Sep 27
Russia, viewed by the Obama administration as hostile to U.S. interests, has discovered what may prove to be a vast pool of oil in one of the world’s most remote places with the help of America’s largest energy company.
Sep 27
A Ferguson Police officer was shot Saturday evening in North St. Louis County, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Police said.
Ferguson, Missouri, police officer was shot Saturday evening, St. Louis County Police spokesman says. The officer was not killed.
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) September 28, 2014
The officer was shot in the arm, KMOV reported. The injury was not lethal, but at the time the condition of the officer was unknown. A suspect had not been found Kelly Jackson of KSDK News said. Police moved on the location of West Florissant and Stein and closed roads to conduct a search.
A heavy police presence on the streets of Ferguson followed news of the shooting.
Police stand in line. #ferguson https://t.co/fckohaGIqv
— deray mckesson (@deray) September 28, 2014
The shooting followed days of protests in Ferguson, after the Ferguson Police Chief issued a video apology to the family of Michael Brown, the unarmed black man fatally shot by a Ferguson police officer earlier this summer.
Reports emerged of the shooting on social media earlier Saturday night.
Bad situation. Reports of a cop killed. Angry cops, angry people in #Ferguson. https://t.co/xRY984owXw
— Antonio French (@AntonioFrench) September 28, 2014
#Breaking Police officer shot in #Ferguson
— KSDK NewsChannel 5 (@ksdknews) September 28, 2014
Police. Everywhere. #ferguson https://t.co/gN79QYzSVf
— deray mckesson (@deray) September 28, 2014
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
Sep 27
New Oculus Rift, the Blackberry Passport and other stories you might've missed
Posted in: Today's Chili
It’s the weekend, ya’ll. So while you sit back and relax, check out our news highlights from the last seven days — we took the new Oculus Rift for a spin, went hands-on with the Blackberry Passport, made an Ello account, and more. Oh, and be sure to…
Sep 27
Eric Holder Replacement Will Be A Woman, Says Longtime Friend Charles Ogletree
Posted in: Today's ChiliAs the dust settled after the abrupt announcement of Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation, the speculation around who will assume the role as the nation’s top justice official has started to swirl.
According to someone who knew Holder well, prognosticators should trim their likely candidates — it will be a woman.
In an interview with MSNBC on Saturday, Holder’s longtime friend and Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree repeatedly referred to the potential replacement as “she.” Pressed by MSNBC’s Alex Witt to reveal his pick for a replacement, Ogletree said, “I’m not gonna put her name out,” reasoning, “I don’t want her to not be able to be confirmed by the Senate.”
Ogletree, who is also considered a mentor to President Barack Obama, had earlier told Witt of his undisclosed pick, “she would be a great attorney general. I think we’re gonna have a long way to go to figure out who she will be — and I hope it will be a woman.”
Holder announced on Thursday that he would step down from the head of the Justice Department, a position he has held since 2009, as soon as a replacement is selected. Obama has yet to announce a replacement for Holder, who was also one of the president’s close friends. There have been many names floated as possibilities, including Former White House Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan, and University of California System President Janet Napolitano.
There are many issues that await the next Attorney General, including security amid the threat of ISIS, concern over government surveillance, and prosecuting misconduct in the financial sector. But first, Obama’s eventual nominee must clear confirmation in a divided Senate, which would be all the more challenging should Republicans take control of the chamber after midterm elections.
(H/T BuzzFeed)
Sep 27
Did you think becoming an internet music celebrity was hard? Pshhhhhh. All you have to do is repeat stuff. Seriously. Just repeat stuff.
Sep 27
It looks like the smartwatch is here to stay, and now that Apple has shown off their own attempt at creating some svelte looking electronic wrist candy, you can guarantee more people will be wearing them in the near future. But are smartwatches…
Sep 27
I can’t believe the amount of content targeting small business rhapsodizing the endless rewards bigger brands are generating with social media marketing.
Some of it is disingenuous at best, and the absolute wrong marketing strategy for many small businesses.
Yes, you can extrapolate value, insight and go to market tactics.
But, many of you do not have the marketing resources, staff and/or technical expertise to create these types of social media campaigns!
