Twitter to Launch Subscription Service Super Follows, Aims to Double Revenue by 2023

Social-media company detailed its goals at an event for analysts, its first in several years

By Sarah E. Needleman
Updated Feb. 25, 2021 3:32 pm ET

Twitter Inc. TWTR +3.87% plans to introduce a subscription service for content creators and said it would explore tipping, as it looks to double its annual revenue and accelerate user growth over the next few years.

The social-media company on Thursday said the subscription initiative, called Super Follows, will give people an opportunity to receive payments for their content. Twitter expects it to appeal to so-called influencers with large internet followings and plans to launch it this year.

Twitter executives didn’t say when it would roll out tipping or share details on how it will work. The company also didn’t disclose how much of a percentage it would take from sales for that feature or Super Follows.

Dantley Davis, Twitter’s head of design and research, said that “an audience-funded model where subscribers can directly fund the content that they value most is a durable incentive model that aligns interests of creators and consumers.”

Read more.

Great Recode Article on How Jeff Bezos Keeps Amazon Fresh, Nimble and Relevant

This is the Jeff Bezos playbook for preventing Amazon’s demise

It’s Day 1 forever because Day 2 is death.

BY JASON DEL REY@DELREY APR 12, 2017, 5:28PM EDT

Once a year, in his letter to Amazon shareholders, Jeff Bezos gives us all a glimpse into his business world view and management philosophy. This year’s version did not disappoint.

In it, Bezos explains how he thinks about preventing Amazon from slipping into “stasis,” “irrelevance” or “painful decline … followed by death.”

Some of the keys, he outlines, include skepticism around “proxies,” such as market research as a proxy for customers; the willingness to jump on powerful, external trends; and the openness to “disagree and commit” — that is, to fully support decisions you don’t necessarily agree with after a thorough discussion in which all sides are heard.

But the letter is good enough that it deserves a full read. It’s pasted below.

2016 Letter to Shareholders

April 12, 2017

“Jeff, what does Day 2 look like?”

That’s a question I just got at our most recent all-hands meeting. I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic.

“Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.”

To be sure, this kind of decline would happen in extreme slow motion. An established company might harvest Day 2 for decades, but the final result would still come.

I’m interested in the question, how do you fend off Day 2? What are the techniques and tactics? How do you keep the vitality of Day 1, even inside a large organization?

Such a question can’t have a simple answer. There will be many elements, multiple paths, and many traps. I don’t know the whole answer, but I may know bits of it. Here’s a starter pack of essentials for Day 1 defense: customer obsession, a skeptical view of proxies, the eager adoption of external trends, and high-velocity decision making.

True Customer Obsession

There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Why? There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it, and I could give you many such examples.

Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight. A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.

Resist Proxies

As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.

A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing. It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us? In a Day 2 company, you might find it’s the second.

Another example: market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers – something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products. “Fifty-five percent of beta testers report being satisfied with this feature. That is up from 47% in the first survey.” That’s hard to interpret and could unintentionally mislead.

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you’ll find on surveys. They live with the design.

I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.

Embrace External Trends

The outside world can push you into Day 2 if you won’t or can’t embrace powerful trends quickly. If you fight them, you’re probably fighting the future. Embrace them and you have a tailwind.

These big trends are not that hard to spot (they get talked and written about a lot), but they can be strangely hard for large organizations to embrace. We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.

At Amazon, we’ve been engaged in the practical application of machine learning for many years now. Some of this work is highly visible: our autonomous Prime Air delivery drones; the Amazon Go convenience store that uses machine vision to eliminate checkout lines; and Alexa, our cloud-based AI assistant. (We still struggle to keep Echo in stock, despite our best efforts. A high-quality problem, but a problem. We’re working on it.)

But much of what we do with machine learning happens beneath the surface. Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more. Though less visible, much of the impact of machine learning will be of this type – quietly but meaningfully improving core operations.

Inside AWS, we’re excited to lower the costs and barriers to machine learning and AI so organizations of all sizes can take advantage of these advanced techniques.

