Fewer than 1 percent of website visits come directly from a social media URL according to research just released by customer satisfaction analytics experts ForeSee Results.
The company surveyed 300,000 consumers on more than 180 websites across a dozen private and public sector industries. The referring social media sites covered were not just the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter, but over 40 sites including Flickr, Foursquare, Scribd, Stumbleupon, Meetup and Youtube.
It’s not all bad news for social media marketeers. 18 percent of site visitors (averaged across surveyed websites) report being influenced by social media to visit a website. However, there was considerable variation in the results for different companies.
The social media budgets of marketers is constantly increasing as the survey data to the right shows. Forsee Results’ research showed that the resources companies put into social media and the results they receive vary wildly. Spending more money does not automatically lead to higher numbers of visits to websites, brand awareness or sales.
Promotional emails are also sometimes neglected in favor of the more glamorous social media, in spite of the fact that such emails influence 32 percent of purchases.
Companies themselves seem a bit confused about their objectives when it comes to social media. Internet Retailer Magazine surveyed 400 U.S. companies (19 percent of them retailers) in December 2009 and January 2010. It found that 74 percent of companies wanted social media to drive traffic to their websites, while only 56 percent wanted it to increase sales. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Next Story: Why mobile app success is more than just download numbers Previous Story: Battle brewing at Microsoft over retail store expansion
Fewer than 1 percent of website visits come directly from a social media URL according to research just released by customer satisfaction analytics experts ForeSee Results.
The company surveyed 300,000 consumers on more than 180 websites across a dozen private and public sector industries. The referring social media sites covered were not just the usual suspects like Facebook and Twitter, but over 40 sites including Flickr, Foursquare, Scribd, Stumbleupon, Meetup and Youtube.
It’s not all bad news for social media marketeers. 18 percent of site visitors (averaged across surveyed websites) report being influenced by social media to visit a website. However, there was considerable variation in the results for different companies.
The social media budgets of marketers is constantly increasing as the survey data to the right shows. Forsee Results’ research showed that the resources companies put into social media and the results they receive vary wildly. Spending more money does not automatically lead to higher numbers of visits to websites, brand awareness or sales.
Promotional emails are also sometimes neglected in favor of the more glamorous social media, in spite of the fact that such emails influence 32 percent of purchases.
Companies themselves seem a bit confused about their objectives when it comes to social media. Internet Retailer Magazine surveyed 400 U.S. companies (19 percent of them retailers) in December 2009 and January 2010. It found that 74 percent of companies wanted social media to drive traffic to their websites, while only 56 percent wanted it to increase sales. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
Next Story: Why mobile app success is more than just download numbers Previous Story: Battle brewing at Microsoft over retail store expansion
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Lakers coach Phil Jackson has been fined $75,000 for making unauthorized comments about collective bargaining, sources said Thursday.
bench craft companyWhile the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we've also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, ...
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bench craft company China is a notoriously tough market for American brands. The last few years has seen tech giants like Google struggle to do business due to restrictive censorship and retail giants like Best Buy and Home Depot have found that heavy price competition makes it hard to gain a toehold. Yet, despite the conventional wisdom, Apple’s business in China is booming and it’s not lower prices but better presentation that’s driving their success.
The Chinese economy is having some of its best years ever due to the rising world demand for consumer electronics, much of which is manufactured in China’s city-sized factories. The Mercury News reports that this has led to the average Chinese citizen being more flush with cash than ever before and ready to spend it on what would previously be deemed as unaffordable luxury.
Paul French of Shanghai-based Access Asia indicates that the increase in middle class affluence is behind the increase in purchasing power. “There is now enough of an urban middle class with enough money to afford Apple products. Five years ago — or even two or three years ago — there weren’t enough of those people.”
Five years ago, Apple didn’t have a retail store in China, now it has four, including a stunning split-level glass and metal flagship store in Sanlitun, an area of Beijing known more for its nightlife than its retail outlets. Those stores aren’t barely surviving either, with $2.6 billion in revenue this year, four times what we saw last year from Apple in China. This should mean that Apple is fighting the price war well in China, offering its products for less than they can be purchased in the US, but that’s not actually true. In fact, Apple sells a comparatively specced 13-inch Macbook Air for $180 more in China than it does stateside.
This success seems to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, typically premium products have not sold well in cost conscious China. Some, like Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, say that Apple will have to eventually compete on price or risk losing the Chinese consumer. “The iPhone is going to be huge in China. That’s a given.” he tells the Mercury News. “But if Apple wants it to flow out across China, it has to come up with lower price points.”