There are no sages in marketing, self included.
Success is determined by deploying an iterative marketing strategy in context with your business (size, staff, technical expertise, budget) and then assessing the data and adjusting your tactical marketing (process, platforms, content) accordingly.
Frequently Ignored Topics to be Aware Of!
The endless hype about the joys of using Facebook to generate immediate high value return!
It’s a false line on the horizon – success on Facebook necessitates targeted ads (it’s an Ad Platform) sharing and measuring the ROI of well researched content with a granular understanding of how to drive engagement (shares and likes).
Data is exploding across the web and you need a great community manager who can curate content, writes well, can run a Facebook Ad Campaign and with some CRM knowledge as well. Expect to pay a good community manager $40-60K per year, assuming you can find a good one.
- No reference to conversion metrics for social media traffic versus organic traffic via content marketing activities. Yes, social traffic does convert well for many consumer facing brands but for most B2B brands social traffic does not convert well, unless via Twitter or LinkedIn. Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and/or Vine traffic drives significantly lower conversion metrics. Attention spans are dropping and today’s smartphone enabled consumers and professionals don’t have a lot of patience.
- Telling brands to jump on multiple social media channels simultaneously to better leverage how fragmented the web is becoming. This is not practical for most businesses: start small on one social platform, make a success of it and go from there.
- Not letting you know barriers to entry are rising: social platforms are noisy and growth has slowed on Twitter and Facebook.
- No recognition of the importance of curating and sharing great content across social media platforms: long and short form, stellar images, ebooks, WhitePapers, videos. Selfies may work for celebrities but not for most SMB brands. Recognize content sharing is platform agnostic: it’s everywhere and anything and has to be well curated.
- Free is not “free” on social media platforms: there are burdened costs for each platform: community management, content development costs, feature sets are evolving and connectivity with cloud apps/services requires some sophistication, contacting customer service can be daunting if not impossible for some of thee platforms like Pinterest.
- One of our favorites: “how to do social media in ten minutes a day” – doable but marketing ROI for most brands is not going to be significant. Yes, it has worked for a very small minority of users on social media networks; but, for most of you it will be an iterative process with fans/followers counts building over time.
Your Best Marketing Strategy
- Ignore the sex and sizzle associated with social media until you stand up a blog that speaks to customers, with 30-50 blog posts in place; then, start on one social channel; for B2B that’s Twitter and LinkedIn for B2C: Facebook (with an associated marketing budget).
- As above, when your content strategy (blog) is in place select one social channel and create an engaged audience. Don’t try to establish a presence on 3-4 channels simultaneously unless you have staffing in place and a marketing budget that matches your “platform reach.”
- A great web site is the core of any social media marketing strategy: well designed, great content, smartphone accessible, integrated calls to action, analytics in place, on-board sales funnel, stellar images and functional menus.
- Email marketing still delivers wonderful returns for small businesses. It may have fallen out of favor but it’s still a great way to connect with and build rapport with customers.
- Be a brand with a solid persona identification (who is your target market?) – every start-up from Dehli to San Francisco knows how to analyze who their customer is and then builds out outbound marketing around this target.
- Stellar syndicated content may generate much better marketing ROI than social. Regardless, you can’t “do social” without great content.
- Don’t get on the wrong channel: Facebook is great for consumer brands; but Twitter and LinkedIn deliver 5-10X times more traffic and leads for B2B brands.
- Create short and long term goals: web site traffic, followers/likes, promote events. Short term are 60-120 days; long term goals: are six months to a year.
- Create great content that resonates with your target community.
- Get everyone on board with the strategy.
- Have some personality but if your on Twitter or LinkedIn your customers aren’t going to care about “selfies” on vacation; save these for your personal account.
- The most important social media marketing strategy is a blog: don’t get on any social channel unless you have a blog in place.
- Start slow and don’t expect to get overnight traction across the social web. It’s gonna take time and sharing great content.
- Authenticity and engagement are success drivers.
- Pay it forward on social channels when/where you can. That’s been part of the “social culture” going back to CompuServe days and still relevant. People on these social channels are paying attention to what you are doing.
