#amplified over there since all of the top creators seem to have this connection to each other that i’m scared to encroach on

[seventh-district]

CW: vent post

[lastsonlost]

Many of the women promoting the “cancellation” of men in comics, and demanding they post the recent empty promise known as #ComicsPledge, are in fact hypocrites.  In this article, I’m going to present evidence of lies, collusion, rumor spreading, and, in my opinion, defamation and contract interference.

I personally know that they’ve colluded for YEARS to take down men. Specifically those with conservative politics and philosophies. This is an ongoing, coordinated effort. How do I know this?

Because I obtained access to their PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP.

This is Part 1 of the #Hypocralypse leaks

There is simply too much to put in one leak, so I will make the following three points for now.

1. The so-called Comic Book Whisper Network, which has been dismissed as conspiracy since 2016, is real, and I have hundreds of screenshots to prove it.

2. The Whisper Network has been targeting men and trying to destroy their careers, and use their connections in the comic book media to do so.

 3. Whisper Network members have acted unprofessionally and unethically at best. At worst, they have engaged in what I believe could be illegal behavior.

MY STORY

I first heard about the Whisper Network back in mid-2016 from folks I knew at Image, DC, Marvel, and later, Valiant.  Depending on who I chatted with, sometimes the group was called ‘The Women’s Network’, other times ‘The Whisper Network’, occasionally ‘The Whisper Campaign’, and eventually there were more conspiratorial names used mockingly (a friend called them a gender-swapped 4Chan, which became ‘FemChan’ to some insiders).

Regardless of the name, it was all the same group.

The same five or six names kept popping up in conversation over and again. As time ticked on, I noticed a trend on Social Media: half a decade of rumors, false allegations, cancellation attempts , and they almost always traced back to these same five or six people.  The goal of this Whisper Network, according to industry folks, was simple: choose a target, smear them until they lose their reputation, their income, and are ultimately blacklisted – opening up job opportunities for the same people who started these smear campaigns in the first place.

 Behind the scenes these “cancellations” are painted as morally or politically motivated, but in the end it’s all financial. As time passed, the group in question seemed more and more like a reality. I saw their influence. I saw things I knew to be verifiably untrue go viral online, appearing in what I thought were legit news sources. I felt angry and helpless seeing innocent people getting attacked, but did not know what to do. 

A few years passed and by 2018 almost everyone I interacted with in the industry seemed to know about the Network, from top level editors right down to the letterers. It was an open secret, but no one was willing to speak up for fear of being targeted themselves. They knew the consequences.

And after all, this was a secret network. Without proof, there was no point in going public because members would just deny its existence, and use their media connections to smear anyone who challenged them.

 THEN THINGS GOT INTERESTING

December 16, 2018, Whisper Network member Gail Simone, who joined the Network 6 years ago (4 years before the following tweet was posted), mocks “doofuses” who speculate that a “whisper campaign” exists.

At this point in late 2018, I was still skeptical of the Whisper Network’s existence. I’d heard many stories of individuals spreading rumors and lies, and plenty of malicious behavior was going on behind closed doors. Though I wasn’t ready to believe it was a coordinated effort, or collusion was involved.  Then, certain people began openly mentioning the Whisper Network and my attitude changed.

 March 26, 2019, Heather Antos, a member herself, did not outright mention the Whisper Network or her involvement, but she made what some took as a veiled threat to those who got on her bad side.

 Heather “milkshake girl” Antos’ colorful backstory at Marvel, and later at Valiant, is notorious in the comic industry. A conversation about office rumor-spreading and bullying is never complete without someone bringing up a juicy Antos anecdote. Everyone has one.

Up until then, I still hadn’t seen ACTUAL PROOF of a larger scheme. But then, something changed in 2020.

January 8, 2020, Alex de Campi, who I would discover is one of the most active Whisper Network members, openly admits there is a Network. I have no idea if this was a slip or a brazen attempt to show off her power and influence, but this appeared.

Eventually, everything I had heard and read was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt after I gained access to their private Facebook group.

I WAS INSIDE THE WHISPER NETWORK!

This is the place where the Whispher Network has been colluding for years. And although their activity is not confined to just this site, from what I can tell, this was where they first met, and started their coordinated campaigns.

Members of the Secret Group called “Comic Book Women”

At present time, there are 440+ members of the secret Facebook group, called COMIC BOOK WOMEN. From what I can tell, a few are regular users, though many of them have never posted.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/comicbookwomen/ 

*unless you are a member, this will not show up in a search

Secret Facebook groups offer the same level of privacy as closed groups, but operate under a cloak of invisibility. No one can search for secret groups or even request to join them. The only way to get in one is to know someone who can invite you. Everything shared in a secret group is visible only to its members.

This secret group includes a list of members whose actions and connections speak for themselves. Members such as:

Zoe Quinn

Gail Simone

Alex de Campi

Heather Antos (aka Heather Marie)

Mags Visaggio (aka Magdalene Francis)

Mairghread Scott

And several key members of the group are women who work in the comics media and can be used to run damage control, including women like Heidi MacDonald of Comics Beat.  They have contacts outside of the secret network as well, with some male allies in both comics and the media.

Just the fact that all of these folks were secretly linked in a private network came as a shock to me, considering their reputations and the accusations that they’ve made. Immediately I began to connect the dots…

They’ve denied for YEARS that they coordinate their actions in private. And yet they always coincidentally appear on Twitter, retweeting and amplifying each other’s accusations, signal boosting one another, and helping them gain traction. And their allies in media – Bleeding Cool and CBR specifically – will turn those same tweets into stories almost instantly & with no fact-checking or verification, sometimes within the hour.

I’m going to start explaining who the key actors are, and, from my perspective, how they coordinate these attacks.

KEY ACTORS

There are too many people to focus on at once, so I will have to break this into several posts, but I will start with one of the clear group leaders IMO.

Alex de Campi is well connected, despite never being part of the Big Two (since, from what I’ve been told management is well aware of her bullying, harassment, rumor-spreading and unethical behavior that goes back years, and depending on who you talk to she’s almost as notorious as Antos or Tess Fowler).  She just wrapped up a graphic novel campaign on Kickstarter with David Bowie’s son, the Hollywood film director Duncan Jones. It grossed over $366K

All the while she makes baseless accusations while demanding transparency from everyone else.

Now, I’ll take you into their private network.

Two years ago, on May 13, 2018, De Campi launched a private campaign to target an independent creator, claiming she was using her connections to have Simon & Schuster cancel their book.

In addition to contacting the publisher, others in the Whisper Network coordinated their efforts to contact media outlets to have the narrative changed, according to the posts in this thread.  Again, in my opinion, this could end up as a defamation or tortious interference case, and has many implications regarding media bias as well.

 

The following month, on June 23, 2018, de Campi posted private text messages between herself and writer Max Bemis in what appeared to be an attempt to damage his career. Despite Bemis being mentally ill (diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2014), de Campi still posted the private messages with malicious intent IMO. According to US and UK law this is an actionable offense: posting private texts without both parties consenting.

[talenlee]

The Johnlock Conspiracy Conspiracy

First of all this is going to be building off a point first cast into relief for me by Sarah Z’s video on The Johnlock Conspiracy. She is both directly connected with the experience of this space and did the research into the actual history of the people involved, a sort of on-the-spot observer recounting her experiences ethnographically. If you want a longer form deep dive on what The Johnlock Conspiracy is, check out that video. I will be providing a quick summary.

I’m also going to talk about fanagement, which I wrote about last year, which is about the way that fan engagement was seen as being a thing that corporate entities could deliberately engage for commercial ends. Fanagement isn’t necessarily an inherently evil or corrupting thing, but it’s something to know about as something that exists, and knowing it exists can colour your relationship to the media created in response to fanagement.

There’s this idea of ‘The Johnlock conspiracy.’

In the agonisingly mediocre BBC mystery drama Sherlock that ran from who cares to also who cares, starring in the loosest sense of the word Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman (a man ‘renowned’ for this, The Office and the Hobbit trilogy, on a scale of poisonous influence to actual outright evil), as a modern day re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson that has some interesting ideas that it absolutely does not use well, mysteries that are not interesting and a relationship tension that was making itself up as it went along. Much ink has been spilled about how this series is not very good, and that’s good, because it’s a very expensively made bad series that banks on the reliable draw of the same fistful of boring privilege.

Part of what made it popular, sort of, was the tension of the relationship between John and Sherlock. See, they were both men, you see, and what if they kissed.

Now, tumblr is, by volume, mostly connections to other parts of tumblr. If you make something popular, it becomes amplified and exploded and brought to the attention of others and curated into lists. Content that gets shared is the very sinew of what Tumblr is, which means that doing things people share around is a strange form of primacy on the site. Making content is powerful, heady, druglike. Commanding curation where you determine what does and does not get shared is even moreso. It is a space for an audience that is engaged deeply with the concept of being engaged, and in this space, fandom happened.

There’s not a lot of Sherlock. There were big gaps between the seasons. When a season came out, it did not explain itself or deliver on its promise at all. It is, as I’ve said, bad. But it was well made and used actors you’d heard of and was treated as being prestigious and so, when the show came out, and because people liked the idea of what it could be, fandom struck on a conspiracy:

What if this terrible show is secretly great?

And I understand the impulse. It’s heart to a lot of fandom. I can’t possibly have spent this time and energy on something I don’t like, it must be that the thing I like is secretly this thing I really like. And so scaffolding comes out to buttress the idea. We’re not taught that fandom is right – we’re taught that fandom is something that justifies itself by being right. If you have a story in your heart about a Dark Fuckprince and his soft bean injured Watson, that story is real and right, and doesn’t need the official endorsement of the BBC to be good.

Without that armour of love, though, instead the fandom turned into this endless oroborous of hostility centered around three people, who seem to just be total dickheads, great job you. This resulted in the blossoming of what was known as ‘the Johnlock Conspiracy,’ where through thousands of pages of well intentioned fumes, these fans huffed themselves into believing that Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis were secretly building up to exactly what they wanted, and they were the smartest people ever for noticing it. The lack of payoff of their beliefs and the active hostility Moffat had to their ideas and positions in person, that was all part of the conspiracy.

Oh, by the way, that idea – conspiracy – is when you have an unfalsifiable conjecture. If you can’t prove it false, no matter what, that’s when you’re dealing with a conspiracy theory.

The dramatic conclusion to all this was the series ended, their conspiracy was wrong, they theorycrafted themselves a few more months of content, and then most people let it drop.

But what if I told you there was a conspiracy?

Because there was. It just wasn’t the conspiracy they thought.

See, a conspiracy is a real thing: it’s a secret plan to do something harmful. And the BBC, since they published the work that Matt Hill described in Torchwoods Trans-Transmedia: Media Tie-Ins and Brand Fanagement, worked with the parameters of their experiment aggressively.

The idea, as I outlined in my article about Fanagement was that making the program so it could engage fans directly, and give fans feelings of creative ownership over the work would drive viewership and the kinds of engagement they liked (like, paying for things). Fanagement sought to make media ‘gifable’ – low saturation backgrounds with cuts of under a second so you could break a scene apart easily and conveniently. It wanted to make fan media easy to make, and to minimise hard declarative statements.

The lessons learned from this paper included things like ship teasing as a deliberate task – and I do mean teasing, with the idea that you had to do it in deniable and ambiguous ways. Making things definite wouldn’t get you as much fan engagement as keeping things ambiguous, because fans would make an inference based on what you show them, talk about it, then other fans would watch it again to make sure they could argue with you about it.

A mystery show like Sherlock was perfect for this kind of treatment. Treating the series as if there was some really deep, thoughtful question at the heart of it meant that there was always a reason to keep from ‘revealing’ the secret of the story, to string the audience along, like they’d believe or tolerate it, if it was all in service of a clever explanation. You get it, right? After all, we gave you all the clues.

The toxic fandom of Sherlock did not form as much as it was fostered.

A lesson from this experience, a lesson easily escaping notice, is that it’s not that ‘fandoms are all the same.’ They really aren’t. They are wildly varying in the terms of their problems and those problems root causes. What they tend to have in common is dynamics, but those dynamics are expressed in a lot of different ways. It’s not that ‘fandoms’ naturally become toxic and awful. There are fandoms that are generally, quite nice, and they tend to be that way because of the values of the central movers and shakers and the conscious willingness of people who perceive themselves as part of the fandom as taking care of it. The dynamic is the same – you have common nexuses of community that people interact with – and the kind of behaviour that’s acceptable and reasonable is filtered through them. If the idea of asking people to modify their behaviour or respect people’s boundaries is seen as unreasonable, then you can get a toxic space.

Also, as I talk about ‘toxic fandoms,’ understand toxicity is relative. There is, after all, a very real, very unironic Hitler Fandom, and they are probably one of the worst fandoms out there. Being a mean lawyer on the internet is bad, and I’ve no doubt the fandom curators known now as the Powerpuff Girls absolutely wrecked some teenagers’ lives – like, there are definitely people with, I am not joking or being hyperbolic, some PTSD triggers about (say) Tumblr or whatnot, based on the kind of social force these people were leveraging.

And then remember that holding that lever at the high end, right at the top with the most power over it was a company that made TV shows that was trying to make sure you watched their shows.

Also: The tools for doing this are available to all the companies that read the paper.

My advice? Exhort and uplift queer creators. Be positive about it, not negative. Don’t make your time about attacking other people’s dark fuckprince. Bring what you like to life, and bring that life into the light. Share and love each other, rather than find reasons to be mad at one another for how you’re all playing with toys a corporation wants you to treat with respect and only play properly. And as always, the standard you walk past is the standard you accept – so make sure your fandom circles aren’t putting up with some Powerpuff Girls.

Originally posted on my Blog.

[brokenjardaantech]

captain allen appreciation week 2020 day 5: scars

me: tries to write a short

my brain: how bout some sexy time?

notes: set in the same universe as day 1+7. it is half a year after the android revolution. allen’s dating 60 who’s non-binary and is using they/them pronouns, so i tried to avoid gender-specific vocab for 60 here. please let me know if i fucked up.

warning: smut ahead

----

Decimus starts with the small one on the back of Lou’s left hand. ‘This one?’

‘It’s stupid,’ the human says, reclining further into the permanent pillow for his bed has become after the android moved in. He looks down at his significant other using his chest as a pillow and is met with soft, large, puppy dog eyes which seems to be Decimus’ constant except during missions. 

‘Please?’ Des asks with a pout. Before Lou can react, they have already brought the hand to their mouth and given the scar a lick. 

