#its up to the individual to research and determine the value of the memes and resources you seek

[adhdandcomics]

adding to my tags because i’ve been thinkin a lot about the post i just reblogged and have more thoughts:

i’ll be real, the more i saw ‘hey adhd influencers are so annoying’ the more i worried that i was unconsciously contributing to the spreading reputation of adhd folks as annoying and over-pathologizing every symptom they experience

and then i realized. i am not a goddam influencer or life coach or representative. obviously i have some obligation as someone who cares about myself and the people that like my comics to not spread harmful ideology or blatant misinformation but i never intended myself to be a “’increase your productivity!!’ blog OR a ‘if you have XYZ you have adhd!’ blog. and i do this for fun, and originally started this blog bc i had a lot of internalized shame and self loathing about my adhd and thought if i could make it funny i might have less of that. let’s get real! and it worked!

i’ve obviously done this kind of thing— (hey these symptoms might be adhd!) a lot before in my life & on this blog, but there’s more to it than trying to be an “influencer” or whatever. a term that didn’t even exist when i started this blog!

i felt very isolated trying to find out if i had any mental problems & what have you originally because of large advice (etc) blogs with staunchly anti self Dx views at the time

so i overcorrected when i DID get dxed and tried to validate everyone who was like me. and of course. not the best course of action always for the ol mental health. tried to be the source of positivity and jokes that i didn’t see because the online adhd presence was near non-existent.

and anyway. i make a lot of fun of myself & the way m brain works in my comics obviously but it is not my obligation to... how do you say.... not be annoying online.

because if folks interpret MY little jokes as a strict guide to diagnosis. that’s on them, really, not me. i also believe “making adhd your entire personality” is a non-issue. so what if people find out they have it and get over excited with identifying as adhd. saying this as someone who DID do it. criticism of this gives the same vibes as people being annoyed that young queers make “being queer” their whole personality. im very obviously more than a guy with adhd, and id reckon other adhd comic artists are too. (im friends with a lot of them!) it’s fine to post about it online.

anyway. i just don’t take myself too seriously and i’m a comic artist for myself first! and you know what, i’ve been considered annoying my entire life. what do i care if a few more folks think i’m annoying. neurotypical or not

[studiopeachz]

Women Empowerment Research

What is women empowerment?

“Women's empowerment is the process of empowering women. It may be defined in several ways, including accepting women's viewpoints or making an effort to seek them, raising the status of women through education, awareness, literacy, and training” Empowering women is a part of a person’s well being to enable them to feel ‘powerful’ in their own way. Being powerful can mean a lot of things and can come from philosophy, wisdom, talents, work ethic, and so much more that helps build a person’s character.  

What is the history of Feminism and Women Empowerment in New Zealand?

https://theconversation.com/why-new-zealand-was-the-first-country-where-women-won-the-right-to-vote-103219 

125 years ago today Aotearoa New Zealand became the first country in the world to grant all women the right to vote. The event was part of an ongoing international movement for women to exit from an inferior position in society and to enjoy equal rights with men. Many supported universal male suffrage and a less rigid class structure, enlightened race relations and humanitarianism that also extended to improving women’s lives. These liberal aspirations towards societal equality contributed to the 1893 women’s suffrage victory.

At the end of the 19th century, feminists in New Zealand had a long list of demands. It included equal pay, prevention of violence against women, economic independence for women, old age pensions and reform of marriage, divorce, health and education – and peace and justice for all.

During the 1880s, depression and its accompanying poverty, sexual licence and drunken disorder further enhanced women’s value as settling maternal figures.

New Zealand gained much strength from an international feminist movement. Women were riding a first feminist wave that, most often grounded in their biological difference as life givers and carers, cast them as moral citizens. With hindsight, the feminist movement can be implicated as an agent of colonisation, but it did support votes for Māori women. Meri Te Tai Mangakāhia presented a motion to the newly formed Māori parliament to allow women to vote and sit in it.

What does women empowerment mean to Gen Z?

https://www.thinkhousehq.com/insights/bodies-blood-brilliance-gen-z-feminism 

“Everyone should be feminist, because it’s about equality. It’s not about telling women what they should or shouldn’t do, if someone wants to wear make up then they can, and if they don’t want to wear make up then they don’t have to. But there is an issue with many self-proclaimed feminist being gatekeepers. My friends and I think that TERFs, particularly, are a major issue. Feminism is also about helping men, helping them express their emotions and not have to be the breadwinners of a family and destroying toxic masculinity.” - Grace, 18

From actresses to survivors, artists to poets, and models to musicians, what Gen Z feminist icons all have in common is that they channel their creativity expertly to tell their stories, while adopting an unapologetic activist approach to opening conversation and fighting for justice, change and equality.

Representation in popular feminism today takes many forms. It’s about equal representation in society, with regard to industry, politics and policy making and equal representation in culture. Initiatives like Her Story aim to raise the profile of women’s stories, as a way to combat the global phenomenon of amnesia of women’s stories in history and more contemporary times.

Gen Z are talking more openly about vaginas, periods, miscarriages, body hair, the lot. This celebration is not only about the differences between women’s personal experiences, but also of the distinctive traits all women hold. The representation particular feminine traits and the unique brilliance of women comes to the fore in conversation here: 

“While equality is important, to me it’s more about valuing the traits that a woman has. Creating more feminine, comfortable environments could bring about a positive change in different ways.”- Alwyn, 25.

Ultimately, what these trends tell us about feminism today, is that young women today are radical about owning who they are and being recognized accurately by wider society. They are unashamedly channeling their intelligence, digital currency, agency and creative skill, with purpose, to shout louder and more powerfully as a group than ever before.

https://musebycl.io/7-ways-empowering-gen-z-girls-change-world 

These girls—especially those born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s—have the ambition, confidence and desire to make a difference in the world. So much so that they've inspired me to take the leap from communicating to women to making a real cultural change.

Having other strong, supportive women to look up to will be a motivator to these girls when they enter the workforce. With initiatives like the #SeeHer movement, the advertising industry is already making an effort to accurately portray women in media, and hopefully strong women will continue to take the spotlight.

Individuality is important to Gen Z, so encouraging them to pursue their passions is vital. Recognizing that their lives are multifaceted and giving them the tools to explore and grow will help inspire them both at work and beyond.

https://psmag.com/ideas/why-generation-z-is-embracing-feminism 

In many cultural contexts, Generation Z appears to be embracing feminism as a positive thing, demonstrating confidence in the power of activism, particularly via social media.

Malala Yousafzai, or 18-year-old Emma González, who's at the heart of the #NeverAgain movement protesting gun violence in the U.S.,

Online feminist campaigns such as #everydaysexism, #MeToo, and #TimesUp all draw energy from the new consciousness among this generation.

How is women empowerment done/displayed in a Gen Z way? - consider what inspired you to do a women empowerment campaign.

“HOT GIRL SUMMER”

https://time.com/5632924/hot-girl-summer-meme-explained/ 

If you’ve logged onto Twitter or swiped through your Instagram at any point this summer, you’ve definitely seen a post declaring it’s a hot girl summer. The now-ubiquitous phrase, a call to live your most confident and unapologetic life, was coined in the early months of the season by Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion, whose colorful monikers for herself also include “the H-Town Hottie” and “Hot Girl Meg.”

Contrary to what one might assume when hearing “hot girl,” the lifestyle is not focused on aspiring towards conventional beauty or influencer clout. Instead, it’s an embrace of confidence at its most essential: loving who you are and doing what you want, without caring what others think.

hot girl summer is for “women — and men — having a good-a– time, hyping up your friends, doing you and not giving a damn what anybody has to say about it.”

(the hashtag #hotgirlsummer has been used over 170k times on Instagram, while the hot girl summer has been used on Twitter a whopping 2 million times over the past month) distills an affinity, exhibited by many women in 2019, towards body positivity and self-affirmation. Hot girl summer, a hip-hop feminist manifesto, taps into these movements from many angles, championing confidence, sensuality and fun.

Tacho explained why she embraced hot girl summer to TIME thusly: “It’s a positive movement! Having a Hot Girl Summer is all about being the best version of yourself and doing what you want to do. It’s all about having fun.”

And as with most things on the Internet, it’s attracted its fair share of controversy. Although Megan clearly stated that hot girl summer is gender neutral, some trolls on the Internet were determined to make hot girl summer a battle of the sexes, pitting it against a “hot boy summer” or a “city boy summer,” the latter being a play on the rap group the City Girls (the duo is known for their fierce, take-no-prisoners approach to love and sex in their music).

“I CAN’T TALK RIGHT NOW, I’M DOING HOT GIRL SH*T”

https://www.buzzfeed.com/andriamoore/doing-hot-girl-sht-tiktok-trend 

Megan Thee Stallion gifted us the slogan of a lifetime when she broke onto the music scene and coined the phrase, "real hot girl sh*t."

If you don't know, the phrase has basically become a battle cry for female empowerment.

But the latest TikTok trend is putting a hilarious twist on that sense of empowerment. People are uploading videos of themselves doing... well, things that aren't typically in the realm of "hot girl sh*t"— like shaving your stomach.

If anything, this trend has only further increased the purpose of the hot girl anthem: feeling proud and confident with who you are already.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3v873/hot-girl-shit-meme-megan-thee-stallion-tiktok 

Over the past couple of months, “hot girl shit” has swept through social media like a heat wave. These videos feature people, mostly those who identify as women, embracing their most everyday, banal moments—shaving their upper lips, putting on face packs, savouring the last few puffs of a joint, involved in an intense gaming sesh or simply taking their 23rd nap in the day—under the guise of doing something that could be considered hot, a term that generally refers to the sexual attractiveness of a person.

But what they may lack in logical reasoning, they make up for in deeper meaning: letting the world know that being “hot” isn’t just equated to someone’s physical appearance anymore. That being hot is a mentality, a mindset that involves extra dollops of extreme self-confidence, and something to be found inherently within us rather than something you’re blessed at birth with or what your cosmetic surgeon helped you achieve.

TikToking and Reels-ing our way to chipping away centuries of female objectification and sexism, prompted by the male-dominated industry ideal of how women should look and behave to “qualify” as hot.

“This trend proves that ‘hot girl shit’ lies on a spectrum, and is ultimately just about feeling confident,” Uchenna, the first known creator of this meme format, who goes by her screen moniker @makeupbychelseax, told VICE. The young creator sees the trend as a way to reclaim the identity of what a “hot” girl should be, after centuries of the concept hanging on the hinges of the male gaze.

Mulvey theorises that essentially the male gaze hypersexualises women, reducing them to objects of attraction for the male lead. The male gaze, which has been dominant throughout the history of pop culture, ultimately drives the perception of what the ideal woman should look like.

Over decades of women being seen through a stereotypical lens in pop culture and art, mostly crafted by heterosexual men, the male gaze has also conditioned many young women who consume this content to strive to achieve the same standards of the perfect on-screen female lead.

“The stereotypical idea of the ‘hot girl’ would be a tall, skinny, fair girl with big boobs,” Shreemi Verma, a film critic and marketing professional told VICE.

“hot” girl is a socially conditioned prototype, a fantasy fuelled by the lack of female filmmakers and critics in the mainstream industry. so many of us connected with this meme trend is because of how real it was.

Verma stressed that by showing the raw reality behind what can be considered hot, this trend became a relatable way for women to challenge the on-screen stereotype. the idea of “hot” continues to evolve into a more empathetic, all-encompassing ideal. Supriya Banerjee, a 24-year-old social researcher based in the Netherlands, told VICE. It normalizes simple things like art, dance or cooking meals for children as things a hot girl does.” For Banerjee, the trend has a simple underlying message: that everything women do can be considered hot girl shit.

What does Gen Z women empowerment suggest?

Feminism and female empowerment within Generation Z shares the idea of positive cultural change in female stereotypes through technology and social media which can be easily flowed into the mainstream of society and news. Gen Z is all about individuality, authenticity, and diversity and is always up to challenge  stereotypes and break the norms unapologetically in order to be truly happy because Gen Z is passionate about wellbeing and mental health. Gen Z sets out trends on social media to spread messages and ideas that influence other social media users. Overall, Gen Z’s way of breaking female stereotypes is through trends, social media, music, and many more types of media just to get the word out.

[orbemnews]

Why AMC shares are skyrocketing again What’s happening: Shares of AMC Entertainment (AMC) have shot up nearly 120% this week as amateur investors show renewed enthusiasm for the movie theater chain. They climbed 36% on Thursday alone, reaching their highest level since 2017, and are up another 12% in premarket trading Friday. So what’s happening, and should Wall Street be bracing itself for another GameStop-like saga? Perhaps not yet, Giacomo Pierantoni, a research analyst at Vanda Securities who tracks retail investment flows, told me. It’s true that social media users are exhibiting a lot of hype for AMC, and that their excitement once again seems divorced from the stock’s fundamentals. Analysts forecast that AMC’s revenues will nearly double in 2021 and 2022 as theaters reopen, but the company still expects to lose money this year and next. One reason: Speculative retail investors have been on the hunt for new places to park their money as some of the air gets let out of cryptocurrency trades. Pierantoni observed that just as selling of bitcoin and ethereum picked up, retail purchases of AMC jumped — as did the number of people buying risky but bullish call options popular among Robinhood investors. AMC appears to be a solid target because it’s seen a recent rise in short interest, Pierantoni said. Short sellers borrow shares of a stock and sell it, with the hope of buying it back at a lower price and pocketing the difference. But if the price jumps dramatically, these investors are forced to buy back in to limit their losses — further fueling a rally. This is what’s known as a “short squeeze.” Investors on Reddit’s WallStreetBets community used this method to pump up the price of GameStop shares earlier this year. Four months later, they appear to be taking a page out of the same playbook. Still, meme stock mania isn’t back in full force. “The total net flows of retail investors overall — the figure is quite low,” Pierantoni said. He suspects some older retail investors are nervous about the future and opting to remain on the sidelines, referring to recent surveys from the American Association of Individual Investors. But he thinks retail buying could pick up before long, as traders leave crypto and start searching for the The Next Big Thing. “Right now it’s just WallStreetBets targeting AMC,” Pierantoni said. “But my guess is in the next few weeks you’ll see a proper rebound.” Watch this space: Vanda is keeping an eye on gaming stocks, noting a pickup in trading volume around popular video game platform Roblox. Will the sector be the next beneficiary of a frantic, cash-rich market? BlackRock flexes its muscle at shareholder meetings BlackRock, the biggest asset manager in the world, is increasingly willing to throw its weight behind votes on climate and diversity at shareholder meetings — though activists argue the company is still being too conservative. What’s happening: This week, BlackRock made headlines when it voted for three of four new ExxonMobil directors nominated by the hedge fund Engine No. 1, which wants the oil giant to dramatically change its approach to the climate crisis. Engine No. 1 ultimately won enough support to oust at least two directors from the board. In a report released earlier this month, BlackRock said that between January and March it voted against management on one or more proposals at 35% of shareholder meetings, compared to 30% for the same period in 2020. BlackRock (BLK) also said it supported 75% of shareholder proposals on environmental and social issues. A caveat: Most shareholder meetings take place in the spring, so the next round of data will be crucial. BlackRock doesn’t immediately disclose how it votes at every meeting. And though the company has indicated it’s more willing to vote against directors or back proposals than in the past, it still prefers to engage with corporate leaders behind the scenes. “Engagement is our key mechanism for providing feedback or signaling concerns to companies about factors that affect long-term performance,” a spokesperson told CNN Business. “We have ongoing dialogue with companies to evaluate their business practices and explain the evolution of our priorities and expectations.” Watchdogs think BlackRock could be doing way more given its size and support for achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Last week, the International Energy Agency said that would require immediately stopping investment in new fossil fuel projects. “BlackRock has made big sweeping promises about its climate commitments, and has certainly increased its rhetoric on its [calls] for climate action … but it has time and time again this shareholder season taken the easy route, supporting votes that are not fundamentally transformational when it comes to addressing the root causes of the climate crisis,” Ben Cushing, financial advocacy campaign manager for the Sierra Club, told me. He expressed disappointed that BlackRock backed Exxon CEO Darren Woods and lead independent director Kenneth Frazier, noting that accountability “has to start at the top.” BlackRock said in a disclosure that it had determined from recent engagement that the executives “are prepared to internalize shareholder feedback, and lead the company … on a more ambitious course of action.” The latest company to launch a hot IPO makes scrubs Who says doctors and nurses can’t look good in medical scrubs? That’s the idea behind FIGS, the trendy health care apparel company that made its Wall Street debut Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange, my CNN Business colleague Paul R. La Monica reports. What happened: In a sign of strong demand, FIGS — which also makes face masks and shields — priced its IPO above its expected range and sold more stock than planned. It was the first IPO to allow Robinhood customers to buy shares at the IPO price instead of after they began trading. Shares surged more than 35% from their initial public offering price of $22. At a price of around $30, the company is valued at nearly $6 billion. FIGS is the latest unicorn to reap the benefits of a hot stock market as investors hunt for new places to park their money, joining the likes of ZipRecruiter, Oatly, Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company and Coinbase. But unlike many startups that have recently gone public, FIGS is profitable. The company reported net income of $58 million in 2020 and earnings of $16 million in the first quarter of 2021 as its sales and customer base more than doubled. Big question: Can the company keep up its strong performance as more people get vaccinated against Covid-19? Co-CEO Heather Hasson thinks so. “Health care professionals wore masks well before the pandemic,” Hasson told CNN Business. “Mask and face shields are part of the professional uniform.” Up next US personal income and spending data posts at 8:30 a.m. ET. Coming next week: The big event is the US jobs report for May, which will shine a light on the country’s economic recovery and feed into political debates over labor shortages. Source link Orbem News #AMC #investing #Premarketstocks:WhyAMCsharesareskyrocketingagain-CNN #shares #skyrocketing

