WordCamp Boulder 2010 was my first WordCamp event. As a web designer, SEO, and online strategy consultant, I found the sessions and opportunity to meet others in the industry to share ideas and information very useful. Even though you know much of the material already because you’re in the biz, there are always things you pick up at events like these, and they provide the opportunity to learn something completely new.

WordCamp Boulder @ Boulder Theater

Attended the “Creating a Blog Community”, “Blogging for your Business”, “BuddyPress 101″, and “What’s Next for WordPress”. Of course the Social Hour was fun. Look forward to seeing the videos on WordPress.tv so I can tune into the sessions I couldn’t attend such as “WordPress Development” and the “Design Panel”.

The most important thing I learned was in “What’s Next for WordPress” session by Jane Wells of WordPress and Automatic – that was to make sure you use a capital “P” in WordPress!

Maybe I’ll head out to WordCamp New Zealand August 7-8.

Minds Over Media provides full-service online marketing services including web design Denver, SEO Denver, video production Denver, social media marketing Denver, blog design Denver, graphic design Denver, and other digital media services.

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(CNN) — Concerns over Facebook’s new privacy policy and the online social network’s recent efforts to spread its information across the Web have led some of the site’s faithful to delete their accounts — or at least try to.
On Wednesday’s episode of a podcast called This Week in Technology, host Leo Laporte, a well-known tech pundit, said he had to search wikiHow, a how-to site, to figure out how to delete his Facebook account permanently.
After finding the delete button, which he said is hidden deep within the site’s menus, Laporte proceeded to delete his account during the online broadcast.

“That’s it. It’s gone,” he said during the show. “And I think that’s the right thing to do.”

Read entire article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/05/13/facebook.delete.privacy/index.html?hpt=T2

Internet Explorer losing grip on browser market

Many people complain about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. There have even been campaigns to kill old versions of the Web browser.

But despite the haters, IE has always remained way on top. In June 2002, 95 percent of computers accessed the Internet through the product, which comes installed as the default web-surfing tool on Microsoft Windows computers.

IE remains dominant today. But, compared to its heights in the early 2000s, it’s slipping. This week, the market researcher NetApplications released a report saying IE has fallen to less than 60 percent of the browser market.

Meanwhile, alternative browsers like Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox are catching up a bit.

Firefox makes up nearly a quarter of the browser market; and newer Chrome is at about 7 percent, up from about 2 percent a year ago in May.

A new version of Internet Explorer – IE9 – is expected to debut soon.

Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann tells the BBC that alternatives to IE continue to catch consumer attention:

“There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple’s Safari. There is just a great awareness that there are alternatives,” he says.

That’s impressive, considering there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that many Web users don’t know what a browser is. (If you’re one of them, don’t feel bad. It’s the program you open in order to access the internet. It’s what you’re using to view this story.)

What do you make of IE’s slipping market share? Which browser do you use and why?

Advertising will fail for three reasons:

There are three problems with advertising in any form, whether broadcast or online:

Consumers do not trust advertising. Dan Ariely has demonstrated that messages attributed to a commercial source have much lower credibility and much lower impact on the perception of product quality than the same message attributed to a rating service. Forrester Research has completed studies that show that advertising and company sponsored blogs are the least-trusted source of information on products and services, while recommendations from friends and online reviews from customers are the highest.

Consumers do not want to view advertising. Think of watching network TV news and remember that the commercials on all the major networks are as closely synchronized as possible. Why? If network executives believed we all wanted to see the ads they would be staggered, so that users could channel surf to view the ads; ads are synchronized so that users cannot channel surf to avoid the ads.

And mostly consumers do not need advertising. My own research suggests that consumers behave as if they get much of their information about product offerings from the internet, through independent professional rating sites like dpreview.com or community content rating services like Ratebeer.com or TripAdvisor.

Read rest of article at TechCrunch

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/Dispatch/market-dispatches.aspx?post=1619799&_blg=1,1620847

More people in the United States are falling victim to identity fraud.

A study by Javelin Strategy & Research showed that the number of victims jumped by 12% to 11.1 million adults in 2009, the biggest increase since the survey began in 2003.

“Identity fraud continues on the upswing and we believe it will continue to rise if consumers fail to take proactive steps to prevent fraudsters from taking advantage of their offline and online transactions and their increasingly exposed personal information on social networks,” said Michael Stanfield, CEO of Intersections (INTX), one of the survey’s sponsors.