Fucking androids. ‘Fine,’ the human’s voice is filled with fond exasperation. ‘It’s from a bug bite. Scratched it so hard that I broke skin. I used to have a few more, but they faded throughout the years.’

Decimus kisses the raised patch of skin with the reverence as if it is something precious. Smoothing his hand from above Lou’d belly button to his neck, they return to the human’s collarbone where a long scar sits. ‘And this one?’

Lou sighs, his smile turning sad. ‘When Anna and I first moved from Alaska. I nearly got mugged. She saved my life that day.’

The android kisses the pale, smooth piece of flesh. Lou doesn’t stop them as they start nibbling on it. ‘How?’

‘There was...this scaffold,’ Lou’s voice becomes distant. ‘Anna collapsed it on the muggers. Only one survived.’

Decimus frowns. ‘I’m...sorry.’

‘It’s a long time ago,’ the human buries his hand in the android’s hair and plants a kiss there. With his nose buried in synthetic strands, he murmurs, ‘I’ve made peace with it.’

‘That your sister kills so freely?’

‘And more.’

Decimus’ LED spins yellow, and Lou knows that they’re processing the news. He had no one to talk to about Anna until he and Decimus crossed paths, and by the time the android helps him realize how fucked up everything was, he is already numb to most of it.

Des lifts their head only when they’re satisfied with the bruise they have sucked into their boyfriend’s skin. Supporting themself on their arms, they glide their naked body against Lou’s until they can nuzzle the long, thin scar behind the human’s ear along his hairline. ‘And this?’

‘Neural implant,’ Lou holds the android closer and exchanges a chaste kiss. ‘Helps me control my biotics, weak as they are.’

Decimus shifts and kisses Lou’s nose where a thin scar sits. ‘You’re already better than a lot of people. How about this one?’

‘’Cause they don’t even know biotics are a thing, Des.’ As if to demonstrate his point, he shrouds his hand in a blue halo. ‘Compared to you, Connor, Anna, Ryder… I can barely move my phone from one side of a table to another without wrecking anything else. And that’s from Anna accidentally punching me too hard when I taught her how to fight.’

The android hums, not quite agreeing with their boyfriend on his biotics but not exactly disagreeing either. Two fingers trace the twin scars above Lou’s left eyebrow, and before Des asks, the human explains, ‘Car crash. Some idiot rammed their car into the but I was taking. The window shattered and cut me.’

Decimus kisses them and does the same to the two forming an inverted Y under their boyfriend’s eye. ‘And this?’

Lou’s expression visibly darkens. ‘Ryder.’ A deep breath. Knowing that nothing good comes from their creator, Des kisses those scars as well to try to soothe the pain both physical and emotional. ‘She had her skin on so I didn’t know that she was converted into an android. The building was collapsing, she was blocking the only exit, and I really wanted to live to see Anna getting promoted. So I tried to fight her. Needless to say, a fleshy human is no match for an android who has a chassis of metal and biotics. By the time she’s finished with me, she already broke my legs. She could’ve left me to die there.’

‘But she didn’t,’ Des says, their voice distant. ‘She crushed you with a building as if what she had done to you wasn’t enough.’

‘I’m here now.’

They kiss deeply, and Decimus’ hands slide downwards along smooth planes of muscles and stop at the bottom of Lou’s rib cage.

A thick, pink line runs along the bottommost rib. ‘How?’ they ask.

‘Complex fracture of the rib,’ is the reply. ‘Feel this?’ Lou holds Decimus’ hand and guides smooth finders along the bone. The android nods. ‘Most of it is titanium now. A few screws hold it in place.’

Des buries their face in Lou’s abs. ‘Must have hurt.’

The human combs through the android’s hair and cups their jaw, the latter leaning into the firm but gentle touch. Sea-green eyes meet synthetic brown, both pairs equally warm. ‘I was out for most of it,’ Lou explains. ‘The only pain I felt is realizing that I was the only one to have survived the blast,’ he tears his gaze away as his jaw stiffens, ‘and sacrificing part of my humanity in doing so.’

‘Lou -’

‘Don’t worry, it’s been a long time,’ Lou brushes the stray curl of hair which never seems to stick to the coif just to see it flop down again. His hand stays on the back of Decimus’ neck. ‘I may never forgive what Anna did, but it saved my life. I get to live to have met you.’

A sad, sideways smile from the android, their eyes somehow managing to get even more watery. Des moves further down, the sensors in their fingertips allowing them to find out precisely where organic skin ends and gives way to flexible polymer and synthskin, and they press their lips there. A proof of concept that artificial intelligence and organic creations can co-exist. Then they kiss him once more, this time closer to his belly button and the V of his legs. Their tongue darts out to taste the blend of sweat and something not organic that blends into what Decimus associates with Lou. Licking and kissing a trail to the human’s shaft, Des slowly lets information flood their processors until Lou is his entire world. They look up when they’re bare inches from their mark. ‘Is this alright?’

The large hand in their hair grounds them. Dilated pupils, heavy breaths, increased blood and thirium flow throughout his system and heart rate. Decimus knows the answer before Lou opens his mouth.

‘Go on, Des.’ Then in French, ‘But I want to be in you later.’

Des shivers from the promise which they know Lou will deliver. As they kiss and lick his shaft with both hands wrapped around the base, the taste of Lou overwhelming their sensors and processors, their entrance clutches involuntarily and futilely against the onslaught of the first gush of slick, and they can feel the thirium-based lubricant sliding warmly down his thighs and drips onto the bed, onto their own and even Lou’s legs. Closing their lips around the head and tasting Lou’s precome, they can’t help but whine around the cock in their mouth, the emptiness amplified by the low throb of their own organ.

‘Prepare yourself if you want to,’ Lou says, and that is all the permission Decimus needs before reaching down with their left hand and shoves not one but two fingers immediately into the wet heat, stretching tight synthetic muscles to search for the bundle of sensors which serves as an erogenous zone while their mouth sinks down to take more of Lou’s dick, and when the head touches their throat, tears which have been threatening to fall since the beginning from the sheer intensity of their deeds rolls down Des’ cheek just to be wiped away gently by callused fingers. Lips still stretched around Lou’s member, Decimus risks looking up and immediately has to shut their eyes: the trust, the adoration, the love - it is too much.

Their fingers finding the sensors sends them over the edge. Lubricant gushes out from both their entrance and their untouched cock, their entire body quivering and barely able to support themself, and no matter how hard slick, warm walls clutch around their fingers, it is not enough. Faintly, they can hear Lou’s constant reassurance - ‘So good for me, I’m here. I trust you. Take your time.’ - but it isn’t until the man has to tug Decimus’ hair that they notice that they’ve been trying but failing to take Lou down their throat. Their jaw, for the lack of a better term, hurts. ‘Lou, I -’

‘Shh, come here.’

Lou pulls Decimus up and flips them over so that he is lying on top of them, his face hovering mere inches from the androids to force him to look at nothing else but him. When he reaches to wipe away their tears, Des’ skin deactivates wherever their bodies are touching, and the human doesn’t need to look down to know that the skin covering his cybernetics is completely gone. 

They are interfacing.

Although the connection is shallow, it manages to calm Des down just fine, and soon the full-body wrecks are reduced to no more than the occasional sob and tremble, which is normal for the android after every orgasm. All Lou wants to do right now is to bend them in half and fuck them to standby mode, but they had set up a few rules when they started dating, and making sure that both parties are in to go on is one of them. Ignoring his raging erection and peppering Decimus’ tear-soaked face with kisses, he asks, somehow reverting to French, ‘You alright?’

Des wraps their limbs around him tightly. No, they admit through the interface, voice echoing directly in Lou’s head, but I want you in me. Please.

Oh, that he can do. ‘Who am I to deny that?’

Lou leans down to kiss his love deeply and filthily, making sure that his spit is on every single tiny little sensor on the android’s tongue while he spreads their legs even further apart and pushes in. Des’ lips tears away in a wail, and, knowing what the android wants through their connection, he doesn’t wait before nearly pulling out completely and slams back home, setting a brutal pace that coaxes all kinds of sounds and reactions from them, a high-pitched, static-laced whine here, a crackle of blue there lighting up the entire bedroom and reflecting off their exposed chassis. He finds the bundle of sensors within him and rams into it again and again, and the screams of pleasure-pain that tears themselves from Des’ voice box are stronger than any aphrodisiac, encouraging him to go on and to take whatever he needs - Decimus is here to give.

A soft brush of his hand against Des’ cock is enough to wring another orgasm out of the android. Once thought to be impossible, their entrance got slicker, lubricant flowing freely out from both ends, and the tightening of wet, hot muscles around him sends Lou spilling inside them. He collapses in a sweaty mess on top of the android, and Decimus, so utterly wrecked, can’t stop trembling and crying from oversensitivity and their overwhelming emotions, their arms still wrapped tightly around Lou’d broad shoulders like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a piece of driftwood.

They have to stop holding their boyfriend for a while after Lou catches his breath and gets up to get some wet towels from the bathroom. After wiping most of the fluids on their bodies away (the amount of slick never ceases to make Decimus blush), the human also removes the soiled blankets and sheets and pillows from the fort and tosses them into the washing machine, allowing them to sleep on clean linen without doing something drastic such as stripping the bed entirely.

When he emerges still completely nude from the shower, he isn’t surprised that Decimus hasn’t reactivated all their skin yet. He also isn’t surprised that the android winds themself around him like an affectionate octopus, and in this proximity, he finally notices the slight dent in the chassis on Des’ forehead; when he tries to touch it, they bury their face in the crook of Lou’s neck, essentially disallowing the human a second look on what he guesses is a scar.

Both of them are asleep before Lou can think of its implications.

[joealwyndaily]

Sometimes the best Christmas presents are the ones we don’t think we need; a new Christmas Carol, for instance. Indeed it may be indicative of a certain unappreciated vacancy around the Christmas tree that in discussing the BBC’s new version of the Dickens classic both its director and leading man refer back to The Muppet Christmas Carol made way back in 1992.

“I was sent the script,” admits Nick Murphy, best known for directing the Rebecca Hall ghost movie The Awakening, “and my first thought was, ‘For God’s sake! The Muppets! They nailed it. What’s the point?’ ”

Joe Alwyn, who plays Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit in the BBC three-parter, has meanwhile posted a trailer on Instagram with the caption: “Hard to fill the shoes once worn by Kermit. But I tried.” The self-deprecation was quickly “hearted” by the singer Taylor Swift, who is the actor’s girlfriend and who will be watching the mini-series with Alwyn and his family in London in the final days before Christmas.

There is nothing wrong, of course, with The Muppet Christmas Carol. It is probably in most people’s top three adaptations of Dickens’s masterpiece (alongside, I would say, Alastair Sim’s 1951 version and Scrooged). Its endurance does suggest, however, that it may be time someone did something a bit more serious, a little darker and a touch more grown-up with a tale that excoriated Victorian neglect and associated Christmas with the relief of poverty for ever more.

And this is exactly what Nick Murphy has achieved with a bracingly fresh script by the Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight. Guy Pearce’s Ebenezer Scrooge is still a “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner”, but since Pearce is only 52, there is rather less of the old. At the end of the novel, Dickens wrote that “ever afterwards” — that is after Scrooge’s Very Bad Night — “it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well”. That is rather more of an achievement when, as in this version, you may have 40 Christmases, rather than a couple, left to you.

Equally remade is Cratchit, who in Alwyn’s incarnation is far from the bashfully gulping frog thanking his master for granting him Christmas Day off before scampering back to Miss Piggy’s fleshy arms. Although Alwyn grew a rough beard for the part, his is also the best-looking Bob Cratchit you have seen. As the actor and I talk at the Picturehouse Central cinema in London, I find him as mesmerising off screen as on.

“Bob is trapped by Scrooge,” Alwyn says. “He’s abused by him. He’s not treated fairly. He’s there only because he has to be. He’s treated like shit.”

I’d say there’s a definite feeling in their shared scenes that Bob might just snap and hit Ebenezer over the head with a poker. “That was the intention. He’s at breaking point. He’s pushed right to his limits and Scrooge, I think, relishes winding him up. All Bob can do is hold his ground and fight back as much as he can — but he isn’t such a sap in this version.”

Scrooge and Cratchit’s relationship so much resembles an unhappy marriage that the niggling, bitter exchanges invented by Knight, with very little reference to Dickens’s dialogue, resemble Steptoe and Son rewritten by Strindberg. The easy contrast would have been with the Cratchits’ poor but happy marriage, but this too comes under scrutiny. There is an acknowledgment of the challenges a disabled child can bring to a household, and it is somehow emphasised by Tiny Tim being played by Lenny Rush, an extraordinary young actor, aged ten, who has a rare form of dwarfism called spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita, the same condition as Warwick Davis.

“It really mattered to me that nobody was photo-fit,” Murphy says from a studio where he is dubbing the last episode. “Bob Cratchit is always a winsome, put-upon nice guy and the Cratchits themselves represent this idea of an ideal, working-class, lovely family. So we looked into their relationship on the page and there seems a genuine tension between Bob and his wife. Things are hard. It isn’t easy to have no money and a disabled child, and they lean on each other and they’re not straight with each other and there is a genuine antagonism between them.”

Knight has written into the narrative a family secret that connects the Cratchits to Scrooge. The secret belongs to Mrs Cratchit, played by Vinette Robinson, whose part is greatly expanded; indeed, the novella does not even grant her a first name, although the Muppets, and other adaptors, opted for Emily.

“Inevitably the secret begins to surface and cracks appear in the family,” Alwyn says. “Something has to happen. I think what Steven has done is take the story and drill deeper. He hasn’t taken too much liberty. It’s not bending the truth too much from what Dickens would have wanted. Or I hope not.”

Murphy insists that worthwhile adaptations of classic texts should be “edgy” and have “a good bite to them”. “If you absolutely don’t want any variation from the book then I strongly suggest you sit in a corner at Christmas and read it again. But if you want to see it used as a prism through which we can see a broader and slightly different subject explored, then this one’s for you.”

Alwyn’s performance is part of the iconoclasm. “Joe’s instinct as an actor is always to push away from the obvious and into ambiguity,” Murphy says. “He’s very quietly spoken. He’s not brash at all. He’s a gentle, intelligent guy, but he just simply wasn’t interested in fitting a Dickensian cliché.”

“I’ll take that,” Alwyn says when I pass on the compliment, having not considered his technique in such terms. He is 28 and would probably accept that he is best known for two facts: the first is that he is Taylor Swift’s boyfriend; the second that, aged 25 and with no professional acting experience, he won the title role in an Ang Lee movie.