[michaelandy101-blog]

Everything Our Paid Team Learned From Attempting a Reddit Advertising Strategy

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/everything-our-paid-team-learned-from-attempting-a-reddit-advertising-strategy/

Everything Our Paid Team Learned From Attempting a Reddit Advertising Strategy

With a ranking as one of the top ten most popular sites on the internet, Reddit is undoubtedly an intriguing channel for advertising purposes.

However, the site can often seem intimidating, and perhaps even too random to create a cohesive advertising strategy. Plus, since its primary purpose is to expose viewers to the top-trending content of the moment, Reddit users are notoriously anti-marketing.

Regardless of its challenges, its potential advantages proved too good an opportunity to pass up. At HubSpot, we decided to implement a strategy to see for ourselves whether Reddit can serve as a promising channel for the future.

Here, learn what our team figured out about advertising on Reddit, and whether it’s worth the attempt for your own company. Plus, we’ve provided a step-by-step tutorial on how you can advertise on Reddit if you determine it’s a valuable option for your own company. 

The Strategy Behind Reddit Advertising

1. Identify subreddit topics which are well-aligned with your target audience.

To investigate the benefits of advertising on Reddit, I first spoke with Josh Chang, a Senior Marketing Manager at HubSpot. He told me HubSpot’s initial strategy on Reddit involved highly targeted campaigns on specific subreddits, including r/entrepreneur and r/sales.

“The goal of the campaign,” Chang explained, “was to drive awareness and conversion for our products. In terms of results, we saw cost-per-acquisition similar to what we’ve achieved on Facebook in North America, although we did notice a lower activation rate from Reddit — suggesting lower-quality conversions.”

If you’re interested in testing out a campaign for yourself, then, you’ll want to start by identifying subreddits which can likely help foster genuine connections between your brand and your ideal audience. Consider topics your target audience is most interested in, and make a list. Then, narrow your list by investigating how many subscribers each subreddit topic has, whether it’s relatively active, and whether self-promotion or sharing content is allowed on the subreddit topic.

Chang told me, “One of the main things we learned was targeting subreddits specifically was much more effective than broader interest targeting. However, this strategy requires a lot of research, and getting to know which subreddits are most relevant to your audience.”

Additionally, Chang said, “We noticed tailoring our ad creative for individual subreddits helped improve our conversion rates.”

2. Begin engaging with your subreddit communities.

Once you’ve cultivated a list of subreddits that are likely of interest to your target audience, it’s time to start engaging with those subreddit communities.

However, it’s critical you don’t begin by promoting your own content.

To build a level of trust and authentic connection, begin by upvoting other submissions you find interesting and that align well with your brand. Next, share valuable content — but not your own. Instead, post interesting content produced by other media outlets or blogs that you believe will be useful to your subreddit community.

It’s vital you genuinely use the Reddit platform as an opportunity to get to know your target audience before you offer them your own content. Not only will this show your community you’re not simply joining the site to self-promote, but it will also help you tailor your content more accurately down-the-road.

3. Begin promoting your own content, paid or otherwise, on the subreddit platforms.

At this point, you might consider simply posting valuable content from your company that you feel will benefit your community — for free.

However, you might alternatively try spending money on a paid sponsored post, which essentially guarantees your post will be pinned to the top of the subreddit. Here’s what a sponsored post looks like, for context:

In many ways, this post looks similar to all other Reddit content. However, there’s a blue “Promoted” tag in the top left, signifying it’s a paid ad.

In HubSpot’s case, we decided to test out the power of paid advertising on the site. However, it’s still critical you follow the steps listed above to cultivate authentic relationships with your subreddit communities.

Think of it this way — if I begin engaging with a brand on one of the subreddit groups I’ve joined, and notice they typically post helpful content (including content from other publications), then I’m much more likely to take notice when they pay for a sponsored post. If they appear out of nowhere, I have no sense of brand awareness and probably won’t trust the advertisement.

Reddit Advertising Cost

As of right now, the minimum daily spend for an ad on Reddit is $5.

Additionally, Reddit FAQ states, “The Reddit Ads platform uses a second price auction based system, which means you pay a cent higher than the next highest bidder. Because we are using an auction based system, there is a risk of 20% over-delivery when setting up an individual campaign.”

However, as of January 2019, Reddit changed their pricing model from CPM (cost-per-impression) bidding to CPC (cost-per-click). The CPC model will likely make it easier for brands to track conversion or traffic goals, and could result in changes in prices over time.

Advertising on Reddit: Worth it?

When I asked Chang whether he felt advertising on Reddit is a worthwhile investment, he offered a candid response, admitting HubSpot has temporarily halted its efforts on Reddit.

“We saw promising results,” Chang told me, “But because we were targeting specific subreddits, it wasn’t crazy volume that could really move the needle. However, we have on our docket to re-test Reddit to see if we can improve performance and scalability in the future.”

It’s important to note, there have been success stories — Findlay Hats, for instance, drove $28,000 in sales from one viral Reddit post.

However, most brands see better results simply by relying on Reddit for community engagement and brand awareness. Alex Berman found one of his free, unpromoted videos got 25,000 views when it hit the top of a subreddit — but, when he put $250 behind his Reddit posts, he acquired zero leads.

How to Advertise on Reddit

Make a company profile.

Set up an advertising account.

Find your audience on subreddits.

Ensure the subreddit(s) you find have enough page views.

Set up your campaign.

Analyze your campaign performance to improve over time.

1. Make a company profile.

You’ll want to ensure you’re running advertising campaigns on your company profile, not your personal Reddit account.

Along with evoking a sense of professionalism, a company Reddit profile is necessary since users can click on your account and see other content you’ve viewed and upvoted — so you want to ensure that content aligns well with your brand. Additionally, when responding to comments on your ad, you’ll want to be able to respond from a company profile, not a personal one.

To set up a profile, go to https://ssl.reddit.com/login and fill out the Sign Up form, shown below:

2. Set up an advertising account.

To start advertising on Reddit, you’ll need to set up an advertising account. To do this, go to ads.reddit.com and fill out the necessary fields:

Once you’ve inputted your information and selected “Sign Up”, you’ll see an advertising dashboard, as shown below:

Before you can begin advertising on Reddit, you’ll want to add your billing information by clicking the drop-down menu on your username and selecting “Billing”:

Additionally, if multiple people on your team will be involved in advertising on Reddit, ensure you add users by clicking “Manage permissions” underneath your username, and then adding their emails and permission level (including “Analyst”, “Creator”, and “Administrator”):

Once you’ve clicked the blue “Invite” button, your colleagues should receive an email with next steps.

3. Find your audience on subreddits.

It’s important to note, you don’t want to spend money advertising on the homepage of Reddit. Reddit users visit the homepage to browse popular posts and trending news, so it’s too big of an audience for you to target your ideal persona.

Instead, you’ll want to explore subreddits to find your ideal Reddit audience. For instance, let’s say you sell e-commerce software. To find an interested audience, then, you’ll want to explore retail-related subreddits, such as r/retail (8.2K members), r/AskRetail (4.5K members), or even r/retailmemes (733 members).

Make a list of subreddits that might fit your audience, and then spend some time perusing the content that already exists on that subreddit. Does it seem to match content your customer would be interested in? Additionally, does it look like the subreddit community could be filled with high-intent prospects (like a retail advice subreddit), or is it too superficial for your needs (like retail memes)?

To help you find your audience, try a tool like RedditList to sort through various reddit communities and find the ones of highest value for you.

4. Ensure the subreddit(s) you find have enough page views.

This is important enough to warrant its own section: you can’t necessarily advertise on any subreddit you want. Once you make your list of potential subreddits, you’ll need to ensure it has enough page views to be eligible for advertising.

To figure out whether a subreddit has enough page views, consider that one Reddit advertising campaign has a minimum spend of $5, and it costs $0.75 per thousand page views. Additionally, you can purchase up to three months out.

With those requirements, you’ll need roughly 6,700 page views over three months to achieve the $5 minimum spend.

To figure out how many page views you’re likely to receive on a subreddit, take a look at how many users are currently on the subreddit. For instance, you can see at 2 p.m. on a Monday, there are roughly 2K users on the r/marketing subreddit:

Dividing 6,700 by 90, you’ll note you need roughly 74 viewers per day on a subreddit to reach the minimum requirement — r/marketing, then, is way over the daily required page views, but there are other smaller subreddits with only 5-10 users per day, which could make it more difficult for you to reach minimum spend. Plus, you want to choose subreddits that enable you to have the highest reach possible.

5. Set up your campaign.

Once you’ve chosen your subreddits, it’s now time to set up your campaign. In your account, start by clicking on “Dashboard” in the top left of your screen, and then select “Create Campaign”.

Next, you’ll need to create a name for your campaign, a funding instrument, and a campaign objective:

After you click “Continue”, you’ll need to narrow down your audience — including interests, communities, and device type — your budget, and your bid (the maximum price you’re willing to pay per 1,000 impressions). Additionally, you’ll need to figure out a schedule for your ad, including what time(s) of day you want it to appear, and when you want your campaign to end.

Once you click “Continue” again, you’ll be able to add third-party trackers to distinguish how many unique web page visits or social media viewers you’ve gained from your Reddit advertisement.

Here, you’ll also either create a new post or upload an existing advertisement that you might’ve designed for another platform. Feel free to take a look at Reddit’s internal advertising resources — including Reddit’s Advertising Help page — to learn best practices when designing an ad for Reddit.

Once you’re happy with the creative assets, click “Review”:

Once you’ve reviewed all the information regarding your campaign and have determined it’s accurate, click the blue “Submit” button to submit your advertisement for consideration. You’ll get an email once your ad is live.

6. Analyze your campaign performance to improve over time.

Once your campaign is up-and-running, you’ll want to track its performance. You can monitor within the Reddit advertising dashboard itself, as well as through third-party tools like Google Analytics. Additionally, ensure you’re taking the time to respond to any comments left on your ad.

As with any advertising campaign you run, you’ll want to use analytics on this campaign to iterate and improve for the next one.

Ultimately, it’s worth considering using Reddit as a platform for sharing content for the sake of helpfulness and audience engagement, rather than as a cost-effective advertising strategy.

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[gary--martin]

cul-de-sac festival: reflections and feedforward

So I did it... or rather, we did it! I must admit, I was a bit of a nervous wreck throughout the event. I’ve stood at the front of classrooms full of both children and adults, led workshops and hosted installations, so public speaking is something I'm quite familiar with, so I'm not completely sure why I was so thrown by this. Part of it was obviously down to the stakes; let's face it I wanted and needed this to go well because it's for an assessment. But I also wanted this to go well because in that Zoom chat, were the vast majority of people I identify as being part of my local/regional network. And this is the largest public thing, and arguably most interesting, that I have done by myself (as opposed to with pyka, as a team). Which brings me to my other hunch; all the responsibility was on me here. There was no-one to share the nerves with, despite having collaborated with all the performers - they had there own thing to focus on! Was it successful? I've been thinking about the idea of success for while now. I remember in one of our first sessions in semester 1, we were asked about our definition of success. Which I really liked - it made me feel like my own success criteria was valued, which I feel is a rare feeling, ironically in our individualistic society. There's a lot of lip service around the idea of one determining their own ideas of success, but this question felt genuine, and has slowly started to have an impact on the design of my projects on a long term basis. In the creative industries, so often freelance practitioners have to chase the closest carrot to them to get funding (for projects that are having an increasingly shorter turnaround time but expecting larger impacts for the community/organisation). And this makes it difficult sometimes to take the time to ensure you're even chasing the right carrots in the long run. Because if you're not careful [insert clever carrot pun] one can end up taking on projects that seem exciting in the short term, but are not necessarily aligned with the core aspects of your practice. I mean, I can't be the only one that feels this, right? How does this tie in to success? Well I have certainly started projects because I've craved short term success, which sometimes has just been likes and comments; the millennial's favourite source of dopamine. And in honesty I think focussing on producing these short term works has held me back and prevented me from developing longer term strategies for my practice. Something I am certainly not going to be doing again if I can help it. I've decided that now this event has passed, I won't be saying anything publicly until I've figured properly what it is I have to say. I'll come back to this shortly though. Now though, let's take a look at some quantitate data, beautifully presented in the form of a gif I shared on Instagram as a look-back of the festival for those that attended and performed. It also allowed me to thank everyone involved

For me the only number worth discussing is the 44 attendees, which included many of the performers. As I officially started the event and commenced the Zoom call, I was wondering how many people would be logging in to join the experience. Before long I had 44 people logged in, and to my surprise that number remained the same right until the sign off for the end of the event. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean every account logged in had a person engaged the entire time; those with their cameras off could easily have got bored and wondered off but remained logged in out of politeness. But it felt like a big number, considering the aim of the event was to provide an intimate experience. In fact, had it got beyond 60 capacity (I thought half way through) this might have been too many. The 44 mark felt really nice, but it was the fact that they stuck around for the whole thing that was more important to me than the number itself. This suggests to me that the event achieved its other main goal of being engaging for people. I also had a number of really lovely messages from people after the event, some from people I knew and some that I didn't, that confirmed this further. In a time when people have denied access to their usual means of socialising and sharing works, this event seemed to be a good substitute utilising the resources available.