Yet Apple shows no signs of slowing down in the Chinese market, which is projected to account for 10 percent of Apple’s revenue within 5 years.
When asked, locals said that in a country where the people like to try products out before they purchase them, Apple is doing the best job of presenting those products. Apple’s retail stores offer the Chinese consumer a chance to test the products in a beautiful and visually stimulating atmosphere and those efforts are paying off with big sales numbers. This kind of attention to the senses and emotions of the consumer wasn’t pioneered by Apple of course, but they are one of the first major companies to bring that kind of experience to China’s city centers in a big way.
This difference in the way that the products are presented is doing its job in separating Apple’s products from the rest of the pack almost everywhere that its retail stores are located, but nowhere is that effect felt more than in China. A country where consumers are hungry for polished products presented in a stimulating atmosphere and they finally have the cash to afford them.
Seas0nPass jailbreak tool has for both Windows and Mac has been updated with the latest untethered exploit to untether the jailbreak on second generation Apple TV, running on the latest iOS 4.3.1 (4.2.1)
For those of you who don’t know, Seas0nPass jailbreak tool is like PwnageTool for Mac, or Sn0wbreeze for Windows, which can can create custom jailbroken .IPSW files for your second-gen Apple TV.
Before you proceed with the jailbreak, you will need the following:
- A Micro-USB cable
- iTunes 10.2.1
- iOS 4.2.1 (Based on iOS 4.3) for Apple TV
- Seas0nPass
All download links are posted at the end of this article.
Step 1: Download and launch Seas0nPass.
Step 2: Now select “Create IPSW” option to build your own custom jailbroken 4.3.1 firmware for Apple TV.
Step 3: Now wait for Seas0nPass to download all the files required for creating custom firmware.
Step 4: When prompted by Seas0nPass, connect your Apple TV using a micro-USB cable (leave power disconnected), and hold-down both the ‘MENU’ and ‘PLAY/PAUSE’ buttons for 7 seven seconds.
Step 5: iTunes should now open automatically to start the restore process.
Step 6: iTunes will confirm the restore when complete. Once done, your Apple TV will be fully jailbroken, untethered on iOS 4.3.1.
Once complete, remove the USB cable and connect the HDMI cable.
Once you are done with the jailbreak, you can install the following apps on your jailbroken 2nd-gen Apple TV:
- How to Install XBMC Media Center on Apple TV 2G [Guide]
- Plex Has Been Ported to Jailbroken Apple TV 2G ! [VIDEO]
- How to Install NitoTV Weather and RSS App on Apple TV 2G [Jailbreak]
- Apple TV 2G Gets Web Browser and Last.fm Apps via aTV Flash [Video]
- Exposed VNC Server Plugin Enables Remote Access On Apple TV 2G
Required download links are as follows:
Download iOS 4.3.1 (4.2.1) for Apple TV
Download iTunes 10.2.1 for Mac OS X
Download Seas0nPass for Mac OS X
Download Seas0nPass for Windows
You can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook fanpage to keep yourself updated on all the latest iPhone jailbreaking and unlocking releases.
bench craft companybench craft company Kevin’s post and David Glenn’s story are deeply troubling in so many aspects that it’s hard to pick out which ones are the worst. The popularity of the business major, the low work-demands made of students, the quirky assignments and exams . . . they add up to, well, what we get as documented in Academically Adrift. That is, low learning outcomes, little coordination between pedagogy and outcomes, and meager effort on the part of students.
But something else in the story bears highlighting, and it might go to the heart of the problems of the business major. In their analysis of CLA scores for undergraduates, Arum and Rooksa found that business majors score the lowest on writing-and-reasoning skills improvement while in the first two years of college.
A big problem, indeed, when set alongside another statement made by Glenn at the end of the piece: “According to national surveys, [employers] want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively, and analyze quantitative data.” Note what comes first: the writing. We hear it in just about every survey I’ve seen which asks employers about problems or needs in the workplace. They always emphasize communication skills, particularly writing skills. In sum, businesses need competent writers who draft clear prose. Not PowerPoint slides, spread sheets, or Web sites alone, but prose for reports, correspondence, agreements, white papers, etc. Not collaborative composition only, but solitary composition, too.
That’s the reality, but in Glenn’s story, I found only one case in which the examination of writing quality was emphasized, the University of Viriginia’s business school.
Why doesn’t it come up all the time?
Obviously, because writing is a labor-intensive activity for student and for professor. Assign each student a 15-page white paper on some subject or another and the workload for everyone rises considerably. For the student, it means paying attention to punctuation, diction, transitions, and structure, not to mention pursuing one line of thought through 3,000 words. For the professor, it means grading punctuation, diction, transitions, and structure, not to mention one line of thought through 3,000 words.
