I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE OF ADVERTISING: DESKTOPS WILL BE FOUND ONLY IN MUSEUMS

Reflect on the last 12 months of your life. Does it feel like time passed by much faster than in reality? And there is always more to do, right?

Information overload is driving many of us to seek new ways of distinguishing what matters from what doesn’t in an effort to create a truly personalized world. One innovation already addressing our overly taxed attention spans is what’s called discovery technology.

Platforms such as Amazon, Spotify, Netflix, Yelp and Facebook use intelligent, predictive algorithms to match people with things they want, from articles, movies and products to food, services and even other human beings.

Think of discovery as the connective tissue of the future Web. It helps people navigate options by cutting through the clutter. This service is hugely important to humanity, because our biggest asset in life is time, and we will never have enough time to read all the books on our shelves or listen to all the music we want to listen to. So in what order should we engage with things we never knew existed?

STAKEHOLDERS KICK AGAINST NEW APCON COUNCIL, SAY APPOINTMENT ILLEGAL

For over a year now, the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) the body regulating the practice of advertising in Nigeria has been facing challenges. Though, President Goodluck Jonathan has appointed Ngozi Emioma to pilot  the affairs of APCON council as chairman for the next three years, the appointment has elicited negative reactions from some of the stakeholders who constitute the membership of the regulatory body and are kicking against the appointment. Emioma replaces Mr. Lolu Akinwunmi whose tenure expired on September, 2012. Ever since he left office, there has been intense lobbying and maneuvering characterized by intrigues as to who occupies the APCON House. The six key bodies that make up APCON council include Newspapers Proprietors Association of Nigeria (NPAN); Association of Advertising Agencies of Nigeria (AAAN), Advertisers Association of Nigeria (ADVAN), Outdoor Advertising Association of Nigeria (OAAN), Broadcasting Corporation of Nigeria (BON) and Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN).

While NPAN is presently in court with APCON over some unresolved industry issues and so was not part of the discussions on who runs the affairs of the body, the other five key members, AAAN; ADVAN, MIPAN and OAAN have said Jonathan’s action was done without recourse to the rule of law. As a result, efforts are ongoing to get the President to reverse the appointment. To this end, THISDAY learnt that these members had been quietly reaching out to the President, the Minister of Information, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and even the man at the peak of the controversy, Mr. Emioma on the need to reverse the federal government decision all to no avail.

MOST ESSENTIAL SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS

In his book Tweet Naked, online marketing expert and Social Media Firm CEO Scott Levy provides the critical information entrepreneurs need to craft a social media strategy that will boost their brand and their business. In this edited excerpt, the author offers a quick look at the tools that can help you track your social media data.

There are tools that can help you track all possible social media data. Most are easy to use if you take the time to learn them, and many have both free and for-fee versions, the latter offering more detail.

The most useful tools are often those on the platforms themselves. For example, one of the simplest metrics that many businesses find extremely valuable is Facebook's PTAT (People Talking About This) score, which measures word-of-mouth marketing. It tracks the number of individual users or unique visitors who have interacted with the page. The number, which changes often, allows you to determine not only how many people are interacting with your pages but also whether that number is staying consistent, dropping or rising. For small-business owners who can't afford a 24/7 social media team, PTAT is a very helpful metric because it is a cost-effective manner of tracking content.

A slightly more complex factor to understand is EdgeRank. Even if Facebook users like a brand, they don't return to brand pages often, if at all. So many businesses look at the impact of showing up on users' news feeds, and EdgeRank is an algorithm designed to help brands increase their news feed visibility.

To understand the algorithm, it's important to first understand what "edge" means. Edge is a term for every possible Facebook action: updates, comments, likes, shares, etc. The algorithm takes into account each user's edges, and then measures the sum total of affinity, weight and time decay in conjunction with each action.

Affinity is the number of repeat interactions, including likes, sharing, commenting, etc., that a Facebook user has with a specific brand. The greater the interaction, the greater the relationship the user has with that brand.

THE TWO WORDS STEVE JOBS HATED MOST

It's not often that we get to hear new first-hand accounts of what it was like to work at Steve Jobs' Apple.

When we do get a new chance, there's always some new reveal about how he shaped the company's culture.

Take, for instance, this new interview with former Apple VP of Worldwide Marketing Communication Allison Johnson.

From 2005 to 2011, Johnson was one of the few people at Apple to have a direct line of communication with Jobs himself.According to Johnson, the two most "dreaded, hated" words at Apple under Steve Jobs were "branding" and "marketing."

"In Steve's mind," she recalls, "people associated brands with television advertising and commercials and artificial things. The most important thing was people's relationship to the product. So any time we said 'brand' it was a dirty word."

On the subject of marketing, Johnson says that "marketing is when you have to sell to somebody. If you aren't providing value, if you're not educating them about the product, if you're not helping them get the most out of the product, you're selling. And you shouldn't be in that mode."

Wait a second. Isn't marketing what Apple does best? How can the head of worldwide marketing at Apple claim that marketing was dirty word in the company?

Responding to a similar question from her interviewer, Behance CEO Scott Belskey, Johnson explains that Apple treated its launch campaigns as massive efforts to educate the public about the company's new products by effectively communicating what made the experience using them so great:

What was important about that is the marketing team was right next to the product development and engineering teams. So we understood deeply what was important about the product, what the team’s motivations were in the product, what they hoped that product would achieve, what role they wanted it to have in people’s lives. And because we were that close, we were able to translate that very clearly in all of our marketing and communications.

Source | Entrepreneur

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING STRATEGY.

Social media marketing is an important marketing tool for many small businesses as it takes less time and effort. It is effective but it needs to be planned and executed systematically. The following tips will guide you on how to go about it.

1. Planning: Begin to list out your objectives and map out a plan-of-action to meet these objectives. You should think of what you want to get out of social media marketing and how. You must think about your audience and how you are going to reach them. By planning your ideas, you will have something to refer back to in case you lose focus.

2. Commitment: Once you decide to use social media marketing as a tool, it is most effective to be totally devoted to it. You either give it your all or nothing. More harm than good will be done if you go into it halfheartedly.

5 COMMON MISTAKES ENTREPRENEURS MAKE ON TWITTER

Twitter is one of the purest forms of true social media -- conversations and direct interactions in real time happening all day, every day, making it one of the most valuable brand channels for entrepreneurs. You can find out what people are saying in real time about you and can personally connect with an individual in a genuine way.

While you may be promoting yourself or business on Twitter, you may be making a handful of easily correctable mistakes that could be severely limiting your influence and reach on Twitter, as well as hurting your brand.

Here are the five most common Twitter errors and how to correct them.