I guess the other measure of success for this event is the impact it has had on my own thinking and approach to my future practice. I have spent a lot of time on social media platforms over the past few months, researching other artists, learning about their mechanics, affordances and limitations, and how they facilitate communication between people. To keep a very long story at a moderate length, I have come to the conclusion that social media platforms are REALLY badly designed. Or, more accurately, they have clearly been designed and iterated with advertisers and those that profit from them in mind. Surprise surprise! This of course sounds completely obvious, and I've known this for a while, but until now I have been completely complicit of them because I felt I had to for the success of my career. During this semester I have stumbled across alternative social media platforms that exist on the periphery of the internet, like Yap.chat, special.fish, and Mastodon. And comparing these to the likes of Twitter, FaceBook and Instagram, you can clearly see that these have been designed and maintained with the user in mind. Instagram, for example, encourages you to be a prosumer; post content and consume content. And see it ALL in one feed. Whether that's photos of cats, brunch, a visual artwork, satirical meme, performance video, event poster, advert. They all come through one funnel, and therefore presented as equal. A cluttered highway of a mixture of content from people you may or may not actually want to follow (but have done so to reciprocate a follow). Doesn't this all sounds very messy? And what do I post? My food, my pet, my artwork? Do I keep it casual and share my process, or do I use this as a gallery and show my best work? Do I need to share anything at all? Well no, but that + button in the middle of the screen make me feel I ought to. And if I don't then how will people still know I'm an artist? etc. etc........ These are genuine thoughts I've had recently and quite frankly I've had enough. I'm tired of living my 'personal' life so subconsciously strategically in an effort to be perceived as actively doing stuff all the time. And I know no-one's asked me to do this, but it's happened to me gradually as social media platforms play increasingly important roles in networking for people in the creative industries. Particularly individuals who consider themselves freelancers and rely on these platforms to share what they're up to, and send gentle reminders (in the form of likes and comments) to others that they are still around. Carrying out this project has been super helpful in making me realise that I need to focus on working on projects that contribute to MY idea of success in the long term, and the small steps I take in that direction don't have to be celebrated publicly. It's easy to look at someone I admire like Louis Cole and get trapped into aiming for the type of success he has, because he's in show business and there are superficial markers for this success. But when I finish this MA programme, I want to be ready to carry on my practice in a sustainable way. Had I not done this project, I may very well have continued to work on future projects because they seemed 'cool' or been successful at a superficial level. I've realised that community and collaboration is really important to me and my practice. I have little interest in doing things unless I'm doing them with someone else, and for someone else. And I don't think social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter are going to play a significant role in achieving this. I'm aware this sounds like the rants of a techno luddite, but I'm actually feeling 'optimistically realistic', and more than ever appreciate digital technologies as tools for enhancing human experiences. I'm genuinely very excited to begin planning my major project, with a new set of skills as a systems thinker, and designing meaningful experiences with and for people, with a focus on why I do it rather than what I'm doing.

[stefanistarivlah]

Research Essay/Investigative Report: McLuhan’s Prophetic Prediction of the Insidious Nature of Memes

Target Audience: Rhetoric professor

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Introduction

In this essay, governed by the theories outlined in The Medium is the Message and Media Hot and Cold by Marshall McLuhan, I will be examining the how the current day iteration of the internet, as a medium, has the potential to facilitate ideological radicalization through memes and algorithmically curated content. I will outline the lifecycle of a meme, from its inception in the fringe outskirts of the online sphere on image sharing forums such as 4chan, and delineate how makes its way into the content of mainstream creators, specifically on YouTube. Using the recent Christchurch massacre as a case study, I will be examining the insidious nature of the memes featured in the shooter’s manifesto and the livestream of the massacre, their function as political dog-whistles and how, through algorithm generated recommendations, they function to passively indoctrinate individuals into self-identifying with extremist ideology.

Through McLuhan’s notions of “hot” and “cold” media, I will argue that the internet, as a medium, facilitates the rapid heat transfer of ideology--that is, that it allows otherwise “cool” media from online niches to heat up and permeate into the mainstream spheres of the World Wide Web and be passively consumed by unsuspecting audiences. Through consistent passive consumption, the Overton window of online discourse is shifted within the algorithmically mediated reality that is one’s online activities, potentially indoctrinating users into actively seeking out and participating in the “cool” spheres from which their initially “hot” curated media originated from.

Specifically, I will be examining how the political far-right utilize internet memes as white-supremacist dog-whistles, and how the algorithms that mediate website content based on a user’s past actions essentially curate an ideological echo-chamber, ultimately creating a secondary reality in which a users are consistently pipelined into extremist media territory that can have tragic real-life consequences, such as the Christchurch shooting.

Delineating Online Spheres According to McLuhan’s Notions of “Hot” and “Cold” Media

In his essays, The Medium is the Message and Media Hot and Cold, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan outlined how the nature of the medium reveals more about its message than the content of the message itself, and that the ways in which people interact with a medium can be either “hot” or “cold”. The aforementioned theories, despite significantly predating the inception of the Internet, are reflected and substantiated through the ways in which online discourse and rhetoric are constructed.

In Media Hot and Cold, Marshall McLuhan categorizes media into two distinct groups under the umbrella terms “hot” and “cold” to denote the amount of participation needed to consume them. To McLuhan, “hot” media is already saturated with data, thus offering limited opportunities for audience participation, while “cold” media is relatively more barren in terms of its content, allowing for active interpretation and participation (McLuhan 39). In other words, cold media offers less information, requiring the audience to contemplate the content and fill the voids in meaning with personal interpretations, while hot media is intended for a more passive manner of consumption.

Although Marshall McLuhan passed away prior to the advent of the internet, McLuhan’s notions of hot and cold media, and the analogies with which he illustrates how they function, maintain their relevance when applied to online media. For instance, McLuhan describes towns as “cool or casually structured” and cities as “hot and intensely filled in” (McLuhan 46), which are sentiments that similarly describe the gathering places of the World Wide Web. Mainstream websites, such as YouTube and Facebook, match McLuhan’s “hot and intensely filled in” description of a city--by algorithmically curating (i.e. “intensely filling in”) viewable content based on a user’s past activity, an endless newsfeed that can be passively scrolled through emerges, requiring little participation on behalf of the user. Meanwhile, niche image sharing forums like 4chan or 8chan that predate Facebook and Youtube, “still foster anonymous communication, [hence] their popularity pales in comparison with [more modern] sites like Facebook that foreground identifying characteristics” (Mitchell iii). In comparison to Facebook and YouTube, the relatively archaic user interfaces of image sharing forums require active participation and a niche set of knowledge to maneuver, akin to McLuhan’s notion of a “cold” medium due to the lack of modern features such as discernable user profiles and algorithmically curated content. Through the juxtaposition of modern social media websites, such as Facebook or YouTube, with the comparably archaic 4chan and 8chan, McLuhan’s notion of the “disruptive impact of a hot technology succeeding a cool one” can be examined (McLuhan 41).

McLuhan claims that a “hot” media “will serve to fragment the tribal structure” established by a “cold” media (McLuhan 41). As it pertains to the internet, the “hot” media spheres of Facebook and Youtube, due to their accessibility, are frequented by a wide range of users that contribute to the information saturation that defines it’s “hotness”. Thus, archaic sites such as 4chan and 8chan are pushed into the fringe spheres of the internet, and subsequently “marks its user as radically different from the mainstream” (Mitchell 111), creating the ideal breeding ground for extremist ideology.

How Online “Cold” Media Utilizes “Hot” Media to Spread Extremist Ideology   

Interestingly, McLuhan predicts the insidious consequences that emerge from the “hot” media format of mainstream websites. He claims that, “the content of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium” (McLuhan 20), hence “any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary” (McLuhan 28). He argues that this passive approach to processing the oversaturation of information characteristically presented by “hot” media is the fulfilment of an evolutionary function, as “were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks”, prophetically describing the average internet browser’s passivity as a state of somnambulism (McLuhan 40).

In his essay titled The Hyperreality of the Alt Right: How Meme Magic Works to Create a Space for Far Right Politics, Dan Prisk describes how an individual fell down the YouTube rabbit-hole of the Alt Right, a recent political movement described as “catchall for an Internet focused white nationalism” (Heikkila par. 4). Initially, the individual in question, who self-identified as a “lifelong liberal” (Prisk 7), was recommended YouTube videos by the website’s algorithm that they described as containing “modes of talking that are presented as innocuous criticism from people claiming to be liberals themselves” (Prisk 7). He likens the passive absorption of ideology through the YouTube algorithm curated consumption of videos to osmosis, claiming that “by spending so much time, even passively, living among the ideas that form the basis of these videos, the [individual in question] comes to pick up a predisposition, tendency, propensity, or inclination towards the mental frameworks that underlie them”, adding “in other words, the [individual in question] developed a habitus from the field of the Alt Right, that came to be applied in their life outside that” (Prisk 7).

Thus, through algorithmically generated content, YouTube has facilitated the indoctrination of extremist ideology, allowing political extremists to take advantage of the “hot” nature of the media and the subsequent somnambulism of the audience. Once a user has been indoctrinated through the “hot” channel of a curated media, such as YouTube’s recommended videos and autoplay feature (which automatically creates a video queue depending on the content of previously watched videos, eliminating the need for active browsing) algorithms also function on a “cool” channel to “deliver search results for those who seek confirmation for racist notions” and, in the case of the aforementioned individual, “connect newcomers to like-minded racists” (Daniels 62).

This begs the question, how can such problematic media be proliferated on mainstream websites? My hypothesis, on which I base my argument, is that users of “cold” media are well aware of the insidious potential of “hot” media as outlined in the previous paragraphs, and utilize the inconspicuous medium of the meme to propagate extremist ideology through mainstream channels of online social media. The recent Christchurch massacre, in a tragic way, exemplifies my aforementioned hypothesis, as the shooter was clearly aware of the YouTube algorithm’s penchant for constructing ideological echo-chambers--hence why, during the livestream of his mass murder, he directed the audience to subscribe to Pewdiepie (Romano par. 4).

A Vox News article describes Pewdiepie, the most subscribed to YouTuber of all time, as someone who “has [had] a history of amplifying white nationalist rhetoric that is both serious and violent” through his online show, aptly titled “Meme Review”, during which he reviews popular online memes to his millions of views on a nearly daily basis (Romano par. 39). However, Vox News’ criticism of Pewdiepie’s perceived influence on the Christchurch shooter’s ideology is misdirected. McLuhan outlines a similar scenario in which he criticized an individual who claimed that “we are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them… the products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value” (McLuhan 23). McLuhan states that the aforementioned quote fails to bear scrutiny, as it “ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation of extension of his own being in a new technical form” (McLuhan 23). Vox News fails to understand the insidious nature of memes, as a medium, and how the “hot” nature of YouTube in tandem with the “cold” origins of memes serve to push the Overton window of acceptable online discourse.          

How Memes Facilitate the Online Spread of Extremist Ideology

Richard Dawkins was the first to describe the modern notion of a meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene; he referred to memes as “seemingly insignificant cultural units of transmission that spread from person to person by imitation” (Riemensperger 3). In the online sphere, memes function in a similar manner to Dawkins’ initial definition, but have evolved from being “insignificant cultural units of transmission” into a potentially insidious medium for the proliferation of extremist ideology.  

McLuhan was able to predict the conclusion that many modern rhetorical scholars have come to in regards to the persuasive power of the modern notion of the internet meme, namely “how Internet memes, a unique medium that has the capability to easily and seamlessly transfer ideologies between groups… enable subcultures to challenge, and possibly overthrow, hegemonic power structures that maintain the dominance of a mainstream culture” (Pettis ii).

Prisk describes the insidious nature of the modern internet meme, specifically the memes that originated from the deeper, “cold” recesses of the internet, such as 4chan and 8chan, in which far-right ideology pervades, claiming that “all this stuff [memes] is so steeped in irony, this kind of really detached ironic tone, it’s very hard to know what anyone actually means” (Prisk 6). He goes on to describe the ironic nature of inflammatory memes as “a kind of defense mechanism… a way to hide behind multiple layers of irony and make oneself hard to interpret” (Prisk 6). Prisk is essentially outlining how the memes can act as a political dog-whistle to insidiously spread white supremacist ideology--the very same seemingly inconspicuous memes that Pewdiepie may naively present to his audience of millions during one of his Meme Reviews.   

McLuhan reflects Prisk’s impression of far-right memes, as he states that “we are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation”, adding that “accelerated media change as a kind of massacre of the innocents” (McLuhan 29). For those uninitiated with the rhetoric of the far-right, the memes that originated from such online communities may just appear to be “insignificant cultural units of transmission”, as they “do not occur at the level of [explicit] opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan 31).    

Just as McLuhan describes a medium as an “extension of ourselves” (McLuhan 19), Gavin Brown describes memes as a “product of the culture that people live in” (Brown 190) in his essay Web Culture: Using Memes to Spread and Manipulate Ideas on a Massive Scale. Just as a medium serves to propagate a message, Brown defines memes as “units of information that are transferred from one person to another” that “can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain” (Brown 190). He adds that, “the more a meme is shared, the longer it can survive and promote its messages or cultural values to viewers” (Brown 188).

As McLuhan notes, “the medium is the message because it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action” (McLuhan 20). Thus, to maximize the scale of exposure of a meme, one must ensure that it is transferred through a “hot” form of media that is saturated with users. Hence why the Christchurch shooter live streamed his murders on Facebook, and wrote a 74 page manifesto nearly exclusively made up of internet memes (Romano 3), which Vox News described as “akin to what’s known as “shitposting” [a popular form of internet meme]— intentionally throwing out red-meat content to readers to distract them or draw them deeper into the same online pits where he himself was radicalized” (Coaston 9).

Conclusion

The Christchurch shooter is essentially reflection McLuhan’s notion that media “must be reduced to a very cool state before it can be learned or assimilated” (McLuhan, 40), and that “the disruptive impact of a hot technology succeeding a cool one… will serve to fragment a tribal structure” while cool media functions to “retribalize” (McLuhan 41). By indoctrinating an audience through white-supremist dog whistles disguised as memes, and making reference to popular “hot” media icons such as Pewdiepie, the Christchurch shooter aimed to seduce users of “hot” mainstream media to “cold” fringe spheres of the internet as a means by which to “retribalize” them into self-identifying with racist ideology. Through cyclical heat transfer of ideology, the Christchurch shooter attempted to perpetuate “cold” messages through a “hot medium”, in an attempt to insidiously indoctrinate user into participating in the proliferation of racist ideology.     

Works Cited

Brown, Gavin. “Web Culture: Using Memes to Spread and Manipulate Ideas on a Massive Scale.”, CommonKnowledge, 2013, https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1008&context=inter13

Coaston, Jane. “The New Zealand shooter’s manifesto shows how white nationalist rhetoric spreads.” Vox News, 2019, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/3/15/18267163/new-zealand-shooting-christchurch-white-nationalism-racism-language

Daniels, Jessie. “the algorithmic rise of the “alt-right”.”, SagePub, 2017, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1536504218766547

Pettis, Ben. “PEPE THE FROG: A Case Study of the Internet Meme and its Potential Subversive Power to Challenge Cultural Hegemonies.” (Spring 2018). (PDF).

Prisk, Dan. “The Hyperreality of the Alt Right: How Meme Magic Works to Create a space for far right politics”. (26th March 2017). (PDF).

McLuhan, Marshall. "The Medium is the Message". Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press; REV edition (Oct. 24 1994). (PDF).

McLuhan, Marshall. "Media Hot and Cold". Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press; REV edition (Oct. 24 1994). (PDF).

