YouTube’s “Play in 3D” Option: Now Available for All Users
YouTube continues to push itself in offering new tools and features to their site. The latest is a site-wide accessibility to the new 3D tool, a feature which allows users a simple, “one-click-solution” to convert 2D videos to 3D. When this feature was first offered last September, as it was in beta testing, it was available to only YouTube creators. Now it’s available to creators and viewers – any user can now, should they choose, convert short-form videos uploaded in 1080p to 3D.
Rather than relying on the creators to offer 3D, viewers can take matters into their own hands. Viewers access the 3D options in the video’s ‘Quality’ settings, and with a simple click, can enjoy the content in 3D – well, at least a form of 3D. This 3D option is not traditional 3D – YouTube’s system does not use two simultaneously captured videos. Instead, this 3D takes its form from a software hack that utilizes various techniques in order to convert regular 2D content to 3D. While not of the same quality as true 3D, it is certainly advanced enough to work.
These various techniques are far from simplistic – to run this project requires a daunting amount of ...
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How To Promote Your Blog Using Social Media
Are you using social media to get your product out there to the public? If not, you would probably cringe when you realise that most of your competitors ARE and when you find out just how much potential business you are missing out on. The idea of using social networking websites to promote your business or blog is something that should form part of your marketing plan. Do you know why social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter are designed for?
The Purpose of Social Media Websites
Online communities like Twitter, Linked In and Facebook are great ways to meet new people and stay in contact with people that you do know. So why wouldn’t you have business accounts on all of them? Yes, OKAY, they can be very time consuming – but the rewards you can reap from a well organized social media account, website or even a blog can increase your database AND the number of sales you make.
Social media websites make it much easier to establish and maintain relationships with friends, family and even clients. If your clients can contact you on Twitter or Facebook, as well as through your website or blog – that can only be a ...
Connect, Convince, Convert, and Carry on The Four Cs of Social Media Success
Social media has been widely embraced by a variety of sectors in recent years. But how can social media specifically benefit financial advisors? Consider the four Cs of social media success.
Connect
Connecting is the most widely recognized value proposition of social media tools. By their very nature, social media platforms enable advisors to connect with existing clients and potential prospects. While most advisors understand the potential of these tools, many struggle with proper implementation. Specifically, financial advisors often don’t know how to address privacy regulation concerns. By focusing on intelligence gathering and relationship building opportunities, social media enables financial advisors to connect with prospective clients in a compliant manner.
Convince
There is a major social media opportunity to provide quality content to your niche without selling yourself or your service. By providing advice with regards to the essential financial services, best fit investment strategies and avoiding bad investments and advisors, you can demonstrate your financial expertise. This effort also helps to demonstrate your care and consideration for the particular needs of your clients. In this sense, social media can help you to convince your prospective clients of your trustworthiness and encourage them to engage your services without generating overtly sales-oriented content.
Convert
Social media can ...
What Are the Risks Associated with Financial Social Media?
As a highly regulated industry that deals with sensitive personal information, financial services face some unique challenges in participating in social media. When considering a move into the social media arena, it is important to identify, evaluate and mitigate potential risks.
A common risk identified by financial service providers is the potential for exposure to additional liability by offering recommendations publicly. It is conceivable that well meaning advice targeted at a particular audience could be misinterpreted and used out of context by a social media user. While advisors can offer useful information about products such as investments, insurance and plans, as a professional service provider, advisors are responsible for performing due diligence when making recommendations. When offering opinions in the social media arena, it is important for advisors to seek to inform prospective clients rather than making a recommendation which could be used out of context.
Privacy is a major concern for financial advisors. Trusted relationships are the key to business success and any infringement on privacy could harm an advisor’s reputation. That said, a few rules of thumb can help to assuage privacy concerns. First, do not encourage clients to share confidential information via social media sites. Even direct messaging services ...
Financial Social Media: How Financial Advisors can Reap the Benefits of Social Media
Many financial advisors are wary of involvement with the world of social media. Do sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube present an untapped opportunity? Or are they likely to turn off potential clients from engaging your services? Uncertainty surrounding the appropriate use of social media can be attributed to some common misunderstandings of the demographics of users and the nature of online marketing opportunities.
With 16 million Canadian users and 130 million American users, Facebook is the largest social media site on the web. While many associate the site with a younger audience, Facebook reports that over 50 per cent of its Canadian users are older than 30 and 6.6 million users are older than 40.