Behind Every Great Marketing Campaign Including Social is Identifying your Brand’s Persona
- Where does your user “live” in GEO targeted and digital sense?
- What are income, levels, marital status, likes, dislikes?
- What problem are you solving for them? (B2B and B2C brands)
- Does your content map to their profiles and is it shared on the right social channel(s)?
- Are you creating a meaningful brand experience for your optimum persona? (“I like doing business with……”)
- Have you taken a hard look at your direct competitors to help you identify your competitive position?
- Have you identified who the “super personas” who are influencers in your market are? How do you reach them?
30K Foot Review for Busy Execs
- Great social media campaigns take time, technical expertise and some level of marketing sophistication.
- Creativity with content and images helps your brand stand out in a noisy world.
- Test engagement metrics and retest on a continual basis.
- A small engaged audience is better than a large non-engaged audience: we block 10-15% of our Followers on Twitter based on zero engagement via their accounts. Just broadcasting!
- We love Facebook and its inherent ability to deliver great marketing ROI. But know it’s a Ad Platform disguised as a social network.
- Not all traffic is created equally: social traffic can vary significantly. B2B: Twitter & LinkedIn & maybe G+ B2C: Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine and/or SnapChat
- Make sure someone on staff is technically competent or you have an outsourcing partner or agency to help with some of the back end tech heavy lifting.
Got questions, please let me know on Twitter or comments below.
Related Posts on Strategic and Tactical Marketing
“How Content Heroes and Heroines are Made Not Born”
“What I Learned About Social Media from Andy Warhol”
“How to Generate More Revenue and Lower Costs with the Cloud”
“Why Every Marketing Campaign Lives or Dies on this Foundation”
“Four Critical Marketing Strategies to Stand out in Today’s Noisy World”
“Why so Many Web Sites are Lipstick on a Pig”
Sep 27
PROVO, Utah (AP) — A group of Brigham Young University students is protesting the Mormon church-owned school’s ban on something its namesake once sported: a beard.
About 50 students, some donning paper beards, biked, skateboarded or rollerbladed their way from the Provo City Library to campus during the “Bike for Beards” protest on Friday night.
“I love BYU. I love being a student here,” protest organizer Shane Pittson said. “But the rule on beards I find particularly outdated.”
The 23-year-old international studies major and other students have launched a petition drive to get the school to lift the ban.
University spokeswoman Carri Jenkins said students agree to its grooming standards before their first day of class and the beard ban was set in place by students.
“It’s nothing against beards. It’s just how we choose to represent ourselves at the university,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune (http://bit.ly/1pkn2fh ).
Brigham Young and many other early leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints grew beards as they aged. A statue of Young in downtown Salt Lake City depicts him with a beard, but another at BYU shows him clean-shaven.
The BYU Honor Code, created in the 1940s, states that “men are expected to be clean-shaven” and beards are not acceptable. But students can be exempted from the prohibition if they have a medical condition such as scarring.
Among other things, the university’s mandatory student contract also forbids premarital sex, alcohol consumption and tattoos.
In 1971, then-university President Dallin Oaks defended the beard ban as “contemporary and pragmatic,” but he said he would be surprised if it was not eventually changed.
At the time, Oaks said beards and long hair on men were elements of “slovenly appearance” linked to “protest, revolution and rebellion against authority. They are also symbols of hippie and drug culture.”
Pittson enjoyed growing his own beard this summer, but he shaved before the protest.
“I figured it would make more of an impact to say, `I respect the university and here I am abiding by the rules but asking for change,’ ” he told The Tribune.
—
Information from: The Salt Lake Tribune, http://www.sltrib.com
Sep 27
The gunman parked his black Honda directly south of the White House, in the dark of a November night, in a closed lane of Constitution Avenue. He pointed his long, semiautomatic rifle out of the passenger window, aimed directly at the home of the president of the United States, and pulled the trigger.
Sep 27
Jimi: All Is By My Side, the biopic following a young Jimi Hendrix, opened this weekend. In the movie, André Benjamin just about nails Jimi’s distinctive, wandering way of talking. Tonight, let’s go to the source: Jimi Hendrix’s final interview, recorded just seven days before he died in September 1970.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.