Romano, Aja. “How the Christchurch shooter used memes to spread hate.” Vox News, 2019, https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/3/16/18266930/christchurch-shooter-manifesto-memes-subscribe-to-pewdiepie

Riemensperger, Kory. “Pepe's Power: Internet Memes, Constitutive Rhetoric, and Political Communities.”, ProQuest, 2018, https://search.proquest.com/openview/48e276b0d2813ccd209fa7361d46f9b8/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y

Heikkila, Niko. “Online Antagonism of the Alt-Right in the 2016 Election.”, OpenEdition, 2017, https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/12140

Mitchell, Liam. “A Phenomenological Study of Social Media: Boredom and Interest on Facebook, Reddit, and 4chan.”, Dspace, 2012, http://dspace.library.uvic.ca/bitstream/handle/1828/4045/Mitchell_Liam_PhD_2012.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

[njacknis]

Books That Link Analytics, Big Data And Leading Change

Last week, at the end of my class in Analytics and Leading Change, one of the required courses in Columbia University’s Masters Program in Applied Analytics, my students asked for books I’d recommend that provide more detail than we could cover in the course. It turns out that others are also interested in a good library of books about analytics from the viewpoint of an organization’s leaders.

You’ll see that these are not textbooks about analytics or machine learning techniques – there are plenty of those. Instead, this reading list is the next step for those folks who understand the techniques and now want the insights from their work to have an impact on and provide value to their world.

Although most of these books were published in the last decade, there are also some classics on the list going back fifty years. And I’ve chosen mostly popular books because frankly they are written in a compelling way that is accessible to all leaders.

With that introduction, here are my recommendations.

1.     On the experience of doing analytics and seeing its impact:

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

The movie, Moneyball, starred Brad Pitt as the hero of the first and most storied use of analytics in professional baseball. For people in the field of analytics, what could be better than a movie about your skills helping the underdog. But like all movies, it tended to gloss over or exaggerate situations for the benefit of a good, simple plot.

The book that Lewis wrote originally is subtler and is a good case study of the human side of introducing analytics in a tradition-bound field. Tying it all up, his more recent book, The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds, is the story of the collaboration between Kahneman (see below) and Tversky.

The Signal and The Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — But Some Don’t by Nate Silver

Nate Silver is probably the best-known analytics practitioner by those not in the business themselves, due to his work over the years, especially for the New York Times and in relation to high visibility elections. This is his review of the ups and downs in using analytics, offering lessons especially from sports and politics.

Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns by Sasha Issenberg

Although sometimes a bit over the top and now five years old, it is a thorough description of the use of analytics in election campaigns. Election campaigns are good examples of analytics because they are both well-known and there is a huge amount of data concerning elections and the voters who determine their outcomes.

Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity — What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves by Christian Rudder

The author is the co-founder and former analytics lead for OkCupid. Not surprisingly, much of the book is about dating choices, but he goes way beyond that to uncover insights about various social attitudes, including racism, from the large amount of data he had in his hands both at his former company and elsewhere.

How Not To Be Wrong: The Power Of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

Since analytics is essentially a mathematical art, Ellenberg’s book about mathematical thinking is important preparation for the field. It also provides numerous examples of how to present quantitative insights in a way that non-experts would understand.

2.    On expanding the normal range of analytics:

Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social Sciences by Eugene Webb, et al

I’ve added this fifty year old classic to the list because even in a world of big data we don’t necessarily have all the data we need, either in our computer systems or in the physical world.  This book reminds us to observe indications of phenomenon that are not already available – such as the influence of an individual measured by the wear and tear on the entry to his/her office space. It also points out the need to always include metadata in our analysis since that is often revealing.

How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard

Somewhat picking up the same theme, this book helps both the business executive and the analytics practitioner to be more creative in measurement, especially when it comes to things that people haven’t so far been able to offer good metrics for.

Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

This is a book about how social networks influence us in ways we hadn’t considered before. As they say: “How your friends’ friends’ friends affect everything you think, feel and do.” I suppose a good example is how their observation that you’ll gain weight by being connected to overweight people in a social network has itself become a meme. In its own way, this book is an interesting work of analytics.

Just as important is its elaboration of how to study social networks since an understanding of the network of influencers in any organization is essential to anyone who wants to change the behavior of the people in that organization.

Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

The author was part of Google’s analytics team, which is the analytics equivalent of working at the Vatican if you’re a Roman Catholic theologian.  Her emphasis in on how to show the insights of analytics work and to tell a story about those insights. In a world of all kinds of data visualization tools and fads, her advice is clear and evidence-based.

3.    On the way that the human mind perceives the insights of analytics and might or might change as a result:

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely

Professor Ariely, formerly of MIT and now at Duke, is one of the more creative experimenters in psychology and he quickly reviews both his own and others�� research results. The theme of this short book is that the payoff which often makes a difference in human behavior is not necessarily a financial reward and that sometimes financial incentives even backfire. This is important for leaders of change in organizations, particularly big corporations, to understand.

Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman

I’ve written about the work of Nobel Prize winner and Princeton Professor Kahneman before, most recently in “What Do We Know About Change”. This describes what Kahneman has learned from a lifetime of research about thinking and decision making. His work on how people process – distort – quantitative statements is especially relevant to analytics experts who need understand the cognitive biases he describes.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

The Heath brothers, popular business writers, have done a good job in this book of explaining what’s been learned in recent psychological research – see Kahneman and Ariely, for instance – without dumbing it down so much that the key points are lost. In doing that well, they also provide the leader of change and analytics some good ideas on how to present their own results and getting their organizations to switch to a more analytics-oriented outlook.

4.     On the strategic linkage between leading change and analytics

The Dance of Change by Peter Senge, et al

This is another classic that goes beyond the usual cookbook approach found in most books on “change management”. Yet, Senge and his colleagues anticipated the more recent approaches to change management which is about something more than just getting a single project done. For Senge, the goal he established was to help create learning organizations. While he does not focus on analytics, this book should particularly resonate with analytics professionals since they now have the tools to take that learning to new and more useful levels than in the past.

I could easily expand this list, as could many others, but this “baker’s dozen” books will provide a good rounded education to start.

© 2017 Norman Jacknis, All Rights Reserved @NormanJacknis

[rosajspinksca]

Web Designers Near Me: How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Scams are everywhere. 

Just today, I received a message from someone overseas claiming to be a roofer in Springfield, MO, asking me to build him an expensive website. He assured me that he  would gladly pay with his credit card. Ah, but I know that he would later dispute the charges after he had already sold his newly designed website to some other chump. Fortunately, I know how to check IP addresses.

In our most recent article, we talked about the positive reasons that motivate so many businesses to turn to local web design companies or freelancers for their online needs. We want to carry that thought one step further as we discuss what may be the best reason of all to hire locally.

Advancing technology creates opportunity for good and bad operators alike.

As technology continues to advance, the more impact it has on how business is conducted across industries and the more websites continue to gain importance. Every successful modern business now pegs much of its success on how effectively their website performs in their market space. Websites now provide a primary avenue through which companies promote themselves and interact with clients. The return on investment that owning a good website has to a business is quite high, and that has caused a craze in demand for web design services.

This high demand for new and better websites has consequently led to an increased number of web designers. This is a good thing overall, but it also presents its own set of dangers. For the individual or company wanting to get a new website, it has become more affordable since there is a larger number of people offering this service. But, unfortunately, it has also increased the number of website design scams, and one can easily fall victim. So, we want to help you to be alert to potential scams. It’s sad to say that you can even encounter these pitfalls when you’re searching “web design companies near me.”

Table of Contents:

How Web Designers Scam People

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Our Final Take

How Web Designers Scam People

As a website design company with high ethics, we thought that we should help enlighten consumers on some of the more popular web design scams and how you can protect yourself from them. They include:

1. Website Hijackers

You can more easily fall prey to this type of scam if you already own a site and you’re looking for someone to make it better. Website hijacking occurs when you are locked out of your website by someone that you gave access to your site. The hijacker can then decide to infect files on your site with malware, to delete pages or to corrupt your content. How much worse the damages to your website will be just depends on the malicious intent of the scammer.

However, you can easily regain access to your website through the intervention of your host service provider. Your host can also help with the disinfection of the site and restoring a backup to a time when it was still in a good state.

2. Disappearing Web Designers

Ethics in web designing requires one to be continually available and to keep in touch with their clients throughout the web designing process. This allows both parties to discuss how the project is proceeding so that the result will be satisfying for both of them. However, some web design scammers will practice the opposite of this. Once you make your deposit for the work, they disappear into thin air. Usually, the deposit requested is substantial so that they make off with a large amount. Other scammers will complete your site and request the final payment before handing you the site. Then, once you pay up, you never hear from them again nor receive the final project from them.

That is why it is  always advisable to avoid direct payments to bank accounts. Instead, use payment processors like PayPal or Stripe. This makes it possible for you to recover your money through a dispute if you fall victim to this type of scam.

3. Undelivered Promises

In this type of scam, the web designer fails to do as you had agreed but still delivers the final project to you. They may promise to use specific design elements, such as themes, plugins, special fonts or images at a fee, but in the end, they don’t follow through. You can always contact the designer to redesign the site applying all the features you had agreed on. But if they ask for more pay, then know that you have been scammed.

4. Price Inflation and Hidden Costs

Make sure you understand the value your website will bring when you’re assessing investment costs.

Some web designers will deliver good work, but at double the price you would have paid with another designer. They can overcharge you for the themes, plugins, fonts, and graphics that they use. That is why you should carry out market research on the prices of web design services and the cost of acquiring additional features like plugins. Better yet, purchase the themes and other essentials on your own.

Always be sure to ask for the final total cost of your completed site. It’s also a good idea to ask for a price guarantee. As a point of reference, our company guarantees our estimates, bids, and price agreements. We know that our customers want to know how much a website costs. So look for simplicity and clarity in pricing.

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Now that you are aware of how you can be scammed; it is equally essential for you to gain knowledge on how you can protect yourself from such scams.

1. Avoid making full payments for incomplete projects.

You do not want to end up spending thousands of dollars on a site that has not been done. Ensure that your web designer has completed the project before you pay. Another alternative is for you to set up a milestone payment, which will encourage the designer to work on every bit of the project to receive your payment after hitting the milestone. 

A good practice which our company uses is 50% down with 50% due upon completion once the site is live online and you are satisfied with it. This way both parties are invested. We use this model because there are also those who take advantage of web companies or who won’t pay upon delivery.

2. Get it in writing.

If you do not want to fall victim to undelivered promises, ensure that you get a legitimate estimate, an email with design and price intent, or a signed contract with your website designer. The correspondence or contract should indicate all the specifications of the project, themes paid for, fonts, graphics, time under which the project should be completed, and how the payment will be made. With this in place, your web designer will be legally bound to serve you well, and if they breach it, you can take legal action against them.

3. Do your homework.

Most people get scammed by website designers because they go for the first option that they meet in the market. No matter where you are, we can pretty much guarantee that there is a fairly high number of web designers near you! That’s precisely why you need to take your time before settling on one. Verify their past projects with other clients by checking if the websites they claim to have designed are real and how good they are.

You can also set up a meeting with them and discuss your site. By doing so with more than one web developer, you will be better able to determine the best option for your needs and you’ll lower your chances of getting scammed.

4. Work with a quality CMS that you are familiar with.

One of the ways that web designers can scam you is by designing your website using a sophisticated CMS (content management system). Without the knowledge of how that CMS works, you will be easy to dupe. It is advisable to decide on a designer that uses a standard open-source CMS like WordPress.

Here at our company, Ozark Web Design, we have switched over to using WordPress exclusively for precisely this reason. Often a customer desires a site they can edit themselves. WordPress is the largest and most respected CMS in the world, with easy and intuitive user interfaces available. This way, the customer can easily find another company or freelancer to take over their site should they ever wish to do so.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in the world because of its ease and powerful features. It powers approximately 1/3 of all the world's websites.

Final Take

No one is completely immune to fraud, and scams have morphed into an ever-present, global pain in the butt. So being equipped with the right information is the first step toward protecting yourself. As a local business owner myself, I much prefer doing business locally as much as possible. Not only for the sake of the community, but I like the idea of being able to go see a person face-to-face if they try to bilk me out of money! Plus, if you are locally connected, you can likely help prevent others from using the local business of someone who is less than scrupulous.

So finally, don’t compromise on the cost of getting a good website because, in most cases, “cheap” should raise a red flag. If you want a good website, you will need to spend a reasonable sum of money because a good site will deliver money and value to your business. But if you choose to go cheap and get scammed, it will cost you even more money.

Web Designers Near Me: Reasons to Hire Locally

November 6, 2019 No Comments

Thinking of getting a website, or even moving your services online for your customers to access them more easily? Well, that’s a solid business step that you should take. The proliferation of mobile devices and the continual move to integrating

Read More »

7 Tips to Find the Best Web Design Company for Your Needs

October 17, 2019 No Comments

A great looking website can help your business. But a great performing website can make a world of a difference to your business. Whether you sell products online or provide services, your company’s online presence is often your client’s first

Read More »

How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively

October 5, 2019 No Comments

I mean, really, who doesn’t love a good meme? After all, most people use social media for entertainment. B2C marketers (business-to-customer) and business owners will do well to remember this and use their social media channels accordingly. And to that

Read More »

The post Web Designers Near Me: How to Avoid Getting Scammed appeared first on Ozark Web Design.

source https://ozarkwebdesign.com/web-designers-near-me-how-to-avoid-getting-scammed/ from Ozark Web Design https://ozarkwebdesign1.blogspot.com/2019/11/web-designers-near-me-how-to-avoid.html

[ozarkwebdesignseo]

Web Designers Near Me: How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Scams are everywhere. 

Just today, I received a message from someone overseas claiming to be a roofer in Springfield, MO, asking me to build him an expensive website. He assured me that he  would gladly pay with his credit card. Ah, but I know that he would later dispute the charges after he had already sold his newly designed website to some other chump. Fortunately, I know how to check IP addresses.

In our most recent article, we talked about the positive reasons that motivate so many businesses to turn to local web design companies or freelancers for their online needs. We want to carry that thought one step further as we discuss what may be the best reason of all to hire locally.

Advancing technology creates opportunity for good and bad operators alike.

As technology continues to advance, the more impact it has on how business is conducted across industries and the more websites continue to gain importance. Every successful modern business now pegs much of its success on how effectively their website performs in their market space. Websites now provide a primary avenue through which companies promote themselves and interact with clients. The return on investment that owning a good website has to a business is quite high, and that has caused a craze in demand for web design services.

This high demand for new and better websites has consequently led to an increased number of web designers. This is a good thing overall, but it also presents its own set of dangers. For the individual or company wanting to get a new website, it has become more affordable since there is a larger number of people offering this service. But, unfortunately, it has also increased the number of website design scams, and one can easily fall victim. So, we want to help you to be alert to potential scams. It’s sad to say that you can even encounter these pitfalls when you’re searching “web design companies near me.”

Table of Contents:

How Web Designers Scam People

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Our Final Take

How Web Designers Scam People

As a website design company with high ethics, we thought that we should help enlighten consumers on some of the more popular web design scams and how you can protect yourself from them. They include:

1. Website Hijackers

You can more easily fall prey to this type of scam if you already own a site and you’re looking for someone to make it better. Website hijacking occurs when you are locked out of your website by someone that you gave access to your site. The hijacker can then decide to infect files on your site with malware, to delete pages or to corrupt your content. How much worse the damages to your website will be just depends on the malicious intent of the scammer.

However, you can easily regain access to your website through the intervention of your host service provider. Your host can also help with the disinfection of the site and restoring a backup to a time when it was still in a good state.

2. Disappearing Web Designers

Ethics in web designing requires one to be continually available and to keep in touch with their clients throughout the web designing process. This allows both parties to discuss how the project is proceeding so that the result will be satisfying for both of them. However, some web design scammers will practice the opposite of this. Once you make your deposit for the work, they disappear into thin air. Usually, the deposit requested is substantial so that they make off with a large amount. Other scammers will complete your site and request the final payment before handing you the site. Then, once you pay up, you never hear from them again nor receive the final project from them.

