Introducing UpDog: Untangling the World of Social Media Barketing

Posted by TheDahv

[Estimated read time: 3 minutes]

Technology makes it easier than ever to learn about people and the world around you. Despite significant progress, however, the tech community has left a gaping hole unaddressed: the tools available to our dogs to engage in social media marketing are completely unsatisfactory.

So, what's UpDog?

UpDog is our new company-wide initiative to bring the benefits of human social media marketing to the canine world. If you haven't noticed, we love dogs here at Moz.

A photo posted by Moz (@moz_hq) on Aug 26, 2015 at 1:01pm PDT

We're uniquely positioned to hear and empathize with the needs of our aspiring barketers. Now that we have finished our second-quarter planning, we're ecstatic to share that the future is looking up for dogs! We intend to strategically fold canine marketing tools into all of our platforms.

Feeling skeptical? Not sure this is right for your social media barketing strategy? Well, check out what Moz's founder has to say:

"Every day, when I walk to work, hop on a plane, or speak at a conference, I see them. Thousands of humans, buried in their phones, swiping for hours through potential dating partners or friends' baby photos or short videos surrounded by crayon scratches. It made me realize - it's not fair that only our species gets this privilege. We need to be thinking about Earth's other inhabitants too, especially our best friends, dogs."
– Rand Fishkin

#InternetOfDogs

Before we can make progress on improving the landscape of marketing tools for dogs, we have to improve the state of content creation itself. That's why we're hereby announcing the Moz Bark-Activated InstaShot Pro tool!

We developed this sophisticated technology in-house so we could precisely meet the needs of our furry friends in the office. Each device is uniquely associated with your dog, and connects to WiFi to upload photos to the cloud.

Simply bark, upload, and watch the Likes and Hearts roll in for days. Want a taste of the kind of 10x content YOUR dog can start creating without the help of opposable thumbs? Take a look!:

Choose from your favorite filters to give your canine perspective that modern human touch!

Gratuitous pictures of breakfast, lunch, and dinner have gone to the dogs!

Duckface? Welcome to the new obsession to sweep millennial pups - dogface!

Seriously, watch out - dogs love selfies.

This whole new perspective is sure to draw tons of new followers, likes, and shares!

Beautiful design for beautiful dogs

The device itself is sleek and beautiful. Our design team turned to the past to inspire the device of the future.

This led us to a design that seamlessly blends with all shapes, sizes, and colors. Moreover, our innovative strategy for collar customization means no dog will have to compromise to match their (probably broodingly artistic) mood on any given day.

We'll launch with our original RogerPup model, and are working on partnerships with top designer brands to innovate on iterations of future collars.

Looking ahead

As the year progresses, keep your eyes out for improvements, integrations, and renewed focus on shaping our tools for the barketers of the world! Here's what we have in the pipeline for the coming months:

• Followerwonk – Explore the success of your top Treats on your Twitter account. Compare your main competitors, animalyze trends, and track scents!

Click to open a bigger version in a new tab!

• Moz Local – Understand what drives traffic to your favorite park benches, fire hydrants, and light poles.

Be sure your local search barketers know what a zip code is first, though.

• Moz Content – Support both the analysis and posting of blog posts powered by our top-notch Bark Translation Team.

Our newest product will turn over an even newer leaf with cutting-edge bark-to-speech software!

The possibilities are as limitless as an off-leash dog park!

We're confident this is only the beginning, and we can't wait to see what the future holds as we continue to evolve our business model to meet the avid marketing demands of our furry comrades.

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Our Twitter Account Has Just Got A Little Bit More Majestic…

As of today, our Twitter account's name has now changed from @tryMajestic to simply @Majestic. After lengthy discussions with the previous owner of the Majestic account (world renowned DJ based in London), we finally came to an agreement with him to the delight of the marketing team, in particular our social media ambassador. He is…

The post Our Twitter Account Has Just Got A Little Bit More Majestic… appeared first on Majestic Blog.