He is from north London, the middle of three sons. Their father is the television documentary-maker Richard Alwyn, renowned for making The Shrine about the public reaction to Princess Diana’s death.

“He was away a bit,” Alwyn says. “He made quite a lot of films in Africa when I was growing up. He was often in Uganda, Rwanda at one point, South Sudan. So he’d come back with stories and artefacts from all over the place. He made a great documentary in Liverpool during the World Cup about two kids on an estate growing up there.”

His mother, Elizabeth, is a psychotherapist. So, I say, although his family were comfortably off and he was sent to the fee-paying City of London School, he knew something of other people’s lives?

“All different kinds of people, all different kinds of stories,” he says. “Obviously, she couldn’t share them with me in the same way that Dad could, but both their jobs take an interest in other people and are about how to empathise, understand, and listen to stories and tell stories. I suppose it’s not a million miles away from an actor’s job; listening to other people, understanding them, trying to tell stories.”

I ask about the contemporary political resonances of A Christmas Carol. I cite the wealth of certain members of his profession and of Swift’s. Only the other day I have read that she has a private jet so she can visit Alwyn on a whim. He promises me that 99.9 per cent of what the press write about them is false, and this is an example.

I ask if he finds it embarrassing.

“Find what embarrassing?”

The disparity between the amount some people earn and the wages of workers in, say, Amazon fulfilment centres.

“I saw something in The Guardian the other day, I think, saying that the top six richest people in the UK accumulate the same amount of wealth as the poorest 13 million. I think that was the figure,” he says.

And politics today?

“It’s bigger than Scrooge, but it’s the same thing amplified; not being able to see beyond yourself, building walls, cutting yourself off from other countries. If there was ever a story to counter that, featuring someone who epitomises that and then who remembers who he is as a human being, it is A Christmas Carol.”

Unlike the young Dickens, Alwyn was not a boy to stand on a table and sing and dance. As a child he auditioned to play Liam Neeson’s son in the Richard Curtis film Love Actually, but didn’t get it. He harboured ambitions to act, but pursued them only later at the University of Bristol, where he took plays up to the Edinburgh Fringe. One night he acted before an audience of one: the writer’s mother. Undeterred, he went on to the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, joining the scramble at the end to find an agent. Weeks later, his new agent rang to say that Ang Lee was working on a new film, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and wanted to see an audition tape.

“I got some mates to film me in a lunch break and then my dad filmed another scene, and we got a call that night saying, ‘He wants to meet you this weekend. He’s saying, we’re going to put you on a plane and take you out of school. Come for the weekend. Learn these scenes.’ ”

As Billy, a young US Marine fêted for killing an enemy assailant in Iraq, Alwyn was painfully believable; a virgin solider returning home to be exploited for an act that had devastated him. The film did not do well, mainly because it was shot at a hyper-reality frame rate that few cinemas had the technology to show, but Alwyn was on his way.

“Things only evolve by change and people taking risks,” he says. “And Ang Lee is someone who I admire for that. None of his films are the same. Maybe thematically they draw on the same things, but he’s always pushing the boundaries.”

The same can be said for A Christmas Carol and, even more, about Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, in which Alwyn appeared alongside Emma Stone and Olivia Colman. It applies less so to his other recent films, Mary Queen of Scots, Boy Erased and now Harriet, a faithful biopic about the slave liberator Harriet Tubman in which he played a slave owner’s son. What he has managed to do consistently is work and learn from some seriously good actresses — Colman, Stone, Saoirse Ronan and Cynthia Erivo. “I know. I am targeting them,” he jokes.

I tell him my daughters have insisted I ask if he minds Swift writing songs about him (whole albums, actually, but check out London Boy if you are in search of a little cringe). “No, not at all. No. It’s flattering.”

Does it matter to him that the press — it’s a bit metatextual this, I admit, for I’m probably doing the same thing — make it obvious that they are as interested in his girlfriend as they are in him? “I just don’t pay attention to what I don’t want to pay attention to,” he explains tolerantly. “I turn everything else down on a dial. I don’t have any interest in tabloids. I know what I want to do, and that’s this, and that’s what I am doing.”

The boyf, described only the other day as “mysterious” in one of those tabloids, is no mystery at all. He knows what he wants for Christmas, and it is the career he is already forging.

A Christmas Carol begins on BBC One at 9pm on Sunday

[thelmasirby32]

Social media influencers fight back the Coronavirus disruption

30-second summary:

With sponsor deals shutting down, trips cancelled and events postponed, the Coronavirus has given influencer marketing a huge hit.

Travel influencers suffered while fitness influencers thrived in a world of social distancing.

Twitch, which is a top live streaming platform, saw a 10% rise in viewership.

Be it self-help or DIY tutorials, social media figures are finding new ways to help their followers. 

As audiences trusting influencers more than faceless brands, they’re collaborating to raise funds from people affected by the coronavirus pandemic as well as to pay tribute to doctors who are on the front-line.

Social media personalities are proving themselves to be flexible enough to create content that still resonates with a quarantined population. Dive in for more details.

No one predicted that a virus that emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan would take the world into its grip. All around the world, life is on standstill and most economic and social activities have come to a halt.  

Influencer marketing is among many industries that have been disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic. With sponsor deals shutting down, trips cancelled and events postponed—the once-booming influencer industry is going through a curious time.

In December of last year, Business Insider estimated that brands will invest up to $15 billion on influencer marketing by 2022. Among other things, this estimate was based on the fact that influencers proved themselves to be highly effective promotional tools. Individuals with a significant following on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook became important voices for brands that were seeking to spread their word.   

But under the current crisis, influencers are not seeing money flowing into their bank accounts.  

Travel influencers, the worst hit 

Travelling from country to country and getting paid to do so is a dream life for many. But those who have been living this dream have been struck by a harsh reality. With countries suspending air travel and companies reluctant to invest in anything new, business isn’t exactly booming for vloggers and influencers who made a living travelling around the world.  

View this post on Instagram

Have you read any books you loved since the quarantine started? I’ve been watching way too much Netflix and would love a book recommendation to reduce my screen time

:: Jumper @sezane – feminine and comfy

A post shared by Zory | Travel & Lifestyle | SF (@zorymory) on Apr 19, 2020 at 8:46am PDT

Source: Zornitsa Shahanska’s Instagram 

Zornitsa Shahanska, whose Instagram page usually features captivating images of fashion and travel is feeling the impact of the pandemic. Speaking to the Wired, she exclaimed,

“In the travel sector, the future seems uncertain.”

The influencer further informed that most of her trips and contracts have been either cancelled or postponed indefinitely.  

Travellers who are shut off from beautiful tourists hotspot that previously dominated their Instagram feed are the worst hit in the influencer community.  

Fitness influencers are thriving 

People who made arguments against lockdowns felt they would devastate every section of the economy. While this is proving to be true for many industries, some businesses are thriving in a socially distant world. 

Fitness creators are seeing spikes in traffic to their pages. Videos of home workouts have already garnered millions of views on Youtube. With gyms closed, people are flocking to fitness influencers on sites like Instagram and Youtube so they might stay fit during the pandemic.  

Source: YouTube

Since fitness influencers often promote their own programs rather than relying on advertisements for revenue, they are surprisingly safe from the adverse effect on the lockdowns. 

Live streaming is extremely popular 

Influencers have always used live streams to interact with their followers in real-time and generate community engagement. Social isolation has made this form of content even more popular as people are seeking connections digitally.  

Twitch, which is a top live streaming platform, saw a 10% rise in viewership during the weekend of March 14th. A similar rise was seen on Instagram as celebrities and influencers conducted live sessions. Musicians, in particular, are using Instagram to perform virtual concerts, raising relief money for charity.  

Live streams are currently the only source of back-and-forth conversations between influencers and those who enjoy their content.  

A new kind of content is in demand 

Brands realize that these are sensitive times. Any campaign that comes off as tone-deaf and opportunistic would be a PR disaster that will haunt them for a time to come. This is why businesses are turning towards influencers for more purpose-driven campaigns.  

With audiences trusting influencers more than faceless brands, they are more effective in promoting philanthropic messages. Brands and influencers are working together to raise funds from people affected by the coronavirus pandemic as well as to pay tribute to doctors who are on the front-line.

Governments and private institutions alike are enlisting influencers to promote social distancing and other precautionary measures.  

Many brands are taking the page out of Ford’s book which was quick to replace its scheduled March Madness ads with car payment relief programs. Gestures like these might be the only way brands will be able to win hearts and continue to earn goodwill in this uncertain period.  

Meanwhile, influencers themselves are shifting towards more solution-based content. Be it self-help or DIY tutorials, social media figures are finding new ways to help their followers.  

Though Ad revenue is down, engagement has spiked 

While campaigns are currently on a pause, influencers are reporting more engagement than ever before. Social media usage has increased exponentially with people staying indoors resulting in a dramatic traffic increase for many influencers.  

Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok serve as distractions for individuals who are practising social distancing. In the early days, the same platform saw decreased engagement with Twitter dominating the online world. However, people are back on their favourite social media sites and are showing great interest in organic and non-sponsored content. 

Marketing firm Influence Central conducted a survey involving 389 digital creators. All of these individuals reported an increase in engagement on different social media outlets. The report analyzed the period when states and local governments first gave out the stay-at-home orders.  

Content creators are adapting to the new normal 

Influencers put in a great effort to have a carefully curated feed. Generally, their social media depicts a dream lifestyle that prominently features designer dresses, fancy meals, and breathtaking scenery from exotic locations.  

But given that people are not interested in this content at the moment, influencers are thinking out of the box. Instead of stylish halter tops from famous retailers, they can be seen in more casual clothing.  

View this post on Instagram

Having a big voice comes BIG responsibility #Repost to spread the positive energy

A post shared by Katie Sands (@honestlykate) on Mar 17, 2020 at 6:34pm PDT

Some have taken this opportunity to discuss issues like mental health and anxiety. Others are going down the memory lane, posting images from events they attended or locations they visited years before the pandemic gripped the world.  

Time are tough but there’s influencing to be done 

For influencers, the primary source of income exists via brand partnership and affiliate revenue they earn through tools like exclusive digital coupon codes. Currently, both of these revenue streams are under threat. 

But rest assured, influencers aren’t going anywhere and neither are the millions of their loyal followers. While the circumstances have changed around their work, what hasn’t changed is the power influencers wield over big sections of the internet.  

Social media personalities are proving themselves to be flexible enough to create content that still resonates with a quarantined population. Companies are taking note of this as many brands are still going ahead with their scheduled campaigns. 

Inevitably, when things go back to normal, brands would need these important voices to amplify their message on the digital realm. 

Evelyn Johnson is a full-time cat lady and a part-time blogger. I write about money-saving, technology, social issues and pretty much anything that’s in the now. She can be found on Twitter @EvelynJohns0n.

The post Social media influencers fight back the Coronavirus disruption appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/05/01/social-media-influencers-fight-back-the-coronavirus-disruption/

[vapormaison]

Budget Hi-Fi for Future Funk & Vaporwave: An Introduction

Introduction

I’ve had a couple of readers reach out to me in DMs after the holiday, and both wanted to start consuming vaporwave in reasonably high-fidelity — presumably with some fresh Christmas cash. First off, I want to apologize for converting them to this insane hobby. It will serve as an eternal joy to your ears, but an eternal terror to your finances. With that in mind, they both gave me budgets of around a thousand dollars, American, and I found myself recommending rather identical setups based on their parameters, living space, and general use patterns.

From the outline I gave over those previous DMs, I prepared a three part (potentially five part, if there’s sufficient interest) series of articles serving as a primer to roughly introducing basic principles of hi-fi enjoyment to a novice or neophyte crowd, My hope is that this can double as both a buyer’s guide for the reader, but also as a way to proselytize new fans into these two great hobbies: hi-fi and vaporwave. Here goes:

BASIC PRINCIPLE: Pure Sound, Compression & Loudness

“Pure Sound” is more of a term in vogue with Japanese audiophiles, but I think it’s functional here for what we’re trying to achieve. To understand pure sound, we’ve got to take a look at its antithesis: compressed digital. I want to make a point here of the word compressed because I’m not some boomer or vintage fetishist to the point where I can’t appreciate good sound from a digital source.

But, the way 90% of the world consumes music in the 21st century — in lossy mp3 formats with varyingly low bitrates on mediocre-to-poor head/ear phones is not ideal. Steve Jobs’ decisive victory over physical media with the iPod and iTunes expanded our libraries, but rendered most of that music into poor shadows of its state when originally recorded. The reason why your dad or grandpa are still devoted to their old stereo with a collection of CDs and vinyls is not just because they’re a luddite — primarily, it is because those CDs (up until ’95 or so) and vinyls (since and to forever, essentially) are usually compiled and pressed in the highest resolution possible. 

And before, anyone gets on my case about denigrating about Steve — I love the guy. His taste was excellent, too. Here’s a picture of the man’s Woodville mansion, where his only furnishings are a lamp, his hi-fi and some records. He’s got a handmade-in-Scotland Linn LP12, Acoustat Monitor 3 loudspeaker pair, and a Spectral Statis Amplifier. Absolutely legendary gear. Rest in sonic peace, King.

It was a $30,000 kit in its day, so he spared no expense. While he was selling you poorly compressed music, he was enjoying his audiophile vinyl music (a 1960s recording of Handel is in there, one of the “pure sound” classics in Japan) in the ideal recreative sonic comfort. Be more like Steve. I’ll try to get you there for 1/25th of that price.

What We Need:

To get a good sound system going for your library of vaporwave, there are four things you need at minimum. Today I’m going to just address formats. In the coming weeks I’ll go over the following: playback platforms (turntable, network streamers, etc), amplifiers, and your speakers (in-ear, headphones, or loudspeakers). But what all those are predicated by are a necessity of some kind of musical source — the reason, if you will, that you’re probably intrigued by hi-fi, right? Apart from the aesthetics of most systems, we’re trying to reach a higher echelon of music enjoyment.

Digital Fomats

The short answer here is just .flac files. They are lossless (uncompressed) 16-bit data-hungry kings which pump out much more detail than normal mp3s, which will be extremely important when you get a pair of nice speakers or headphones. I will go into that into more detail in a future article. If you play a crummy mp3 on a pair of nice earphones or loudspeakers, you waste their ability to soundstage — something we will discuss when we get to the speakers article. These lossless lassies also give us the ability to chase after that muse known as “dynamic range”, which is another way we can detect detail in musical compositions.