That is why it is  always advisable to avoid direct payments to bank accounts. Instead, use payment processors like PayPal or Stripe. This makes it possible for you to recover your money through a dispute if you fall victim to this type of scam.

3. Undelivered Promises

In this type of scam, the web designer fails to do as you had agreed but still delivers the final project to you. They may promise to use specific design elements, such as themes, plugins, special fonts or images at a fee, but in the end, they don’t follow through. You can always contact the designer to redesign the site applying all the features you had agreed on. But if they ask for more pay, then know that you have been scammed.

4. Price Inflation and Hidden Costs

Make sure you understand the value your website will bring when you’re assessing investment costs.

Some web designers will deliver good work, but at double the price you would have paid with another designer. They can overcharge you for the themes, plugins, fonts, and graphics that they use. That is why you should carry out market research on the prices of web design services and the cost of acquiring additional features like plugins. Better yet, purchase the themes and other essentials on your own.

Always be sure to ask for the final total cost of your completed site. It’s also a good idea to ask for a price guarantee. As a point of reference, our company guarantees our estimates, bids, and price agreements. We know that our customers want to know how much a website costs. So look for simplicity and clarity in pricing.

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Now that you are aware of how you can be scammed; it is equally essential for you to gain knowledge on how you can protect yourself from such scams.

1. Avoid making full payments for incomplete projects.

You do not want to end up spending thousands of dollars on a site that has not been done. Ensure that your web designer has completed the project before you pay. Another alternative is for you to set up a milestone payment, which will encourage the designer to work on every bit of the project to receive your payment after hitting the milestone. 

A good practice which our company uses is 50% down with 50% due upon completion once the site is live online and you are satisfied with it. This way both parties are invested. We use this model because there are also those who take advantage of web companies or who won’t pay upon delivery.

2. Get it in writing.

If you do not want to fall victim to undelivered promises, ensure that you get a legitimate estimate, an email with design and price intent, or a signed contract with your website designer. The correspondence or contract should indicate all the specifications of the project, themes paid for, fonts, graphics, time under which the project should be completed, and how the payment will be made. With this in place, your web designer will be legally bound to serve you well, and if they breach it, you can take legal action against them.

3. Do your homework.

Most people get scammed by website designers because they go for the first option that they meet in the market. No matter where you are, we can pretty much guarantee that there is a fairly high number of web designers near you! That’s precisely why you need to take your time before settling on one. Verify their past projects with other clients by checking if the websites they claim to have designed are real and how good they are.

You can also set up a meeting with them and discuss your site. By doing so with more than one web developer, you will be better able to determine the best option for your needs and you’ll lower your chances of getting scammed.

4. Work with a quality CMS that you are familiar with.

One of the ways that web designers can scam you is by designing your website using a sophisticated CMS (content management system). Without the knowledge of how that CMS works, you will be easy to dupe. It is advisable to decide on a designer that uses a standard open-source CMS like WordPress.

Here at our company, Ozark Web Design, we have switched over to using WordPress exclusively for precisely this reason. Often a customer desires a site they can edit themselves. WordPress is the largest and most respected CMS in the world, with easy and intuitive user interfaces available. This way, the customer can easily find another company or freelancer to take over their site should they ever wish to do so.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in the world because of its ease and powerful features. It powers approximately 1/3 of all the world's websites.

Final Take

No one is completely immune to fraud, and scams have morphed into an ever-present, global pain in the butt. So being equipped with the right information is the first step toward protecting yourself. As a local business owner myself, I much prefer doing business locally as much as possible. Not only for the sake of the community, but I like the idea of being able to go see a person face-to-face if they try to bilk me out of money! Plus, if you are locally connected, you can likely help prevent others from using the local business of someone who is less than scrupulous.

So finally, don’t compromise on the cost of getting a good website because, in most cases, “cheap” should raise a red flag. If you want a good website, you will need to spend a reasonable sum of money because a good site will deliver money and value to your business. But if you choose to go cheap and get scammed, it will cost you even more money.

Web Designers Near Me: Reasons to Hire Locally

November 6, 2019 No Comments

Thinking of getting a website, or even moving your services online for your customers to access them more easily? Well, that’s a solid business step that you should take. The proliferation of mobile devices and the continual move to integrating

Read More »

7 Tips to Find the Best Web Design Company for Your Needs

October 17, 2019 No Comments

A great looking website can help your business. But a great performing website can make a world of a difference to your business. Whether you sell products online or provide services, your company’s online presence is often your client’s first

Read More »

How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively

October 5, 2019 No Comments

I mean, really, who doesn’t love a good meme? After all, most people use social media for entertainment. B2C marketers (business-to-customer) and business owners will do well to remember this and use their social media channels accordingly. And to that

Read More »

The post Web Designers Near Me: How to Avoid Getting Scammed appeared first on Ozark Web Design.

source https://ozarkwebdesign.com/web-designers-near-me-how-to-avoid-getting-scammed/

[ozarkwebdesign]

Web Designers Near Me: How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Scams are everywhere. 

Just today, I received a message from someone overseas claiming to be a roofer in Springfield, MO, asking me to build him an expensive website. He assured me that he  would gladly pay with his credit card. Ah, but I know that he would later dispute the charges after he had already sold his newly designed website to some other chump. Fortunately, I know how to check IP addresses.

In our most recent article, we talked about the positive reasons that motivate so many businesses to turn to local web design companies or freelancers for their online needs. We want to carry that thought one step further as we discuss what may be the best reason of all to hire locally.

Advancing technology creates opportunity for good and bad operators alike.

As technology continues to advance, the more impact it has on how business is conducted across industries and the more websites continue to gain importance. Every successful modern business now pegs much of its success on how effectively their website performs in their market space. Websites now provide a primary avenue through which companies promote themselves and interact with clients. The return on investment that owning a good website has to a business is quite high, and that has caused a craze in demand for web design services.

This high demand for new and better websites has consequently led to an increased number of web designers. This is a good thing overall, but it also presents its own set of dangers. For the individual or company wanting to get a new website, it has become more affordable since there is a larger number of people offering this service. But, unfortunately, it has also increased the number of website design scams, and one can easily fall victim. So, we want to help you to be alert to potential scams. It’s sad to say that you can even encounter these pitfalls when you’re searching “web design companies near me.”

Table of Contents:

How Web Designers Scam People

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Our Final Take

How Web Designers Scam People

As a website design company with high ethics, we thought that we should help enlighten consumers on some of the more popular web design scams and how you can protect yourself from them. They include:

1. Website Hijackers

You can more easily fall prey to this type of scam if you already own a site and you’re looking for someone to make it better. Website hijacking occurs when you are locked out of your website by someone that you gave access to your site. The hijacker can then decide to infect files on your site with malware, to delete pages or to corrupt your content. How much worse the damages to your website will be just depends on the malicious intent of the scammer.

However, you can easily regain access to your website through the intervention of your host service provider. Your host can also help with the disinfection of the site and restoring a backup to a time when it was still in a good state.

2. Disappearing Web Designers

Ethics in web designing requires one to be continually available and to keep in touch with their clients throughout the web designing process. This allows both parties to discuss how the project is proceeding so that the result will be satisfying for both of them. However, some web design scammers will practice the opposite of this. Once you make your deposit for the work, they disappear into thin air. Usually, the deposit requested is substantial so that they make off with a large amount. Other scammers will complete your site and request the final payment before handing you the site. Then, once you pay up, you never hear from them again nor receive the final project from them.

That is why it is  always advisable to avoid direct payments to bank accounts. Instead, use payment processors like PayPal or Stripe. This makes it possible for you to recover your money through a dispute if you fall victim to this type of scam.

3. Undelivered Promises

In this type of scam, the web designer fails to do as you had agreed but still delivers the final project to you. They may promise to use specific design elements, such as themes, plugins, special fonts or images at a fee, but in the end, they don’t follow through. You can always contact the designer to redesign the site applying all the features you had agreed on. But if they ask for more pay, then know that you have been scammed.

4. Price Inflation and Hidden Costs

Make sure you understand the value your website will bring when you’re assessing investment costs.

Some web designers will deliver good work, but at double the price you would have paid with another designer. They can overcharge you for the themes, plugins, fonts, and graphics that they use. That is why you should carry out market research on the prices of web design services and the cost of acquiring additional features like plugins. Better yet, purchase the themes and other essentials on your own.

Always be sure to ask for the final total cost of your completed site. It’s also a good idea to ask for a price guarantee. As a point of reference, our company guarantees our estimates, bids, and price agreements. We know that our customers want to know how much a website costs. So look for simplicity and clarity in pricing.

How to Avoid Getting Scammed

Now that you are aware of how you can be scammed; it is equally essential for you to gain knowledge on how you can protect yourself from such scams.

1. Avoid making full payments for incomplete projects.

You do not want to end up spending thousands of dollars on a site that has not been done. Ensure that your web designer has completed the project before you pay. Another alternative is for you to set up a milestone payment, which will encourage the designer to work on every bit of the project to receive your payment after hitting the milestone. 

A good practice which our company uses is 50% down with 50% due upon completion once the site is live online and you are satisfied with it. This way both parties are invested. We use this model because there are also those who take advantage of web companies or who won’t pay upon delivery.

2. Get it in writing.

If you do not want to fall victim to undelivered promises, ensure that you get a legitimate estimate, an email with design and price intent, or a signed contract with your website designer. The correspondence or contract should indicate all the specifications of the project, themes paid for, fonts, graphics, time under which the project should be completed, and how the payment will be made. With this in place, your web designer will be legally bound to serve you well, and if they breach it, you can take legal action against them.

3. Do your homework.

Most people get scammed by website designers because they go for the first option that they meet in the market. No matter where you are, we can pretty much guarantee that there is a fairly high number of web designers near you! That’s precisely why you need to take your time before settling on one. Verify their past projects with other clients by checking if the websites they claim to have designed are real and how good they are.

You can also set up a meeting with them and discuss your site. By doing so with more than one web developer, you will be better able to determine the best option for your needs and you’ll lower your chances of getting scammed.

4. Work with a quality CMS that you are familiar with.

One of the ways that web designers can scam you is by designing your website using a sophisticated CMS (content management system). Without the knowledge of how that CMS works, you will be easy to dupe. It is advisable to decide on a designer that uses a standard open-source CMS like WordPress.

Here at our company, Ozark Web Design, we have switched over to using WordPress exclusively for precisely this reason. Often a customer desires a site they can edit themselves. WordPress is the largest and most respected CMS in the world, with easy and intuitive user interfaces available. This way, the customer can easily find another company or freelancer to take over their site should they ever wish to do so.

WordPress is by far the most popular CMS in the world because of its ease and powerful features. It powers approximately 1/3 of all the world's websites.

Final Take

No one is completely immune to fraud, and scams have morphed into an ever-present, global pain in the butt. So being equipped with the right information is the first step toward protecting yourself. As a local business owner myself, I much prefer doing business locally as much as possible. Not only for the sake of the community, but I like the idea of being able to go see a person face-to-face if they try to bilk me out of money! Plus, if you are locally connected, you can likely help prevent others from using the local business of someone who is less than scrupulous.

So finally, don’t compromise on the cost of getting a good website because, in most cases, “cheap” should raise a red flag. If you want a good website, you will need to spend a reasonable sum of money because a good site will deliver money and value to your business. But if you choose to go cheap and get scammed, it will cost you even more money.

Web Designers Near Me: Reasons to Hire Locally

November 6, 2019 No Comments

Thinking of getting a website, or even moving your services online for your customers to access them more easily? Well, that’s a solid business step that you should take. The proliferation of mobile devices and the continual move to integrating

Read More »

7 Tips to Find the Best Web Design Company for Your Needs

October 17, 2019 No Comments

A great looking website can help your business. But a great performing website can make a world of a difference to your business. Whether you sell products online or provide services, your company’s online presence is often your client’s first

Read More »

How to Make Memes for Your Business and Use Them Effectively

October 5, 2019 No Comments

I mean, really, who doesn’t love a good meme? After all, most people use social media for entertainment. B2C marketers (business-to-customer) and business owners will do well to remember this and use their social media channels accordingly. And to that

Read More »

The post Web Designers Near Me: How to Avoid Getting Scammed appeared first on Ozark Web Design.

from Ozark Web Design https://ozarkwebdesign.com/web-designers-near-me-how-to-avoid-getting-scammed/

[callmemoprah]

Vital Pieces of Best News Websites

Life, Death and Best News Websites

Some on-line communities may be quite helpful, though some might be less responsive. nexter.org/fr Facebook marketing for smaller companies can be tough to master.

The images are best for sharing on Facebook. The website is helpful and user-friendly. It is very interesting.

Furthermore, members can combine with Google Adsense and generate more income when a item is sold. Therefore, it is going to become required to keep updated so as to acquire the most out of technology. Very similar to advertise research (above), it’s more important that people search for a problem’s solution than hunt for the true product itself.

Use this chance to get ideas on how users interact with your site, and analyze their actions accordinglyfigure out how to incorporate your analysis on your design. Millennials prefer to remain on the Internet through their mobile devices. Once you have many edits supported below your belt (minimum 10 approved edits ought to be great ), you can grow to be an Autoconfirmed user.

Undeniably, email promotion is among the best and best tools as soon as it comes to online marketing. Keyword loading shouldn’t be used. The website, oftentimes, is the principal communication mechanism of a small business.

As most individuals are too lazy to check at their resources, they have a tendency to consider information that confirms their very own biases. You share in your profile that you’re a important advocate for kids with ADHD. You can find those you know.

In case the project is completed and does not perform well, there’s a significant financial effect on the organization. You’re able to follow your pals and other industry experts to learn what interests them. Nevertheless, your earnings and effectiveness available on the market will skyrocket.

Obtaining your everyday dose of information is not the same ritual for everybody. All news stories need to be placed via the practice of critical thinking, and analyzed dependent on the circumstance, and any feasible biases whether intentional or otherwise. For those who have a tinge of curiosity about what is going on in the information and content business, here is what I have observed in the last 6 months.

It’s always updated with the latest news and information, so that you could always stand to gain an additional advantage. The website provides well-researched news posts that are edifying and educational.

Check to find out whether the exact story is being printed on more reliable sites. The blog part of a larger media group and you’ll be able to catch weirder news at sister websites like Geekosystem. If you don’t dismiss a story, it’s going to remain in your feed for a couple days.

You want to likewise consider your readers at the choice. Before your draft, ensure there have yet to be any huge injuries to any of the very important players you might want to draft. To start with, there’s the matter of news.

Then you’ve landed on the appropriate page. There aren’t any sidebars but all of the articles and details are mentioned widely on the internet page. Proceed to this page whenever possible.

Best News Websites Options

Building quality inbound links that directs others to your own internet page plays a massive role in its overall all-natural search performance. Actually, if you see your favourite sites on Twitter you most likely don’t will need to store them in your bookmarks bar. In fact, a growing number of websites aim to show you content that’s specifically tailored to you.

There are numerous customization options which permit you to craft an exemplary newspaper website. There’s no lack of helpful and enjoyable details on here, which makes it prime for endless browsing.

Experts recommend using billboard in actual estate in case the agent will likely be selling a whole subdivision. It is actually more inclined to happen in various places.

|

Ensure your own information website includes an RSS feed. You may use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to spread the info. The website provides well-researched news posts that are edifying and educational.

Check to see whether the precise story is being published on more reliable sites. The blog a part of a larger media group and you will have the ability to catch weirder information at sister sites like Geekosystem. Before it is possible to reflect on a subject you will have to choose one.

Now the web is filled with health and exercise articles it is possible to read at no price. Clearly, you have got to actually set the site online. There are numerous kinds of fake news websites.

