NYTimes.com has undergone cosmetic and under-the-hood changes, its largest in seven long years. It now has a look and feel on par with its print counterpart. The Times’ director for digital design said that the new change was aimed at preserving the brand’s identity.
After Facebook bought Face.com and Yahoo’s purchase of LookFlow, Pinterest has snapped up VisualGraph, a start-up that develops image recognition, machine vision and visual search technologies. This latest acquisition by the pinboard-style photo-sharing website is an indication of the increasing demand for visual search solutions for better discovery and ad-targeting.
After five years of struggling growth, digital video sales soared in 2013. According to the year-end figures provided by Entertainment Retail Association, sales grew a healthy 40.2 per cent at £621.4m. The entertainment retail market is comprised of music, video and games. While all three recorded solid numbers last year, physical disc-based sales still ruled the roost at the top, accounting for over half the market with 56 per cent sales.
If you want to follow an alcohol brand on Twitter, get ready to share your birthdate first. Operational from November 25, Twitter users will need to go through an age-screening process, one the micro-blogging site calls a ‘safe and responsible’ step for brands to connect with the right audience.
For eight long years, Google has been embroiled in a legal dispute with Authors Guild. The bone of contention has been Google Books, a service allowing internet users to locate and preview millions of books from publishers and libraries worldwide. Now, a federal judge has ruled in favor of Google Books, deeming the service to be beneficial in many ways and serving the whole society.
Almost everybody must have seen the new author bios that show up on Google search results. Along with the link and the picture, and a small description of the author show up below the search result of some articles. This is possible with the help of Google+ where Google links all content created by the author to the author’s profile on Google+. In fact, authorship and AuthorRank are important ranking signals for the latest Google search algorithms.
Yahoo seems to be in the mood for some summer purging. It has brought under the axe a total of twelve of its products and services, which will phase out by the end of September. The list includes AltaVista- web’s primeval text based search engine and the more recent Yahoo Axis.
Images are far more interesting than plain textual content and are instantly eye-catching. Even companies that don’t necessarily need to depend on images should use high-quality images on their websites to make their websites much more appealing to customers. The appeal of images can be seen by the fact that Pinterest and Instagram are some of the most popular social networking sites on the planet. These websites only allow users to share images, but smart businesses have been able to use them to promote their products and brands.
To win the high-stakes internet marketing battle with bigger competitors, you need to first get your online marketing approach right. Without a proper approach, you’re literally like a child lost in the woods.
The sale of smartphones overtook that of conventional mobile phones for the first time last year and recent studies show that more than 8% of all web searches are conducted from mobile devices. More importantly, more than 70% of all mobile users ditch their attempts of viewing a website from their mobile devices if it fails to load properly in the first five seconds. Shockingly, more than 50% of all mobile device users admitted to not visiting a website if the first attempt to do so was buggy and unappealing. Such alarming figures have prompted many companies to make their online presence more mobile friendly and experts predict that 2013 will be the year when companies make the dash to become more mobile-friendly.
The whole point of advertising is storytelling and not selling. Brands need to be able to tell their stories in innovative and memorable ways to make a lasting impression on their audiences. We are aware of the different advertising channels available in the digital era – the Internet, television, radio, mobiles, etc.; but do you know how it all started? How we went from painting on cave walls to keep stories alive to how we started making viral videos on YouTube? In this video Joe Sabia – digital artist and master storyteller, reveals the evolution of storytelling in just under four minutes in a charming and humorous way that makes this video a must-watch!
Online marketing – especially content and social media marketing – has been seeing tremendous growth in the last few years. Businesses are finally giving social media and content marketing the due respect they deserve and are incorporating it in their overall marketing strategies. Online marketing is no longer a one time activity done on the fly! More and more companies are joining the online marketing bandwagon because they have seen how successful and cost effective it can be. 2012 was the year of content marketing when surveys showed that a large number of companies were expanding their content marketing budgets and creating and publishing more content online.