[Communications Report] for September 1st 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

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  • What People Think of the Ad/PR Biz | Reuters – One-third of respondents voiced a positive view of the advertising/pr industry (6 percent “very,” 27 percent “somewhat.”) Twenty-seven percent were “neutral.” Twenty-five percent expressed a “somewhat negative view,” while 11 percent were “very negative.” (The rest didn’t venture an opinion.) The numbers aren’t significantly different from those yielded by last summer’s edition of this annual survey.
  • Is it time for a Chief Social Media Officer? | ZDNet – The role may not be prominent now, but it will happen.
  • New report on “The State of Mobile Communications” – Now is the perfect time for businesses to jump into mobile communications, says “The State of Mobile Communications,” a newly issued report by Burson-Marsteller and Proof Integrated Communications. The report provides recommendations based on the implications of a range of key mobile research reports.
  • 5 Tips to Maintain Social Media Momentum – Servant of Chaos – One of the challenges with social media is that it’s easy to start and it’s easy to stop.
  • The UK’s media consumption habits – Ofcom released its seventh annual communications market report last week. Its a goldmine of information about media consumption habits in the UK and is worth reading in full, the internet section in particular.
  • Facebook Usage Still Rising in Europe, but UK Growth Slows – eMarketer – The Facebook juggernaut rolls on in Europe, but the first sign of declining growth rates has appeared. In particular, the site’s meteoric expansion in the UK is tailing off.
  • Skype Etiquette – Some good tips to keep in mind when using Skype by Michael Arrington
  • Pre-recorded TV viewers cut out ads – The increasing use of digital television recording devices means fewer viewers will watch advertisements. Online video adverts have failed to make an impact on consumers with only 3% citing them as the kind of ad they were most likely to pay attention to.
  • Want an SEO job? Check out the Daily Mail’s robots.txt file … – This is actually a great idea!
  • 10 Tips For Aspiring Community Managers – Tips from community builders on what it takes to land a job and be effective at cultivating community.
  • The Value of a Social Media Fan….Priceless – CPM models are generally used to price traditional media ads which represent only a monologue selling a specific product and are not customized to measuring the overall value of social media. Facebook “impressions” are a completely different kind of media where more often than not, the post should be as divorced as possible from trying to make a sale and are more about creating dialogue, brand awareness and positive social conversation which indirectly leads to higher sales.
  • Top 5 Mobile Advertising Trends To Watch – After a tough 2009, advertisers are expected to increase mobile and digital marketing budgets over the next year. With this in mind, it’s essential that advertisers keep up-to-date on their options in the mobile space. Here, we’ve laid out five mobile advertising trends to watch over the coming year.
  • Infographic: The Geosocial Universe – This infographic, created by Jesse Thomas of digital creative agency Jess3, shows the relative size of social networks and online services such as Skype, Gmail, MySpace, Twitter and Foursquare, and also shows the proportion of their user base that access the service via a mobile device.
  • How to Handle an Employee’s Controversial Online Comment – Stuff just happens. In most situations, though, the most important factor is how the situation is handled.
  • 5 Items to Delete From Your Website Today – When we add ideas and actions, websites become more complicated. Complication creates confusion and often translates to lower effectiveness.
  • Youtube stars making 100000 plus per year: Tech Ticker, Yahoo! Finance – There are 10 independent YouTube stars who made over $100,000 in the past year, according to a study done by analytics and advertising company TubeMogul.
  • 5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now – What follows are five of the hottest social media trends right now. Each are influencing our social, online and mobile behaviors in significant ways.

[Communications Report] for July 29th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

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[Communications Report] for June 28th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

Do you want to get these report-updates in real time? Subscribe to the live-report RSS feed! This feed includes only report related items. It’s not a substitute but a complement to my main RSS feed which still remains the official one that brings you all my blog posts.

