Hi Everyone
Things have been really hectic at the office and i have seriously neglected my blog and blogger peeps.
So i hope to get things running smoothly soon. Thanks for all the emails and messages.
Will be updating my blog soon.
Cheers 
Top 50 firms submitted by GRIT respondents as the most innovative in the industry. The goal of this avenue of inquiry is to glean insight on the drivers of perception around what makes a firm innovative in order to understand how MR firms are capitalizing on the idea of “innovation” to grow their businesses. We believe that this list, developed by our peers within the industry, is a true measure of how successfully these companies are leveraging this brand attribute.
The worlds leading provider of web-based survey solutions, trusted by millions of companies, organizations and individuals alike to gather the insights they need to make more informed decisions. But you know all that. Here’s a bit more about the Monkey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/
Chances are you know someone who is hooked on the Monkey. Our customers include 100% of the Fortune 100, as well as other businesses, academic institutions, and organizations of all shapes and sizes. Literally millions of people use SurveyMonkey for everything from customer satisfaction and employee performance reviews, to course evaluations and research of all types.
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean will be available in a few weeks. Besides the brand new Nexus 7 tablet, the first devices to receive the latest Android update from Google will be the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S, and the XOOM. Following Google’s mind boggling Keynote announcement at Google I/O today, the Android team posted the platform highlights, recapping all of Jelly Bean’s new features. Here are a few we are particularly excited about.
Faster, Smoother, More Responsive
Due to the success of Google’s “Project Butter”, the latest version of Android is just like the saying goes “as smooth as butter”. Jelly Bean is the most responsive and impressive version of Android to date coming with triple buffered graphics, extended vsync timing and intuitive touch that boosts your CPU at the next touch event to make sure lag is minimal.
Enhanced Accessibility
Jelly Bean includes new API’s for accessibility features such as services that let you handle gestures and manage accessibility focus with on-screen navigation buttons. These can be handled by accessibility gestures, accessories, or other input methods. Applications that use the standard View components inherit support for these new features automatically without the need for developers to alter their code.
Support For International Users
Android 4.1 helps developers reach more users through support for bi-directional text. Apps can handle text editing in left to right or right to left scripts. Apps can also make sure of new included Arabic and Hebrew locales and fonts. If that isn’t enough, the platform now supports user-installable keymaps.
Expandable Notifications
Android 4.1 brings a major update to Android notifications. Apps can now display larger, richer notifications to users that can be expanded and collapsed with a pinch. Notifications support new types of content, including photos, have configurable priority, and can even include multiple actions assigned to them.
Resizeable App Widgets
Android 4.1 introduces improved App Widget functionality that can automatically resize, based on where the user drops them on the home screen, depending on the size, and the amount home screen real estate available. You can also supply separate landscape and portrait layouts for your widgets, which the system activates depending on your current screen rotation.
High Resolution Contact Photos
With Android 4.1, we cab finally store our contact photos at a whopping 720 x 720, allowing contact pictures to be truly beautiful. Apps can store and retrieve contact photos at that size or use any other size as needed.
Android Beam
Android Beam was introduced with ICS, but we haven’t seen a lot of uses for it. In Android 4.1, Android Beam makes it easier to share images, videos, or other payloads by leveraging Bluetooth for the data transfer. When the user triggers a transfer, Android Beam hands over from NFC to Bluetooth, making it easier to transfer and manage files between devices.
Smart App Updates
The latest feature of Google Play introduces a better way to receive application updates on your devices. When a developer publishes an app update, Google Play now only delivers the changes bits of the application rather then the entire APK. This makes app updates much lighter and easier on your network data. On average, a smart app update is about 1/3 the size of the full APK update.
Google Voice Search and Google Now
Google has drastically improved the default Voice Search functionality with Android 4.1. Dubbed Google Now, the new search functionality makes search much more visual such as displaying your results as cards for weather, navigation routes, sports scores, and more. This is much more than a virtual assistant.