That said, Facebook is probably not the arena to connect with potential senior clients looking for help with estate planning. For more conservative market segments, conventional marketing strategies may be a better fit. Social media is not substitute for your existing marketing efforts. Rather, it is an important tool for diversifying your strategy and consequently your potential clients.
For those still wary about the risks involved with marketing via social media, consider the unprecedented intelligence gathering opportunities these platforms present. The ability to better understand ...
Social Media : An Introduction to Social Media for Financial Advisors
The financial community tends to approach social media with both interest and trepidation. Many financial institutions have cultivated strong customer relationships and powerful brand loyalty with conventional marketing strategies. So while social media may appear to be the latest marketing bandwagon, executives are justifiably concerned about jumping on.
In an industry which takes online privacy very seriously, financial services organizations are also concerned about the privacy implications of online communication. Moreover, financial marketers worry that social media is little more than a resource drain, taking valuable time and dollars away from tried and true strategies.
While valid, these concerns are founded in some common misconceptions about the nature of social media. While social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn are very popular, they are not representative of the diversity of social media options. Broadly, social media includes any online resource that helps to build relationships through sharing, communication and interaction. In contrast to traditional websites which maintain a one-way flow of information from website to customer, social media sites allow users to interact with a brand and with each other – building a sense of community and ultimately, a relationship with the brand in question.
Financial institutions may choose to broaden their ...
How financial institutions are making sense of social media
While social media can be a powerful marketing tool for financial institutions, a new report from Aite Group and the European Financial Management Association reminds these organizations to take a cautious approach.
The report, “Social Media at the Starting Blocks: A Look at Financial Institutions in Europe and the United States”, surveyed 166 executives in the financial services industry and found that 60% of financial institutions consider themselves “novices” or “beginners” when it comes to social media.
A third of financial institutions have no funding dedicated to social media, but insufficient funding isn’t the reason why these organizations are hesitating: according to the report, most executives indicate that lack of time and human resources hold them back.
By 2012, 90% percent of surveyed firms intend to budget for social media initiatives. While one-third of firms will dedicate new funds, two-thirds will re-target existing print advertising and direct marketing budgets. A year from now, social media will comprise 2% to 10% of the overall marketing budgets of half of the sector’s firms.
What are financial executives trying to achieve through their social media strategies? Brand awareness was identified as a top objective, as well as increased revenue and improved customer retention.
According to report author Ron ...
Social media: The emergence of social media based discount platforms
Coupons are no longer your grandmother’s domain. Over the past year, the market for online discount sites has grown exponentially. Sites such as Groupon, LivingSocial and Scoutmob offer users an opportunity to save, their business partners an opportunity to gain new customers and a tremendous value proposition to boot. While each site differs in its approach, the focus on crowd sourced savings remains a constant.
The flagship site Groupon requires a threshold of people to buy into the deal in order to unlock savings. In many U.S. and Canadian cities, Groupon offers discounts between 50 and 90% on a variety of goods and services. The model provides incentive for Groupon’s evangelists to engage friends and family in the effort to unlock their savings.
Scoutmob builds off of recent developments in mobile technology to access savings in proximity to a user’s location. In thirteen U.S. cities, a person can enter a store, whip out their mobile phone and show the store manager the discount which will then be applied to their purchase.
LevelUp caters to an elite crowd in Boston and Philadelphia using a “frequent-flier” model. The more deals a user takes advantage of, the more premium discounts they can access – enabling them ...
Google Panda : Why Ecommerce and AdSense website got penalized for Duplicate Content
Since Google Mayday update release in 2010, the massage was loud and clear for all website sites, big or small:
Get original quality content, or get out.
Get rid of duplicate content or get penalised
The website that got increasingly affected by Panda had either of the following:
They were ecommerce website with little or no quality content while generating income or
They were using AdSense with duplicate poor quality content while generating income
Why Ecommerce and AdSense website got nailed?
For years many ecommerce websites have maintained competitive rankings down purely to:
Domain age
Links from an authority site in a vertical industry
They have never invested time or money into building:
Unique Quality content , they only relied on aggregated content from variable sources
Social interaction (these website has never invested in social media or have never build a community
User Generated Content via accepting reviews and suggestions
What should you do to work around Panda Duplicate Content penalty?
Your site has to look professional. Professional website will get excluded from manual penalty.
Eliminate all scrapped or hijacked content; Manual reviewers are looking for that kind of content. Google now can detect duplicate content within the domain, so protect yourself and use Copyscape to uncover if you have identical content problems outside ...
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