In case you have News Capsules in your Hubs, you don’t need to do anything they’ll disappear independently. The web has altered the manner that we see news. Real News has a excellent viewership and a great deal of readers already.

With the continuing advancement of technology, it can be hard and challenging to remain up-to-date on the hottest trends. Based on the amount of curation that you wish to be applicable to your content aggregator, you can also need to pick up the Keyword Filtering add-on too. Magazine-style themes, particularly for WordPress are extremely popular at the moment.

The Pew Research Center has an intriguing study where they’ve monitored American’s values with time. Opinions are less expensive than good journalism. Unconventional Navigation Designing is comparable to writing music.

Among the greatest things that came from the fellowship was really learning how to live at the present time. Your initial 10 20 picks ought to be set already and in case you get the 5th pick, you must have a very good idea who you’re going to get. In a situation like this, telling a story of a genuine common man with real-life incidents ought to be applauded.

History helps us understand our existing situations using a more realistic eye. Getting inspired from different peoples’ life that is not the same to ours isn’t a lousy option right after we don’t have enough time to innovate ourselves. Weird Asia News is a little website, but even if you’re from any corner of the planet, you will appreciate that no one has a monopoly on insanity.

Instead, attempt to discover the way your app idea can help men and women in their daily lives. All news stories should be placed via the tradition of critical thinking, and examined determined by the context, and any feasible biases whether or not otherwise. The how-to would tackle the problem of consuming news from just one perspective, instead of being educated by numerous points of view.

Try to be quite specific with your audience targeting to reduce the quantity you might have to pay for every video engagement. A great deal of information is crammed in here, but it is a neat overview that provides you the ability to pick from wide range of stories.

You may translate every line of articles, leading to a multilingual page that is certain to entice a great deal of people. You can begin by making small edits in a few of the present Wikipedia pages. As the page states the blog is all about highlighting women in the geek planet, and supplying a prominent spot for all those voices of geek ladies.

As the blog owner it’s simple to overlook the fact that several of your customers won’t know precisely where to locate everything. Visitors are happy since they get to see a massive number of content in 1 place. If your Hub receives a warning enabling you to know that it’s on an over-saturated subject, you might want to create an effort to make certain that it really does offer something of value over the thousands of different articles on exactly the same subjectand bear in mind that it is going to be held to higher editorial standardsand make certain it does not have any affiliate links inside.

The Downside Risk of Best News Websites

If you would like to remain informed about technology, you have to be ready to be open minded. Lets say I like a specific product or lets say I hate a particular product.

Research serves as an extremely important tool to supply such info. Access is wholly free, and you may download pictures to your computer for private or research usage. From beginning to end, the setup procedure can be finalized in only a couple of minutes.

Site admins may use the Theme choices as a way to set up the Network on which information will be shared, in addition to the allotted cache period. Keyword loading shouldn’t be used. The website intends to track down the best ICOs for the users to put money into.

|

Driving Rules Network is a great place to begin. The internet is quite a distinctive and distinctive place. Meme’s have existed for a very long time, even before the net.

A safe wallet is crucial if you would like to dive into the region of crypto. Google Lit Trips For many pupils, the best method to experience history is via storytelling. ListICO is undoubtedly among the best regions to record your upcoming ICO should you would like to entice the correct investors.

Steer clear of the standard blog appear Many folks really hate the conventional blog look that’s seen pretty much anywhere. Knowing the audience helps guide the caliber and quantity of material to get. At the base of every write-up, find different stories liked by those who liked that specific story, which might send you down a rabbit hole into websites you’ve never heard of.

Do not use click bait since it will lose your readers once your paragraph is not what readers want to find. You can begin by making small edits in a couple of the existing Wikipedia pages. As the page states the blog is all about highlighting women in the geek planet, and supplying a prominent spot for those voices of geek ladies.

Its extensive details on a broad range of products is mind-boggling. Experts recommend using billboard in actual estate in case the agent will likely be selling a whole subdivision. Again, your selection of options depends upon the goals that you put facing you.

Because most individuals are too lazy to look at their resources, they have a tendency to believe information that confirms their very own biases. In an age where folks are receiving their information and data from a larger selection of sources, like Facebook, it’s troubling to realize how in bed with the left apparently every important media outlet is. You can find those you know.

Creative ways are almost always beneficial for business, since they are unusual, eye-catching and engaging. You may also alter your language. A great deal of people feel that America’s first digital generation is newsless.

Obtaining your everyday dose of information isn’t the same ritual for everybody. All news stories need to be placed via the tradition of critical thinking, and examined determined by the context, and any feasible biases whether intentional or otherwise. The how-to would tackle the problem of consuming news from just one perspective, instead of being informed by numerous points of view.

What Is So Fascinating About Best News Websites?

Aesthetically Commafeed isn’t as attractive then again, very few news aggregators give much beauty whatsoever. It is possible to also read out the most recent news online at Dainik Bhaskar official Hindi news site. The world wide web has transformed the way by which information is made and distributed though.

So, it’s wise you hire somebody who isn’t associated with your business to compose your Wikipedia page. Essentially, you might use the app to make your dream magazine. If you don’t dismiss a narrative, it is going to remain in your feed for a couple days.

Clearly, you have got to really set the website online. There are numerous kinds of fake news websites.

It isn’t straightforward to say which features are important for the ideal news sites. There are not any sidebars but all the articles and details are mentioned broadly on the internet page. Content aggregator websites are certainly something which you’ve run into no less than a couple times in your life online.

Everybody can now make their own website, irrespective of technical abilities with Joomla CMS and NewsPlus template given by JoomShaper.com. Capable social media sharing frameworks allow you to construct your existence quickly. If you’re not experienced in handling code, consult a internet developer who will support you in optimizing your website.

To begin with, you want a feed reader. Bear in mind, reviewers can discover technical bugs in your site and trust problems.

Boosts your organic search results Wikipedia page can help you grab more eyeballs since it’s often rank on the very first page of virtually all search engines. Keyword loading shouldn’t be used. The site plans to track down the best ICOs for the users to put money into.

}

Source: http://mobimatic.io/2019/01/28/vital-pieces-of-best-news-websites/

[sualkmedeiors]

Should You Trust Influencers to Promote Your Brand? Consider These Problems First

Influencer marketing is drawing more and more suspicion from brands and advertisers alike. There is a growing concern in some business sectors that consumer trust in influencers is waning or has reached its peak. Empirical data, however, shows that influencers still have a lot of pull. They can still raise brand awareness, push customer loyalty, and boost engagement. One study by Marvrck also shows that cost per acquisition (CPA) was also far lower with influencer marketing compared to other types of advertising like Facebook ads.

While there's no denying that influencer marketing works, it has a lot of issues that have resulted in brands having a general lack of trust for influencers.

4 Reasons Why Brands Don't Trust Influencer Marketing

1. Hard to Measure ROI

The majority of brands find that choosing the right metrics to use and measuring return on investment are the main challenges they face when it comes to influencer marketing.

Every marketing campaign should be based on measurable objectives, like an increase in revenue, higher brand awareness, or more social media followers. You need to determine your objective first. Once that's done, you can then identify how you will track your KPIs and evaluate how the content or an influencer has performed.

Luckily, most of the tools used in tracking conventional and digital marketing are also appropriate for influencer marketing. For instance, tools like Google Analytics, promo codes, giveaways, vanity URLs, and UTM parameters can all be used to measure the results of an influencer marketing campaign. Social media platforms like Pinterest are also taking steps in this direction by giving access to their APIs to ensure that influencers and marketers can work well together.

2. Fake Followers and Fake Accounts

Fake followers and fraudulent accounts are also behind the mistrust of influencers. According to a New York Times report, this practice is so rampant that about 15 percent of Twitter profiles are fakes and many celebrities and influencers buy followers to inflate their perceived social influence.

Too often, brands look for influencers with the largest number of followers and pay big money for access to them. So it's not surprising that some influencers pad their numbers with fake accounts. Unfortunately, the practice messes up one crucial element of this marketing method—influencing another individual. After all, you can't wield your influence over an imaginary person.

To combat this problem, brands should focus more on quality than quantity. Instead of looking at the numbers, they should concentrate on the kind of consumers that follow the influencer, and whether said influencer is suitable for the brand. Social media platforms should also put more effort into cracking down on dubious accounts. 

More importantly, the influencers should hold themselves accountable and check for fake followers, even if it means they have to scroll through their list of followers and vet each one.

3. A Million Followers Doesn't Mean More Profit

A social media account might have tens of thousands of followers but not have much influence. There are people who are influential in one area but not in another. For instance, an account that specializes in memes might have a million followers but those followers are not there to buy anything. They just follow the account for its entertainment value.

Brands should first determine whether an influencer is considered trustworthy by their followers or just a digital performer. The former has an impact on a follower's buying decision while the latter doesn't. Companies can tell which is which by their posts. Consumers respond to honesty and passion, and a good influencer shows these in their posts.

4. Competition Between Influencers and Marketers

If your brand has a marketing team, they may view influencers as a direct threat. This implied threat is due to the fact that influencers work in direct competition with traditional marketing strategies. Moreover, a lot of marketers don't totally trust social influencers with regards to content development.

To get past this problem, you'll need to understand how influencer marketing actually works. Influencers have to be authentic and strive to show this in the tone and passion of their posts. In contrast, your marketers need to double check everything or have some say in the content creation process. You'll need to find a good compromise between the two groups to prevent conflict.

Should Brands Still Trust Influencers?

Many consumers have relationships with influencers that are more like friendships. And according to Neilsen, 92 percent of consumers trust the recommendations of family and friends. For this reason, influencers still have the power to greatly impact a brand. However, the problems that come with influencer marketing have gone largely unresolved.

Part of the problem is that these issues have only recently come to the forefront, so best practices have not yet been established. Brands and influencers are still learning and adjusting. 

Moving foward, more influencers will need to audit their followers and check for fake accounts. Branded content should merge well with integrated content, and sponsored posts should be kept to a minimum. Meanwhile, it's imperative for brands to thoroughly research their potential partners, making sure they only work with credible influencers and choose the right platforms to promote their products and services.

The post Should You Trust Influencers to Promote Your Brand? Consider These Problems First appeared first on WebProNews.

from https://www.webpronews.com/should-you-trust-influencers-to-promote-your-brand-consider-these-problems-first/

[lindyhunt]

9 Native Advertising Examples People Actually Enjoyed Reading

In 2012, the concept of native advertising broke onto the scene. Back then, who would have predicted the deep impact of native on the world of online advertising?

Native ads have since overtaken display ads as the most popular form of digital advertising. For marketers everywhere, native ads -- used on social, search, and content recommendation platforms -- have become a staple item on the online advertising menu.

Clearly, native advertising hits a nerve. Over time, native ads have become more sophisticated, calling on complex design and UX principles in the never-ending grab for consumer attention.

There are so many amazing examples to choose from, so we've narrowed it down to nine exciting, advanced, and current native ads that we think do a great job:

9 Native Advertising Examples

1. Altran Engineering in the Financial Times

This native advertisement combines some of the best elements of digital advertising: video, a human interest story, and classy hi-tech with an Elon Musk connection.

Produced by the Altran engineering company, and published in the Industrial Tech section of the Financial Times, the above video, "Hyperloop: designing the future of transport?" tells the story of a group of students from the Technical University in Valencia, Spain who are competing in the 2018 Hyperloop Pod Competition run by Musk's SpaceX company.

This native video ad has a palpable human component -- the students and the Altran staff who are supporting them in the tough competition. This brings in its futuristic aspect -- the best and the brightest working to design the fastest transport pod that will transform the future of transportation. And it's presented as a news story, not as a promotion or ad for Altran or the SpaceX competition (although it's actually promoting both).

Together with high production value and a compelling narrative, it's a great example of a native video ad.

2. Land Rover -- A Mini Suspense/Action Movie

Land Rover uses diverse outstanding content marketing campaigns to promote its vehicles. These native content strategies are in full form in Land Rover's Dragon Challenge video, shown above. It's eye-catching, slick, and suspenseful. It's everything a native campaign can and should be.

This nail-biting ad shows the world's first attempt to scale the stairs leading to the Heaven's Gate landmark in China -- by vehicle. In February 2018, a specially fitted Range Rover SUV successfully drove up the 999 steps to Heaven's Gate, at a frightening angle of 45 degrees.

The native campaign perfectly captures the brand essence of Land Rover -- daring, excellence, adventure, and ultimately, success. Promoted via social Land Rover's networks, it's much more than an ad. It's a record-breaking event and a story of its own.

3. Eni Energy on CNN

Here's an example of graphic, luscious storytelling, ripe with green landscapes, promoted by oil and energy conglomerate Eni. It focuses on the Green River Project in the Niger Delta, an Eni development program for farming and livestock to improve the livelihoods of local communities. The campaign is promoted with native ads on CNN.com, linking back to the Green River Project. It's a truly impressive example of native content.

The site is designed as a story, divided into three sections: Past, Present and Future. The content is a mix of just about everything -- text, imagery, audio, video, personal stories, animations, and illustrations. The complete look and feel is reflective of an environmental agency, rather than an oil company.

In this native campaign, Eni succeeds in distancing itself from the criticisms faced by energy conglomerates, and creates a brand image as a 21st-century social and environmental force for good, and a beacon of corporate responsibility.  

4. Mercedes in the Washington Post

This native campaign by Mercedes is an example of smooth, clean content designed to pique interest and engage the user. The campaign is called "The rise of the superhuman," and it focuses on various technologies that are turning people into "superhumans," such as robotic exoskeleton suits, virtual reality in medical settings, and the Mercedes Benz E-class series that integrates the new Intelligent Drive system.

The native content above is highly interactive, featuring quiz questions and hot spots the user can click to get more information. But one of the best things about this campaign is how it effortlessly creates a connection between Mercedes and the "superhuman." It's reminiscent of one of the oldest native examples, the "Penalty of Leadership" ad by Cadillac, which enhanced the Cadillac image as a prestigious leader. That simple print ad, published in 1915, is credited with reviving the Cadillac brand and boosting flagging sales that plagued the company at the time.

Today's native interactive Mercedes ad relies on the same principle -- creating a powerful connection between the car and the concept of cutting-edge excellence.

5. Viral Meme on VentureBeat

Nothing beats a viral meme in terms of sheer stickiness, and it's a great way to promote brand awareness. Recently, during the famous "Laurel or Yanny?" dispute, we saw VentureBeat take advantage of the meme in native content to promote the upcoming Transform conference on artificial intelligence and analytics. How? By using an artificial intelligence (AI) device to settle the dilemma of Laurel versus Yanny, once and for all.

VentureBeat promoted an article that briefly describes how AI was used to determine whether the stated name was Laurel or Yanny. The native article discusses some of the problems that arose, and how the engineers had to adjust the algorithms to get an accurate result.

It also opened up the issue of the limits of algorithms -- which will presumably be explored at the Transform conference run by VentureBeat and scheduled to take place in August. Of course, the article opened with a clear CTA to register for the conference, including a tempting 30% discount offer. A great example of not letting a viral meme go to waste in a native campaign.

6. 'Know Your Girls' on AOL

Here's a great example of native advertising used to advance a great cause. The "Know Your Girls" campaign is designed to promote breast health and breast cancer awareness among African American women in the US. Promoted natively on AOL.com, the "Know Your Girls" ad title is catchy, intriguing, a little naughty, and clearly speaks the language of the target audience.

A click leads you to an informative and well designed website that provides health resources, personal stories, and important information about risk factors, screening, and much more. The campaign is a partnership between the Susan G Komen breast cancer foundation and the Ad Council, which unites this important cause with the latest and best advertising practices. Clearly, that includes native ads.