It is precisely the kind of training that business majors need and employers prefer, but it looks just too darn onerous for students and for teachers. Even if students end up on the job writing more PowerPoints than long papers, the training in prose composition in school pays off.
We should guard against an assumption cited in the article that what people will do in the workplace should be replicated in the classroom. This is to align training and the thing you will eventually do too closely. Students should write papers that are longer than the things they will have to write in the workplace. They should spend more time alone than they will in the workplace. Training should always require practices that exceed the tasks that need to be handled later on.
If business school leaders wish to improve learning outcomes and raise the workplace readiness of graduates, they have a simple option: require a year-long composition course at the beginning of the major. That course should focus on prose and should minimize collaborative work.
In recent weeks we’ve shared articles on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. Now it’s time to look at how all these tools are changing the way you do business. By the way, we’d like to learn what kind of social media your business is using and why. Be sure to leave a comment below.
Strategy
How to be a social media leader. How to be a social media leader or authority. It’s a question surely on the mind of plenty of small business owners working to learn the vocabulary of the new online media. In the end, it may be easier than it looks. Check these simple tips. Small Business CEO
How to set up a small realization that business blog. Whether practitioners of small business social media nowadays would describe a format as “old school” as blogging as being a part of the social media is uncertain. We certainly consider it to be. In many ways blogging is the cornerstone of a strong online social presence and establishing a blog as the hub of your social media campaign requires learning some basics on establishing a small business blog. Dazzlin Donna
Marketing
How to use social media to build context. Gary Vaynerchuck is arguably one of the most innovative pioneers of the social media marketing approach, but in this interview he argues using the means open to small businesses today isn’t necessarily about the tools, it’s about the context. Find out why. The Rise to the Top
How to grow your social media fan base. Whether it’s Facebook or another comparable site, social media is about being social. To understand why this is harder than it might at first seem, check out this post on growing a social media fan base for your business. Like other online marketing, social media is about content. This post talks about how to use content and other tools to boost your number of fans. Premium SEO Solutions
Operations
How to create Twitter and other social media content. So, we know that using social media and frequently updating with content are the key to an effective social media marketing campaign. But what in the world can you say. As it turns out talking endlessly and pitching endlessly about your business on social media is NOT the answer. Follow this guide to participating effectively in social media WITHOUT being labeled a spammer. What’s your approach? Blog Godown
How bloggers have become much more influential than celebrities. When it comes to influencing purchasing decisions, people are more likely to listen to a blogger than a rock star. That’s according to a recent study suggesting the increased influence social media is having on purchasing decisions. If you haven’t yet considered social media and particularly blogging as part of your marketing campaign, you may want to read more. Fox News
Research
Why social media may not be your best traffic driving tool. A recent study suggests that as a strategy for driving traffic to your Website, social media may not be the best choice. Then again, the study goes on, for brand awareness its effectiveness may be somewhat higher. In the end, it’s important to remember that the tools you use must make sense to your business, says blogger Cynthia Boris. Don’t look to social media as a magic bullet. It’s a useful tool, nothing more. Marketing Pilgrim
How to create a successful social media strategy. Businesses seeking to take advantage of all aspects of the social media need to apply careful planing to their approach. The possibilities for crowdsourcing, studying of online customer conversation and other factors makes innovation easier as well. But with all these possibilities, where should your business begin? A well defined social media strategy is a good first step. 1 to 1 media
How to listen to social media and gain insight about your brand. Someone is talking about your business out there. But what are they saying and is it something you should even be worried about? Monitoring social media for positive and negative comments about your business can be a great strategy for constant innovation. Here’s more about how it works and how you can get involved. InformationWeek
Final Thoughts
Trying to figure out social media. One of the main issues for small businesses today, surprisingly, is not just deciding to implement social media but trying to figure out all of the possible implications. Social media is, after all, more than just a tool. It is a movement as well. The existence of social media is a hard reality and offers opportunities to small business of all kinds. But there are challenges too. Here are some important thoughts. Business 2 Community
bench craft companyThe networks of NBC Universal, including CNBC, MSNBC and NBC News, are all lining up green-themed programming for the 2011 installment of the company's Green is Universal “Earth Week” April 17-24. On “Today” Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda ...
bench craft companyThe networks of NBC Universal, including CNBC, MSNBC and NBC News, are all lining up green-themed programming for the 2011 installment of the company's Green is Universal “Earth Week” April 17-24. On “Today” Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda ...
