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The Total Image Group   ...Business Alchemists

A regularly updated resource of information and news items.

Mark Zuckerberg VS A 30 year Old

May 16th, 2014

While most 30-year-old guys are just landing on their feet in the workforce or perhaps finally leaving their parents’ basements, Zuck is entering his third decade with a pretty stacked resume — including the company he founded turning 10, a pseudo-biopic focused on his career and enough hoodies to last a lifetime.

 


My comical conversation with RyanAir on Twitter

May 2nd, 2014

So here’s the background: my brother’s Polish girlfriend returned to the UK from Poland on a RyanAir flight. she landed in stanstead, 150  miles from where we live in Bournemouth and during her coach trip back to the south coast she realised she’d picked up the wrong bag. She immediately tried to ring RyanAir and Stanstead but neither picked up and she returned home without her luggage but with someone else’s instead.

I knew RyanAir had recently joined Twitter so I thought it’d be a great way to contact them and help her out. I was pleasantly surprised that when i sent a tweet they replied relatively quickly and asked to DM eachother to collect the reference number and further info and here’s what happened:

This was one of my favourite bits- come to the airport and use a telephone on the wall as though it was the bat phone.

You could just imagine travelling all that way and finding everyone was out and there was no answer! It goes on:

There was 9 days between them saying they’d get back to me and having to chase for an update. and when I do ask, they’ve

unfollowed me and we have to start all over again as they’ve lost our DM history! Here we go again:

Of course there was no word on Tuesday

How amazingly cheeky is that- having said it looks as though the other passenger has stolen our luggage RyanAir then says we are equally guilty!

 

And there it ended. 17 days after my first message I was sent to a link to fill out a form. Of which I got this email through- bearing in mind the luggage had a few items of clothes in it (we opened the luggage to look for contact details of the passenger), a pack os sausages, a box of crackers and one condom (I’m not joking!). Apparently RyanAir have tried to contact the passenger who has already returned to Poland but she is not picking up her phone or replying to emails. So RyanAir were kinf enough to finish the conversation with this email

That’s going to cost £30 to return their luggage to Stanstead who seem totally disinterested in collecting their lost bag. So where do you stand on this? What would you do? We’ve lost our luggage that had clothes, jewellery and personal items and have tried to get assistance from RyanAir who have doen very little and have in our possession a bag that has sausages, crackers and a condom in and they have made no attempt to report their loss. Its possible that they don’t even have our bag and it could be in Stannstead somewhere, but still you’d expect the other passenger to have asked where their bag was?

How would you deal with this?

 


5 Reasons Every Business Should be on Snapchat

April 17th, 2014

Snapchat is the newest social tool that lets you share photos and video, or “snaps,” with the bonus of adding drawings or captions to whatever you record. Here’s the catch: Snaps disappear after a few seconds, and the sender gets to choose how many seconds messages will be visible before they self-destruct. The concept basically blends photo and video texting with the age-old tradition of sending notes with disappearing ink.

What’s the appeal? Less pressure to be perfect than on other platforms such as Facebook, where content is more permanent. It’s a simple way to share simple things, and in a world where every social media lover has to become their own personal public relations guru, Snapchat offers a stress-free way to say — whatever. Here are five reasons your business should utilize the app:

1. People use it, and they’re going to keep using it. Snapchat first caught on among high schoolers, but now college students have checked in to the craze. The app, designed by Stanford students Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy as part of a class project, launched in Apple’s app store in September 2011. By October 2012, the company tallied its billionth snap. The company is estimated to have more than 30 million users as of December 2013, although they’re coy about sharing the actual number.

Scoffers might wrinkle their noses and shrug Snapchat off as another passing phase. But skeptics were momentarily silenced in November 2013 when Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg offered the infant startup $3 billion in cash and was promptly turned down. Whether you’re keyed in to Snapchat or not, Facebook knows Snapchat’s hot, but Snapchat knows it’s even hotter.