Using our pre-packaged versions of popular deep learning frameworks running on P2 compute instances (optimized for this workload), customers are already developing powerful systems ranging everywhere from early disease detection to increasing crop yields. And we’ve also made Amazon’s higher level services available in a convenient form. Amazon Lex (what’s inside Alexa), Amazon Polly, and Amazon Rekognition remove the heavy lifting from natural language understanding, speech generation, and image analysis. They can be accessed with simple API calls – no machine learning expertise required. Watch this space. Much more to come.

High-Velocity Decision Making

Day 2 companies make high-quality decisions, but they make high-quality decisions slowly. To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations. The senior team at Amazon is determined to keep our decision-making velocity high. Speed matters in business – plus a high-velocity decision making environment is more fun too. We don’t know all the answers, but here are some thoughts.

First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process. Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong? I wrote about this in more detail in last year’s letter.

Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes.

This isn’t one way. If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities. They had a completely different opinion and wanted to go ahead. I wrote back right away with “I disagree and commit and hope it becomes the most watched thing we’ve ever made.” Consider how much slower this decision cycle would have been if the team had actually had to convince me rather than simply get my commitment.

Note what this example is not: it’s not me thinking to myself “well, these guys are wrong and missing the point, but this isn’t worth me chasing.” It’s a genuine disagreement of opinion, a candid expression of my view, a chance for the team to weigh my view, and a quick, sincere commitment to go their way. And given that this team has already brought home 11 Emmys, 6 Golden Globes, and 3 Oscars, I’m just glad they let me in the room at all!

Fourth, recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately. Sometimes teams have different objectives and fundamentally different views. They are not aligned. No amount of discussion, no number of meetings will resolve that deep misalignment. Without escalation, the default dispute resolution mechanism for this scenario is exhaustion. Whoever has more stamina carries the decision.

I’ve seen many examples of sincere misalignment at Amazon over the years. When we decided to invite third party sellers to compete directly against us on our own product detail pages – that was a big one. Many smart, well-intentioned Amazonians were simply not at all aligned with the direction. The big decision set up hundreds of smaller decisions, many of which needed to be escalated to the senior team.

“You’ve worn me down” is an awful decision-making process. It’s slow and de-energizing. Go for quick escalation instead – it’s better.

So, have you settled only for decision quality, or are you mindful of decision velocity too? Are the world’s trends tailwinds for you? Are you falling prey to proxies, or do they serve you? And most important of all, are you delighting customers? We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.

A huge thank you to each and every customer for allowing us to serve you, to our shareowners for your support, and to Amazonians everywhere for your hard work, your ingenuity, and your passion.

As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. It remains Day 1.

Sincerely,

Jeff

Original Article:  https://www.recode.net/2017/4/12/15274220/jeff-bezos-amazon-shareholders-letter-day-2-disagree-and-commit

The Evolving Digital Landscape

 

 

Image courtesy of Leanport Software Pvt Ltd

The Evolving Digital Landscape – 2016
by Steven Copertino

The Digital Landscape continues to evolve in both ways we could have predicted and ways we could never have imagined just several years ago. Below is a listing of things that strike me as particularly relevant and interesting. What are your thoughts?

Snapchat Dominates At SXSW In 2016

• Snapchat did not have a presence at SXSW, nor did they do any advertising there
• Snapchat generated 192 million impressions on Twitter from SXSW – more than any other brand (3/6 – 3/16)
• It’s a messaging app created in 2009 by Students at Stanford University. By early 2016, users were sending      7 billion photos and videos PER DAY – more than tripling between June and Nov of 2015 alone. (FB 8 bill/day)
• The messages self-destruct after 10 seconds – images, videos or text. You can create a story that lasts for 24 hours
• Bought by Facebook for $20 billion in 2014 – Snahchat has over 100 million active users per day
• Brands creating unique content for Snapchat – NatGeo, CNN, MTV, Buzz Feed, Comedy Central, WSJ, Food Network, ESPN, People, Cosmo, Mashable and many others…

“Desktop” Matters Less and Less

• No secret that desktop users have been flocking to mobile in droves
• But only this year did mobile traffic finally overtake desktop traffic
• Growth hasn’t slowed. In fact, some companies are preparing for desktop to stop mattering altogether
• That means it’s more important than ever to have a mobile component to your digital strategy