7. Influencer Promotion on BBC.com

BBC Future is one of the BBC's "storytelling" channels, which connects brands to audiences via sponsored stories. An interesting example is this 2017 article, which purports to show the face of the "average American politician."

In fact, this is achieved by using technology to perform "face averaging," creating composite images of all American politicians to derive the average face.

This technology can lead to all kinds of research and suppositions about what the average politician represents, including gender, race, republican, and democrat -- all hot topics in a highly politicized time period.

The article ends with a call-to-action (CTA) to learn more about face averaging with an online tutorial on OpenCV, an open-source computer vision software. The link leads to a website, owned not by a large corporation or software giant, but to an individual entrepreneur, programmer, and blogger -- Satya Mallik. In this example, we love how native advertising is accessible to small businesses and influencers, affording powerful promotion opportunities on premium websites like the BBC.

8. Colored Corn on Business Insider

One of the best native tactics is creating a story. And if the story is visual and colorful, well, that's a huge help. Take this example of native content promoted on Business Insider.

The example above looks and feels just like a regular Business Insider article. It's about Glass Gem Corn, a multi-colored corn variety that became a public sensation in 2012. It's the story of one man and his search for his Native American roots that led him to develop the colored corn. And in true Business Insider fashion, the story of the rainbow corn is retold in amazing, bold, eye-catching visuals.

The article contains links to buy the seeds online from Native/SEARCH, a not-for-profit conservation company that now owns the product. So what's in effect a product sales page is presented as a remarkable, colorful news story.

What's most interesting about this article is the disclaimer published by Business Insider: "This article was originally published in 2013 and has been updated because the story is timeless." It just goes to show: Evergreen content promoted natively can truly be a long-term success story.

9. KPMG on Forbes

Forbes' BrandVoice is a platform for native advertising and sponsored content. Many brands have their own BrandVoice channel, such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, SAP, Deloitte, and even the government of Japan.

KPMG has taken its own native content on Forbes to the next level, with a campaign called "The Great Rewrite."

Big and bold (just like native advertising should be), The Great Rewrite focuses on different industries and how they are being "rewritten" in a post-innovation age. The campaign look and feel is grand and ultra modern, yet easy to navigate.

It makes its point, connecting KPMG with the future of innovation, while continually adding new "chapters" about various sectors. Each chapter is packed with content, including video, featured articles, and content recommendations. This is a great example of a native campaign that, just likes its title, is rewriting the rules of native in an ongoing, ever- growing, content-rich user experience.

These days, many native ads that we see online are truly spectacular. Some are eye-catching, others are original, and yet others offer inspiration for new ways to promote compelling content and capture mindshare.

The nine examples above are by no means an exhaustive list. However, they do give a taste as to how native advertising is constantly advancing, pushing the boundaries of content and design to create new, unexpected online brand experiences.

[wisejellyfishcrown]

In my corporate days, I asked this question of the marketing team on a weekly basis: “Who are these 20,000 people in our email newsletter database? Do they even fit our ideal client profile?”

I’m embarrassed to admit, instead of pushing for the answer, we stayed on the hamster wheel churning out a weekly newsletter featuring one staffer blog post, two curated industry articles, and one marketing meme. No wonder our click-through and open rates were low and never budged.

We were focused on fulfilling the obligation to ship the newsletter on time. However, before I beat myself up too much about the quality of our content, I realize now I should have pushed the pause button and taken a step back to investigate.

When click-through & open rates are low, take a step back to investigate. @JeffLHerrmann #email Click To Tweet

Were the open and click-through-rates low due to lame subject lines and shoddy copy or was our email database full of people who didn’t fit our ideal client profile?

We had no idea if we were wasting great content on the wrong people.

Today, smart marketers operate like niche media publishers, forgoing a massive but unresponsive email database in favor of a possibly smaller but more engaged audience.

If your goal is a more valuable audience, it makes sense to use proven audience measurement methods to better understand the size, composition, and preferences of your audience.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

Understand who is on your email list

To convert the names in your database into an engaged audience, you first must understand who is behind those names. You want to consider demographic, “firmographic,” and behavioral factors because no single factor tells all about a person.

You need to know who is behind the names in your database to convert them into engaged audience. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Segment by demographics and firmographics

Break down your list by demographics (personal characteristics) and firmographics (company characteristics). Many opt-in web forms capture not only name and professional email address but also job title and industry type. From this information, you can determine a lot about the composition of your database. Create parameters for your classifications – gender, job title, company size (revenue and employee numbers), and industry classification, etc. Then code and segment the records by those classifications.

Insights available could include the composition of C-level executives vs. non-managerial individual contributors or the composition by department (marketing vs. IT vs. sales).

Using this sorting approach, don’t be surprised to find gaps due to inconsistent or insufficient data collection practices. For example, names collected from scans at trade shows over the years may vary in their depth of information because of the evolving technological capabilities.

You can explore third-party “data-appending” services, which would offer additional details about your database. While a single project can be expensive, most providers offer discounts for annual subscriptions to their service. Alternatively, you could search for additional details on LinkedIn or in other online searches and manually update your database. Whether it’s your team’s time or a contract with a service, the investment to learn more about your database contacts is worth it.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Steps to Improving Subscriber Data for More Personalized Emails

Segment by behavior

While segmenting by demographics and firmographics is an important first step, it doesn’t provide the depth of insight to help you program your content to engage your audience. You haven’t yet shed light on the desires and motivations of your audience.

Lean into behavioral segmentation and your lead-scoring system. If you have a marketing automation system, you can track the web activity of people in your database and assign lead scores based on their actions. That provides critical insight into the kind of information people in your audience respond to.

Marketing automation software is great at tracking the people in your database who actively engage with you. But in many cases, lack of engagement is the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus only on the behavior of your engaged database members, you risk missing the big picture.

And another caveat: Analyzing your own database limits your insight to the characteristics and behaviors of the people who have connected with your company. How do you know whether these people reflect the broader desired audience? Is your list skewed or biased in any direction? 

You need to do more work to get the answers. You can start with demographics, firmographics, and behavior data, but the key is to find out how the characteristics of your database compare to the characteristics of the market you’re going after.

Understand your database audience profile relative to the broader market

To better understand your database in relation to the overall market, you can apply audience evaluation methods used by the media industry. Having this insight will help benchmark your current database (composition and value), understand the gaps in your audience, and build an investment case to grow an audience that will deliver for your organization.

To get started, borrow a page from media measurement powerhouse Nielsen. It analyzes its audience-measurement sample composition in local markets by producing “in-tab” reports that compare sample groups to “universe estimates” for the market. These reports are great at identifying the gaps of market penetration or over/under audience representation.

Step 1: Identify your target audience and market

Decide on a target audience aligned to your ideal client profile. Your audience is most likely composed of your best current and future buyers. In some cases, your target could be customers you don’t have but aspire to reach. Once you’ve decided who you want as your ideal audience, you can then develop a universe estimate, more commonly known as the total addressable market.

Market sizing helps you determine the level of effort and resources required to build an audience comprising your ideal clients (more about this in Step 3). The goal is to determine the total size of the target audience, which is used as the denominator for market share calculations. Consider whether you want a single-digit share of a massive market or deep penetration of a niche market.

Example: Being early in its maturity, Acme’s B2B marketing team decides to target all B2B medical marketers rather than a subset of medical marketers.

Step 2: Determine the most important market characteristics to track

With a firm handle on the identity of your total potential audience, develop a set of characteristics to understand the composition of the audience in your target market. Remember, personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding.

Personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding, says @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Which characteristics – demographic or firmographic – may be important to know about your target audience? You’re looking to create discrete segments to truly understand the depth and dimension of your audience. Then you can create a blended sketch or composite view of the target audience – the asset you seek.

Example: The Acme marketing team recognizes that “B2B medical marketers” isn’t descriptive enough for its target audience. It chooses to segment based on gender, seniority, and company size because these are the most observable and reliable characteristics at this point.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Create Easy, Yet Actionable, Content Marketing Personas

Step 3: Build a table and populate the Universe Estimate (UE)/Total Addressable Market (TAM) and market characteristic fields

For this stage, you should use reliable industry resources to develop the most accurate market size and audience composition counts possible. For example, this report from Salesforce Research and LinkedIn provides valuable benchmarking data to inform the total audience profile for a half-dozen sectors. LinkedIn can be a great resource for estimating the size of your target audience. Industry associations also usually have solid estimates on the total count and characteristics of their industry.

At this point, enumerating your niche market will be more art than science for beginners. In the B2B space, available data isn’t as vast as it is in the B2C space. While you won’t have every characteristic populated, making some reasonable assumptions on the count of the people in a market segment is a great way to build reality checks to understanding sizing the audience opportunity and composition.

Example: The table illustrates Acme’s target audience of B2B medical marketers in comparison to the overall audience of medical marketers based on data from the Salesforce Research report.

Step 4: Analyze the table

With the industry data and calculations, you now can identify how your database audience reflects the overall audience, including opportunities to focus on and invest in audience development.

Example: Acme’s marketing team sees that its database:

Reflects less than 5% of available audience of medical marketers

Skews heavily toward males though the overall audience skews heavily female

Reaches fewer managers and director-level marketers (22.5%) than the available audience (35%)

Reflects proportionately to the available audience for companies between 501 and 1,000 employees, but captures a higher percentage of companies with 1,001 to 10,001-plus employees (65% vs. 55%).

This analysis now can inform Acme’s content marketing strategy, from content creation (i.e., create content better targeted to attract a senior-level audience) to content promotion (i.e., develop outreach plan to capture more of medical marketers in the United States).

Acme has a lot of work to do. It’s barely reaching its market potential, and its gender composition and seniority levels are skewed. The only bright spot is the company size target reflects Acme’s focus on mid-market and small enterprise organizations. Acme is reaching the right type of company, yet it is most likely not reaching enough of the right type of people.

What’s next?

We’re really just getting started by understanding the relative size and composition of who is in your audience and who isn’t. Use this method as a tool to help your management understand the current state of your audience or email database and how much work you have to do to develop the strategy and content to improve your composition by engaging your ideal clients.

Understand your current audience to learn how much work you have to do to engage ideal clients. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

For example, the Acme team could justify new content initiatives that address director-level information needs by showing decision-makers how underrepresented that segment is in its current contact database.

Once you understand the gaps in your database as it relates to the market as a whole, you can decide how to invest the resources to improve your audience composition. If you want to take the analysis to the next level, you can derive the total asset value of the audience you currently have or­ – more importantly – the audience you want. To understand how to do that, read Robert Rose’s recent article The Audience Valuation Engine: A New Model for Calculating the Value Per Subscriber.

It’s time you stop beating yourself up about your open rates and engagement rates and consider that you just might be throwing great content at the wrong people.

Hear from Robert Rose and how content strategy can help your customer understanding, and much more, at the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today.

Source link

The post How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience appeared first on elgibborsms.com blog.

[lucyariablog]

How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience

In my corporate days, I asked this question of the marketing team on a weekly basis: “Who are these 20,000 people in our email newsletter database? Do they even fit our ideal client profile?”

I’m embarrassed to admit, instead of pushing for the answer, we stayed on the hamster wheel churning out a weekly newsletter featuring one staffer blog post, two curated industry articles, and one marketing meme. No wonder our click-through and open rates were low and never budged.

We were focused on fulfilling the obligation to ship the newsletter on time. However, before I beat myself up too much about the quality of our content, I realize now I should have pushed the pause button and taken a step back to investigate.

When click-through & open rates are low, take a step back to investigate. @JeffLHerrmann #email Click To Tweet

Were the open and click-through-rates low due to lame subject lines and shoddy copy or was our email database full of people who didn’t fit our ideal client profile?

We had no idea if we were wasting great content on the wrong people.

Today, smart marketers operate like niche media publishers, forgoing a massive but unresponsive email database in favor of a possibly smaller but more engaged audience.

If your goal is a more valuable audience, it makes sense to use proven audience measurement methods to better understand the size, composition, and preferences of your audience.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

Understand who is on your email list

To convert the names in your database into an engaged audience, you first must understand who is behind those names. You want to consider demographic, “firmographic,” and behavioral factors because no single factor tells all about a person.

You need to know who is behind the names in your database to convert them into engaged audience. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Segment by demographics and firmographics

Break down your list by demographics (personal characteristics) and firmographics (company characteristics). Many opt-in web forms capture not only name and professional email address but also job title and industry type. From this information, you can determine a lot about the composition of your database. Create parameters for your classifications – gender, job title, company size (revenue and employee numbers), and industry classification, etc. Then code and segment the records by those classifications.

Insights available could include the composition of C-level executives vs. non-managerial individual contributors or the composition by department (marketing vs. IT vs. sales).

Using this sorting approach, don’t be surprised to find gaps due to inconsistent or insufficient data collection practices. For example, names collected from scans at trade shows over the years may vary in their depth of information because of the evolving technological capabilities.

You can explore third-party “data-appending” services, which would offer additional details about your database. While a single project can be expensive, most providers offer discounts for annual subscriptions to their service. Alternatively, you could search for additional details on LinkedIn or in other online searches and manually update your database. Whether it’s your team’s time or a contract with a service, the investment to learn more about your database contacts is worth it.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Steps to Improving Subscriber Data for More Personalized Emails

Segment by behavior

While segmenting by demographics and firmographics is an important first step, it doesn’t provide the depth of insight to help you program your content to engage your audience. You haven’t yet shed light on the desires and motivations of your audience.

Lean into behavioral segmentation and your lead-scoring system. If you have a marketing automation system, you can track the web activity of people in your database and assign lead scores based on their actions. That provides critical insight into the kind of information people in your audience respond to.

Marketing automation software is great at tracking the people in your database who actively engage with you. But in many cases, lack of engagement is the problem you’re trying to solve. If you focus only on the behavior of your engaged database members, you risk missing the big picture.

And another caveat: Analyzing your own database limits your insight to the characteristics and behaviors of the people who have connected with your company. How do you know whether these people reflect the broader desired audience? Is your list skewed or biased in any direction? 

You need to do more work to get the answers. You can start with demographics, firmographics, and behavior data, but the key is to find out how the characteristics of your database compare to the characteristics of the market you’re going after.

Understand your database audience profile relative to the broader market

To better understand your database in relation to the overall market, you can apply audience evaluation methods used by the media industry. Having this insight will help benchmark your current database (composition and value), understand the gaps in your audience, and build an investment case to grow an audience that will deliver for your organization.

To get started, borrow a page from media measurement powerhouse Nielsen. It analyzes its audience-measurement sample composition in local markets by producing “in-tab” reports that compare sample groups to “universe estimates” for the market. These reports are great at identifying the gaps of market penetration or over/under audience representation.

Step 1: Identify your target audience and market

Decide on a target audience aligned to your ideal client profile. Your audience is most likely composed of your best current and future buyers. In some cases, your target could be customers you don’t have but aspire to reach. Once you’ve decided who you want as your ideal audience, you can then develop a universe estimate, more commonly known as the total addressable market.

Market sizing helps you determine the level of effort and resources required to build an audience comprising your ideal clients (more about this in Step 3). The goal is to determine the total size of the target audience, which is used as the denominator for market share calculations. Consider whether you want a single-digit share of a massive market or deep penetration of a niche market.

Example: Being early in its maturity, Acme’s B2B marketing team decides to target all B2B medical marketers rather than a subset of medical marketers.

Step 2: Determine the most important market characteristics to track

With a firm handle on the identity of your total potential audience, develop a set of characteristics to understand the composition of the audience in your target market. Remember, personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding.