  • 5 Tools to Track Twitter Trends – On any given day there are over 600 tweets per second on Twitter for a total of over 50 million tweets per day. With an overload of tweets daily it can be difficult to grasp what is really trending at any given moment. Use the tools below to quickly find current Twitter trends and trending conversations.
  • Social Media Measurement Should Focus on Outcomes, Not Output – It’s not about simply looking for opportunities to drop messaging into ordinary conversation, but about finding shared interests, shared benefits and shared rewards for others in the communities where your brand interacts.
  • 8 Steps to Creating a Brand Persona – In social networks, the brand and how it’s perceived, is open to public interpretation and potential misconception now more than ever. Without a deliberate separation between the brand voice and personality and that of the person representing it, we are instantly at odds with our goals, purpose, and potential stature.
  • Top 10 Clever Google Voice Tricks – The phone management app is great, but even cooler hacks exist just under the hood.
  • How I Use Gmail Multiple-Inboxes Lab Feature to Manage E-mail Overload – Useful productivity tips.
  • 15 more awesome social media infographics – Infographics that demonstrate a mixture of both hard data and strategy practices. Hopefully, they’ll also provide some inspiration or can be useful in helping you with presentations or pitches. As before, links to the actual graphics are in the headline titles.
  • 6 ways to find value in Twitter’s noise – A great example that shows how we can get insights from analyzing Twitter data.
  • Social Media is the 3rd Era of the Web [graph] – A search that compares the world wide search volume on Google for new media, web 2.0, and social media. What the graph shows is that we’re at an inflection point in the language we use to describe the macro trends of innovation on the web…it’s the indicator that we’re in the 3rd Era of the Web and it’s The Era of Social Media.
  • How The World Spends Its Time Online [infographic] – Millions of people across the world are constantly connected by the internet. Here’s a look at what everybody’s doing when they’re in front of their computer screen.
  • Is Social a Source for B2B Leads? – Terrific insights about B2B site visitors referred from social media.
  • Diesel Cam – Interactive installation at Diesel Stores in Spain, being the first store that allows users to share the moment of buying and trying garments on their Facebook profiles from the store. Consumers are able to make pictures, publish them and boast their new acquisitions with their Facebook friends.
  • The Fun Theory – A great Volkswagen initiative. #engagement
  • Teens and Their Mobile Phones / Flowtown – Have you ever wondered what teens were really using their mobile phones for? A recent study released by Pew Internet Research has shed light on average mobile
  • Public Media Joins Forces for One Big Platform – The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

[Communications Report] for April 5th 2010 – AndreaVascellari.com

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  • The Collapse of Complex Business Models « Clay Shirky – Some video still has to be complex to be valuable, but the logic of the old media ecoystem, where video had to be complex simply to be video, is broken.
  • Report – Future of the Internet IV – In an online survey of 895 technology stakeholders’ and critics’ expectations of social, political and economic change by 2020.
  • Facebook Summarized In A Single Picture – The chart breaks down Facebook’s history as well as some of the most important facts and figures from the company. Included in the chart is information about the site’s user base as well as the impressive engagement levels that Facebook is able to maintain.
  • Study: Mobile internet traffic is set to grow 400% by 2015 – What does that mean? As smartphones become more commonplace, phone companies could start charging a lot more money to keep them up and running. But consumers may not go along willingly.

#LiveGoodLife

#livegoodlife

Life is not easy at times.

Especially the last 2 years have been really intense for me. I managed fantastic projects and achieved great goals with my team. On the other hand one of the longest relationships I had came to an end and I lost a person that meant so much to me. I’ve been through wonderful and terrible periods. During the tough ones I was struggling to find something that was keeping me going.
So I decided to tag some tweets and facebook updates with #livegoodlife. These updates were about moments that I was living and that made feel good.

Since twitter is losing tweets (many old tweets don’t seem to be searchable) I decided to keep track of them so I could browse through this list of happy thoughts during hard times and feel good again.

It worked and this is what I keep doing.
I collect nice snippets of life and dive into them when I need something to remind me what makes me happy.

It might sound weird to some but for me it turned out to be a perfect way to get that inner strength during difficult periods at work or in my private life.

In addition to that it’s amazing to see how supportive has been all my community and network of contacts in the process. Often the #livegoodlife updates that I shared are the ones that got most traction. These social web vibes are another thing that can help you a lot.