Video Is Becoming The New Normal

• For a while, written content dominated the digital landscape, but videos are taking over – 20% of digital budget in 2016 vs 17.7% in 2015 (display, search and social higher but video is pulling $ from them)
• Thanks to wider availability of lightning-fast internet (and smaller screens that favor video over text), video content is becoming preferred and more popular among publishers
• Social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are auto-playing videos in news feeds and rewarding video contributors
• Google is considering allowing video ads in its SERPs
• If you don’t already have a video content strategy, it’s time to get one. (don’t forget imagery, data visualizations, illustrations as well)

Omni-channel Is More Important Than Ever

• Studies show that 90% or more of consumers’ interactions with a brand employ more than one device/channel
• For example, a customer might search for a business/product/service with a smartphone and then continue using a laptop or by calling or visiting in person
• It’s very important for marketers to work collaboratively to study ALL channel interactions and customer behaviors and to adjust accordingly – data is key

The Humanization Of Digital

• Social media started this trend years ago by showing brands they no longer control the conversation nor the definition of their brand
• There is a movement towards more “human communication” – content with warmth and humor instead of corporate buzzwords, and making communication more authentic through humor, visuals and storytelling.
• It’s the humanization of digital to make brands feel more real and differentiated
• UGC is a great way to help warm up your digital presence – customer blog posts, customer ratings & reviews, etc. – search engines love UGC!  

 Digital Marketing Needs To Be Even More Data Driven

• This is nothing new, but it is. The expectation is for real-time changes based on data and for a personalized experience
• Digital marketing is both an art and a science
• Successful marketing comes from collecting, analyzing and using data about when and where customers spend their time
• In short, data is behavior. Learning from this behavior drives creative messaging and strategic campaigns
• Tracking behavior and tapping into the emotional connection through messaging, ads, social, and design makes all the difference in the digital space
• Content personalization is a consumer expectation

Social Engagement Is Key

• There’s a lot to be learned from your audience online
• You’ll get honest feedback on campaigns and messaging, for one
• Incorporating your fans’ interpretation and opinion of your brand can get you both fresh content and loyal fans
• Create incentive for fans to write, tweet, take photos, share videos, etc
• Reward them for their participation and loyalty by giving them the spotlight in your campaign.
• Think holistic strategy, rather than specific tactics. Each social channel, blog post, email, weblink must have a purpose and drive towards something
• Never post simply to post
• Without engagement or traffic, those posts are a waste of time and money

Social Is Starting To Mean Much More Than “Social”

• Social media apps change a little more every year, but for the most part, those changes have been made to introduce new kinds of social interactions or simplify old ones
• Now, social apps are moving in non-social directions; for example, Pinterest is leading a new trend of social/e-commerce hybrid apps, which offer social functionality combined with purchasable items, and Facebook is developing its own digital assistant

Feel free to share your thoughts.

Ad Age’s Digital Predictions 2016

From the Demise of Texting to the Next Phase of Facebook Messenger

Facebook’s Messenger Opens for Business
Facebook’s chat app is poised to become the social network’s next big revenue stream. Originally an instant-messaging service, Messenger was spun off into its own app in 2014. And after a series of announcements, now it’s ready to start up its own business. Last year Messenger began testing ways for businesses to use the service as a customer support line and for people to use it as an artificially intelligent assistant that can do things like order an Uber car. As more people use Messenger to communicate with businesses, expect Facebook to find a way to charge companies for the privilege, as it’s done with its own social network. –Tim Peterson

The Death of Texting
Emojis ruled in 2015. But GIFs, those quick looping videos or animations, are the next messaging app trend. In Asia, GIFs have been huge on apps like WeChat and Line. The appeal is obvious: Why use a standard yellow smiley face when you could send someone a three-second cat video? The fancier, funnier cousins of emojis are familiar from sites like Tumblr, but they’re about to get much more mainstream in Western markets, since Facebook finally embraced them. Facebook Messenger integrated a GIF-finder, and some brands have been using them on Facebook too. Between emojis and GIFs, who really needs text anymore? –Angela Doland