Google Reveals New Local Ranking Signals by @SouthernSEJ

Google has updated its document on local ranking signals to include more traditional ranking signals we've grown accustomed to in organic search. These include signals such as links, articles, and overall position in web rankings. Google previously had a list of local ranking factors publicly available; Mike Blumenthal was first to notice an addition to the document regarding “Prominence”, which reads: ”Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably […]

The post Google Reveals New Local Ranking Signals by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

How artificial intelligence can be used for marketing

This week sees the launch of our Marketer's Guide to Artificial Intelligence report, which takes a look at how AI can be used for marketing, now and in the future.

In this extract, report author Martin Talks looks at the various ways marketers can make use of the technology.

1. New customer experiences

Although AI still has limitations, forward-thinking brands are starting to harness its power to enhance the customer experience.

They can do this by creating their own virtual assistants to help customers navigate through their product range or get acquainted with new functionality.

Brands could also tap in to the virtual assistants being created by the Big Five Western tech companies…

Facebook

Facebook launched a concierge service called M through its Messenger app in 2015.

M can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements for the user. There is an element of the Mechanical Turk about it at the moment as it is powered by a combination of AI and real-life people.

Apple

Siri has been around for a few years but has been upgraded in that time. It's now capable of showing

the user specific photos he or she has taken, ordering things via ecommerce apps and giving directions.

It has also been integrated with HomeKit so it can be used to control heating and lighting. It is available on Apple devices only.

Google

Google's personal assistant Google Now takes a data-hungry approach to providing its service and improves as more data is shared with it.

It anticipates our needs based on our browsing behaviour and consumption of content on social networks. Google Now can be used across Android and Apple devices.

Microsoft

Cortana's features can set reminders, recognise the user's voice without them having to first

input a predefined series of commands, and answer questions using information from Bing.

It's interestingly named – in the Halo game series Cortana is an artificial intelligence that goes wrong…

Amazon

Echo is a connected device that combines the abilities of Siri and a Bluetooth speaker in a 9.25- inch tall cylinder. The built-in personal assistant is called Alexa. Alexa can answer questions, play music from an Amazon library or via Prime, read an audio book, tell the sports results and control the lights.

Baidu

And one must not underestimate China's Google equivalent, Baidu, which has launched its intelligent virtual assistant Duer.

Duer is built into the Baidu Android search app which is installed on millions of smartphones across China. It is service-oriented, so can order food and access other services through the app.

There are plenty of other plays going on too. In the enterprise space, one of the more interesting is Amelia, while the original inventors of Siri are creating a new virtual assistant called Viv8. Viv grandly describes itself as the “global brain”.

You could reasonably predict that in the not-too-distant future everyone will have a personal concierge in their life not only making recommendations on products and services, but ordering them, paying for them and providing feedback all without our conscious involvement. This of course all has implications for the role of marketing itself as we'll explore later.

An extension of the virtual assistant role could be assessing performance of products and recommending timing and nature of replacements.

With sensors embedded in products as part of IoT, AI will be able to take a range of readings on products and, for instance, decide if a replacement is desirable or due. A virtual assistant could then make choices based on the performance data.

2. New product launches

There are a whole range of industries launching new products with AI embedded in them, from the smart fridges of LG and Samsung to robo-investing products of the advisory markets. But from a marketer's point of view, AI can help in the process of any new product launch.

However much preparation a brand makes for a new product launch and however much material is prepared and explanations provided, there are always going to be prospective customers who want to ask questions.

This is not necessarily customer laziness, but a human desire to get reassurance from a fellow being. Through AI that 'being' need not necessarily be human.

For instance, BMW employed its iGenius technology in an ad campaign for its first electric car9, which was used to answer customers' questions about the new model via text.

iGenius increased BMW's capacity to handle simultaneous questions and reduced the need for BMW to invest in training dealers or customer service staff to handle queries.