#livegoodlife

Did my life change using #livegoodlife? Well it’s definitely easier to go on through tough times 🙂
Did it help me to get into a new relationship? Unfortunately not. Although I’m doing my best it doesn’t seem easy to find the right person nowadays. But #livegoodlife helps me to keep thinking positive and who knows maybe one day this will change too.

I hope #livegoodlife will help you too as it did with me.

Andrea

A New Way To Backup Your Tweets and Make Them Searchable with Google Calendar

In the long run many tweets don’t seem to be searchable. This is why I decided to have a backup of all my updates.

How to do it?

Few months ago I read the tips shared by Steve Rubel on this topic. The idea was to use Twistory to subscribe and consequentially import your tweets to Google Calendar. At that point all your tweets would have been saved and of course searchable. Really handy.

Unfortunately now Twistory works in a bit different way so Steve’s trick doesn’t work anymore but Marsh Gardiner came up with another interesting way to achieve the same goal. Enjoy!

You might be interested in checking also these other posts:

Andrea

Better Video For Your Business – 3 Tips by Steve Garfield

Episode: VMC #221 – Better Video For Your Business – # Tips by Steve Garfield

When I think about video Steve Garfield is one of the first names that comes to my mind. He is a pioneer, I’ve been following him for years and I finally met him in New York during social media week NY. Steve gave me also a copy of his new book Get Seen (thanks Steve!). He didn’t ask for it but I’ll review it. If you are thinking about it the answer is ‘No, this is not a sponsored post’, he really knows what he’s talking about and as usual I’m happy to share it with you.

We had a nice chat about the book and we recorded this episode in which he also shared 3 tips on how organizations can use video to better promote their business.

Click, play, enjoy!

Andrea

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Why and How to Sync Google Calendar – iCal – iPhone

Why?

I’m always on the go and I need to have access to my calendar/s from wherever I am and whenever I need it. Instead of calendars I look at them as sets of data related to the projects I’m working on. During the last years I tested a good number of tools but I got the best out of the ‘Google Calendar – iCaliPhone or iPod touch‘ combo.

How?

  1. Enable Google Calendar in Apple’s iCal (this will work only on Mac OS X v10.5… or newer)
  2. Sync your Google Calendar with your iPhone/iPod Touch (by default only your primary calendar will be synced to your device. To sync additional calendars see next point…)
  3. Sync your additional calendars with your iPhone/iPod Touch by visiting https://www.google.com/calendar/iphoneselect from any browser (via desktop or mobile device) or For Google Apps users: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/YOUR DOMAIN NAME/iphoneselect
  4. When you sync your iPhone/iPod Touch on iTunes make sure to select the calendars you want to sync (in the screen-shot below I synced all my calendars). iTunes > iPhone/iPod Touch > Info > Calendars


Advantages?

Your data doesn’t live anymore on single devices like your computer or you mobile phone, it lives in the cloud. Devices are used to simply edit or interact with your data. This means that…

  • after you edit one of the calendars (iCal, Google Calendar or iPhone) the changes will reflect in realt-time on all the others. Basically you use ‘one ring to rule them all’.

Tip: If you are using an iPhone/iPod and you don’t have wifi/data connection when you are on the go…no worries. Keep updating your calendar and the when you’ll find a connection (or when you’ll plug your iPod/iPhone to your computer > iTunes) your calendar entries will sync automatically!

  • you always have an online backup of all your data. So there’s no problem if you lose your phone or your computer crashes.
  • if you don’t have with you or you can’t use your phone or computer, you can still access your data from any other device connected to the internet. (I’ve been in this situation once… and this literally ‘saved me’)

What appears to be a simple synchronization actually opens up a huge number of new doors on how you can better organize and manage your life, work and projects. Give it a try!

If you liked this post you might be interested in also checking out:

Meanwhile… Do you have any related tips you want to share? What advantages you find syncing with the cloud? Questions? Ideas? Special requests? Feel free to share them in the comments or via a quick “comment-ready-tweet” @vascellari!

Andrea