Headhunters Look to China
Given the explosion of online shopping in China and how crucial that market is, more multinationals will tap executives with experience there to oversee their worldwide e-commerce strategy. Case in point: Mars recently promoted its China general manager, Clarence Mak, to chief customer officer and global e-commerce leader. Mondelez International’s Cindy Chen, global head of e-commerce, also has worked in China. –Angela Doland

Refined Virtual Reality
This year will deliver more sophisticated virtual reality experiences, refined storytelling and increased layers of interactivity, given the consumer arrival of the Oculus headset and a variety of big deals in the space. Oculus partnered with premier VR storytellers Felix & Paul Studios to develop long-form, narrative content. Disneymade a $65 million investment in Jaunt VR. And 20th Century Fox is diving in as well, unveiling “The Martian Experience,” based on the blockbuster movie, at its Fox Innovation Lab during the Consumer Electronics Show.–Ann-Christine Diaz

2016 Won’t Be 360-Degree Video’s Breakout Year
There are plenty of reasons to believe 2016 will be the year that 360-degree videos hit the mainstream. Two of the biggest digital video services, Google‘s YouTube and Facebook, already support the format that lets people swivel their viewpoint all the way around a scene. And Facebook’s Oculus VR has finally begun selling the long-awaited consumer version of its virtual-reality headset that, like Samsung‘s Gear VR and Google Cardboard that are already in the market, is more tailored to 360-degree video viewing than a smartphone.

But while the ways to watch 360-degree videos have grown, there’s still the question of what people will watch. The New York Times, Vice and Disney are among the content companies already producing 360-degree videos, but too many of the 360-degree videos currently available offer beautiful documentary-style landscape shots yet lack a clear story or characters that can entice mainstream audiences and offset the format’s learning curve. If people are to tune in to 360-degree videos consistently, those videos must survive the novelty of the form; their content needs to rival, if not surpass, what people could watch normally. And for that to happen, filmmakers need to experiment with the form. That will likely require more time than 2016 holds. –Tim Peterson

Read the Full Article:  http://adage.com/article/digital/ad-age-s-digital-predictions-2016/302095/

2015 Predictions for CMOs and Digital Marketing

Gil Press Contributor

In 2015, digital marketing budgets will increase by 8%, according to a recent Gartner’s CMO Spend Report, a survey of 315 marketing decision makers representing organizations with more than $500 million in annual revenue.

Customer experience is the top innovation project for 2015, continuing its role as the top priority for marketing investment in 2014. The survey also found that

• In 79% of companies, marketing has a budget for capital expenditures — primarily, for infrastructure and software
• Marketers are managing a P&L and generating revenue from digital advertising, digital commerce and sale of data
• 68% of organizations have a separate digital marketing budget — it averages a quarter of the total marketing budget
• Two-thirds of companies are funding digital marketing via reinvestment of existing marketing budgets

Earlier this year, IBM found in its worldwide survey of CMOs that CEOs increasingly call on them for strategic input. Furthermore, the CMO now comes second only to the CFO in terms of the influence he or she exerts on the CEO. The survey also found, however, that very few CMOs have made much progress in building a robust digital marketing capability: Only 20%, for example, have set up social networks for the purpose of engaging with customers, and the percentage of CMOs who have integrated their company’s interactions with customers across different channels, installed analytical programs to mine customer data and created digitally enabled supply chains to respond rapidly to changes in customer demand is even smaller. Almost all CMOs, 82% of survey respondents, felt underprepared to deal with the explosion of data.

With this as a background, here’s a summary of what digital marketing and the CMO will look like in 2015, based on observations by Scott Brinker, a leading commentator on marketing technology, Forrester, TopRank online marketing blog, Wheelhouse Advisors, and Brian Solis.

CMOs will take charge of focusing their companies on the customer

CMOs and their marketing teams will become the primary driver behind customer-centric company growth. Leveraging their knowledge of the customer and the competitive landscape, CMOs will advise and council CEOs on how to win, serve, and retain customers to grow the business. They will also lead organizational changes and new collaboration initiatives aimed at unifying all customer engagement activities across the enterprise.

