you don't, you must create one. Lead generation tools are available and can help you down the line. Unbounce in their article offers the right tips and tools that can help in preparing your email base. After you created your relevant database, prepare engaging templates and use them for newsletters. Don't worry if you are not experienced with email marketing.

2. Blogging - Create your own blog where you will discuss your new social media platform. People like to read useful information. Give them that, focus on what they like and give them the titles they are interested in. The best tactic is to contact blogging influencers and make them write a piece for your social media platform on their blog. Neil Patel applied this technique in his early struggling days and he achieved a lot in terms of traffic and engagement later. You can even monetize your writing endeavors.

3. Engage with people - When other portals mention your social media network or write news about you, you need to act immediately. Engage with them. Make a connection. Build a community. Ask them about another piece of content and reply to that story with your own blog. People appreciate engagement and care.

4. Activate paid ads - Google ads can do wonders. Activate multiple paid ads for a certain period of time. Use different wording for each ad and see what works the best. Through testing find out what gives the best result and focus all your marketing budget there.

With the numerous available resources today, creating a social media platform is easier than it was in the past. Doing a quality research is a must activity before you start with anything else. The right information can save you time and resources. There are three types of companies that have emerged in the space of white label social networking according to Techcrunch.

In their article, they review the best social media building tools and rank them based on quality. Remember to focus on the tools that will benefit your idea the most. Focus on the core values of your social media platform and build it the best you can. Success is inevitable if you plan everything the right wat. Who knows, maybe your idea will change social media forever.

The rest is here:
How to Create Powerful Social Network Platform in 8 Steps | Inc.com - Inc.com

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has reportedly written to LinkedIn Corp, questioning the company over a potential breach of the Companies Act. According to sources, the market regulator has alleged that the business-oriented social networking service is providing startups and individuals a platform to raise money publicly.

However, LinkedIn has denied all such allegations. Head of Consumer PR-Asia Pacific, Deepa Sapatnekar stated, LinkedIns vision is to create economic opportunity for the entire global workforce. We can confirm that LinkedIn is not engaged in any activities associated with the securities market.

LinkedIn currently reaches more than 42 Mn users across India, some of whom are angel investors. The platform also hosts several funding groups that claim to offer financing to any registered LinkedIn users involved in entrepreneurial activities.

Popular groups that fall in this list include Startups and Entrepreneurs Get Funded (62,396 members) and Global Investment Network (44,005 members).

Email queries sent to LinkedIn did not elicit a response at the time of publication.

Given the wide user base of the social networking platform, the SEBI believes that the number of investors funding startups through these LinkedIn groups could very well be upwards of 200. This stands in direct violation of the Companies Act, which dictates that a private company securing funding from 200 or more investors should make a public issue of the securities on an established stock exchange.

One angel investor told Livemint requesting anonymity, For practical reasons, these online networks can be used by companies/startups to solicit funding from practically millions of registered users. So, a founder of a company can be a part of such groups and propose detailed funding proposals in the group, which can be broadcast to all the members within a second. In comparison to professional and dedicated Indian online funding platforms, LinkedIn and Facebook have enormous reach.

As per reports, the concerns were raised by the SEBI in a letter to the social networking service, wherein the regulatory body asked the social networking service to share details of the measuresithas adopted to ensure that private placement norms are not violated.

In the second week of August, it was reported that the SEBI is looking to finalise crowdfunding norms. In the case of larger firms, the SEBI is considering exempting crowdfunding activities from the private placement norms under the Companies Act.

Around the same time, the board formed a Committee on Financial and Regulatory Technologies (CFRT) to examine ongoing and medium-term trends related to fintech in the securities and financial markets worldwide. The 10-member CERT committee is being headed by T.V. Mohandas Pai. The committee has been created to advise the market regulator on opportunities and challenges for new solutions and its impact on the countrys securities market.

In a separate development, between July 2017 and August 2017, the Securities and Exchange Board of India sent notices to a dozen angel networks, asking them to reveal details of their fundraising business. The aim, according to a SEBI official, was to know the persons running these platforms, and whether these platforms are operating like exchanges; whether public issue norms are being sidestepped.

As revealed by sources close to the development, LinkedIn is currently working with the SEBI to address concerns surrounding the Companies Act. How it will affect its reach among angel investors and startup founders will likely become clear in the coming months.

(The development was reported by Livemint)

See the rest here:
SEBI Concerned About Fundraising Via Social Networking Firm ... - Inc42 Media