This kind of stuff matters deeply to both audiophiles and the artists themselves. If you remember the Quincy Jones vs. the Estate of Michael Jackson case, one of the accusations is that the detailed sound-spaces he created were crunched to oblivion in subsequent CD and digital releases of tracks like Thriller and Bad.

Above is a CNET comparison of the vinyl rips of Bad’s original release and a 2017 mp3 release. The top is “good” dynamic range -- you can hear the whole sound arrangement. The bottom is, well, shit.

People will occasionally argue for other digital formats. I don’t consider it a point even worth belaboring, really, as in my own benchmarks and those of many other audiophiles, there’s just no beating FLAC for general purpose listening. Some people will simp for another similar lossless format, ALAC. It’s Apple’s format, and while I’m a huge apple Stan (this is being typed on a 2018 MacBook pro connected to a Apple Thunderbolt display), Apple has effectively abandoned the project since Jobs’s death, primarily because it doesn’t sell, and secondarily because it needs a visionary of Jobs’s caliber to really take it global. Some people will also try to sell you on WAV. Just laugh at them. It’s also worth noting that the vast majority of vaporwave releases offer .flac as a format available for download, and you should be taking that option every single time.

Now, if you’re not a downloader, there are some streaming services that are offering hi-res. Spotify does so, but poorly at the moment. Tidal does a much better service to listeners and creators. I’m a Tidal guy, myself, but just because Tidal was an early adopter of hi-res formats for streamers. The differences in a few years, I think, however, will be negligible, as Spotify has finally started to take audiophiles serious now that its market share has started to stagnate. I’ll be going more into how to optimize your lossless streaming in my article about pre-amplifiers and network streamers, so stay tuned for that.

Analog Formats

I’m going start off by making a controversial statement here: cassettes are not high fidelity.

This is unfortunate, because the vast majority of physical releases for vaporwave are definitely motivated by a sort of 80s nostalgia and I’m sure many of the purchases are also motivated by the false presumption that the cassettes offer better sound quality. While they very well might seem like it in comparison to a youtube upload (although I think Real Love uploads in hi-res audio, not sure about Artzie), they will mostly be wasted on your system unless you’re just looking to pump some bass or annoy your neighbors. Real quality sound will be difficult to extract from these.

Why CDs? Why vinyl? It comes down to the numbers. I’ll explain this in the most lay terms possible, so much so that I’m sure audiophiles will wander onto my socials and demand retractions and corrections.

One of the ways we measure high quality sound is in terms of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). I think this is best expressed as a sustained “pop, & warmth” that you hear when a needle hits a record. With tapes it sounds a little different — I’d liken it to the cracking of unboiled pasta, or the fluttering of plastic in the wind. The lowest quality consumer tapes, the stuff that your parents probably fucked to in the early 90s, are rated at roughly 45-50db of SNR. That’s like 2003-iTunes level of muddy, ugly, sound. CDs are almost double consumer-grade tapes, at around 95db. Vinyls sit at around 70-75db.  

Now, some vinyl-heads will come at me with some takes from the Loudness Wars. Yes, CDs went through a period from roughly 1994-2008 where they were poorly mastered that they bordered on unlistenable. But we’re talking about vaporwave, where the work is contemporary, and the mastering and production lines are boutique. No one at the Aloe Island, DMT FL, or Neoncity is demanding the mastering engineer to compress the sound to make the bass sound punchier for badly designed car audio systems based on bad anecdotal studies from disgraced EMI engineers -- at least that I know of. 

However, I will, just for you, include an obligatory “loudness wars” jpeg that only you will understand. Everyone else, for the purpose of this article, disregard.

Saint Vitus - "Let Them Fall" from "Lillie: F-65" (2012)

Additionally, I know most of you guys like a “little” analog sound in your systems. I do, too. Vinyl’s a warm medium, and I love it for that. It exists in that happy medium between the noisiness of cassette tape and the cold cleanliness of CD. If I ever have to do serious reference listening of classical music or something like that, I have CDs for that. Vinyls are what I listen to for fun.

Concluding Thoughts

My next article — in a few days — will be getting into the weeds with gear, specifically turntables, cassette decks (I know the people want it) and network streamers. I’m hoping that gives interested parties some time to get their records or FLACs on a hard-drive, because that is going to be essential to us even embarking on this journey towards high-fidelity Outer Heaven.

[unifiedsocialblog]

15 of the Most Important Instagram Trends to Watch Right Now

Instagram trends can make or break your social marketing strategy. That’s why it’s important to stay on top of them.

Brands that keep up with the top trends on Instagram can take advantage of new features and beta tools ahead of their competitors. They also show their followers they know what’s up.

With added pressure from TikTok and a new head of company, Instagram is rolling out lots of new innovations, features, and tools.

These are the top trends on Instagram we’re watching right now.

Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps a lifestyle photographer used to grow from 0 to 600,000 followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

15 top Instagram trends to watch for

1. More Instagram Stories, fewer posts

Instagram Stories have taken over, with more than 500 million viewers every day.

They have also become the place where people keep tabs on their friends and family, according to Instagram research.

On the other hand, the Instagram feed is primarily associated with polished content and discovery.

Getting rid of the chronological feed has only reinforced that perception. Posts now need to be slightly more evergreen. Stories seem more real-time by contrast.

The majority of users see the Instagram feed as a place to find information and discover products and brands.

While that’s good news for brands, regular users find it more difficult to imagine their content in the mix. Some have viewed Instagram’s decision to test hiding likes as an attempt to spur more sharing from those who feel intimidated by the feed.

2. Growth of the Explore tab

More than 200 million Instagrammers check the Explore grid every day and that number is expected to rise this year.

The feed’s new navigation bar now offers shortcuts to IGTV and Shop. From there, people can delve into their niche interests, like beauty, travel, food, or art.

Or, they can get lost in a selection of Stories that will now be algorithmically fed into the Explore feed.

3. Sound on for Instagram Stories

It’s still important to design for sound off environments. But a recent Facebook (and Instagram) study found that viewers like voiceover and music. 80% of Stories with voiceover or music performed better than ads without.

Currently 60% of Instagram Stories are viewed with sound on.

Maybe TikTok’s musical platform has helped turn up the volume across social media channels. Either way, expect TikTok to influence more Instagram trends to come.

4. Strategic stickers in Instagram Stories

Stickers are popular on Instagram Stories, but businesses have had mixed results with them. That’s going to change this year, though.

Expect to see fewer unnecessary and generic stickers, and more polished and original branded stickers over 2019.

5. More interactive Instagram Stories

While stickers have been a mixed bag for businesses, interactive stickers have been a hit.

Questions, poll, countdown, and emoji-slider stickers don’t just prompt more engagement, they make Instagram Stories more sticky. In other words, people stick around longer if there’s something for them to interact with.

For instance, Instagram internal data shows that nine times out of 10, the polling sticker increases video views.

Look for Instagram to unveil for interactive elements over the coming year.

6. Easier ways to shop on Instagram

With more than 70% of shopping enthusiasts using Instagram to explore brands, Instagram now rivals Pinterest as a platform for product discovery.

Over the past year Instagram introduced product tags in feed posts, product stickers in Stories, and a shopping feed via the Explore tab.

With more than 130 million taps on these tags each month, a direct buying option is the logical next step. In March 2019, Instagram rolled out a beta in-app Checkout feature that it’s testing with 20 brands, including Adidas, Burberry, Nike, and Revolve.

Instagram charges merchants a selling fee to use Checkout. But, if it spikes enough sales, the fee won’t stop more brands and influencers from getting in on the action.

Pick up tips on how to make your Instagram account more shoppable.

7. Shoppable influencers

Instagram influencers face a barrage of comments and DMs that often ask the same question: Where’d you get that?

To save influencers’ time, Instagram now lets creators tag products in their posts, which can be purchased directly with Instagram Checkout.

Only a select few currently have access to the feature, including Chiara Ferragni, Kylie Jenner, and Vogue.

Right now, they can only tag businesses participating in the beta Checkout program. But more will be available soon.

8. More realness and representation

Authenticity is so last year. 2019 is all about #nofilter.

Celebrity influencers like Jameela Jamil have waged a war on airbrushing, photoshopping, filtering, body shaming, and non-inclusive creative.

View this post on Instagram

Boob stretch marks are a normal, beautiful thing. I have stretch marks all over my body and I hereby rename them all Babe Marks. They are a sign my body dared to take up extra space in a society that demands our eternal thinness. They are my badge of honour for resisting society’s weaponizing of the female form. ❤️ ps. My face is white because I wear spf 100 sunscreen like a boss. ???? PS. LOVE YOUR BROWN SKIN. I tan responsibly but I love to tan! I love to embrace and celebrate my heritage. This skin bleaching and whitening should be banned. It’s inherently racist, classist and emotionally very damaging. #brownandproud

A post shared by Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamilofficial) on Apr 1, 2019 at 7:50am PDT

Expect to see stretch marks, zits, and more from brands, especially in Instagram Stories. And with it expect to see more real talk about mental health, body insecurities, and other important issues.

In fact, Jamil’s radically inclusive @i_weigh account continues to gain followers. And with a follow from @sussexroyal, the official account of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, I WEIGH’s profile will by royally amplified.

Expect brands to more frequently sub models for real people. You should also see more diverse creative.

Aerie has earned major social klout for its “Retouching free since 2014” aesthetic. This goes for influencer partnerships, too. See IKEA’s partnership with the rainbow Amina Mucciolo being @studiomucci.

View this post on Instagram

#tbt I can’t believe it’s already been a year since this happened! Caption from the original post: “Total full circle moment! @mrstudiomucci and I got married at @ikeausa 10 years ago and now our loft is featured in the @ikeafamilymag ???????????? and my mug is on the cover ????!” See link in my bio for the full #Ikea home tour.

A post shared by Amina Mucciolo (@studiomucci) on Mar 28, 2019 at 10:36pm PDT

View this post on Instagram

"Middle school and high school years were really hard for me. When it came to accepting my body it felt like a forever struggle that would never ease up. Now I know that my beauty is not determined by how skinny my waistline is or how perfect my skin is. The truth is I know I am beautiful, every day, outside and in. Every pimple, stretch mark, every roll and curve are real and unretouched. My beauty shines every day in every way. And yours does too." @daniebb3 Loves the swim she's in! Share your unretouched swim photos with #AerieREAL @Aerie & we’ll donate $1 (up to $50K) to @NEDA for every post.

A post shared by aerie (@aerie) on May 20, 2019 at 6:00pm PDT

9. Rise of relatable influencers

Users are looking for authenticity from their influencers, too. The unrealistic lifestyles and picture-perfect aesthetics of certain Instagram influencers has given rise to Instagram vs. Reality memes. Out of that has come a new breed of influencer: the relatable influencer.

For example, mommy blogger Laura Izumikawa shares the ups and the downs of parenting. Joana Ceddia channels her awkwardness into humour. Jen Gotch talks anxiety and bipolar disorder. These influencers attract followers who are going through similar experiences.

As Izumikawa shares, “People are on social media to connect—or at the very least—relate to others. Being open and transparent will go a long way to help you connect with your audience.”

View this post on Instagram

This is feels like my new normal. Swollen eyes, constant flow of tears and long, beautiful hair. It’s stress, and insecurity and sadness.  it’s emotions – some of which I haven’t felt in a long time.  And it’s not that my meds don’t work or that I’m having a depressive episode, and part of me wishes it was, because I know exactly what to do when that type of situation arises.  Strangely they come with less pain than this. Less tears.  Less rumination and obsessive thinking because the sensation is closer to no emotion than all emotion.  Add in a little shame, because I thought I was stronger than this.  And also I realized that I am not immune to vulnerability and vulnerability has kind of become my brand.  And it feels scary to share and it feels oftentimes meaningless to share, because it is really personal and I don’t have a solution and I usually like to offer solutions along with problems. And I’m in this fucked place because I asked to be and I should be grateful. I’m here alone, in solitary confinement – a form of psychological torture, writing this book that I really want a lot of people to read, because although it is a memoir, the goal is not just to share funny stories from my past. The goal is to enlighten people about their own mental health, to deglamorize success, build emotional intelligence, help as many people as possible feel less alone and yes of course, make everyone laugh. And I feel that instagram was a big part of what brought me this opportunity so I feel accountable to the platform and more specifically to you. So yeah, no solution here. Just an update, because the lack of an update was making me feel worse than an actual update. I know there is a light at the end of the tunnel.  I believe there is a light at the end of every tunnel. I just am not deep enough until the tunnel to see it and I want to go back, or lay down & cry or watch the entire first season of the Walking Dead while drunk.  But I won’t because I know moving forward is the only way through. Don’t feel bad for me, I am just identifying what is happening and acknowledging that I hate it more than going to the dentist naked – which I never have done, but it sounds awful.

A post shared by jen gotch (@jengotch) on Jan 27, 2019 at 3:59pm PST

10. The influence of TikTok

The unstoppable growth of TikTok, a music-backed video-sharing app that’s popular with teens, may inspire copycat behaviour from Instagram—as we saw with Snapchat.

IGTV will probably see the most changes, since many think the channel is due for a revamp.

And there are already early signs. Instagram’s recent overhaul of the IGTV feed resembles a cross between TikTok and Snapchat’s Discover feeds. Horizontal scrolling has been replaced with vertical scrolling. And, an algorithm automatically queues up the next video for you to view.

TikTok’s popular challenges have already organically migrated into Instagram follower feeds. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see Instagram attempt to foster more of that, especially since these challenges inspire content creation.

View this post on Instagram

anxiety has left the group chat.

A post shared by Liz Plank (@feministabulous) on May 14, 2019 at 11:19am PDT

11. More channel-to-channel sharing

With posts in Stories and IGTV videos in the feed, Instagram has been toying with increased linkage between its different formats. Expect to see more crossover from brands who are attempting to boost views in different streams.

For example, when Instagram changed its feed algorithm, we saw more people sharing “new post” alerts in their Stories. Also, one-minute IGTV teasers have been popping up in the feed to direct viewers to the main channel.

Stories are no longer contained to the top of the app either. Now, they’ll show up in the Explore grid too.

The grid will offer personalized Stories recommendations, reminiscent of TikTok.

Instagram is reportedly testing adding direct links for Instagram Stories, too.

12. Sharing Twitter takes on Instagram

Hot takes have taken over Twitter, and they’re showing up on Instagram more and more.

It’s true, @fuckjerry’s been stealing (ahem, now crediting) Tweet memes for years. But, accounts like @will_ent show that this Instagram trend is not letting up.