2. Prove you’re a “cool” company. If you hadn’t heard of Snapchat before Facebook’s stunning $3 billion offer (or before you started reading this article), you’re not alone. That’s part of what adds to the inherent allure of the app. The number of users is growing exponentially, but it’s still new enough to make those who use it “in the know.”

The Snapchat frontier is still wide open for adaptive marketers who are ready to start exploring. Those who hit the ground running will have the biggest impact, plus the chance to define the ways marketers will use an emerging genre. Can anyone say, “Innovator Award”?

3. You’ve already built the audience on other social platforms. Snapchat is part social hybrid and part revolutionary, but adding it as a marketing platform doesn’t mean you have to reinvent the wheel. After all, what about all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers you worked so hard to collect? Does Snapchat mean those metrics have an expiration date? Not at all. Existing social platforms can remain healthy even as they drive fans and followers to explore a new sharing tool with you.

Incentivize your audience to join you on Snapchat and you’ll not only gain an instant audience on an emerging platform, you’ll find a whole new way to interest them. Offer mobile coupons, the chance to take a sneak peek behind the scenes, and the promise to deliver hot brand news to Snapchatters before anyone else, and fans will follow.

4. Embrace a new wavelength of messaging. Remember when YouTube grew in popularity and politicians began to realize the simpler, less professionally-staged videos were ranking better with audiences than pristinely polished ones? Savvy marketers are realizing the same is true of Snapchat. The app is supposed to be less-than-perfect, and that’s why people love it. The bonus for businesses is that you have the chance to kick your shoes off at the edge of the dance floor and have a little fun.

5. This is the new world of advertising. Traditional radio commercials were zapped by satellite radio. Television ads were nuked when digital video recorders careened on scene. And now, even digital recorders are being outrun by instant streaming. Mute buttons, spam filters, pop-up blockers — all are ways audiences keep slipping through marketer’s fingers.

What if people actually wanted to engage with your brand? What if, instead of ducking behind junk settings and filters, people actually pushed a button of their own free will to watch your brand in action? Snapchat introduces a groundbreaking forum, one where people are interested in what you have to say and offer.

It may still be new, but it represents the new age of advertising.


Why Your Business Should Be on Google+

April 10th, 2014

There are some very compelling arguments in favor of including Google+ in a social media marketing strategy.

Google Plus has a huge user base
With more than 540 million active monthly users, Google Plus sees its number of users increase daily. Google is encouraging you to link your profiles on Google Play and YouTube and with more peopel using these platforms, more people will be using Google+

Make use of Google Hangouts.

With Google Hangouts, free live video conferencing can take place for as many as 10 people. The benefits for a small business are obvious: You can reach out to customers, dealers, vendors and social media contacts at no cost. You can also participate in Hangouts initiated by others and communicate with thought leaders in your niche.

Be cognizant of the Google connection.
Google is at the epicenter of all search engines. While Bing is also a player, Google is still the big daddy. There is sufficient anecdotal evidence to suggest that profiles that do well on Google+ get indexed quicker on Google. Add to that the fact that Google Plus business pages are beginning to show up on search engine results pages, and you have two very strong reasons to work on establishing a presence here.

Take advantage of Google+ reviews.
With Google+ reviews showing up on search results, potential customers might be influenced to choose your business if they come across positive reviews. Therefore, provide great service and proactively solicit reviews on Google+. Nothing beats a favorable reference from one human being to another.

Explore Google+ Ripples.
Google Plus is a feature-rich social media platform; you can leverage Circles, Hangouts, Hangouts on Air, Communities and Ripples. The latter category can be particularly useful for small businesses. It is a data visualization graph that lets you take in at a glance the manner in which your content has been shared.

Are you on Goolge+ or is your business? How do you think it compares to Facebook, Twitter or Linked?


Reskinning Apps- the opportunities to reskin differently

April 4th, 2014

Here’s a blog post I wrote for an app blog which is about to go live and I thought I’d share. It looks at how many indie app developers are reskinning apps with he same old code and having trouble standing out in the app store. Here’s thoughts about a different approach and how reskinning could even help people around you.