These are only a few of the features that come with Jelly Bean. For a full feature listing including subscriptions, we suggest you check out the full Jelly Bean feature list to see what’s all under the hood. Just because this is a “dot” release doesn’t mean it isn’t major. This is more than just API enhancements. This is a major update.
Knowing your social media communication objectives is important when planning an online community. Though many variables play a pivotal role in the growth phase of an online community selecting the right social software is one of the most important variables that need consideration.
Software that cannot keep up with strategy can cause the community management processes to drag, thereby decreasing engagement, customer retention and possibly overpriced software upgrades.
When choosing online community software ask yourself, “Does this platform have enough resources that will provide value to my target audience?”
What you should be looking for is a platform that has a broad range of options with a great deal of flexibility to roll out features over time or give access to specific social features to only certain groups.
BoonEx goes beyond software development to fulfil your needs in community and social networking website building. We offer web and mobile social software, technical services, a community support platform, and extensions market and a lot more.
Dolphin 7 - open-source, downloadable, scalable, customizable, full-featured, independent and free software package for building social networks, dating sites and niche communities. Dolphin is the only “all-in-one” bundle of PHP community scripts, Flash plugins, Adobe AIR and Mobile apps that provide full control, freedom and flexibility. Launch your site, customize it and watch it grow
All the software tools you need to build the community site.
Your vision and your dream may now become reality with the world’s most feature-reach community software system. Imagine Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Plentyoffish, Match, WordPress and Twitter – all in one package of social networking scripts, fully customizable, with your brand and under your full control.
You can deploy a unique social network or niche community site , even if you don’t have a technical background, huge capital to invest or even experience in the social networking industry.
Open source code. Freedom of creation.
With Dolphin you get unencrypted PHP source code, making it possible to add or integrate custom designs and features. Dolphin is hosted on your own server, where you have complete control over your community site members and content. Promote your own brand, serve your own ads, invent and add your own features, get all the money if you ever sell your site and enjoy your own success.
Software that grows with your community.
What if your community site grows to tens of millions of members? What if existing features are not enough? Is BoonEx Dolphin future-proof? What if some new technology becomes fashionable? Fret not! You covered:
•Dolphin is scalable, fast and tested on tens of thousands of online communities and social networks.
•BoonEx has specialized solely in social networking and online dating softwarefor over 10 years.
•You’re backed by a choice of hundreds of extensions and a community of over 100,000 webmasters.
•We constantly update Dolphin, keeping a few steps ahead of the competition.
Customizable database fields and forms. Drag-n-drop “Builders” for everything!
BoonEx pioneered a user-friendly administration and modification interface for community site operators. Login to the Dolphin Admin panel and change specific fields in join and search forms; control default profile fields and their visibility and thus build all sorts of online communities, dating sites, niche networks, adult sites, publishing portals or media sharing hubs
Memberships and access levels.
Paid or free communnity sites, closed or open social networks, matchmaking or dating sites… they all require a different approach to membership statuses and rights. That’s where Dolphin excels!
•Create multiple membership levels with configurable permissions.
•Set different access levels to all parts of your community site,
including specific pages and even separate page blocks.
•Charge membership fees and integrate with different
payment providers.
Extensions, Plugins, Add-ons…
Enhance your social site with hundreds of extensions, design templates, mods, plugins, language packs and 3rd party software integrations sold and freely shared at BoonEx Market.
Packed with thousands of social networking and online dating site features.
No other community or dating script comes packed with so many modules and apps. Video chat, video messenger, players, iPhone app, Android App, Adobe AIR desktop app, groups, events, blogs, files,media sharing, store and much, much more.
Choose a lean, streamlined feature-set or go crazy and launch all the modules to please your site members. You are the creator and you decide what’s going to work on your community website. Just turn things on and off and see what works best.
We are lucky to be living in a world today where we have the world at our fingertips. Between all the computers and phones, we are constantly connected. We have access to almost anything in just a couple of minutes, and of course this includes online selling. Now-a-days, there are plenty of sites that allow you to upload an item to sell, but just how good are they? And are they really necessary? Most of the time people will only buy from you if you are a top rated-seller! Today we are so connected with our social networks that we could just as easily post something we want to sell ourselves to our own circle of friends. Are those big online selling marketplaces even necessary anymore?