As The Verge author Megan Farokhmanesh notes, “For some meme creators, Twitter and Tumblr are a canvas, while Instagram is the wall where they display their work.”

Look for Tweets appearing in more Instagram-friendly templates, from branded backgrounds to cleaner, cropped screenshots.

Expect also to see more text-a-gramming, too, ranging from Rupi Kaur-esque poems to more type-moding in Instagram Stories.

View this post on Instagram

#ElleWoods2020

A post shared by Hello Sunshine (@hellosunshine) on May 17, 2019 at 9:59am PDT

Read more about what meme creators get right on Instagram.

13. Increased social activism

With heightened activism spurred by social unrest and the upcoming elections in Canada and the United States, people are sharing their opinions on social media more than ever.

Text-friendly platforms like Facebook and Twitter have traditionally been associated with social activism. But Instagrammers now have a stronger-than-ever grasp of how to use the platform to share and amplify their views.

From “I voted” stickers to climate change memes, it’s become increasingly common and sometimes inescapable for people and brands to take a stand on the platform.

Activism on all fronts often involves calls for donations to nonprofits.

In February, Instagram introduced a donation sticker that can be added to Stories. While the feature is not yet available to everyone, people will be able to select a nonprofit and even customize the name of their fundraiser.

View this post on Instagram

School strike Day 1… Now I’m not alone anymore! On Friday 24/5 we are striking in 1387 places in 111 countries. And counting! I Stockholm samlas vi i Humlegården kl 11:30 nu på fredag. Sen går vi till Kungsträdgården. Forskare och aktivister talar, inklusive jag. På scen: Astrid S, Molly Sandén, Jireel, Danny Saucedo, Lamix och Annika Norlin (Säkert!) Dela detta!! Sprid till alla!! #FridaysForFuture #schoolstrike4climate #climatestrike

A post shared by Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg) on May 21, 2019 at 11:50am PDT

View this post on Instagram

Saw this sign near my neighborhood coffee shop. It, like all of last night’s firsts, gives me so much hope. For the first time in HISTORY, there will be more than 100 women in Congress, speaking for us. Check out @glennondoyle’s latest post for a great list of where things stand. #midtermsmatter

A post shared by Natalie Portman (@natalieportman) on Nov 7, 2018 at 1:51pm PST

14. Crackdown on Instagram bots

Facebook and Twitter have been under the microscope for their role in influencing elections and harbouring hate speech. And more recent reports are uncovering the role Instagram has played, too.

Over the coming year, we’ll likely see Instagram take steps to combat abuse on its platform. We’ve already seen a few, including increased access to verification and the addition of “About this Account” to profiles with large followings.

Bans on Facebook may start to apply to Instagram, too. For example, far-right figures Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, and Laura Loomer were removed from both sites this month.

But before there were any headlines about Russian meddling, Instagram already had a bot problem. Fake engagement bots have long been the scourge of the app, and Facebook has already started the year off by slamming bot sellers with lawsuits.

More purges, enhanced security, and increased scrutiny will likely follow in 2019.

15. Changes to Instagram Direct

Rumours that Instagram would completely push direct messaging to its standalone Direct app can finally be put to rest, at least for now.

With Direct gone, it’s likely that Instagram users will see some changes or improvements to the in-app messaging feature instead.

GIFs were introduced last year, and the Quick Replies tool was added to help businesses quickly answer frequently asked questions. It’s possible that Instagram will offer more filtering options for business and regular accounts.

For example, the option to make a Close Friends list for Instagram Stories makes it easier to direct message a group of friends at once. There are also rumours that Instagram will make direct messaging available on desktop.

Instagram is testing option to share content to Close Friends each separately pic.twitter.com/p21B4oiPof

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) May 15, 2019

Manage your Instagram presence alongside your other social channels and save time using Hootsuite. From a single dashboard you can schedule and publish posts, engage the audience, and measure performance. Try it free today.

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The post 15 of the Most Important Instagram Trends to Watch Right Now appeared first on Hootsuite Social Media Management.

15 of the Most Important Instagram Trends to Watch Right Now published first on https://getfblike.tumblr.com/

[filipeteimuraz]

5 Content Creation Tactics That Will Amplify Your Content’s Reach

Content marketing growth isn’t always explosive, but should it be slow?

No, it shouldn’t.

You should have steady, measurable growth on a monthly basis in most cases.

That’s why it pains me to see so many marketers create content and be satisfied when barely anyone sees it.

You don’t need tens of thousands of views for a new piece of content to make a difference, but you should be aiming for at least a thousand, even when you’re just starting off.

If you’re not getting many views on your content, something is wrong.

It could be one of many things:

not a good topic

weak writing

overall mediocre content

not enough promotion

low quality promotion

In this post, I want to dive deeper into one of these elements: the content aspect.

There are things you can do to instantly expose your content to a larger audience. In fact, I’m going to show you 5 of them in this post.

If you’re looking to get hundreds or thousands of extra views on your content, this is a post you’ll want to read closely. 

1. Influencers can help you in many ways

In order to grow your site’s traffic and readership, you need to put in a ton of consistent hard work.

However, there are ways accelerate the growth. They involve getting a few big influencers in your niche on your side.

Imagine that someone sent an email to thousands of their subscribers, linked to you in a blog post seen by tens of thousands, or shared your content on social media.

Depending on how much of an influencer that person is, it could lead to you gaining dozens of subscribers immediately.

If you could just find 5-10 influencers who wouldn’t mind helping you promote your content once in a while, you would grow your blog several times faster than you currently are.

It’s a simple plan, and it works.

However, it’s not so easy to actually get influencers to share your content.

Influencers don’t share mediocre content, and getting them to take the time to look at your content in the first place is difficult as well.

Again, though, there are ways that you can increase your chances of getting a positive reply and action from an influencer.

You can’t ever guarantee that a particular influencer will help you promote your content, but you can greatly increase the chances with these four tactics.

Option #1 – Get them to contribute to the article: Why should someone help share your article?

There are a few main reasons someone might want to:

because they want to be nice

because they think their readers will love it

because it makes them look good

The first one is nice, but completely unreliable. Influencers often get several (hundreds for some) share and link requests each day. Even the nicest guy can’t say yes to all of them.

That leaves us with two reasons.

Option #1 focuses mostly on the second main reason.

The idea is to ask them to contribute a small bit of content to the post, whether it’s a short story, quote, or piece of advice.

If they contribute to something, they’ve essentially given it their “stamp of approval.”

Through confirmation bias, they are more likely to overvalue the quality of your content. And since they think that it’s great, it follows that their readers would as well, which makes them more likely to help promote it.

If they do agree to contribute, you don’t need to ask them to promote it. Just thank them for helping you out, and send them a link an hour or so before you publish the post.

Most influencers understand that you would also appreciate any mentions to their audience, but asking for it can put them off.

The hard part, therefore, is getting them to contribute in the first place.

Here’s a sample email you could send:

Hi (first name),

I’m the head content creator at (site) and have a quick offer for you.

I’m putting together an incredibly comprehensive (describe the content) for our audience of X,XXX subscribers.

I guess this isn’t the time to be humble—it’s going to be amazing. I know you wouldn’t waste your time contributing to sub-par content, and I wouldn’t waste your time if this was the case.

My offer to you: I’d love to feature a quick piece of advice from you in the guide—it’d be the icing on the cake for my audience.

If you’re in, here’s what I’m looking for:

(ask them one specific question here).

But if you’re too busy, no worries, I won’t take it personally.

Thanks so much for your time,

(Your Name)

You wouldn’t want to go any longer than that.

The key part is your question has to be specific. If they don’t think they can answer it in under 200 words, most aren’t going to bother.

For example, ask them a question like:

What would you say is the best thing a beginner marketer can do to begin their education?

But obviously tailor it to your topic.

Option #2 – Giving input always makes someone care more: If someone came up to you and started complaining about not being able to find a job, you might sympathize, but you probably wouldn’t care very much.

But how would you feel if they asked for your advice on finding a job?

All of a sudden, you’ve taken on the role of a mentor/teacher. In this role, you have a natural inclination to care about your student’s success.

If they actually listen to you and apply your advice, how likely are you to help them more?

Very likely.

You’d probably try to set up interviews and introduce them to any relevant people you know to help them network.

Content promotion is pretty similar.

If you can get an influencer to offer advice on your content—and you actually apply that advice—most will be happy to share the content when it’s ready. They will want to see it succeed.

How do you get an influencer to offer you advice? That’s the hard part.

There are two keys to getting a decent response rate:

Genuinely ask for feedback

Have a really cool idea

The first key is self-explanatory. If it seems that you just want them to share your content and you don’t really care what they think, they’ll delete the email immediately.

The second key is something most marketers don’t stop to consider.

If you send me yet another “guide to SEO,” I don’t care how good it is, it’s not interesting. Besides my own guide to SEO, there are hundreds of others.

You need to have a unique and interesting take on a topic (or an entirely new topic altogether).

Let me show you an example of a great email to help illustrate my point.

Groove HQ launched their content marketing strategy just under 3 years ago, but they launched it with a bang.

Their first post got them over 1,000 new subscribers. Seriously. Some blogs take months or years to reach that number.

And they did it using this one tactic.

First, they identified several key influencers who might be interested in their content marketing project. Then, they sent them this email:

The key part is that long second paragraph, the main paragraph, where Alex explains the project.

The idea he presented was for Groove to reveal everything about growing their software startup.

At the time, this was completely unique, and, of course, many influencers found it intriguing.

They offered to give real feedback on the post.

After Alex took action on that feedback, he produced an article that immediately got comments from plenty of huge influencers like Gary Vaynerchuk.

Option #3 – Give them a great reason to care: The final reason why an influencer might care enough about your content to help promote it is because it makes them look great.

In simple terms, you feature them in a good light.

This has worked for years, but like most tactics in content marketing, it’s evolved.

You used to be able to simply link to someone’s site and then email them to let them know about it. When you told them you loved their content so much you had to link to it in your post, a decent percentage were happy to share your post.

That doesn’t work so well anymore because many marketers adopted that strategy.

Influencers now get many similar emails, and the content doesn’t even make them look good (it’s just a link buried somewhere in the article).

But you have an opportunity to get ahead of the curve again.

With this final option, I recommend not only linking to an influencer but giving them a few surrounding paragraphs where you paint them in a positive light.

Here’s an example from one of my past Quick Sprout articles:

I used Brian Dean’s content as a “great example” of a concept I was trying to explain.

By doing this, not only did I include a useful example for my readers, but I made Brian look really good.

Imagine if I sent him an email after and included the content in the above picture in it? Automatically, I’d stand out from dozens of other similar emails he gets.

Another way you can show someone that you want to make them look good is to interview them.

Many bloggers successfully start podcasts just to build relationships with the influencers they interview.

For anyone, an influencer or not, being able to grab someone’s attention for 20-40 minutes during a podcast is an amazing opportunity.

Why wouldn’t I promote an interview of mine if I felt like my audience would enjoy it?

Tools to help you find influencers: One of the most important steps for all of these different options is to target the right influencers.

If they aren’t a good fit for the content you’re proposing, why would they contribute?

If you email me for advice on how to bake a pie, it’s going straight to the trash (the email, not the pie).

If you’re familiar with your niche, you might already know all the big influencers and can simply list people you’d like to connect with.

However, if you’re somewhat new or aren’t confident that you know all the influencers, you can find them in a few different ways.

The first is a simple Google search for “top bloggers (your niche),” which is a great starting point.

Most of the time, you’ll be able to find 50-100 fairly popular blogs, and you can then figure out who the people behind the blogs are.

Next, head over to BuzzSumo. Type in a few main keywords that describe your niche into the influencer search function:

You will get thousands of results. The first few hundred are usually pretty good.

2. Optimize your images for maximum shareability

It’s no secret that images are crucial for good readability.

They attract attention; readers love them; and they break up content.

But many marketers don’t make the connection between images on their sites and shares on social networks.

If you do understand this connection, you have an opportunity to increase the social shares you get on an average article by a substantial number.

Size comes first: One of the most common mistakes I see is creating an attractive image to include in a blog post but making it an awkward size for social networks.

Even if a reader shares it, it will end up distorted or cut off, so it won’t get much attention.

If you don’t know which social networks to optimize for, head over to BuzzSumo again, and type in a niche keyword. Typically, one or two results will dominate the search:

Even better, if you have a fairly high traffic blog, you should be able to check the number of shares past posts have had on each network by plugging them into a social share checker.

Once you know which network most of your readers use, either search on the social media site for image guidelines, or refer to Buffer’s ultimate guide to social media image sizes.

From there, just make sure all your blog images fit within the optimal size range.

Once you know the right size for an image, you need to figure out which types of images to include. There are a few types of images that attract more shares than others.

Type #1 – Informational images: An image that includes actual practical information will get more attention than a plain photo.

An infographic would belong to this group, but so would other images like short tutorial pictures:

You can see how the above picture would naturally attract more shares and likes than a picture of just a makeup brush.

Type #2 – Quote images: Another type of image that absolutely kills it on social media in most niches is a quote image.

Such images consist of a simple patterned background with a meaningful quote laid over top.

This is a type of picture that gets shared a lot but can become boring if used too much.

I recommend including no more than one of these per article.

Type #3 – Plain beautiful pictures: I often get asked how I get such great pictures to use for the featured images on Quick Sprout posts.

The truth is my designer creates them or finds amazing pictures that others have created.

Yes, they cost more than most stock photos, but they not only attract more reader attention but also result in more social shares.

Add image sharing buttons to your images: This small tweak will immediately produce a significant increase in shares.

You can do this by using a plugin such as SumoMe Image Sharer.

Once you enable the plugin, all of your pictures will have buttons like the ones shown above.

You can configure it to show only specific networks.

Tools to make image creation simple: There’s no point in spending money on simple pictures like quote images unless you have a very comfortable budget.

Instead, spend 10-20 minutes learning how to create your own custom images.

There are a few tools I recommend using. They are easy to use even if you stink at designing:

Canva

Snappa

Pablo

In this case, I’d recommend using Pablo when possible—an image creation tool created by Buffer.

It’s specifically designed to create images that are optimized for social media, which saves you a lot of time.

You don’t need an account to get started, and it’s completely free.

Start by picking the image size on the right sidebar (it shows you which one is best for each network):

Your canvas in the middle will adjust to that size.

Then, you can pick a background from the left sidebar:

Finally, you can click in the textbox and edit the text as you’d like. You can also drag the text around if you think it’ll look better in a different location.