Smashing Apps

We’re all in the app reskinning business and hopefully everyone is smashing it! It took me some time to get my head round how it all works and implementing the systems that helped me release quality apps quickly. But as I’m sure many people experienced, I hit some early financial losses when I started which I couldn’t afford and what’s more, I was worried whether the app business would work for me or I would get it right.  It forced me to find a way of making guaranteed income from reskinning before I spent all the money I had to build apps

I’d love this article to be about how I’ve cracked it, instead it’s a couple of thoughts on the opportunities reskinning offers and how I’ve used what I’ve learnt to make alternative revenue. Initially I needed to find a way to cover my costs to reskin my own apps but eventually I realized how reskinning could apply to any new business. Hopefully there’ll be a follow up message on how I’ve nailed it!

The Background

I run a company called SWARMbuzz which helps businesses with their online, social and mobile strategies. I’d been running the business for 3 years when I discovered how to build an app, I love everything mobile so I thought I’d give the app game a go. But I took a massive early hit; I made some poor decisions on my first app, severely overspent and finally got nailed by the developer. It was a disaster. But I tried again and whilst I’d learnt a few lessons, I still made mistakes and made a loss, poor developers and my own inexperience were costing me. By my third attempt I had an app released which saw some good early downloads but it would have needed to be a smash hit to recover expenditure on 3 apps, 2 of which didn’t even get released!

I couldn’t afford to keep losing money but I wanted to continue having a go at building apps as I believed it was a great market and I enjoyed it. I needed to find a way to cover my early losses and get some quick income to fund further projects. I continued to release some small games which were making money but my P&L sheets weren’t looking very healthy and I needed to do something about it

 

How can I play the reskinning game differently?

Initially I thought that the reskinning game was a secret I should keep. As I’d spent the time and money learning only I should know about it. But this didn’t last, partly because I think it’s better to share knowledge and secondly I’m not very good at keeping secrets! The more people I told, friends and clients, the more they were interested and saw the sense in it. Until a friend who owns a successful company asked me to produce monthly games for his business targeting families. He knew they were reskinned apps and he was happy they were, I wasn’t cheating him, I was helping him. He’d been producing apps for his other companies paying tens of thousands of dollars but I was telling him I could produce apps at a fraction of the cost and quicker, he was naturally very happy and I now produce small games for him each month. You may ask why I wouldn’t just produce these games for myself but in the early days the money I charged allowed me to recover my loses, I liked working with his company and we’re about to start new mobile businesses together because it has worked so well

When we think reskinning we think of games immediately because that’s what we’ve seen our teachers do and what we’ve read most about. But I’ve come to realize that the opportunities are truly endless, so far I’ve found a source code that has suited all of my crazy ideas! As an example, my family run a charity to help educate children less fortunate in India and Africa so I decided I could take a wallpaper source code I owned and use it to build a charity app. I wanted to offer it to other charities so I contacted local charities to show them the app I’d built and how I could do the same for them. I covered my costs and time and whilst it made a little money, it was the chance to help charities reach a mobile audience and acquire donations via an app which was all for good causes.

Where are these opportunities?

Networking networking networking! Speak to new people on social media, forums and friends at the bar!. Reach out to new people and speak to your friends to share your app knowledge because mobile is still very new to many people. I made a point of listing the people I knew who ran a business which could best benefit from apps. I sent them an email and just asked if we could meet for a chat. All of them agreed and those who understood mobile liked apps and they loved reskinning because quite frankly, it makes sense! Keep in contact with the people you know who own or work in a small business with a simple email or text message; majority of your business will come through people you already know.

To help my online business I took out a $1500 loan from my family and joined a networking group which could be hard work as it started at 6.30am once a week, but it gave me the chance to meet local businesses and talk about the online and mobile world. Remember we’re tech ninjas, there are a lot of people, even young people, who don’t understand the mobile game and how it’s conquering everything! When I decided to offer reskinning commercially I arranged meetings with fellow members and we discussed how I thought apps could help them. Over the course of my two years with the group I did $25000 in business (a mixture of mobile, social and app work) so I was thankful the investment was worthwhile.