That’s where Shook comes in!
Shook’s process is what makes it the stand-out tool for online selling. It’s easy, smart, and doesn’t cost you a thing.
There are only 3 steps to take with Shook:
1. List your item – It’s free to list your item and will only take you a minute.
2. Share – Tweet, like and share your item so your friends can see and share your item.
3. Get paid – The money will be directly transferred to your PayPal account!!
Shook provides a more personal selling process by connecting with your social networks and therefore, a more successful and trusted experience.
So what are you waiting for? Upload your item today!
The recent addition of the Facebook promote post feature has caused concern with many of our Facebook business page clients. They believe it is unfair that Facebook is charging them to reach their own fan base that they have already worked hard or even paid to acquire.
This isn’t our biggest concern because we understand the need to filter the news feed in order to avoid message overload. Instead we set out to test the Promote Post feature’s effectiveness. In doing this we decided to compare the Promote Post feature to traditional email marketing.
The reasons why an email marketing campaign is a good comparison to Promote Posts are:
Now, on to our case study.
We ran a few different Promote Post campaigns on different types of pages (marketing, games, real estate) to provide a broad set of test case samples. As all of the different pages had similar results so we will focus on just one for brevity.
We setup a 60% off promotion to get the attention of our fans. Following is what the promoted post looked like.
We setup the promoted post to reach 10,000 fans which Facebook quoted us $100 for. We linked the graphic on this post and added a link to a Facebook tab that required the fan to enter their email address in order to receive the promo code. This was important to us because we wanted; one, to track the conversions on how many people from this promoted post would enter their email address and; two, to use this method to convert more of our “Likes” into “leads”. Following is what the tab with the promo on it looked like.
Following are the results of this campaign.
Facebook only displayed the promoted post to 6322 of our 35,000+ fans when we requested it to be shown to 10,000. They however only charged us $44.03 rather than the $100 which we initially chose. Presumably, this is due to the possibility that not all of our fans were on Facebook for the 3 days we ran the promotion. The majority of our fans have been acquired from Facebook ads that target users interested in the types of services we offer. Another thing to note is that we allowed this post to run 2 days on our Facebook wall before we promoted it, in which time it reached 2718 of our fans. We did not calculate the 2718 people it reached or the conversions from these fans being that we were trying to calculate the effectiveness from fans reached just from the Facebook Promoted Posts.
We wanted to keep the comparison as similar as possible when running our email marketing campaign so we sent it to 10,000 of our 100,000 email subscribers. This is the same count of subscribers (fans) we were trying to target on our Facebook page. These email subscribers are people who have signed up through our FaceItPages.com site by coming from a Google search for the services we offer. Following is the email that was sent.
Following are the results of this campaign.
There are a few things to keep in mind here. One, the “Opens” are only recorded from emails that have html and images enabled, so not all “Opens” are logged. (Note: it is our experience that more than twice as many emails are opened than are tracked.) Two, we calculated total cost based on what popular email providers such as MailChimp and ConstantContact charge for a list of 10,000. Three, we didn’t require users to enter their email in order to receive the coupon being that they are already in our list. We simply displayed the promo code within the email.
As you can see from these numbers, email marketing is the clear winner.
Does that mean marketing on Facebook is not worth it? Not at all. Promoted Posts however, at least from our tests, are not as effective but they still returned a positive ROI. Anything that returns a positive ROI is worthwhile in our opinion. We heavily suggest using methods that capture your fans email addresses such as running promos, contests and adding email forms to your tabs. When you convert more of your “Likes” (fans) into leads, it enables you to market to them outside of Facebook through other methods such as the above email marketing campaign. Facebook business pages are effective if you learn how to leverage them. It is important to capture “targeted” fans and just as important to convert those fans into email addresses (leads).
Link from http://faceitpages.com/blog/facebook-promote-post-vs-email-marketing/1867/