3. Feature something other than an influencer

We know that people are more likely to share something if they are featured in it, especially in a positive way.

That’s why featuring influencers can produce some pretty impressive results.

But influencers aren’t extremely likely to share your content even if you do feature them. Sure, a decent percentage will, but not as many as you’d like.

But what if you could feature a typical reader who isn’t an influencer? They’d be really excited and be very likely to share it with everyone they know.

The problem here is that they have a small number of people they could send it to.

If only there was a way we could feature hundreds or thousands of typical readers at the same time.

Do you see where I’m going with this?

You can feature people not just by including their names but by featuring groups they are a part of.

And this is really powerful.

When people are heavily invested in a forum or a community site like a subreddit, they identify with that group.

If you feature that group, they’ll want to talk about it and share it because it makes the group as a whole look good (and therefore themselves).

To do this, pick any active community in your niche, and feature it in a post.

You can simply use the group as a good example for something, just like I did when I talked about influencers earlier, or you can make the whole article about them.

Even better, compare two or more of the leading communities together, and it could start a discussion within each community about which one is actually better:

4. Create content specifically for a community

This tactic piggybacks on the last one, so make sure you understand that one first.

The idea here is to recognize a common problem within a community and then solve it. This is content marketing 101.

The best example of this happened on Reddit years ago.

At the time, most image hosting services sucked because they would constantly crash, load slowly, or be filled with ads.

One Reddit user took this opportunity to create their own minimalistic image hosting service called Imgur.

It is now one of the top 50 sites in the world.

The interesting part is that all the promotion that was needed was a few posts by the creator within the community (Reddit).

From there, the community was the one that spread it. They excitedly mentioned it at all opportunities, and power users flocked to it.

Even today, many years later, Imgur is still thought of as the Reddit image host even though it’s a completely separate business.

Get as specific as possible: I’m not suggesting that you need to create the next Imgur to use this tactic. It’s unlikely that you’ll see a huge problem within a big community and be the one to solve it (although possible).

But what you can do is find a problem on a small, niche community site and solve that.

For example, a forum member on a popular poker tournament forum noticed that many other members were struggling with staying focused and energetic during long tournaments.

So, he put together a really interesting and practical post for the members of the community, calling it his “gift to MTTC” (the community).

It’s gotten over 400 replies and tens of thousands of views. I’m sure it gets linked to all the time from other parts of the site.

Ideally, your gift would be a tool or some content on your own site. However, even if your content was posted just on a website of that community, it would still instantly elevate you to the status of a highly respected member.

You could then use that standing to promote your future content with a lot more support from the community.

5. Pick topics with the potential to go viral

You want any piece of content you create to spread as fast and as wide as possible.

In other words, you want it to go viral.

But content marketers often don’t understand that they can’t just add words like “surprising” to the headline and hope the article will go viral.

Certain topics are doomed from the start.

A review guide about lamps is never going to go viral.

While you can never guarantee that an article will go viral, you can at least give yourself a chance if you understand the three factors behind viral spread.

Factor #1 – Positive feelings: Fractl conducted an in-person research study to analyze how people felt when shown a variety of different viral images.

They found that there were three significant factors behind the popularity of those images, and one of them was positive feelings.

By positive feelings, they mean any of the following:

joy

trust

interest

anticipation

The study found that when shown a selection of viral images, most participants felt a positive emotion.

This suggests that positive emotions spread more easily than negative ones. It doesn’t mean that posts that evoke negative emotions can’t go viral; they can—just much less likely.

For you, this means that you should create content that makes your readers feel good.

Factor #2 – Emotional complexity: If you see an image and smirk, you probably won’t be in a hurry to share it.

However, if it has you smiling from ear to ear, you’d want to share it so that others can feel that positive emotion too.

The second main finding from the study was that the viral images were associated with a wider range of emotions in the subjects (extreme emotions), while non-viral images had a narrow range of emotions (mild emotions).

Not only did the subjects feel strong positive or negative emotions, but when shown the most viral pieces of content, they felt both!

This is a good thing for you because it means that even if you’re creating content around a negative topic, it can still go viral. Just make sure to end it on a positive note.

Here’s an example of a video that starts negatively but ends positively. It went viral and now has over 3 million views on YouTube alone:

It starts with a heartbreaking story about a dog who was chained to a spot and left in poor conditions for 10 years.

However, it ends with the dog being rescued, taken into a caring family, and doing much better.

Neither of these two parts of the story would get too much attention by themselves, but when you combine extreme emotions on opposite ends of the spectrum, you drastically increase the story’s chance to go viral.

If there’s an issue in your industry that’s really sad, create content around the way you fixed that issue (even on a small scale).

Factor #3 – The element of surprise: While surprise can be categorized as a positive emotion, it can also be a negative emotion.

The study found that surprise is the most important emotion of all when it comes to a piece of content going viral.

Viral images, both positive and negative, were very likely to trigger a feeling of surprise in the study’s participants.

So, it turns out that adding “surprising” to the headline might not be so silly afterall.

The really important part is making sure that the meat of your content really shocks your readers.

This is something that sites such as Upworthy have down to a science.

Just about every article they post has some element of surprise:

First, you’ll need to get your reader to become curious about the topic. Then, you need to show them something that they never expected, which gets them to feel the emotions we’ve looked at.

All of this isn’t easy, but you give your content a much better chance of spreading when you focus on these three emotional factors behind viral sharing.

Conclusion

Content can help you achieve a positive return on your investment only if it’s reaching an audience.

The bigger the audience it reaches, the better the results.

If you’re having trouble reaching a large enough audience with your content, start by trying out one or two of these content creation tactics.

They will help you expose your content to new readers, and if the content is good enough, they will stick around for more or help you share it.

Some of these tactics are fairly difficult, so don’t expect to get them perfectly on the first try. As long as you see a positive result (better reach than usual), continue refining your use of the tactic, and I think you’ll be surprised with the results.

http://www.quicksprout.com/content-creation-tactics-that-will-amplify-your-contents-reach/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/5-content-creation-tactics-that-will.html

[premayogan]

Top 10 Recent Advancements in Robotics

The robot revolution may not be here quite yet, but our mechanical cousins have made some serious strides. And now some of the leading experts in the field have provided a rundown of what they see as the 10 most exciting recent developments. Compiled by the editors of the journal Science Robotics, the list includes some of the most impressive original research and innovative commercial products to make a splash in 2018, as well as a couple from 2017 that really changed the game.

1. Boston Dynamics’ Atlas doing parkour

It seems like barely a few months go by without Boston Dynamics rewriting the book on what a robot can and can’t do. Last year they really outdid themselves when they got their Atlas humanoid robot to do parkour, leaping over logs and jumping between wooden crates. Atlas’s creators have admitted that the videos we see are cherry-picked from multiple attempts, many of which don’t go so well. But they say they’re meant to be inspirational and aspirational rather than an accurate picture of where robotics is today. And combined with the company’s dog-like Spot robot, they are certainly pushing boundaries.

2. Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci SP platform

Robotic surgery isn’t new, but the technology is improving rapidly. Market leader Intuitive’s da Vinci surgical robot was first cleared by the FDA in 2000, but since then it’s come a long way, with the company now producing three separate systems. The latest addition is the da Vinci SP (single port) system, which is able to insert three instruments into the body through a single 2.5cm cannula (tube) bringing a whole new meaning to minimally invasive surgery. The system was granted FDA clearance for urological procedures last year, and the company has now started shipping the new system to customers.

3. A soft robot that navigates through growth

Roboticists have long borrowed principles from the animal kingdom, but a new robot design that mimics the way plant tendrils and fungi mycelium move by growing at the tip has really broken the mold on robot navigation. The editors point out that this is the perfect example of bio-inspired design; the researchers didn’t simply copy nature, they took a general principle and expanded on it. The tube-like robot unfolds from the front as pneumatic pressure is applied, but unlike a plant, it can grow at the speed of an animal walking and can navigate using visual feedback from a camera.

4. 3D printed liquid crystal elastomers for soft robotics

Soft robotics is one of the fastest-growing sub-disciplines in the field, but powering these devices without rigid motors or pumps is an ongoing challenge. A variety of shape-shifting materials have been proposed as potential artificial muscles, including liquid crystal elastomeric actuators. Harvard engineers have now demonstrated that these materials can be 3D printed using a special ink that allows the designer to easily program in all kinds of unusual shape-shifting abilities. What’s more, their technique produces actuators capable of lifting significantly more weight than previous approaches.

5. Muscle-mimetic, self-healing, and hydraulically amplified actuators

In another effort to find a way to power soft robots, last year researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder designed a series of super low-cost artificial muscles that can lift 200 times their own weight and even heal themselves. The devices rely on pouches filled with a liquid that makes them contract with the force and speed of mammalian skeletal muscles when a voltage is applied. The most promising for robotics applications is the so-called Peano-HASEL, which features multiple rectangular pouches connected in series that contract linearly, just like a real muscle.

6. Self-assembled nanoscale robot from DNA

While you may think of robots as hulking metallic machines, a substantial number of scientists are working on making nanoscale robots out of DNA. And last year German researchers built the first remote-controlled DNA robotic arm. They created a length of tightly-bound DNA molecules to act as the arm and attached it to a DNA base plate via a flexible joint. Because DNA carries a charge, they were able to get the arm to swivel around like the hand of a clock by applying a voltage and switch direction by reversing that voltage. The hope is that this arm could eventually be used to build materials piece by piece at the nanoscale.

7. DelFly nimble bioinspired robotic flapper

Robotics doesn’t only borrow from biology—sometimes it gives back to it, too. And a new flapping-winged robot designed by Dutch engineers that mimics the humble fruit fly has done just that, by revealing how the animals that inspired it to carry out predator-dodging maneuvers. The lab has been building flapping robots for years, but this time they ditched the airplane-like tail used to control previous incarnations. Instead, they used insect-inspired adjustments to the motions of its twin pairs of flapping wings to hover, pitch, and roll with the agility of a fruit fly. That has provided a useful platform for investigating insect flight dynamics, as well as more practical applications.

8. Soft exosuit wearable robot

Exoskeletons could prevent workplace injuries, help people walk again, and even boost soldiers’ endurance. Strapping on bulky equipment isn’t ideal, though, so researchers at Harvard are working on a soft exoskeleton that combines specially-designed textiles, sensors, and lightweight actuators. And last year the team made an important breakthrough by combining their novel exoskeleton with a machine-learning algorithm that automatically tunes the device to the user’s particular walking style. Using physiological data, it is able to adjust when and where the device needs to deliver a boost to the user’s natural movements to improve walking efficiency.

9. Universal Robots (UR) e-Series Cobots

Robots in factories are nothing new. The enormous mechanical arms you see in car factories normally have to be kept in cages to prevent them from accidentally crushing people. In recent years there’s been growing interest in “co-bots,” collaborative robots designed to work side-by-side with their human colleagues and even learn from them. Earlier this year saw the demise of ReThink robotics, the pioneer of the approach. But the simple single arm devices made by Danish firm Universal Robotics are becoming ubiquitous in workshops and warehouses around the world, accounting for about half of global co-bot sales. Last year they released their latest e-Series, with enhanced safety features and force/torque sensing.

10. Sony’s aibo

After a nearly 20-year hiatus, Sony’s robotic dog Aibo is back, and it’s had some serious upgrades. As well as a revamp to its appearance, the new robotic pet takes advantage of advances in AI, with improved environmental and command awareness and the ability to develop a unique character based on interactions with its owner. The editors note that this new context awareness marks the device out as a significant evolution in social robots, which many hope could aid in childhood learning or provide companionship for the elderly. Read the full article

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Case Study: Adidas Originals (NMD)

Adidas Originals, a sportswear brand, launched an original song and music video to encourage young people in North America to be creative, which coincided with the release of its new sneaker, NMD.

Adidas Originals wanted to reach a new generation with the launch of NMD – the first truly new sneaker, and symbol of the future, from a historically retro brand.

It found that the mainstream pessimistic vision of the future has become an obstacle to the youth's courage to create.

Adidas Originals launched a music video and an original song, 'Your future is not mine', written as the lyrical manifestation of its idea with an unknown musician and eight of the future's most exciting young creators.

The campaign became the most successful launch in Original's history – selling more shoes, with greater ROI, than any previous launch effort.

Campaign details

Brand: adidas Originals Advertiser: adidas Lead agency: Johannes Leonardo

Effie awards category context

Following a record-breaking 2015 that made their iconic 'Superstar' the best-selling shoe in the world, adidas Originals bet its business on expanding beyond retro-cool heritage by introducing its first entirely new shoe design – the 'NMD'. Despite a lack of mega-celebrity support our work established the NMD as the symbol of the brand's future. The hero shoe anchored and haloed the entire Originals product line-up, resulting in the most successful product launch in Original's history – selling more shoes, with greater ROI, than any previous effort.

State of the marketplace and brand's business

adidas Originals – adidas' sub brand dedicated to streetwear – had always been associated with classic, "retro" silhouettes. It was originally created in 2002 to re-issue iconic adidas shoes like the "Stan Smith" and the shell-toed "Superstar".

Even in the wake of Superstar's success as the world's #1 selling shoe in 2015, the brand could not hang its future on a trend of interest in "retro" fashion. In 2016, the brand would launch NMD, the first truly new sneaker that adidas Originals had ever produced – it would be an entirely fresh design and something the sneaker world had never seen before.

In this category, whole seasons are designed around hero franchises that drive interest across the product range. With the NMD as the focus for 2016, we would be counting on a successful launch to buoy the entire Originals business.

As an added challenge, we would be launching this campaign without the celebrity star power that the category had been built on, and that our Superstar campaign (Beckham, Pharrell, Damian Lillard, Rita Ora) used the year before.

Success would mean finding a way to make an outsized impact with the most skeptical audience. With NMD as our signal to the world, we needed a completely new way to reach a new generation.

Audience

Segmentation research showed that the brand's key market opportunity was with an emerging cohort of youth who are driving street culture 1 . They have wide influence on their social circles in terms of fashion and use social media to broaden and further this influence. We call them "Cultural Creators". This is a culturally diverse audience aged 16-26, who actively pursue their own creative projects. Using the digital and social tools at their disposal, they look to express themselves in new ways, especially when it comes to their own style.

Addressing street culture is one of the toughest challenges for big global brands. Many in the category get it wrong by trying to hold up a mirror to it, whereas the only way to get it right is by contributing to it. The future success of Originals (and adidas as a whole) would depend on our ability to add value and vision to street culture. Therefore, we needed to work in service of our target's creativity. Our campaign would first and foremost inspire this core segment, and then radiate towards a wider audience.