It’s not as though my time is now filled with building other people’s apps, I still have plenty of time to build my own. But it brought in some early money to help cover my mistakes. What I’ve enjoyed the most is being able to help companies build a low cost app that is equally effective as one that would’ve cost far more money. It also started conversations with successful business owners who now want to build other mobile businesses together.

The fighting talk

What’s cool about all of this is that I’ve never written a line of code, I can’t design an icon or implement a chart boost SDK. That’s not what I do, a property developer doesn’t build the walls, they try to spot the opportunity and that’s what I enjoy the most; now and again it pays off!

It might not be your bag getting involved in other businesses; personally it’s what I love to do. If you’re in reskinning just as a passive income then you can still consider how your app flipping knowledge could pay for your first app, your next app or a big app you’ve been dreaming of releasing. You could reskin an app for your local restaurant or even your or your kid’s school and then multiple schools in your area. Charge whatever you’re comfortable with or enough to pay for your next app. Or simply find fun opportunities to utilize your app reskinning knowledge.

How cool would it be to build fun apps, extraordinary businesses and potentially help others, with the app reskinning lessons we’ve been taught, there’s no reason why we can’t!

Good luck to you all!

Get in contact:
Twitter: owhittle

 


Why YouTube is important to your business

March 14th, 2014

We all know YouTube, we enjoy watching the funny videos but with all the viweing time, how can we use videos to help our business? It’s simple to make a video but many people worry that a video needs to be professional and expensive before peopel can view it. This doesn’t need to be the case, in fact it’s more likely to get views if it’s fun and engaging

Check out the Dollar Shave Club Video which proppeled the company intot the public eye

  • More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
  • Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that’s almost an hour for every person on Earth
  • 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
  • 80% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
  • YouTube is localised in 61 countries and across 61 languages
  • According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable network

(YouTube Stats)

 

Grab and camera and make a simple video which you can then edit on iMovie. Learn what works and employ the same tactics when you make a video for your business.

Eloqua found that video is a cutomers preffered content over text (SOURCE) because a voice conveys rich information and peopel prefer to engage with the emotions of a face.
One great example I love is Casey Neistat who makes  exceptional commercial videos with a fun engaging twist. These are the type of videos we can all make with a bit of practice and interestingly, Casey style has attracted millions of views for Nike, Mercedes and the Walter Mitty film.

Make a video and make it fun. Display the persoanlity of your business and show people why they should work with you.

Good luck!


Why Use a Hashtag?

March 6th, 2014

Are you using hashtags in your social media campaigns?

Why Use a Hashtag?

Hashtags make it easier for people to find and follow discussions about brands, events and promotions. They also let brands track the performance of promotions across social media.

Hashtags can determine how easily you can target and track a campaign. You’ve probably seen many businesses use generic hashtags like #food or #chocolate. While these will get your update into a large conversation, using such broad hashtags is wasting your time.

Can you imagine how many posts (tweets or otherwise) contain #chocolate every minute? Managing the hashtag would be a nightmare. You’d spend weeks sorting through every instance of the hashtag to determine which mentions apply to you.

It’s worth the effort (and your sanity) to come up with a unique hashtag that fits with your particular campaign.

A good example is Subway’s #januANY campaign. Their hashtag has two key components: it’s distinctive enough to track easily and it’s simple for fans to remember.

From Google+ and Facebook to Pinterest and LinkedIn, hashtags are everywhere these days.

With the right tools, hashtags make it easier for brands to manage and maintain social media campaigns.

Tools above can help you launch, track and analyze hashtags across social networks. You can see what’s working and what’s not, how big your reach is and even how you compare to your competition. Pretty handy!

What do you think? What do you use to keep track of your hashtags? How have they worked for you? Share your experiences and opinions in the comments below.


10 Useful Social Networking Statistics for 2014

February 28th, 2014

How are we using the leading social networks in 2014?

