2013 may be the year of mobile, but the majority of brands are leaving it out of their strategies. Take a look at this infographic from Uberflip, which delves into brand usage, ad spend projections, and tips on making apps stand out in the crowd. Is your brand ready for mobile?
These days, it seems like every major brand is getting hacked by one activist group or another. Recently, satirical news site, The Onion, was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), who took over The Onion’s social media accounts. As The Onion explains in their blog, the compromise was the result of gullible Onion employees who fell for SEA’s phishing scheme. These phishing schemes (and other hacking incidents) are easy to avoid if you can identify them as suspicious. In order to avoid falling victim to a hack attack, there’s a simple Internet etiquette that you can embrace.
Almost every brand will deal with some level of adversity during its lifetime, whether it’s an unhappy customer or a bad review that snowballs into a social media call to arms. While no company wants to deal with a crisis, there’s a way to show transparency, maturity, and move on quickly, and there’s a way to do… well, exactly the opposite. A prime example: Samy and Amy Bouzaglo, who own Amy’s Baking Company in Scottsdale, AZ, have experienced a great deal of backlash surrounding the unethical and downright crazy business practices that came to light when their episode of Gordon Ramsay’s “Kitchen Nightmares” recently aired. But rather than handling it in a productive way, they took to their Facebook page and went totally off the deep end. Read More
Let’s be real – Facebook Edgerank can be… tricky. That’s why this infographic from PostRocket is so great. It puts the ins and outs of Edgerank in plain English and harnesses the help of the Dark Knight himself – can’t hate on that. Read up and you’ll be an expert faster than you can say, “why so serious?”
Update: On May 13, Zach Epstein of BGR was the first to report that the HTC First will be discontinued. Signs pointed to distress several days ago when, after a little over a month on the shelves, AT&T announced that the price of the First would be dropped from $99.99 to 99¢. Although AT&T claimed the sudden decrease was based on data usage – the provider said First users were liable to buy more to keep overages at bay, thus balancing out the price – it was immediately apparent something deeper was going on. While the First is not officially off the market, a discontinuation announcement seems imminent. Moreover, users are not readily cozying up to Facebook Home itself. While about 60-70 million active devices are compatible with Home, it just hit a million downloads and has a two-star rating in the Google Play store.
The Facebook Phone is here… well, sort of. At a launch event on April 4, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asserted, “Today we’re going to finally talk about that Facebook Phone. More accurately, we’re gonna talk about how you can turn your phone into a Facebook phone.” The big announcement was Facebook Home, a group of apps that essentially makes your smartphone a multi-functional version of the social network. Although this is indeed a unique idea for a social media company – kudos for thinking outside the box – I’m not sure it’s a particularly solid one. Read More
Thinking about ditching your brand’s email marketing strategy? Think again – email isn’t just thriving; it’s on the up-and-up. Open rates are up by 14% and newsletters still prove to be an essential tool for pushing readers toward converting, whether that means making a purchase or setting up a meeting. Check out this infographic from Scoop.it for more promising stats and tips on rocking your email marketing content, time after time.
In my experience, sometimes finding a good webinar can be a shot in the dark. They’re either not what they seem, or it’s a struggle to find good bits of info in the midst of thinly-veiled sales pitches.
However, I thoroughly enjoyed the recent Vocus webinar, “Nice Brands Finish First,” featuring the always-entertaining Peter Shankman. Not only was it full of traditional Shankman quirk, it had great points woven all the way through. Check out my top Shankmanisms (yep, think I coined that) and learn what being nice really means for brands. Read More
Oftentimes, “Typeface” and “Font” is incorrectly used interchangeably. However, there is a difference, non-designers! I decided to ask Michael Tussey, our talented art director, this simple (or is it?) question, “What is the difference between typeface and font?”
Here at Mindgruve, we do custom everything – and forms are no exception. Many times it can be difficult to choose a JavaScript or jQuery library and just go with it, especially one that will work for any project we take on. We needed something flexible, that we could style with as much CSS as possible. I found myself continually hacking plugins to add HTML or a piece of functionality, but it quickly became unmanageable. This was the moment where we decided to build our own jQuery plugin for custom forms, and formIt was born.
When you think of advertising on social media, Pinterest is probably one of the networks furthest from your mind. However, the reason why – no set advertising platform – is exactly the reason why you should be doing it: It’s easy to use the Pinterest format to create intuitive, attention-grabbing content fans will love. Brush up on the essentials with this guide from Prestige Marketing:
