Donuts explained in Social Media terms.

Gustavo Sousa uses the Olympic rings for infographics on the 5 continents. Very nice! #Olympics #ringabell

http://vimeo.com/45658298

credits : Gustavo Sousa.

NANHI KALI - A GIRL STORY

A Girl Story is a unique donation-based film series that combines technology, film and storytelling to shed light on the global challenge of educating young girls. The animated, emotional story follows the path of a young Indian girl named Tarla who wants to go to school to better her life. Whether she succeeds, however, is completely up to you because Tarla's story progresses only by audience donations that unlock new chapters within the YouTube film series. To ensure a smooth, filmic quality, each YouTube video is programmed to allow Tarla to seamlessly transition from one frame to the next. 

A Girl Story has created a sustainable effort that people can belong to and share, as they become a part of an organization currently supporting 10 years of education for 58,000 young girls.

Check out . . .

A new form of SEO. Amazing Analysis

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-googles-panda-update-changed-seo-best-practices-forever-whiteboard-friday

Recreate your first car.

Subaru USA is asking consumers to share the story of their first car at Firstcarstory.com. The site, launched to promote the 2012 Subaru Impreza, features an animation generator that allows users to recreate their first car (even down to its dents and dings), and tell its story, turning the tale into an animated video, which they can also set to music of their choice and narrate with their own voice. The video can then be shared by social media.

Credits : Carmichael Lynch

I am a Lousy Copywriter

British-born David Ogilvy was one of the original, and greatest, "ad men." In 1948, he started what would eventually be known as Ogilvy & Mather, the Manhattan-based advertising agency that has since been responsible for some of the world's most iconic ad campaigns, and in 1963 he even wrote Confessions of an Advertising Man, the best-selling book that is still to this day considered essential reading for all who enter the industry. Time magazine called him "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry" in the early-'60s; his name, and that of his agency, have been mentioned more than once in Mad Men for good reason.

With all that in mind, being able to learn of his routine when producing the very ads that made his name is an invaluable opportunity. The fascinating letter below, written by Ogilvy in 1955 to a Mr. Ray Calt, offers exactly that.

April 19, 1955

Dear Mr. Calt:

On March 22nd you wrote to me asking for some notes on my work habits as a copywriter. They are appalling, as you are about to see:

1. I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

2. I spend a long time studying the precedents. I look at every advertisement which has appeared for competing products during the past 20 years.

3. I am helpless without research material—and the more "motivational" the better.

4. I write out a definition of the problem and a statement of the purpose which I wish the campaign to achieve. Then I go no further until the statement and its principles have been accepted by the client.

5. Before actually writing the copy, I write down every conceivable fact and selling idea. Then I get them organized and relate them to research and the copy platform.

6. Then I write the headline. As a matter of fact I try to write 20 alternative headlines for every advertisement. And I never select the final headline without asking the opinion of other people in the agency. In some cases I seek the help of the research department and get them to do a split-run on a battery of headlines.

7. At this point I can no longer postpone the actual copy. So I go home and sit down at my desk. I find myself entirely without ideas. I get bad-tempered. If my wife comes into the room I growl at her. (This has gotten worse since I gave up smoking.)

8. I am terrified of producing a lousy advertisement. This causes me to throw away the first 20 attempts.

9. If all else fails, I drink half a bottle of rum and play a Handel oratorio on the gramophone. This generally produces an uncontrollable gush of copy.

10. The next morning I get up early and edit the gush.

11. Then I take the train to New York and my secretary types a draft. (I cannot type, which is very inconvenient.)

12. I am a lousy copywriter, but I am a good editor. So I go to work editing my own draft. After four or five editing’s, it looks good enough to show to the client. If the client changes the copy, I get angry—because I took a lot of trouble writing it, and what I wrote I wrote on purpose.

Altogether it is a slow and laborious business. I understand that some copywriters have much greater facility.

Yours sincerely,

D.O.