CMOs will poach IT staff to help them manage a rapidly expanding digital marketing landscape

The number of digital marketing tools will grow in 2015 with new startups and large, established tech companies confusing even more that CMO with their numerous offerings. To help manage this embarrassment of riches and move their companies further on their digital marketing journey, CMOs will be poaching IT staff looking for new challenges and better salaries.

CMOs should expect heavy rains from proliferating digital marketing clouds

Digital marketing tools will be increasingly offered as a cloud-based solution (“marketing-as-a-service”) rather than licensed software. Cloud-based solutions will continue to expand their ecosystems, with many small software developers adding apps to existing cloud-based digital marketing platforms.

CMOs will invest in new digital marketing hot areas

Content marketing and predictive analytics will continue to be hot areas of interest and investment for CMOs, but they will be joined in 2015 by sales enablement, post-sale customer marketing, marketing finance, marketing talent management, and new tools based on the Internet of Things, allowing for the integration of offline and online experiences.

CMOs will become brand publishers

CMOs in 2015 will act as heads of a publishing house, overseeing the entire spectrum of brand engagement, increasing the quality of their output, and improving the perceived value of digital interactions with customers and prospects.

Read The Complete Article & Related News on Forbes.com

PlayStation Vue Is Cloud-Based TV Service For PS3, PS4; No Cable Required

Image credit: Polygon

New service will let you watch live TV and on-demand content without a cable or satellite subscription.

by Eddie Makuch on November 13, 2014

PlayStation maker Sony has announced an all new, cloud-based TV service called PlayStation Vue. The platform, which lets you access live TV and on-demand content without a cable or satellite subscription, is coming to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. A beta will begin later this month.

Sony isn’t holding back in boasting about Vue, saying the service “reinvents” the traditional TV experience. The announcement came with a statement from Sony Computer Entertainment CEO Andrew House, who laid out his vision for Vue.

“Everyday TV is about to become extraordinary with our new cloud-based TV service, PlayStationVue,” House said. “Today’s announcement builds on the historic success of PlayStation 4 and demonstrates what our company is capable of when we embrace disruption and stay true to gamers.”

Vue has a “powerful” user interface, Sony says, which delivers “unprecedented personalization and simplicity.” The service also features recommendation algorithms, which will clue you in on movies and shows based on your previous viewing habits and trending content. You can also use Vue’s “Explore” function to view the entire catalog of on-demand content, filtered by program, genre, ratings, and popularity, among other things.

Sony adds that Vue will help you catch up on live TV programming you might have missed, as the service will make available the past three days of popular shows without requiring you to schedule recordings. You can also save shows to the cloud, where they will stay for a period of 28 times.

As part of the initial invite-only beta (there’s no indication yet as to how you can get in), Vue will offer around 75 channels per market. Such a service will likely live or die based on its network partners, and Vue has many of the big names, including GameSpot parent company CBS and others.

Vue’s current network partners, with descriptions courtesy of Sony, are listed below–more will be announced later.

• CBS: At launch, PlayStation Vue will offer the live linear signal from CBS Television Network’s owned-and-operated TV stations in select leading markets in addition to on-demand prime-time programming.
• Discovery Communications: Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, Investigation Discovery, Science, OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network, Discovery Family Channel, and 11 more brands.
• Fox: Fox Networks Group’s portfolio of national entertainment programming services, including–FX, FXX, FXM, National Geographic Channel, and Nat Geo WILD. Additionally FOX Sports’ national and regional programming services–FOX Sports 1, FOX Sports 2, BTN, Fox’s regional sports networks, including YES Network and Prime Ticket. The agreement also covers Fox’s owned and operated television stations.
• NBCUniversal: All local offerings from NBC, Telemundo and regional sports networks as well as Bravo, CNBC, E!, NBCSN, Oxygen, Sprout, Syfy, USA Network, and more.
• Scripps Networks Interactive: HGTV, Food Network, Travel Channel, DIY Network, and Cooking Channel.
• Viacom: BET, CMT, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, PALLADIA, Spike, VH1 and more.