One of the more interesting aspects was the technology's ability to memorise previous questions and so provide more meaningful answers. However, a lot of input is still required to create personable responses with a high standard of knowledge.

3. Insight from data

With vast quantities of data being generated from all areas of business, there has never been a better time to generate insight to improve performance. Although the sheer complexity of this data is beyond human capability, this is very much suited to technology such as AI.

The usefulness of AI for data crunching was dramatically demonstrated in the Google Street View project.

People had been employed to spend weeks tagging buildings and streets in the captured footage. But through the use of Google Brain's AI capabilities, it was possible to transcribe all of the addresses that Street View has captured in France in less than an hour. It is no wonder that Google has been described as no longer a search company, but as a machine learning company.

Ellipse is a machine learning platform developed by Thoughtly that is designed to accelerate the pace of learning for researchers and students.

Describing itself as AI for research, it provides students and researchers with the ability to analyse, visualise and summarise large volumes of text in real time.12 Individuals can use Ellipse to quickly navigate thousands of resources at once.

Another interesting approach is that of Narrative Science's Quill. Quill analyses and then adds value to data by identifying the most relevant information and relaying it through professional, conversational language.

Quill aims to provide intelligent narratives that efficiently communicate the insights buried in big data that people can comprehend, act on and trust. Possible uses include producing readable website activity reports based on Google Analytics.

4. Pre-emptive marketing

With sufficient data it is possible to identify patterns of behaviour. To deliver this, the right volume and variety of data need to be gathered and processed in such a way that its veracity, or its level of reliability, can be understood.

By maintaining velocity, or speedy analysis of this data, we can start to establish these patterns with increasing timeliness. This is true big data and beyond human capability. It is an ideal job for AI.

5. Programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising is already big business. It is the automation of planning, buying and optimising media so advertisers can target specific audiences and demographics. It can be used for online display advertising, mobile and social media campaigns.

The approach can even be used for TV and print. More than half the online display ads being bought in the US are bought programmatically. Google Ad Exchange and Facebook are the main programmatic display sellers.

The benefits of programmatic advertising include its efficiency and simplicity (no negotiation required), and the combination of automation and data which allows better targeting and more informed ad buying.

However, there are issues with programmatic advertising, which include susceptibility to fraud, multiple hidden agency charges and of course the irritation that persistent advertising can cause.

Indeed, the widespread use of ad blocking software is now posing a threat to some forms of online advertising. PageFair predicted that in 2015 as much as $21.8bn (£15.3bn) would be lost in online ad revenue due to ad blockers – and this is expected to increase to $41.4bn (£29bn) in 2016.

AI and the use of virtual assistants could come to the rescue here and change the dynamic of this programmatic advertising. It could be the virtual assistant that decides when it is open to receiving advertising messages and of what type.

This will filter out many of the annoying experiences we currently have of intrusive ads following us around our browsing.

6. Content production

As the previous sections showed, AI can be used in the process of automatically generating and optimising ads. So it should be no surprise that AI is capable of generating the content to populate ads as well as other platforms for sharing content.

This is particularly the case with content that is rooted in data and analytical information. Business information, for example, is likely to be authored by automated writing tools, from press releases and news content through to annual reports. Gartner predicts that by 2018, 20% of business content will be authored by machines.

Indeed, this is already happening as Associated Press (AP) is using an automated system to produce many of its financial stories. If you're wondering whether an article is written by AI, look out for clues such as these at the end of the article: “This story was generated by Automated Insights.” Here's an example.

This system produces millions of articles a week for the likes of AP, Samsung, Comcast and Yahoo, and is capable of producing 2,000 articles per second.

Automated Insights also offers specific services aimed at the marketing industry: it can automatically generate campaign summaries, ad performance overviews and brand management reports.

But the content needn't be dry reporting. TROBO is a lovable, huggable plush toy companion that can help children aged two to five learn about science, technology, engineering and maths through fun, personalised stories.