Mark Zuckerberg’s 6 Ingredients For Success

Leadership guru Warren Bennis asked whether leaders are born or made. When asked if Wall Street would accept a young Mark Zuckerbergin his early 20s as CEO, Facebook investor Peter Thiel said: “Well, we’ll wait until he’s over 25 to file”. Wise move, considering that Mark’s title on his business cards read “I’m CEO, bitch”.
This week Facebook filed its S-1 to go public. Mark is 27. How Mark managed to launch a social networking site after Friendster had crashed during MySpace’s zenith has been widely chronicled. What’s been less discussed is how Mark mastered the six requirements to succeed, namely Ambition, Vision, Determination, Execution, Luck and Timing.
Ambition
“The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the scythe”, Russian Proverb
The foundation and building block of any successful person is Ambition, or the desire for personal achievement.
People are driven by success, recognition, respect, money, power or fame. If you believe everything in The Social Network, Mark launched Facebook to level the playing field at Harvard and to succeed at getting girls. Success is relative, subjective and fluid; over time Mark’s definition of success grew to match his brainchild’s imprint.
Wearing your ambition on your sleeve will get you cut off at the knees, but ambition is required to succeed; the challenge is channeling it properly and managing your emotions around it. When the Winklevoss twins first hired Mark to build their social networking site, Mark never revealed his ambitions to build his own site. It was only later – far too late for the Winklevoss – that Mark revealed his true ambition.
Vision
A design glitch allowed MySpace users to customize their profiles. But that mixed blessing created a cacophonous environment which made users welcome Facebook’s clean interface.
Facebook wasn’t visionary in any revolutionary sense of the word. Where Facebook deserves credit was that Mark et al. recognized the need for a real directory of people, not merely users. Before Facebook it was nearly impossible to actually find people, you could “google” them but finding the person you wanted within one search wasn’t a given. We now take it for granted, but that extension of people search and connecting them was certainly evolutionary, and it’s worth noting that most successes are not radically new but extensions and improvements of existing paradigms.
The critics may note that Mark sometimes lacked charisma. In this context, charisma is a subset of vision: it allows you to convince others to buy into your vision, but charisma in and of itself is not a requirement to succeed, it’s an accelerant or amplifier. In Mark’s case, he has had the good fortune to let Facebook’s massive growth rates do the talking for him.
Execution
“Stay Focused, Keep Shipping”, Mark Zuckerberg
When you look back to Facebook’s functionality when it launched, it was bare bones. Facebook has added features while scaling users, literally changing jet engines at 30,000 feet without missing a beat. It’s easy to laugh at missteps like Beacon or the privacy dossier and fail to appreciate the velocity at which Facebook has evolved and grown.
Determination
To quote President Calvin Coolidge:
“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”
Back in 1995, Steve Jobs added: “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance”.
Determination, drive, tenacity or persistence is the most important variable, demonstrated by Mark through his: relentless coding early on to launch Facebook to catch the Winklevoss brothers off guard; adding colleges; attacking MySpace; defending against the subsequent lawsuit from the twins; repeated encroaching into people’s privacy (which remains one of Mark’s Achilles heels). But, to his credit, he has repeatedly not cared or believed in himself enough to charge ahead no matter what. Mark is a constant reminder that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.
So those were the first four traits: largely innate, can be learned, and things you can control. But without the next two, you won’t succeed.
Luck
“A great fortune depends on luck, a small one on diligence”, Chinese Proverb
In sports and in business, luck can be your best friend or your undoing.
Let’s face it: Mark’s had a horseshoe up his butt. Luck made him run into Sean Parker, who introduced him to Peter Thiel, without whom as an ally and first outside investor it’s unlikely he would have remained CEO to this day.
But you create your own luck, or when lady luck smiles down on you, you seize the opportunity.
Timing
Google wasn’t the first search engine, YouTube wasn’t the first video sharing site and Facebook certainly wasn’t the first social network. Geocities, Tripod, Friendster, Tribe Networks, MySpace are just some that come to mind.
Mark’s managed the clock all along: slowing down the Winklevoss brothers; launching Facebook on Harvard first to then expand to other colleges; relocating to California; refusing Viacom and Yahoo!’s offers; closing his deal with Microsoft.
While the comparisons to Google’s IPO are understandable, Google ushered a new Internet Bull run whereas Facebook’s is coming at the tail end of Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Demand Media and Pandora’s – none of which have fared particularly well.
However, much like Google’s IPO made it the Internet stock bellwether, Facebook will become the de facto stock pick of individual and institutional investors, pushing demand to justify the lofty price-to-earnings and price-to-sales multiples.
There you have it: success = ambition + vision + execution + persistence + luck + timing; with the first four being things you can control and the last two being externalities that you cannot.
While I’ve praised and criticized him and Facebook, as a fellow entrepreneur, Mark is someone all builders look up to and admire despite his obvious mistakes – reminding me of the Michael Jordan quote: “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Innovative wedding card

The card (www.cometokochi.in) titled 'Come to Kochi' is an elaborate website with entertaining images and witty text centered on the wedding. The site is adorned with photos of the couple and their respective families, and a rhyme that spells out the saga of how they met and fell in love. This gives the entire card a very personal touch.
The practical side of things has been taken care of with equal enthusiasm. The site has a side menu pertaining to aspects such as the venue, ways to get there, accommodation, and things guests can do after the celebrations. The main site is hyperlinked to websites such as Cleartrip.com, Redbus.in, and Google Maps, thus offering detailed travel aid to the guests, who can pick their desired mode of transport -- air, train, or road.