“The findings of this Javelin report reinforce what we’ve been telling consumers for more than a decade — be vigilant with whom you are sharing your personal information and where you are sharing it. Protect your computer and only transact on confirmed legitimate websites,” Stanfield said in a press release.

The study said that total overall fraud rose by 12.5% to $54 billion.

Payment-card-related fraud is the most common type of crime, according to the study, with someone opening up a new account in the victim’s name. The perpetrator is often someone the victim knows, such as a family member or presumed friend, according to Javelin founder James Van Dyke.

The number of new credit card accounts opened fraudulently rose 39% in 2009, with new online accounts more than doubling, and the number of new e-mail payment accounts rising 12%.

Fraud on existing accounts rose 12%, with the vast majority occurring with credit cards.

The study also found that 29% of identity-fraud victims said that mobile phone accounts were fraudulently opened in their names.

One good thing in the report: less time to resolve identity crime. It takes 21 hours on average, down from 30 hours reported the year before.

The mobile ad space continued to heat up last week with Amobee’s acquisition of RingRing Media, a 2-year-old London-based startup, for an undisclosed sum. The move surely isn’t anywhere near the magnitude of Google’s $750 million AdMob buy or even Apple’s $275 million pick-up of Quattro Wireless, but it’s the kind of smaller-scale deal we’re likely to see many more of this year as the segment consolidates.

Mobile ad startups are hot commodities once again thanks largely to in-app marketing, which has given the segment a much-needed lift over the last year. Established Internet companies and software development companies alike are scrambling to gain a foothold in the space, much like in 2007, which saw a flurry of activity including AOL’s acquisition of Third Screen Media, Yahoo’s pick-up of Actionality, the Microsoft ScreenTonic buy and Nokia’s tie-up with Enpocket. While 2010 may not see as many blockbuster deals, the number of tie-ups could end up surpassing that of three years ago, Rich Wong of Accel Partners told me last week:

Brand managers now are spending in this medium. It’s real, and it’s genuine. I do think it’s going to be hard to have a quarterly earnings call as a major Internet company and not have an answer to the question, ‘What’s your mobile strategy?’

The landscape is far different now than it was just three years ago, though, when a handful of startups were quick to emerge in the nascent space. Recent figures from IDC indicate that Millennial Media is clearly the largest startup left on the field (see chart); the mobile search firm JumpTap is the second-largest potential acquisition despite a mere 4 percent market share. Yahoo and Microsoft claim a combined market share of only 19 percent — which may prompt the high-profile players to make an acquisition or two this year in order to build their mobile businesses.

The field also teems with smaller player that specialize in targeted areas such as search or that serve specific geographic regions. And recent growth in the space has given rise to a host of startups that play supporting roles by providing analytics and other tools. Flurry, which pocketed $7 million on the heels of its recent tie-up with Pinch Media, may be especially attractive to ad companies that don’t have their own mobile analytics operations.

So while we may see one or two more big-budget acquisitions in mobile advertising this year, most of the M&A activity will center on smaller startups. Entrenched firms with deep pockets will look to fill out the holes in their mobile ad businesses, and independent players will forge alliances to better compete with their larger counterparts. Those deals won’t make headlines, but they will reconfigure the landscape of mobile advertising in 2010.

Minds Over Media provides full-service online marketing services including web design Denver, SEO Denver, video production Denver, social media marketing Denver,blog design Denver, graphic design Denver, and other digital media services.

Contact Minds Over Media regarding mobile advertising marketing to help promote your business and market your services online.

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By Stephanie Chen CNN

(CNN) — If you’re on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site, you could be the next victim.

That’s because more cyberthieves are targeting increasingly popular social networking sites that provide a gold mine of personal information, according to the FBI. Since 2006, nearly 3,200 account hijacking cases have been reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a partnership between the FBI, the National White Collar Crime Center and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

It starts with a friend updating his or her status or sending you a message with an innocent link or video. Maybe your friend is in distress abroad and needs some help.

All you have to do is click.

When the message or link is opened, social network users are lured to fake Web sites that trick them into divulging personal details and passwords. The process, known as a phishing attack or malware, can infiltrate users’ accounts without their consent.

Once the account is compromised, the thieves can infiltrate the list of friends or contacts and repeat the attack on subsequent victims. Social networking sites show there is ample opportunity to find more victims; the average Facebook user has 120 friends on the site.