Objectives and KPIs

As the hero shoe of 2016, NMD needed to halo the entire Originals lineup.

North America has been an undeveloped market for adidas. NA typically accounts for % of global Originals sales 3 . Our goal with NMD was to extend NA's contribution to global sales and growth.

The last Originals campaign in North America was for Superstar in 2015, which yielded a return on every euro spent 4 . We took on the challenge of matching the ROI of adidas' biggest icon and the world's top-selling sneaker of 2015.

Our task was to use NMD to drive cultural relevance for Originals and NMD, judged by engagement – video views, song listens. The goal was to meet a third of the views that the 17 videos in the Superstar campaign got 5 .

Insight

The mainstream pessimistic vision of the future has become an obstacle to the youth's courage to create.

This year, we set out to add value to street culture by encouraging and inspiring its creators. So, we spoke to them to understand the barriers and drivers to creativity.

While NMD represented the future of Originals – and we were optimistic about its future – in broader culture the future seemed bleak. Everywhere they turned, this group reported being confronted with headlines, images and dire predictions of a dystopian future.

Popular culture reflected that in best-selling books, video games and film such as Black Mirror, Mad Max, The Hunger Games and Call of Duty.

In the face of so much doom and gloom, Creators felt that it was difficult to be positive about what lies ahead6 . While the bleak conventional wisdom around the future discouraged their drive to create our audience expressed an ownership over their future and maintained their optimism for what lies ahead.

We didn't need to convince them to create; they didn't need our permission. We just needed to take down this barrier to their courage.

The big idea

Embolden our target to challenge the mainstream vision of the future, and inspire them to create their own.

Bringing the idea to life

In 2016 the strategy for our creative work was to embolden our target to challenge the mainstream vision of the future and inspire them to create their own.

The category was built by Nike through celebrity endorsers promising a ticket to a better future. To connect with this young cohort, we would have to overcome their skepticism of brands and tap into their respect for those who take things into their own hands.

Rather than making promises, we would demonstrate that this generation could create their own future.

Roll-out

We launched in January with an original song "Your future is not mine", written as the lyrical manifestation of our idea. We uncovered an unknown musician as a testament to our idea, Daisy Hamel Buffa, and collaborated with her to bring the song to life.

We made a video for the song – a provocative film starring 8 of tomorrow's most exciting young creators, artists, athletes, designers and musicians from NYC, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo and Shanghai. Together, they confidently march together towards an optimistic tomorrow and dismissing hurdles along their path of the negative future they've been told to inherit.

Contrary to conventional influencer strategies, we didn't put them on a pedestal, or show off their talents in our film. We simply featured them as the cast of our story – even NBA star Iman Shumpert simply appears in support of the story.

We also stayed aware and nimble, and as "Your Future Is Not Mine" was met with such positivity and enthusiasm, we furthered our call for creativity by partnering with Grammy-winning producer Illangelo to recreate a 3-minute version of our content featuring Daisy and the rapper Joseph Mercury. This song was released in March on Spotify, iTunes and Soundcloud.

Media strategy

We spent the bulk of our media dollars in the back end of the year, when people start to think about the future as the year draws to an end.

Since we could not afford to blanket the airwaves, we chose highreach live broadcast placements in contexts that could amplify the idea.

We tapped into the heart of American pop culture by launching our film on TV during the MTV Video Music Awards in late August 2016. Despite Nike's place as the official sponsor of the broadcast, we leaned into the music connection and stole the show.

Then in October, we seized the intensity and the apprehension surrounding the American presidential election and aired "Future" during all three of the Presidential Debates. Our spot brought a new POV to three of the most fraught nights of the year. Viewers were encouraged by the message that they could choose a future outside of the two paths presented.

Communication touch points

Social media

TV spots

Paid media expenditures: September 2016 – August 2017 = $2-5 million and September 2015 – August 2016 = $1-2 million

Budget

Less than competitors and less than prior year's budget. We seeded the online video in January through paid social. We spent 3,986,560 EUR in the back end of the year, when people start to think about the future as the year draws to an end. Since we couldn't afford to blanket the airwaves, we chose high-reach live broadcast placements in relevant contexts. We tapped into American pop culture by launching our film on TV during the MTV Video Music Awards in late August 2016. Then in October, we seized the apprehension surrounding the American elections and aired "Future" during all three of the Presidential Debates.

Owned media and sponsorship

We housed our assets on our own social media channels including Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

Results

This was Originals most successful product launch ever 7 .

NMD sales rose directly in line with media moments during the campaign period. (see Figure 1) 8

With NMD, we were able to tap more into the NA market, with total sales during the results period driving a larger share of NMD global sales than our benchmark of %. (See Figure 2) 9

Originals sales in 2016 dwarfed 2015 sales every month, showing correlation, specifically in the results period, with bumps in NMD sales in NA. (See Figure 3) 10

NMD surpassed the ROI of our biggest icon, Superstar.

Using the formula: ROI = NMD Sales (Aug - Dec) / Media Investment (Aug to Dec), NMD exceeded the ROI of the 2015 Superstar campaign.

We stole the show at VMAs, despite Nike being the official sponsor.

People used #MyFutureIs during the VMAs to share the vision of the future they intend to create 15

The remix was played organically and nearly people posted their own remixes of the track, despite no call for user-generated content submissions.17

Other contributing factors

Category growth could boost sales, but Originals outpaced the category every quarter. While the US sneaker market grew 3% in 2016 18, Originals NA grew at a rate of % 19 .

2016 was the year of retro sneakers. Reissued designs became the fastest-growing category in the US 20 . NMD didn't benefit from this trend as it's a completely new silhouette.

Kanye West's partnership with adidas on the Yeezy franchise has helped improve brand perception. Yeezy is a separate business from Originals, so those results aren't factored into this case. Leading sneaker analyst Matt Powell has also repeatedly expressed that "the growth isn't coming from any styles vaguely associated with West".

Sometimes lowering prices drives volume and may increase revenue. Our average price per unit actually rose during 2016 21.

Sourcing:

Originals Qualitative Research Report, whY-Q? Inc, April 2015

NMD 2016 Monthly Sales, adidas Originals internal, January 2017

KCC Originals Development, adidas Originals Internal, April 2017 (Average of 2014 and 2015 North American sales as a percentage of global sales)

SS15 Post-Campaign Analysis, Media Company Research, May 2016; Superstar Sales Tracker, adidas Originals Internal, Jan 2016 (Note: The results come from North America, but the company's accounting is done in Euros)

Advertising Age Marketing Essentials Case Study: Adidas Originals, January 2016

Originals Qualitative Research Report, whY-Q? Inc., April 2015

NMD 2016 Monthly Sales, adidas Originals internal, January 2017

NMD 2016 Monthly Sales, adidas Originals internal, January 2017

NMD 2016 Monthly Sales, adidas Originals internal, January 2017; KCC Originals Development, adidas Originals Internal, April 2017

Originals North America 2016-2015 Monthly Sales, adidas Originals Internal, January 2017

Future Campaign Spend Breakdown, Media agency research, April 2017

NMD 2016 Monthly Sales, adidas Originals internal, January 2017

adidas Originals Digital Analytics, "Social Media Development", April 2017

adidas Originals Digital Analytics, "Social Media Development", April 2017

adidas Originals Digital Analytics, "Social Media Development", April 2017

adidas Originals Digital Analytics, "Social Media Development", April 2017

adidas Originals Digital Analytics, "Social Media Development", April 2017

The NPD Group, Inc. Retail Tracking Service, Annual 2016

KCC Originals Development, adidas Originals Internal, April 2017

WSJ, "Retro Sneakers Give Shoemakers a Boost", Jun 20, 2016

KCC Originals Development, adidas Originals Internal, April 2017

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Regarding: Search Engine Journal's flagship meeting, SEJ Summit, is dedicated to providing SEO pros the actual require, with an agenda of authentic, first-run presentations covering the newest SEO and PPC tactics through renowned experts, plus excellent network opportunities. SEO combines official lookup engine guidelines, empirical knowledge, plus theoretical knowledge from science documents or patents. This will be a half-day workshop at LeadsCon that will be designed to be able to give attendees an end-to-end watch of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), how it works, and touchable things they can do nowadays Blog9T to improve their SEO functionality. After the Search engines Panda algorithm appeared, SEO professionals realized just how much key phrase frequency and density matters. SEO means optimizing your posts so it shows up even more often in search results. 33. With social media systems like Facebook diminishing visibility associated with companies and brands, SEO (as well as paid promotion) will be becoming critically important for generating traffic to your social stations. 2019 dates TBD. ). Why go to: One-track conference full of forward-thinking, tactical sessions in SEO, development marketing, the mobile landscape, analytics, content marketing and more. ” Don't miss the LeadsCon Meeting in Vegas, March 4-6, 2019. Given that research engines have complex algorithms that will power their technology and everybody's marketing needs are unique, wish unable to provide specific SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION advice to our customers. All of us think SEO in 2019 might find a shift to focusing a lot more on user intent, problem resolving, and hyper locality in purchase to capitalize on the carried on rise of voice search. Private demographic information would come in a great deal handier in 2019 as significantly as the ranking of key phrases is concerned. Links are one of the particular most important SEO ranking aspects. However, more advanced that will readers will recognize the reduce quality of sites employing dark hat SEO at the expenditure from the reader experience, which usually will reduce the site's visitors and page rank over period. So - THERE IS SIMPLY NO BEST PRACTICE AMOUNT OF FIGURES any SEO could lay down since exact best practice to GUARANTEE a title may display, in full in Search engines, at least, since the search little title, on every device. While getting as many pages listed in Google was historically the priority for an SEO, Search engines is now rating the high quality of pages on the site plus the type of pages this really is indexing. Jerrika Scott, Digital Marketing Specialist from Archway Cards Ltd, also feels in voice being the pattern of 2019 rather than 2018. Today, in spite of all the hype about whether or not SEO is dead, we discover that organic search is nevertheless one of the highest RETURN ON INVESTMENT digital marketing channels.

Link building is a type of off-site SEO where various other sites link back to your own site if they feel a person offer something of value in order to their audience. In many crucial areas they overlap; if SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is more technical and provides to a narrow sphere, articles marketing takes a holistic technique. Equally, presently there is no point in spending your SEO marketing efforts simply by delivering lots of traffic in order to your website from highly appropriate search queries, when the consumer experience upon landing on that will website is poor quality. On web page, SEO relates to keywords. In addition to the over search engine optimization solutions, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services provide other Internet advertising services, which includes: search-friendly internet design, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies, backlink programs, SMO services, blog page optimization and marketing, targeted regional search engine marketing, and cellular marketing optimization. A successful SEO effort requires to move beyond building joyful to rank on highly explored keywords and should have the heavy focus on providing solutions for genres of unique concerns that many people might research by voice. Learn the particular strategy behind great SEO, which includes keyword planning, content optimization, hyperlink building, and SEO for e-commerce, local search, and mobile viewers. Seo or SEO will be the simple process of making sure a website can be discovered in search engines for words and phrases and phrases relevant to exactly what the site is providing. Every advertising SEO blog will be talking about online video advertising and every third company professional you talk to is about to shift marketing dollars to a good online video campaign. ” Simply by 2019, video is expected in order to account for 80 percent associated with all web traffic. Don't set it and forget about it. Take time to review your SEO keyword strategy every single few months to make certain it's still relevant and attaining the outcomes you want. Stories are a easy method to do marketing, you simply need to include some custom made images or text in purchase to let people know they will could swipe to click plus see where you can obtain a skirt, grill, buy SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, or anything else you're attempting to pitch to the world. Jana Granko, PR (public relations) head in SEMrush - one of the particular top marketing tools of the particular world - believe that within 2019 AI (artificial intelligence) might change the way people lookup for keywords. In fact, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is simply one part associated with every successful digital marketing technique, but possibly the most essential part. These are called SEO positioning factors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the art and technology of driving the most competent visitors to your website simply by attaining high search engine outcomes. With Digital SEO Land, Rintu Biswas a professional SEO expert throughout Kolkata will assist you in order to build quality backlinks to your site. This ‘what is SEO‘ guide (and this whole website) is not about churn and burn type of Search engines SEO (called webspam to Google) as that is too dangerous to deploy on a actual business website in 2018. The Technical Audit Checklist Produced For Human Beings — Within this post by Distilled, a person will find a link in order to a Google sheet that offers an technical SEO audit directory and links to resources upon how to complete each checkbox. Then each time the term SEO appears on your web site, it's automatically changed into the link you specified. Keyword Analysis for SEO: The Definitive Guidebook — This comprehensive guide simply by Brian Dean teaches you the number of strategies for getting keywords and determining intent with regard to your target market. On-page and off-page SEO function together to improve your lookup engine rankings in complementary style; however, SEOs generally advise obtaining your on-page SEO ducks within a row before focusing as well much on off-page SEO. Within 2019, web-based businesses will embrace more voice-to-text technology to enhance engagement and search activity. There are many SEO web sites suggesting that they can offer a service to make our own website LSI friendly, or satisfy ‘LSI requirements'. The particular art of web SEO is situated in focusing on how individuals search for things and knowing what type of results Search engines wants to (or will) screen to its users. Social press SEO would encourage your present customers to come back whilst helping you develop authority intended for potential ones. He is an expert in SEO, Content Marketing, plus Pinterest Marketing. An SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION expert plays a huge function in helping companies build their own businesses and attract new clients through website traffic.

Something which usually was troubling about 2017, plus as we head into 2018, will be the new wave of agencies merely bolting on SEO since a service without any genuine appreciation of structuring site architectures and content for both people and search engine understanding. A big part of SEO is within creating content which is focused towards the keywords that research engines users are searching with regard to. Building links could be the big part of your work as an SEO because this plays such a big component in the algorithms used simply by search engines to look with regard to the order of their outcomes. Search engines like google through the King Google to supplementary ones like Bing and Google rank the websites on the particular basis of its SEO. It's mainly because creating content and ranking this in Google is what SEOs do! SEO providers look at their links, through where their links are arriving, and what keywords they have got made a decision to optimize for their web sites. Hobo UK SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - A Beginner's Guide (2018) is really a free pdf file ebook you can DOWNLOAD TOTALLY FREE from here (2mb) that will contains my notes about generating increased organic traffic to the site within Google's guidelines. My conjecture is that the biggest SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trend in 2019 is heading to be Amazon search. TYPES OF SEO Generally there are two major types associated with seo, white hat search motor optimization (the ‘good' kind), plus black hat (the 'not therefore good' kind). Google's always tweaking its lookup algorithms, so there's no warranty that SEO practices that proved helpful in the past will maintain working in the future.