Pricing for Vue was not announced today, though Sony says Vue will “change the rules” for how people pay for subscription TV. The company promises “fair and competitive” pricing that’s transparent and doesn’t have hidden fees or charges. Vue subscriptions will be offered on a month-to-month basis, so you won’t be locked in for an extended period of time. It also doesn’t require any equipment or installation charges, since all you need is Internet access and a PS3 or PS4.

The Vue beta will begin in November for select PS3 and PS4 owners. A wider rollout is planned for later, starting in New York and followed by Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. Vue will later be available for iPad, as well as more Sony and non-Sony devices.

“In my opinion, we will continue to see the number of Over The Top (OTT) video options continue to grow. This is a wonderful thing for consumers, but it threatens one of the core revenue streams of companies like Time Warner Cable, Comcast (recently bought Time Warner Cable) Verizon FIOS, AT&T, DISH, DirecTV and other “traditional”  video service providers. By the time most Millennials reach their 30s and 40s, the way video is consumed will have changed completely, and so will the revenue models.”
– Steve Copertino, Former Cable Industry Executive

View full article on GameSpot

Toms Founder: 3 Killer Advantages of Social Impact Businesses BY JILL KRASNY @JILLKRASNY

Blake Mycoskie explains why giving back doesn’t just feel good–it’s really good for business.

If you told Blake Mycoskie 10 years ago he would become a world-famous entrepreneur known for selling and giving away shoes, he probably would have laughed in your face. But after a life-changing trip to Argentina, the Texan realized the value of helping others. When he went on to launch Toms Shoes out of his Venice, California, apartment, he knew he was doing it for the right reasons and not just for money. “Giving doesn’t just feel good,” Mycoskie told an audience of entrepreneurs at the World Business Forum on Wednesday, “it’s actually really good for business, and there’s nothing wrong with that.” Here are three reasons why.

Customers Become Marketers

“I recognized very early on that when you incorporate a purpose beyond profit in your business, your customers will become your biggest marketers,” said Mycoskie. Take the time he was in JFK airport and spotted a woman in Tabasco red Toms. He decided to perform a little experiment and asked what she was wearing. “Toms Shoes!” she exclaimed. This response was enough on its own, but what she said next was astounding. “No, I don’t think you understand,” she went on. “This is the most amazing company in the world. When I bought a pair, they gave a pair to a child. “Turns out, the woman had watched every video of Mycoskie giving away pairs of shoes on YouTube. “She wasn’t a customer,” he said, “she was an evangelist for what we were doing.”

You Attract–and Retain–Amazing Talent

“When you create a purpose that is something more than just profit, you will attract and retain amazing talent,” he added. “Plus, it is an incredible way to diffuse all the petty office politics that happen.” The reason? “People bring their gratitude into the office.” If there’s an argument, they’ll quickly realize both sides are working toward the same goal and drop it.

Others Want to Help

When you run a socially-minded business, others will want to help you out, McCoskie continued. “We had so many partners” over the years. When Toms was less than a year old, American fashion mogul Andrew Rosen allowed them to use his Theory store windows to tell the Toms story. And Ralph Lauren offered to design some pairs for his Rugby stores, which helped them break into fashion. “These people partner with us not because they love our business,” McCoskie said. “They see they can connect to their customers in a new way. More people want to help you out and be part of it.”

View Full Article

IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

LAST UPDATED: OCT 8, 2014

JILL KRASNY | Staff Writer

Jill Krasny is a staff writer for Inc. magazine, where she covers the intersection of entertainment and startups. Prior to Inc., she was a writer for MTV and Esquire and an editor at TheStreet. She is a graduate of the University of Southern California with a degree in communication. She lives in New York City.

The Internet of Things Is the Hackers’ New Playground

July 29, 2014, 5:49 AM PDT By Arik Hesseldahl

Excited about the promise of the shiny new Internet of Things? Good. Because hackers are too. Or at least they should be, according to a study by computing giant Hewlett-Packard.

