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Instagram’s New Business Tools

We’ve seen marketing steadily move to digital since the first banner ads appeared on websites in the 1990s. Newspapers, especially classified ads, were the first to feel the full impact of changes brought about by digital marketing and its unique characteristics of interactivity, data capture, and search-based advertising. Today, TV, which is currently the number one advertising medium in terms of dollars spent, is seeing its growth steadily decline, especially as advertisers move to mobile following the explosive growth of those devices. In fact, analysts expect TV to lose the top spot by 2019.

Last week, Instagram became the latest social network to offer advertising tools for businesses. Budgets for online advertising are growing, so it’s time for companies of all sizes to learn about the available digital marketing options and develop a strategy to utilize them. The move to digital is on. See you on Instagram?

Read full article: http://bit.ly/29VJ1Nl

How the Internet is Further Concentrating the Wealth of the World

The internet has been the great disrupter for over 20 years now. But the greatest effects of the worldwide network we’ve come to depend on are yet to be seen. This article points to one — and it’s big.

Nintendo and its partners are rumored to be earning more than $1 million per day from Pokémon Go. That money is flowing away from small and medium cities and toward big technology companies concentrated in big cities.
Amazon is doing something similar, diverting business away from local retailers and sucking cash into its corporate headquarters in Seattle. Companies like Google and Facebook are drawing ad dollars that previously went to local newspapers and television stations.

The big tech companies are at the root of a new economy that is funneling real money in ways that we may not have expected or wanted. Check out how the success of Pokemon Go points to an economic reality that needs to be dealt with.

Read full article: http://cnb.cx/29BadMX

Branding Is Changing In a Connected World

Consumers don’t care for advertising. They want the real dope on goods and services from people who’ve tried them. This is what they can get thanks to social media and the always-on connectedness of today’s world. And this has a profound effect on branding. Branding is typically about creating perceptions and predisposing people to like your product. But today, branding is all about what people are saying about your products, not what you’re saying. This article talks about ‘de-branding,’ and if correct, points to a very different future for what differentiates products.

The brand that screams the loudest no longer commands the most attention; the one that offers something genuinely useful does.

When you boil it down, value is all that people want.

… go back to the original notion of a brand. Fine-tune your product’s quality, design, and its durability. Become a producer of shoes again instead of surrogate spirituality. It will make your life, and consumers’ lives, simpler. Don’t throw a new product on the market if it’s not intrinsically better and more durable than what already exists. We don’t need more branding; we need fewer, better-quality products. People will find you.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/22MRlQw

Understanding Users

In the end, we’re all users. No, not the manipulators who want to steal someone’s time, money, or ideas, but the everyday people who use technology. Those of us that create solutions from tech often take users for granted or consider them with disdain when we see the ‘mistakes’ they make while ‘using’ our latest product. But we all know what it’s like to be left adrift by technology that hasn’t been well thought out or whose developers have made assumptions about us that are ill-founded at best. This article sheds light on tech from the users’ end, which can serve as a guide when we’re designing something with the goal of someone doing business with us online. The quick take-aways? Make it easy, put yourself in their place, and never call your customers ‘dumb.’

Read full article: http://bit.ly/1ORqWOQ

Voice Enabled Accessibility

Accessibility is taken seriously at Google. They’ve now combined strong accessibility guidelines for Android developers with their speech recognition technology to make smartphones more accessible than ever. This article describes Google’s approach, but it also provides insight into the importance of accessibility and how designers need to think about the people who can be better served through good accessibility.

Full article at http://bit.ly/25fwZVe

And Now, the Right to Disconnect

Leave it to the French to put a balance on things. Digital devices are wearing people out, so the French government is doing something about it. They’ve passed a law making it illegal for companies with more than 50 employees to contact their people after hours. This forced untethering is long overdue, considering how smartphones dominate so much of our lives, interrupting moments, fracturing conversations, and marginalizing face-to-face relationships. We’ve become addicted and, by definition, helpless to help ourselves.

Will this new law stick? Personally, I don’t think so. People want to be connected, it seems, beyond all reason. It’s more likely that the fear of missing some bit of information will be even greater than the stress of hearing the next ping in your pocket.

The cat’s out of the bag. Once connected, always connected. And like marriage, that’s for better or for worse.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/1VlYqGA

Mobile Rising

As if we needed more proof that the world has gone mobile, FB ended its desktop advertising platform. The numbers in this article paint a clear picture of why. http://cnb.cx/1Wl0ShB

What should we do in the face of the mobile juggernaut? Create a separate mobile website? How about an app? You can avoid the cost and hassle of both these options by converting your existing site to a responsive design. Very simply, responsive design uses simple browser technology to automatically reconfigure a typical website based on the size of the screen being used to view it. In other words, responsive websites look great on big desktop screens, little phones, and everything else in between.

Going responsive may require redesigning your existing web presence. Still, the benefits can be huge when considering how many people access the web and email via smartphones today. And responsive is far less costly than developing an app or separate mobile site. Also, going responsive would be a good reason to convert to WordPress, the free, open-source platform for web development that’s become so popular. Most WordPress themes are responsive right out of the box. Plus, you’ll get benefits like customizability, search engine optimization, and a plugin architecture that provides a world of added features, all of which come with WordPress.

Add to Cart, or Add to Basket? Why It Matters

Should the button read, “add to cart,” or “add to basket?” Designers often struggle trying to do something new, something more accurate, or something just for the sake of doing something. None of this matters to users though, who just want conventions, consistency, and simplicity to do what they need to do as quickly as possible. Once someone has to think, the interface is no longer intuitive, and we provide a good reason for the user to click elsewhere. But if you respect users’ desire to “scan, click, and go,” you’ll delight them with a good experience. And if you’re careful to not break conventions, you’ll avoid tripping up your visitors.

Changing your button label from ‘Cart’ to ‘Bag’ isn’t helpful if the former is what users are more familiar with. Designers think ‘Bag’ is more technically correct if their store doesn’t use carts. But being legalistic doesn’t get you the high conversion rate. Speaking the user’s language does.

Read full article: http://bit.ly/1W1nzaN