The TROBOs – Newton and Curie – read the story out loud and the child gets to be the star of the show as their name and avatar feature.

 7. Designing websites

Website design is increasingly becoming a commodity, with many free and low-cost platforms to create websites on offer.

But there is no guarantee of quality with these websites and it is not always easy to modify the layout or elements on the site to increase conversion rates.

The Grid offers AI websites that design themselves by algorithmically generating website designs and improving them based on user behaviour.

For more on AI and Marketing, you can download the full report here. It's free to download after a quick registration form. Also, report author Martin Talks discusses AI in the latest ClickZ Podcast. 

The Healthy Skeptics and the AdWords Redesign: Weekly Forum Update

Skepticism is a healthy thing to have in the SEO world. If there's one thing I learned from Fathom, it's that you should always be hunting for the truth with your own hands and eyes.

That's not to say that you should never listen to anyone else…too much skepticism turns to paranoia. But this week, we've got some great threads with a healthy amount of skepticism in them. They're simply dripping with juicy morsels and a sense of progress.

Let's take a look!

E.U. Considering a Tax on Google Showing Snippets

Sound ridiculous, right? Well, the war between Google and the E.U. is being fought on many different fronts – some of them are bound to be strange and arcane. According to an article from Ars Technica, the tax

“…would require search engines and possibly others to pay for using short extracts to link to articles on other sites.”

WebmasterWorld user topr8 says that

“I should think it [has] nothing to do with snippets but more working out a way to try and tax Google and other big players.”

Another user, Andy Langton, provides some context:

“This is primarily targeting Google News. Spain already introduced a law, which is why Google closed Google News in Spain.”

Ahh, yes – you may remember that announcement as a blip on the news radar. Traffic to Spanish publishers fell through the floor and Google packed up its toys and went home.

Other WebmasterWorld users suspect the same thing will happen across the E.U. if this tax goes into effect. But big E.U. publishers are still eager to have it passed – perhaps as a way of absolutely crushing their smaller competitors.

Is A Higher Bounce Rate Inherently Bad?

As the admin of a forum myself, this is a topic that I find to be particularly fascinating! There are many blog posts and forum dwellers out there who say that you should strive for a high bounce rate – but the concept has never struck me as being black and white like that. Cre8asiteforums user Robert_Paulson writes,

“My hypothesis is that some sites…have pages that adequately answer a visitor's question in a single page.”

User Black_Knight says that bounce rate is not always bad. In two specific cases that he outlines, bounce rate can be good. But otherwise, it is very often bad

“…because you are completely in the dark. You have no idea who they were, or what impression they took away.”

The solution is to gather more data – and you can do just that in this fascinating thread! One of the best I've read in a long time on the topic..

How SEO Best Practices Become Irrelevant

Remember our theme of healthy skepticism? Here's a great thread all about it from WebmasterWorld. When you believe that the rules of SEO were set in stone decades ago, you lose your flexibility.

User martinibuster writes that

“SEO is very much like scripture. The original authors and reasons behind SEO Best Practices are buried in time. As one generation… handed down best practices to the next… these practices were accepted because they have always worked, yet without actually knowing how the best practices came about.”

In other words – we work with things that we blindly accept to be true. And in this masterfully written post, martinibuster will tell you why you should never do that.

As an example, there's the idea that linking out to .gov and .edu sites is a good idea. But linking out to them in excess, and for the sole purpose of improving SEO, makes no sense.

“Link because it makes sense to link. Don't write an article and drop a handful of links…because that is the definition of rote SEO.”

Due Diligence In Affiliate Promotion

If you're promoting a product or creating affiliate pages, it stands to reason that you should be diligent. But how, asks Cre8asiteforums user Robert_Paulson, do you do your research?

Do you purchase and use the product yourself? How can that be a sustainable practice? User EGOL speaks about being frugal:

“I don't spend a lot of money outside of work… I don't spend much on clothes…But, if you take anything away from what I have written here [it] should be that I don't hesitate to spend whatever it takes when publishing content.”