[clubofinfo]

Expert: There was a time when the internet was an experiment in anarchy, but it is increasingly becoming an experiment in “stateness”, meaning police-order. Social networks are in crisis. Our governments are losing patience with them, grilling geek after geek to demand they be more loyal to the nation-state and take a more active role suppressing apparently foreign points of view. The unplugging of the entire internet by NATO countries to stop vaguely defined “Russian trolls” – a nationalistic smear for rebellious social media users living not in Russia but our own countries – cannot be ruled out. As laughable as this possibility may seem to internet users, Western leaders are dead serious about the issue. They consider users who mock them online as existential threats. That they may eventually give up and unplug everything will be touched on here, but it also needs more consideration at a later date. For now, the focus must be on what might happen to the major social networks. If they are profoundly reshaped by geopolitical tension and paranoia, will they be of any continued use for publishing anti-establishment slogans and views? How will the new Cold War affect the freedom of writers and independent creators to express themselves through social networks? Lawmakers in the US, the UK, the EU, and other NATO-aligned political structures are wrathful towards social networks due to the influence they indiscriminately offer anyone who signs up to them. Since the US election of 2016, we have watched staff from Twitter, Facebook and Google get grilled by screaming American and British lawmakers. The ageing lawmakers, not willing to take any chances in the “neuland” of the internet (so described by Angela Merkel) treat social networks with the utmost disdain and hostility. For them, the internet is a war-fighting domain, a battlefield of states with fixed front lines, a red zone where insurgents snipe at them. For them, the objective must be to silence anyone who disagrees with them and glorify anyone who does agree with them. According to the traditional paranoid geopolitical mindset, social networks have to even be regarded as unwitting hostile actors. By offering people the chance to choose their own sources of information and even reproduce those sources and share those sources to others, social networks undermine loyalty to the nation-state, making it harder to spread Nineteenth Century ideas of loyalty and incite new petty wars with other nation-states. Our fossilized politicians, longing for the day when every young man had to complete mandatory military service and longed to die for the flag, seek to lobotomize the youth and restore nation-state loyalty to execute warlike aims against geopolitical foes Russia and China. While hostility of ageing politicians towards social networks may be worrying, their complete intellectual failure and lack of understanding of what they are dealing with is encouraging. Their obsession with the current major social networks – Twitter and Facebook – suggests that they regard social media in the same way that they view news media. In their view, social networks are just some other big companies that need to be reined in. Just one or two big actors need to be forced to conform to the regime’s ideology, like the well-behaved top news journalists broadcasters, and the politicians’ authority will be restored. The “trolls” will be defeated. The youth will start to respect the bleary-eyed generals and politicians who were kept awake at night by them. Unfortunately for every internet creator, the reactions of Twitter, Facebook and Google have been cowed. All are eager to prove their nationalist loyalty, particularly to the US state, because their websites’ physical infrastructure is based on the territory of the US state. They have the American regime’s gun to their heads, just like the television stations. Google serves the Pentagon loyally, but may be incapable of preventing its platform’s exploitation by the Pentagon’s enemies and critics due to the sheer number of targets flooding their scopes. It is possible that the frail politicians so concerned about “trolls” will be able to cower in safety very soon behind a wall of new media enforcement, but it will not last forever. If the power of individuals to express themselves freely at major social networks, chiefly Twitter and Facebook, is sabotaged, communities will move gradually to other social networks and continue their activity there. The centre of media attention will shift away from dullness and conformity to somewhere more interesting once again. A major consideration for alternate media when selecting social networks has likely been the presence of third party applications that can amplify one’s views across social media by providing automated posting services. These upset the traditional dominance of the wealthy and the powerful over the press. Very low overhead is required to establish a publication using various automation and aggregation tools to create feeds that offer a wide different spectrum of news and commentary than the mainstream. Attacks against automation under the guise of fighting “fake news” and “bots” are therefore an excuse to hamper small and independent media projects that lack the staff to manually post every item of content to the social networks. This assumes that the social networks are really going to fight automation.  The BBC and its supporters are mindless bots, if we look seriously at Twitter’s rules, and yet the people whose accounts get suppressed by Twitter are not bots but real people targeted by the British regime for holding dissident views. Perhaps the flight of dissenting users to some future alternative social network should settle the battle between politicians and trolls. But it would probably only anger Western politicians even more, as they regard all alternative media as extremist, so the counterinsurgency would rage on. Not able to pressure the alternate social networks, politicians may resort to the brute force of the law, seeking court orders to block every app or social network being used to hurt political egos or express disloyalty to the state. But websites can be cloned and mirrored, and insurgent networks would be continuously made available again, as is the case with the various “putlockers” endlessly springing up to avoid the court orders that are always too slow and ineffective to counter free streaming. There is every reason to think that many of the most effective anti-government critics would still be able to thrive even on the mainstream social networks, merely by altering their choice of language and modifying aspects of their behavior to evade the automated tools being used to remove them. Resistance can vary between passive and active forms, and rejection of national loyalty and lack of support for war will always be possible in any forum even if everyone else is a bloodthirsty and rabid nationalist. Advocacy for the removal of censorship and the destruction of the yokes used to enforce conformity and faith on a social network would always be considered a moderate and neutral view, making it possible to support more rebellious creators without joining them. The inevitable failures of an online counterinsurgency described above could eventually prove too much for some governments to bear, and the result would be the complete destruction of the internet – something states will always be able to do. They might first attempt “balkanization”, forcing users to only register for accounts at social networks if they reside in the country where the social network is based. If that occurs, websites like Twitter and Facebook would fall into the geopolitical space of NATO, and support of NATO war aims and propaganda would become a compulsory requirement of all users, with everyone lobotomized to be docile supporters. Balkanization would fail to achieve anything. As recent hunts for “trolls” have demonstrated, they are not actually foreign, nor are they automated. The alleged Russian enemies, “trolls” and “bots” are real people. They are not hackers from Russian spy agencies, but independent authors, journalists and creative people – civilians located inside our own countries who hold anti-war and anti-colonial views on foreign policy. Such innocent people look like they will be the new targets in the next “accidental” rampage by our incompetent regimes against perceived anti-state threats. If they pursue and yet fail to achieve anything against trolls through political pressure, court orders, and geopolitical militarization of the social networks, politicians who view trolls as a true threat to the state will inevitably advocate a total ban on the internet. It is for this final contingency that independent writers and serious activists must prepare themselves. It is not enough to have a collection of friends and followers on some top social networks, and even a robust email list may not be enough to sustain one’s writing. Real contacts and a real publishing history outside the social networks, even in print, are a requirement to sustain anti-establishment momentum and the propagation of balanced views. Anything less, and the paranoid regime can delete you and all its other critics with the push of a button. The conservation of social media-based activists on lists and their transformation into published authors is one way for them to save themselves from simple bans, at the same time amplifying their voices ever more. The development of the Mont Order society to connect and preserve dissenting influencers on social networks can only help. It may be that teaming up to use a variety of applications, technologies and email clients based under different geopolitical poles of influence (the US, the EU, Russia and China) may be the only route towards independent political writing and advocacy under the suffocating conditions of the new Cold War. Such a strategy, pursued early on before it is even necessary, would allow dissident gatherings on social networks to survive purges, hostility, court orders, balkanization and even the plug being pulled completely by these paranoid regimes we have tolerated. Much of what is forecasted here is dark, and perhaps too dark. Perhaps the internet isn’t really doomed to die at the hands of paranoid and vain politicians trying to defoliate it to fight their critics. Perhaps police-order is not achievable across the internet. It could be that many of the stages of counter-insurgency would require so much legal reform and such a high budget that most of the politicians concerned will die of old age and be replaced by a more tech-savvy and relaxed generation before their aims are even close to being achieved. Nevertheless, it is prudent to seek out and imagine counter-strategies to survive even the most heavy-handed actions by politicians against critics. http://clubof.info/

[gomysticcollectionbearstuff-blog]

The Idiot's Guide To Pills for wrinkles Explained

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[newstfionline]

Propaganda With a Millennial Twist Pops Up in China

By Javier C. Hernández, NY Times, Dec. 31, 2016

BEIJING--The two-minute cartoon opens with a folksy jingle and a smiling bobblehead of President Xi Jinping, dimpled and cherubic. Then it cuts to a colorful montage praising his government for improving the lives of ordinary Chinese with what might seem like a mundane policy: regulations allowing taxis to be summoned online.

With vivid animation and quirky sound effects, the video does not feel like propaganda. But its creators, a team of 15 people hired by the state-run media, spent months obsessing over the details, down to the shape of Mr. Xi’s grin. Their mission: to promote Mr. Xi and the ruling Communist Party in a voice that resonates with China’s digitally savvy millennials.

“There isn’t any dry language or political jargon,” said Ma Changbo, 35, a former journalist who is the chief executive of the multimedia studio behind the clip, which was published online by China Central Television, the state broadcaster. “People can relate to it.”

Decades after Mao Zedong declared the pen as important to political power as the gun, the party still churns out old-school propaganda--colorful posters with wooden slogans, mawkish movies with patriotic themes, meticulously censored newspapers written in dry, impenetrable language. The evening news is as rigid as ever, almost always opening with Mr. Xi and often featuring the reading of long party communiqués.

But Mr. Xi is demanding that the propaganda apparatus step up its game.

His administration has castigated propaganda officials as ineffective, too slow to assert control over the internet and lacking in their commitment to Marxist values. He is pushing them to master the tools of digital media, resist foreign influences in popular culture and target younger audiences, a demographic that some in the party worry it may be losing.

The fruits of his campaign are popping up online. In addition to a more aggressive effort to stamp out criticism and amplify support on social media, the party has invested millions in animated videos that cast Mr. Xi as a compassionate champion of Chinese workers. Scholars have delivered TED-style talks that rail against Western imperialism. Hip-hop songs pay homage to party history and warn of America’s efforts to topple the Chinese government.

It is unclear how effective such tactics will be in winning over a younger generation that is more skeptical of prepackaged messages and increasingly connected to the outside world. Nor is the party’s ability to modernize and reorient its vast propaganda apparatus--perhaps the world’s largest--guaranteed. But there is widespread agreement that the old methods are no longer enough.

“If the government wants to reach this audience they have to use new media to do it,” said Anne-Marie Brady, an expert in Chinese propaganda at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, adding that many young people have grown accustomed to bypassing official censorship.

Mr. Xi is trying to increase confidence in the party as it contends with a slowing economy. The campaign also underscores his determination to shore up China’s image abroad as it moves to capitalize on political discord in the West and win new allies. Top party officials have called on news outlets to embrace digital media to help “spread Chinese voices” around the globe.

Inside the offices of People’s Daily, the party’s flagship newspaper since 1946, editors are turning to video and animation to enliven stories about government policies and appeal to foreign audiences. When Mr. Xi visited the United States in 2015, for example, they produced a video in which foreign students in China offered fawning assessments of his performance.

Ye Zhenzhen, 40, who oversees “new media” for the newspaper group and prefers not to use the word propaganda to describe his work, said the videos were aimed at helping foreigners get beyond clichés about political oppression and corruption in China. But he added that finding new ways to talk about China was also a business necessity.

“We can’t simply rely on traditional forms of content,” he said. “We need to diversify and put ourselves in our customers’ shoes.”

The government’s interest in new forms of propaganda has created a booming market for digital media enthusiasts with a nationalist bent.

Mr. Ma, whose multimedia studio, Shizhi Media, produced the taxi cartoon, said about a fifth of its clients were party or state entities. The video about the taxi initiative, for example, was produced for China Central Television in September as part of a contract to promote the work of a party body known as the Central Leading Group for Comprehensively Deepening Reforms, 1,000 days after it was formed.

“Government agencies used to be content to just get the message out. Now they care about persuasion,” said Mr. Ma, who teaches at an academy that trains party officials. “Not only do they want people to see their messages, they want to make you believe the messages are true and to inform your judgment. This is a major difference.”

The party’s best propagandists, he said, are students of politics and popular culture. Some have analyzed hit songs to learn how to use musical repetition to convey key ideas. Others have looked for inspiration in the speaking style of leaders like President Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Ma said he had sought to humanize Mr. Xi by depicting him and his wife, Peng Liyuan, as animated characters, a technique aimed at attracting people who are not interested in politics. He has also tried to make political topics more appealing by using vivid imagery, producing animations that depict officials scheming at bathhouses to promote Mr. Xi’s anticorruption campaign, for example.

The results have not been conclusive. While some of these propaganda videos have gone viral, others have been passed around only to be ridiculed. Few are able to summon the audiences drawn to China’s most popular movies, television shows and songs.

Rao Jin, a technology entrepreneur who runs a nationalistic website and media company known as April Media, has tried to take a more substantive approach, starting a series of online talks in the style of TED events.

The subjects range from the colonialist history of foreign powers to China’s stability compared with the United States and Europe, and each video is aimed to appeal to younger audiences, using a conversational tone, sleek graphics and a minimalist set featuring a leather sofa.

Some talks, including one by a political commentator on how to resist the influence of Western culture, have been viewed tens of millions of times. “A lot of Chinese people blindly worship everything foreign,” said Mr. Rao, 31, who finances the project through commercial video work and profits from his tech firm. “We want young people to have more confidence in their own culture and in their nation.”

Mr. Rao is also working with the Communist Youth League and a rap group known as CD REV to produce music videos that denounce negative foreign media coverage of China and present the country as peace-loving and prosperous.

“All we hear is, ‘China is poor, it’s a dragon, it will eat us, it will beat us,’” Li Yijie, 22, a singer and lyricist for the group, said during a recording session in Chengdu. “We want to show people that China is not evil.”

Three of the four members of CD REV, who wear ripped jeans and gold watches, were raised by parents who served in the People’s Liberation Army. But Mr. Li said the group found inspiration in the anti-establishment music of hip-hop masters like Eminem and Dr. Dre.

The group has recorded a half-dozen patriotic music videos, most of them in English, featuring songs about China’s claims in the contested South China Sea and Mao’s legacy. In one about American attempts to spread democracy, it sings:

Democracy, hypocrisy, false liar Trying to use invisible bullets to get money, huh The world is not yours, now you listen Outta our homeland and get back to North America

Mr. Li said the group saw itself as filling a void where traditional propaganda had fallen short.

“Chinese patriotic education has failed--it’s stiff and awkward,” he said. “I think we need to accept the responsibility to make it better.”