  • Pinterest (21%) is now more popular than Twitter (18%) among Internet users.
  • Women are four times more likely to be Pinterest users than men.
  • Facebook is ageing. 45% of Internet users aged 65+ use Facebook.
  • Pinterest attracts older people. Twitter and Instagram are still youth dominated networks, but 23% of Internet users aged 50+ use Pinterest.
  • Contrary to popular belief, most people aren’t using multiple social networks. Over 50% of Internet users either don’t use any social networks, or use just one (i.e. Facebook).
  • Facebook and Instagram users are the most engaged. Around 60% of their users sign in every day (compared to 46% of Twitter users)
  • Almost all social networkers use Facebook. In fact, over 80% of ‘other’ social network users also use Facebook.
  • Instagrammers also use Twitter. There is a 50% crossover between the networks.
  • Pinterest and LinkedIn are stand-alone networks. There is much less crossover usage with other networks (except Facebook).
  • Pinterest and LinkedIn users are wealthier than the other networks with a high percentage earning over $75000 PA.

How does this impact how you use social media for your business?

 


WhatsApp? 10 other things Facebook could have bought with $19 billion

February 21st, 2014

Facebook’s acquisition WhatsApp for $19 billion is one of the largest tech deals in history. It dwarfs Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 — and even that was considered an astonishing number.

Since $19 billion is a sum most of us can hardly comprehend (and because it’s fun to imagine), we came up with a list of other things Mark Zuckerberg and his team could have purchased for $19 billion.

  • Mark Zuckerberg and crew could’ve built four new World Trade Center skyscrapers, at a cost of $3.94 billion each.
  • In December 2013, the UN asked for a record-breaking $13 billion for worldwide humanitarian relief operations in 2014, half of which will aid Syria. The purchase price of WhatsApp could’ve paid for all of that and more.
  • Mark Zuckerberg’s favorite food is the bacon-wrapped hot dog. Some California vendors sell these for $1.50 each, meaning Facebook could’ve bought enough to feed Mark Zuckerberg one hot dog every second for the next 400 years. ‘ve paid for all of that and more.
  • Facebook’s top executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, David Ebersman, and Mike Schroepfer would look pretty stylish cruising the San Francisco Bay in four Nimitz-class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers ($4.5 billion each)
  • Typhoon Haiyan devastated the Philippines and killed more than 5,000 people. The recovery may cost $6 billion — less than one-third of what Facebook paid for WhatsApp.
  • 76,000 trips to space on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic

What would you do if you had that kind of money?


Did Twitter help Flappy Bird’s success?

February 14th, 2014

Love flappy bird or hate flappy bird…you’ve probably played it.

But where did this game coem from? The maddening free app seemed to appear out of nowhere three weeks ago. It’s a great lesson on how simplicity in design, code and even a simple “Share” button may help an app go viral or at least continue to generate buzz

A Focus On Sharing
One of the key things about the game is that, until recently, it made sharing very simple. After every crash (and you crash a lot) you would get the options to play again or share their score

Rise & Fall Of #Flapflap On Twitter
Using the #flapflap hashtag, it’s pretty easy to see just how effective that button was to spread the viral news of the game. Consider this chart from Topsy. The big drop on Feb. 7 corresponds to when the iOS version of the app was updated,it strangely dropped the share button:

This next chart shows how often links to the iOS version of the app were shared on Twitter, with the #flapflap tweets also listed below. You can see that the links far eclipse the hashtag usage, and the viral growth is less pronounced. Perhaps there’s some other reason why the links don’t show the viral spike that the hashtag does.

However, this next chart shows that as of January 1, Flappy Bird was ranked 313 in Apple’s app store. It started climbing a bit, leveled out, then climbed again to break the top 100 on January 8. By January 9, it was in the top 30. January 10 saw it hit the top 10. It took the number one spot on January 17.

That puts Flappy Bird as a viral success before the hashtag sharing started on Twitter. So, in the end, the sharing button just added to the buzz after the success was already happening in the app stores for other reasons.

Or quite simply the pure simplicity and nostalgia of the app was the cause of the frenxy. Importantly, it has to be playable and likeable for people to share the app, in most cases Twitter and social media was used as the channel to vent frustartion

Do you have your own theories on what contributed to Flappy Bird’s success?


 
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