I am NOT Maverick Marketing Sydney

Fancy going to Stanford?

Hey, I can’t promise you that (I’m not in charge of admissions), but I can serve up the link so you can access free 1 hour tutorials covering a range of interesting topics related to Branding, the Web, Legal Stuff, Content and more.

CLICK HERE.

Before you rush off, did you want to know precisely what’s on offer? Here is the list of topics by name and author.
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If you’re using Twitter, you’ll probably agree that it is tough to find good quality people to follow and even more difficult to get interested and engaged people to follow you.

The guys that developed Socialoomph, a tool designed to assist the management of Twitter accounts and communications, have developed an answer.

They call it FollowerHub.

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An oldie but a supreme goodie. Hilarious! Enjoy!

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Back in March 2010, Hitwise reported that Facebook had surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website. Sure, it was a week’s worth of data but the writing has been on the wall ever since.

Then in May we learned that in the UK, people are visiting social networks more than they’re visiting search engines. Facebook dominates the current crop of social networks, accounting for the majority (55%) of all social site visits. When compared to the wider web, Google got around 9.3% of all web traffic, while Facebook captured just over 7%.

But when UK stats for all search engines were stacked up with data from all social sites, social networks attracted .55% more traffic than search engines.

The writing on the wall started to get a whole lot larger.

According to Alexa, Google.com is ranked Number 1 globally and Facebook is ranked Number 2.

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Players from Google’s display advertising team presented seven predictions on the outlook of display advertising for 2015, as part of Google’s “Watch This Space” campaign.

They were:

1. Video: 50% of display ads will include cost-per-view video. The prediction comes with the launch of two new video ad formats on Google’s YouTube: an “in-slate format” that allows users to choose video ads to view, and an “in-stream format” that auto-selects video ads and allows users to click out of the ad after a few seconds.

2. Real-time: 50% of ad buying will happen in real time. Instead of a passive price ceiling or automated bid price, Google sees a trend towards ad buyers bidding on display advertising on the fly.

3. Mobile: The most popular screen will be on-the-go. Google is banking on “media bridging” off-line and online advertising with tools like Google Goggles.
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Here is something useful if you’d like to search Bing and Google at the same time.

Or even compare the results between the two.

It costs nothing and the results can be interesting.

Try it out over at Black Dog.

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Google may have plunged headlong into hot PR water with Google Instant’s new security feature.

Type in an inappropriate keyword and the results disappear. You have to hit enter to see your search results.

Terms like bisexual and lesbian turn the search feature off.

That’ll please parents but irritate vocal minorities that think they’re being discriminated against.

All this from a corporation that is known for a great many things, but censorship isn’t normally one of them.

Word is, Google is trying to prevent people (read, children) seeing pornographic or violent material unless they really, really want to see it.

Read more at Mashable.

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Positive language about learning new things and serving the self-interest of readers is the most common characteristic of blog post titles that get shared the most on Twitter, according to new analysis posted on the blog Smart Data Collective.

Essentially the analysis sought to identify which words or phrases have a positive versus negative bearing on what is likely to get your content tweeted.

The author, Greek data mining consultant Themos Kalafatis, found that the words increase, socialize, automate and manage appear most in posts that prove popular.

Terms including write, talk and trust appear to have a negative weight on the likelihood of a post being retweeted.

With this information, an analyst may then identify why such words tend to commonly exist in popular Social Media posts.

Here are some insights :
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Renowned for making vehicles driven by James Bond, it came top of the annual poll, reclaiming the number one spot from Apple’s iPhone which came second.

Apple’s iPod was named third coolest, followed by Blackberry and stereo and TV maker Bang & Olufsen.

The survey was run by The Center for Brand Analysis which creates league tables based on the opinions of marketing experts, business professionals and thousands of British consumers.

Key factors in the selection process included, style, innovation, desirability and originality.

Vivienne Westwood topped the fashion brands in the poll, which began in 2001, while Ray-Ban was judged the coolest fashion accessory.

Google and YouTube were the only Internet brands to make the Top 20.
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Apple is expected to control 21% of the U.S. mobile advertising market by the end of this year, grabbing share from both Google and Microsoft, BusinessWeek reported, citing data from market research firm IDC.

Google, which accounted for 21% of the U.S. mobile ad market last year, is expected to end the year with 21%, while Microsoft’s share will fall from 10% to 7%.

Yahoo will see its share drop from 12% to 9%, while Nokia will slip from 5% to 2%. Independent ad network Jumptap is expected to increase its share to 13% this year, from 10% a year ago, while Millennial Media will end 2010 with 11% of the market, up from 9%.

Read more at Digital Media Wire.

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