Read rest of article

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When will YouTube be profitable? “In the not-too-distant future,” said Google CFO Patrick Pichette on today’s quarterly earnings call, same as he said last quarter. He did offer a “sound bite” to appease investors and industry watchers: “We’re monetizing more than a billion video views every week on YouTube.” That’s out of “well over” a billion views that YouTube recently said it gets every day. So, let’s put on our fuzzy and unauthorized math thinking cap: There are seven days in a week. YouTube is monetizing in the neighborhood of 14 percent of its total views.

Google’s Nikesh Arora, president of global sales operations and business development, noted campaigns on YouTube’s home page have been undertaken with 90 percent of the top 50 advertisers. He said 90 percent of YouTube’s home-page inventory was sold out in the third quarter. Further, YouTube is beginning to release pre-roll inventory to advertisers — not the most-liked format for watchers or many in the industry, but a good way to make money. And the site is getting more premium content; it tied up a deal with Channel 4 this morning and straightened out its relationships with the music labels in recent weeks.

Google has come a long way from last year in its attitude towards YouTube, when CEO Eric Schmidt called YouTube monetization “the holy grail” and “our highest priority this year.”

“In general we’re really pleased about YouTube’s performance — it is going very well,” said Pichette. Arora added: “We’re pleased with our ability to monetize YouTube so far, and we like the trend.”

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The trough will get even deeper in 2010 as local online advertising continues to slow and as a bevy of new competitors rush in to become purveyors of hyperlocal everything. PBS, ESPN, AOL, Huffington Post, The Knot, Microsoft, Yahoo and scores of others have announced plans to reach deep into local ad sales. While they missed this crest, there is plenty of money yet to be made in local online ad sales.

Meanwhile, the next waves are forming on the horizon, as they always do, and companies that know what to look for can begin moving to catch them. Online promotions and mobile advertising are two such waves. This 2010 Outlook offers observations and forecasts intended to help that process.

Local online advertising will hit $14.2 billion this year, 12 percent more than 2008. For 2010 we are forecasting that it will grow just 5 percent, to $14.9 billion. In the past five years, local online advertising grew at a compound annual growth rate of 46.5 percent. For the next  five, we are expecting that rate to be 2.9 percent. The forecast is predicated upon a slow economic recovery and the fact that “online” as a local media advertising category is approaching what we believe is saturation. Online media buys currently hold a 13.8 percent share of all local advertising. We believe it will peak at a 16 percent share by 2013.

Unfortunately, one of the hottest growth categories – mobile – is not likely to play a significant role on the local media landscape next year. We are estimating that local buys will comprise only 20 percent of all mobile advertising, totaling slightly more than $500 million in 2010. Still, mobile is a category worth watching as the audience grows and as couponing, mobile directory advertising and sponsored text messages find viable applications for local marketers.

The game in 2010 will center more around stealing market share than growing the market. Local advertisers have had plenty of time to assess the effectiveness of banner ads, search, streaming video and e-mail advertising peddled to them over the past decade. They will abandon programs that just do not work, and embrace those that produce measurable results. They are also likely to continue following a few years behind the spending patterns of national advertisers by expanding their use of online promotions, which give them more direct access to their customers and prospects – without having to rely as heavily on media companies to help reach them.

Study provided by Borrell Associates. For more information and to download data samples visit www.borrellassociates.com

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#1 –  Call to Action not clear

Visitor does not know what they’re supposed to do. How to order, what number to call, how to contact?

#2 – Distracting Visuals

Too many images and graphics not related to service or product. Visitor is blasted with too many things, poor separation of content and navigation.

# 3 – Text Overload

Too much detail, poor flow, poor outline. People aren’t going to read a book.

#4 – Landing Page Does Not Match What the Ad Says

Your landing page does not deliver what the visitor is expecting from the ad, banner or other link they clicked on.

#5 – Form and Info Request Overload

Asking for too much irrelevant information, or information that isn’t needed till later.

#6 – Trust and Risk Minimizers

Trust symbols such as BBB, Hacker Safe, Verisign Secure Site are not prominently displayed early in the decision process.

#7 – Trust Verification Missing

Missing third party endorsements, client testimonials, list of current clients and customers, reviews and feedback.

Better landing page design will result in:
Increased conversion rates
Increased revenues

Landing Page Optimization Denver

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