How to stay on top of Google's search rankings.

In May 2009, a year after being in business, OneNewsPage.com founder Marc Pinter Krainer woke up to see internet traffic on his site turning to almost zilch - that too overnight. Krainer, who had raised money a few months back from investors, was not only red-faced but perplexed too about the reason for this drop. Only later did Krainer discover that the dip was because of Google Penalty, whereby your site will show up lower on Google Search.

"It may have been an accidental deletion, or deliberate. Maybe because it was a competition to Google's own news website," Krainer told ET during an India visit. The reason for the penalty, he says is still unknown. But it hurt him very badly because like thousands of websites, being crawled by a Google Search crawler is a must for OneNewsPage.com to generate traffic.

Websites face Google Penalty - also called the Sandbox Effect - where they may be subject to filtering to prevent them having their full impact. It occurs when a website doesn't conform to its standards in terms of quality, content or is found using subversive optimisation techniques.

"If a site isn't appearing in Google search results or it's performing more poorly than it once did, one can check out our help centre article to try to identify and fix potential causes of the problem," said a Google spokeswoman.

Subversive optimisation is another reason for such filtering. Historical use of links as a "vote" for ranking web documents can be subject to manipulation. Google has filed patents that seek to qualify or minimise the impact of such manipulation, which Google terms as "link spam". Link spam is driven by search engine optimisers who manipulate Google's page ranking by creating lots of inbound links to a new site from other web sites that they own.

THE PENALTIES

The penalties can be both manual - actually demoting a site -- or algorithmic, where changes in the search algorithm causes a website to move down. For one, a '-30 penalty', which Google applies when a website fails to use effective search optimisation techniques, lowers the site's position on Google.com down by 30 places. A '--60 penalty' will lower your site down by 60 places on search. A '--950 penalty' will make your site slide on Google.com by 95 pages - you are almost not there.

A similar penalty was faced by Adam Raff, CEO and founder of Foundem.com, a UK price comparison site. Like Krainer's, Raff's website also faced a Google Penalty but for three years. Unlike Krainer, Raff went to court following which,the European Union has started investigating Google's Penalty system last year when Foundem, and Microsoft reportedly said that Google was demoting their sites manually since they competed with the search major.

How Brands Co-Create Value with Customers

In today’s participatory culture, customers want meaningful relationships with the brands they care about. Innovative companies are rising to the challenge, realizing that customer collaboration is vital to keeping a competitive edge.

A wide spectrum of companies are co-creating value with customers and other stakeholders, including Dell, Hallmark, Intuit, ModCloth, Nike and Starbucks. These trendsetters are inviting customers to brainstorm product ideas, develop new products, improve business processes and answer other customers’ product questions. The benefits are numerous, with companies gaining user insights and customers enjoying higher product satisfaction.

To reap the rewards, companies must face a number of challenges. Management, for example, can be slow to accept user-generated content. And when they do take the leap, they often limit their collaborative initiatives to customers, when involving other stakeholders could create more value for all. Companies also tend to restrict their co-creation activities to discrete moments in the product life cycle. But the greatest benefits can be realized when collaboration centers on building value that enhances a product’s daily use.

PMS in guys?!

The “got milk?” people have created a website to promote the fact that research has shown that drinking milk can help counter the effects of PMS in women.

This site aims to provide guys with indicators to and weapons against the mood swings of their softer halves.

I think it’s hilarious.

http://everythingidoiswrong.org

What can Brands expect from Google+ - Karan Patel

Social networking took a turn on June 28th 2011, when google announced their new networking site Google+ on Beta, little over a month Google+ has already touch 30 million mark and its a long way of catching Facebook's 750 million mark. As a late starter Google+ had the advantage of watching and learning from other social networking sites and come up with a solution that integrates the best of the 2 networking sites. The important USP of Google+ is the +1 button that has been integrated with Google+ to replicate the like feature on Facebook this has already started playing in search results on Google search.

Based on their experience with other social network, Brands wants to leverage Google+ early as this could be the next game changer in this space. Google announced that Google+ Business will be launched by end of 2011 and has requested companies not to set up business page till then.Only Ford motors company has been allowed to mantain a test page.