Personas mask the opportunity for true precision in your audience understanding, says @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

Which characteristics – demographic or firmographic – may be important to know about your target audience? You’re looking to create discrete segments to truly understand the depth and dimension of your audience. Then you can create a blended sketch or composite view of the target audience – the asset you seek.

Example: The Acme marketing team recognizes that “B2B medical marketers” isn’t descriptive enough for its target audience. It chooses to segment based on gender, seniority, and company size because these are the most observable and reliable characteristics at this point.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Create Easy, Yet Actionable, Content Marketing Personas

Step 3: Build a table and populate the Universe Estimate (UE)/Total Addressable Market (TAM) and market characteristic fields

For this stage, you should use reliable industry resources to develop the most accurate market size and audience composition counts possible. For example, this report from Salesforce Research and LinkedIn provides valuable benchmarking data to inform the total audience profile for a half-dozen sectors. LinkedIn can be a great resource for estimating the size of your target audience. Industry associations also usually have solid estimates on the total count and characteristics of their industry.

At this point, enumerating your niche market will be more art than science for beginners. In the B2B space, available data isn’t as vast as it is in the B2C space. While you won’t have every characteristic populated, making some reasonable assumptions on the count of the people in a market segment is a great way to build reality checks to understanding sizing the audience opportunity and composition.

Example: The table illustrates Acme’s target audience of B2B medical marketers in comparison to the overall audience of medical marketers based on data from the Salesforce Research report.

Image source: Salesforce Research. Data for gender and company size derived for illustrative purposes.

Step 4: Analyze the table

With the industry data and calculations, you now can identify how your database audience reflects the overall audience, including opportunities to focus on and invest in audience development.

Example: Acme’s marketing team sees that its database:

Reflects less than 5% of available audience of medical marketers

Skews heavily toward males though the overall audience skews heavily female

Reaches fewer managers and director-level marketers (22.5%) than the available audience (35%)

Reflects proportionately to the available audience for companies between 501 and 1,000 employees, but captures a higher percentage of companies with 1,001 to 10,001-plus employees (65% vs. 55%).

This analysis now can inform Acme’s content marketing strategy, from content creation (i.e., create content better targeted to attract a senior-level audience) to content promotion (i.e., develop outreach plan to capture more of medical marketers in the United States).

Acme has a lot of work to do. It’s barely reaching its market potential, and its gender composition and seniority levels are skewed. The only bright spot is the company size target reflects Acme’s focus on mid-market and small enterprise organizations. Acme is reaching the right type of company, yet it is most likely not reaching enough of the right type of people.

What’s next?

We’re really just getting started by understanding the relative size and composition of who is in your audience and who isn’t. Use this method as a tool to help your management understand the current state of your audience or email database and how much work you have to do to develop the strategy and content to improve your composition by engaging your ideal clients.

Understand your current audience to learn how much work you have to do to engage ideal clients. @JeffLHerrmann Click To Tweet

For example, the Acme team could justify new content initiatives that address director-level information needs by showing decision-makers how underrepresented that segment is in its current contact database.

Once you understand the gaps in your database as it relates to the market as a whole, you can decide how to invest the resources to improve your audience composition. If you want to take the analysis to the next level, you can derive the total asset value of the audience you currently have or­ – more importantly – the audience you want. To understand how to do that, read Robert Rose’s recent article The Audience Valuation Engine: A New Model for Calculating the Value Per Subscriber.

It’s time you stop beating yourself up about your open rates and engagement rates and consider that you just might be throwing great content at the wrong people.

Hear from Robert Rose and how content strategy can help your customer understanding, and much more, at the Intelligent Content Conference March 20-22 in Las Vegas. Register today.

The post How to Better Understand the Size and Composition of Your B2B Audience appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/12/size-composition-audience/

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Turning data into numbers

 Jeff Leek  2017/01/31

Editor’s note: This is the third chapter of a book I’m working on called Demystifying Artificial Intelligence. The goal of the book is to demystify what modern AI is and does for a general audience. So something to smooth the transition between AI fiction and highly mathematical descriptions of deep learning. I’m developing the book over time - so if you buy the book on Leanpub know that there are only three chapters in there so far, but I’ll be adding more over the next few weeks and you get free updates. The cover of the book was inspired by this amazing tweet by Twitter user @notajf. Feedback is welcome and encouraged!

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.” Arthur Conan Doyle

Data, data everywhere

I already have some data about you. You are reading this book. Does that seem like data? It’s just something you did, that’s not data is it? But if I collect that piece of information about you, it actually tells me a surprising amount. It tells me you have access to an internet connection, since the only place to get the book is online. That in turn tells me something about your socioeconomic status and what part of the world you live in. It also tells me that you like to read, which suggests a certain level of education.

Whether you know it or not, everything you do produces data - from the websites you read to the rate at which your heart beats. Until pretty recently, most of the data you produced wasn’t collected, it floated off unmeasured. Data were painstakingly gathered by scientists one number at a time in small experiments with a few people. This laborious process meant that data were expensive and time-consuming to collect. Yet many of the most amazing scientific discoveries over the last two centuries were squeezed from just a few data points. But over the last two decades, the unit price of data has dramatically dropped. New technologies touching every aspect of our lives from our money, to our health, to our social interactions have made data collection cheap and easy.

To give you an idea of how steep the drop in the price of data has been, in 1967 Stanley Milgram did an experiment to determine the number of degrees of separation between two people in the U.S. (Travers and Milgram 1969). In his experiment he sent 296 letters to people in Omaha, Nebraska and Wichita, Kansas. The goal was to get the letters to a specific person in Boston, Massachusetts. The trick was people had to send the letters to someone they knew, and they then sent it to someone they knew and so on. At the end of the experiment, only 64 letters made it to the individual in Boston. On average, the letters had gone through 6 people to get there.

This is an idea that is so powerful it even became part of the popular consciousness. For example it is the foundation of the internet meme “the 6-degrees of Kevin Bacon” (Wikipedia contributors 2016a) - the idea that if you take any actor and look at the people they have been in movies with, then the people those people have been in movies with, it will take you at most six steps to end up at the actor Kevin Bacon. This idea, despite its popularity was originally studied by Milgram using only 64 data points. A 2007 study updated that number to “7 degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The study was based on 30 billion instant messaging conversations collected over the course of a month or two with the same amount of effort (Leskovec and Horvitz 2008).

Once data started getting cheaper to collect, it got cheaper fast. Take another example, the human genome. The genome is the unique DNA code in every one of your cells. It consists of a set of 3 billion letters that is unique to you. By many measures, the race to be the first group to collect all 3 billion letters from a single person kicked off the data revolution in biology. The project was completed in 2000 after a decade of work and 3billiontocollectthe3billionlettersinthefirsthumangenome(Venteretal.2001).Thisprojectwasactuallyastunningsuccess,mostpeoplethoughtitwouldbemuchmoreexpensive.Butjustoveradecadelater,newtechnologymeansthatwecannowcollectall3billionlettersfromaperson′sgenomeforabout" id="MathJax-Element-1-Frame" role="presentation" style="border: 0px; direction: ltr; display: inline-block; float: none; font-size: 18.72px; line-height: 0; margin: 0px; max-height: none; max-width: none; min-height: 0px; min-width: 0px; padding: 1px 0px; position: relative; white-space: nowrap; word-spacing: normal; word-wrap: normal;" tabindex="0">3billiontocollectthe3billionlettersinthefirsthumangenome(Venteretal.2001).Thisprojectwasactuallyastunningsuccess,mostpeoplethoughtitwouldbemuchmoreexpensive.Butjustoveradecadelater,newtechnologymeansthatwecannowcollectall3billionlettersfromaperson′sgenomeforabout3billiontocollectthe3billionlettersinthefirsthumangenome(Venteretal.2001).Thisprojectwasactuallyastunningsuccess,mostpeoplethoughtitwouldbemuchmoreexpensive.Butjustoveradecadelater,newtechnologymeansthatwecannowcollectall3billionlettersfromaperson′sgenomeforabout1,000 in about a week (“The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome,” n.d.), soon it may be less than $100 (Buhr 2017).

You may have heard that this is the era of “big data” from The Economist or The New York Times. It is really the era of cheap data collection and storage. Measurements we never bothered to collect before are now so easy to obtain that there is no reason not to collect them. Advances in computer technology also make it easier to store huge amounts of data digitally. This may not seem like a big deal, but it is much easier to calculate the average of a bunch of numbers stored electronically than it is to calculate that same average by hand on a piece of paper. Couple these advances with the free and open distribution of data over the internet and it is no surprise that we are awash in data. But tons of data on their own are meaningless. It is understanding and interpreting the data where the real advances start to happen.

This explosive growth in data collection is one of the key driving influences behind interest in artificial intelligence. When teaching computers to do something that only humans could do previously, it helps to have lots of examples. You can then use statistical and machine learning models to summarize that set of examples and help a computer make decisions what to do. The more examples you have, the more flexible your computer model can be in making decisions, and the more “intelligent” the resulting application.

What is data?

Tidy data

“What is data”? Seems like a relatively simple question. In some ways this question is easy to answer. According to Wikipedia:

Data (/ˈdeɪtə/ day-tə, /ˈdætə/ da-tə, or /ˈdɑːtə/ dah-tə)[1] is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables. An example of qualitative data would be an anthropologist’s handwritten notes about her interviews with people of an Indigenous tribe. Pieces of data are individual pieces of information. While the concept of data is commonly associated with scientific research, data is collected by a huge range of organizations and institutions, ranging from businesses (e.g., sales data, revenue, profits, stock price), governments (e.g., crime rates, unemployment rates, literacy rates) and non-governmental organizations (e.g., censuses of the number of homeless people by non-profit organizations).

When you think about data, you probably think of orderly sets of numbers arranged in something like an Excel spreadsheet. In the world of data science and machine learning this type of data has a name - “tidy data” (Wickham and others 2014). Tidy data has the properties that all measured quantities are represented by numbers or character strings (think words). The data are organized such that.

Each variable you measured is in one column

Each different measurement of that variable is in a different row

There is one data table for each “type” of variable.

If there are multiple tables then they are linked by a common ID.

This idea is borrowed from data management schemas that have long been used for storing data in databases. Here is an example of a tidy data set of swimming world records.

yeartimesex190565.8M190865.6M191062.8M191261.6M191861.4M192060.4M192258.6M192457.4M193456.8M193556.6M

This type of data, neat, organized and nicely numeric is not the kind of data people are talking about when they say the “era of big data”. Data almost never start their lives in such a neat and organized format.

Raw data

The explosion of interest in AI has been powered by a variety of types of data that you might not even think of when you think of “data”. The data might be pictures you take and upload to social media, the text of the posts on that same platform, or the sound captured from your voice when you speak to your phone.

Social media and cell phones aren’t the only area where data is being collected more frequently. Speed cameras on roads collect data on the movement of cars, electronic medical records store information about people’s health, wearable devices like Fitbit collect information on the activity of people. GPS information stores the location of people, cars, boats, airplanes, and an increasingly wide array of other objects.

Images, voice recordings, text files, and GPS coordinates are what experts call “raw data”. To create an artificial intelligence application you need to begin with a lot of raw data. But as we discussed in the simple AI example from the previous chapter - a computer doesn’t understand raw data in its natural form. It is not always immediately obvious how the raw data can be turned into numbers that a computer can understand. For example, when an artificial intelligence works with a picture the computer doesn’t “see” the picture file itself. It sees a set of numbers that represent that picture and operates on those numbers. The first step in almost every artificial intelligence application is to “pre-process” the data - to take the image files or the movie files or the text of a document and turn it into numbers that a computer can understand. Then those numbers can be fed into algorithms that can make predictions and ultimately be used to make an interface look intelligent.

Turning raw data into numbers

So how do we convert raw data into a form we can work with? It depends on what type of measurement or data you have collected. Here I will use two examples to explain how you can convert images and the text of a document into numbers that an algorithm can be applied to.

Images

Suppose that we were developing an AI to identify pictures of the author of this book. We would need to collect a picture of the author - maybe an embarrassing one.

This picture is made of pixels. You can see that if you zoom in very close on the image and look more closely. You can see that the image consists of many hundreds of little squares, each square just one color. Those squares are called pixels and they are one step closer to turning the image into numbers.

You can think of each pixel like a dot of color. Let’s zoom in a little bit more and instead of showing each pixel as a square show each one as a colored dot.

Imagine we are going to build an AI application on the basis of lots of images. Then we would like to turn a set of images into “tidy data”. As described above a tidy data set is defined as the following.

Each variable you measured is in one column

Each different measurement of that variable is in a different row

There is one data table for each “type” of variable.

If there are multiple tables then they are linked by a common ID.

A translation of tidy data for a collection of images would be the following.

Variables: Are the pixels measured in the images. So the top left pixel is a variable, the bottom left pixel is a variable, and so on. So each pixel should be in a separate column.

Measurements: The measurements are the values for each pixel in each image. So each row corresponds to the values of the pixels for each row.

Tables: There would be two tables - one with the data from the pixels and one with the labels of each image (if we know them).

To start to turn the image into a row of the data set we need to stretch the dots into a single row. One way to do this is to snake along the image going from top left corner to bottom right corner and creating a single line of dots.

This still isn’t quite data a computer can understand - a computer doesn’t know about dots. But we could take each dot and label it with a color name.

We could take each color name and give it a number, something like rosybrown = 1, mistyrose = 2, and so on. This approach runs into some trouble because we don’t have names for every possible color and because it is pretty inefficient to have a different number for every hue we could imagine.

But that would be both inefficient and not very understandable by a computer. An alternative strategy that is often used is to encode the intensity of the red, green, and blue colors for each pixel. This is sometimes called the rgb color model (Wikipedia contributors 2016b). So for example we can take these dots and show how much red, green, and blue they have in them.

Looking at it this way we now have three measurements for each pixel. So we need to update our tidy data definition to be:

Variables: Are the three colors for each pixel measured in the images. So the top left pixel red value is a variable, the top left pixel green value is a variable and so on. So each pixel/color combination should be in a separate column.

Measurements: The measurements are the values for each pixel in each image. So each row corresponds to the values of the pixels for each row.

Tables: There would be two tables - one with the data from the pixels and one with the labels of each image (if we know them).

So a tidy data set might look something like this for just the image of Jeff.

idlabelp1redp1greenp1bluep2red…1“jeff”238180180205…

Each additional image would then be another row in the data set. As we will see in the chapters that follow we can then feed this data into an algorithm for performing an artificial intelligence task.

Notes

Parts of this chapter from appeared in the Simply Statistics blog post “The vast majority of statistical analysis is not performed by statisticians” written by the author of this book.

References

Buhr, Sarah. 2017. “Illumina Wants to Sequence Your Whole Genome for $100.” https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/10/illumina-wants-to-sequence-your-whole-genome-for-100/.

Leskovec, Jure, and Eric Horvitz. 2008. “Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network,” 6~mar.

“The Cost of Sequencing a Human Genome.” n.d. https://www.genome.gov/sequencingcosts/.

Travers, Jeffrey, and Stanley Milgram. 1969. “An Experimental Study of the Small World Problem.” Sociometry32 (4). [American Sociological Association, Sage Publications, Inc.]: 425–43.

Venter, J Craig, Mark D Adams, Eugene W Myers, Peter W Li, Richard J Mural, Granger G Sutton, Hamilton O Smith, et al. 2001. “The Sequence of the Human Genome.” Science 291 (5507). American Association for the Advancement of Science: 1304–51.

Wickham, Hadley, and others. 2014. “Tidy Data.” Under Review.

Wikipedia contributors. 2016a. “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon&oldid=748831516.

———. 2016b. “RGB Color Model.” https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=RGB_color_model&oldid=756764504.

Resource: https://simplystatistics.org/2017/01/31/data-into-numbers/