Here's an excellent thread about managing money, producing quality, and being diligent!

Facebook Testing “Anti-Impersonation” Tool

Ever been impersonated on Facebook? If you're like me, you never dreamed that it could happen. But it can and it does. Facebook is now developing a tool that will alert you when someone steals your name and face on their platform. WebmasterWorld user bill writes

“There's an entire industry revolving around fake profiles.”

Part of the new tool will be asking users to identify themselves. Bill asks, is it possible that this tool's structure indicates the scope of Facebook's problem with fake profiles? What's your experience?

AdWords is Getting a Redesign

For 15 years, the interface of AdWords has stood like a Sphinx in the sands…ancient and mysterious. Well, Google will be putting the nose back on that sphinx throughout 2016 and 2017.

The entire interface of AdWords is getting a cosmetic overhaul. Google says that all the functions and inner-workings will stay the same, though. It will just be easier to use.

Supposedly, they'll be taking webmaster feedback into account and claim that the new Adwords “will be focused on marketers' needs and objectives” instead of Google's own products and features.

You can check out a discussion of the issue on WebmasterWorld as well, where users are somewhat skeptical of Big G's intentions. User tangor wonders where additional data will be collected from and what it is.

“Will it impact users (bandwidth/privacy/etc)? This almost sounds like a let's fix something that ain't broke kind of thing….”

User shri says that nothing will fix AdWords for them:

“For me, no amount of redesigning will replace the trust I've lost in their 'Quality Score' and the 1000%+ increase in CPC over the years and precise geo ip targeting.”

Google Finally Reveals Top 3 Ranking Factors; Surprises No One

You'll never believe what Google considers to be the top three ranking factors! Well, ok, you will. They are, in order,

“Links, Content, RankBrain.”

Hardly a shocker – but perhaps the details in this Threadwatch story will help you prove something to your clients!

Has Traffic Dropped Since The Removal of Sidebar Ads?

SEO Chat user JSTucker says that

“One of my clients has experienced a 24% drop in organic traffic over the last 28 days…[with] no obvious explanations.”

They're an ecommerce business, so JSTucker wonders if the removal of sidebar ads could be part of the problem. A few days later, they report a sudden boost – wild fluctuations tend to spook us all.

Users in this thread are still investigating whether it's a sidebar issue or just a normal part of advertising on Google. Have you seen any fluctuations?

Is Something Fishy Happening To Google SERPs?

Stay skeptical – but some users on WebmasterWorld are reporting weird activity in the SERPs lately. Searches seem to be returning extremely non-relevant results.

On March 28, WebmasterWorld admin engine wrote

“I ran some searches today and, wow, the SERPs look awful. So many non-relevant sites appearing. .ru, .com, .fr, appearing and none were what I was looking for.”

User aristotle speculates that it could be RankBrain:

“RankBrain is supposed to improve relevance, but it probably needs some time to self-learn from its mistakes. So the results might have to get worse before they get better.”

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The post The Healthy Skeptics and the AdWords Redesign: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

Google Reveals New Local Ranking Signals by @SouthernSEJ

Google has updated its document on local ranking signals to include more traditional ranking signals we've grown accustomed to in organic search. These include signals such as links, articles, and overall position in web rankings. Google previously had a list of local ranking factors publicly available; Mike Blumenthal was first to notice an addition to the document regarding “Prominence”, which reads: ”Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably […]

The post Google Reveals New Local Ranking Signals by @SouthernSEJ appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

3 Simple Steps to Create a Content Calendar for Your Blog by @syedbalkhi

Struggling to post regularly on your blog? One of the best ways to solve that is by creating a content calendar for your blog. Here's how you can rock one.

The post 3 Simple Steps to Create a Content Calendar for Your Blog by @syedbalkhi appeared first on Search Engine Journal.