The company’s Fortinet network security unit conducted an analysis of the 10 most popular consumer Internet things on the market and found 250 different security vulnerabilities per product for an average of 25 each. Unfortunately HP doesn’t identify each product but does describe them in broad brush-strokes: They were from the manufacturers of “TVs, webcams, home thermostats, remote power outlets, sprinkler controllers, hubs for controlling multiple devices, door locks, home alarms, scales and garage door openers.”

As a basic rule, these devices often run stripped down versions of the Linux operating system, and so will have many of the same basic security concerns that you might expect to be in place on a server or other computer running Linux. The problem is, the people building them aren’t going to the effort to secure them the way they would a more traditional computer.

What’s happening says Mike Armistead, VP and general manager of HP’s Fortify unit, is that manufacturers are rushing to get their products on the market without doing the harder work of locking their devices down against the most basic kinds of attacks.

Magnifying the potential for the problem is the fact that once one device is compromised, overlapping vulnerabilities can lead an attack from one to the other. If that seems like alarmist paranoia, remember that one of the most damaging hacking attacks in history, the Target breach, in which information on more than 70 million people was compromised, was carried out by way of an attack on a system used to manage and maintain the heating and ventilation system in the company’s stores.

Read the full article on RE/CODE

Developer program makes Nest a focal point for the smart home

by Rich Brown  @rh_brown  June 23, 2014 9:00 PM PDT

Nest’s promised developer program is now live, bringing together connected features from Mercedes-Benz, Whirlpool, and Logitech to the company’s smart thermostats and smoke detectors.

Nine months after announcing a plan to let third-party products integrate with its line of popularLearning Thermostats and connected smoke detectors, Nest Labs’ Developer Program has announced an impressive first set of partnerships.

The inaugural group of supported third party products will all come bearing a “Works with Nest” indicator. The roster includes well-known firms like Mercedes-Benz, Whirlpool, and Nest’s parent, Google, as well as less established companies such as smart LED bulb-maker LIFX, and IFTTT, makers of the self-named connectivity software that can automate behavior between various Internet services and devices.

According to Nest Labs senior product manager Greg Hu, the company’s goal is to keep the interactions between his company’s products and those in the Works with Nest program simple. Rather than exposing the full breadth of options to program your Nest Learning Thermostat, a supporting Mercedes will only trigger home and away behavior in your thermostat based on the car‘s proximity to your home.

Read the rest of this article on CNET

 

Woman drops cell phone in toilet, two die in rescue attempt

In China, a woman’s husband and her mother-in-law are overcome by the stench of a cesspit, all because a brand-new phone was feared lost.

by Chris Matyszczyk  @ChrisMatyszczyk  June 8, 2014 4:00 PM PDT

“It’s only a phone,” is an argument that is constantly lost on those who fear they’ve lost their phones.

In the latest tragic incident, a woman in Xinxiang city, Henan, China dropped her phone when she went to an open-pit toilet.

It fell into a cesspit.

The phone was brand new. As the South China Morning Post reports, it cost 2,000 yuan (around $320).

First her husband jumped in. He was overcome by the fumes. His mother also jumped in. When she encountered breathing difficulties, the woman’s whose phone it was jumped in too.

The waste was reportedly only knee-deep. However, despite rescue attempts by neighbors, both the woman’s husband and his mother died.

The tragedy unfolded in five minutes.

Read the full article on CNET.com

B2B Approach To Social Media

B2B Approach To Social Media (click here)

 

Vysk QS1 Case Encrypts Phone Calls Against Hackers, Spies

April 24, 2014, 4:04 AM PDT By Bonnie Cha

Smartphones, just like computers, are vulnerable to hackers, who target mobile devices with malicious software to access your personal information. There are security apps that can help prevent this, but one San Antonio-based startup thinks it has a better solution.

Today, Vysk Communications introduced the QS1, a protective smartphone case that the company claims makes it virtually impossible for others to eavesdrop on and capture phone conversations and also encrypts text messages and photos. It does so by incorporating a proprietary encryption processor and its own microphone into the case. The Vysk QS1 also has two mechanical camera shutters for blocking your phone’s front and back camera.

With the case on, you can activate one of two privacy modes: Private Call Mode and Lockdown Mode.

Private Call Mode requires a $9.95 monthly subscription but gets you the full gamut of security features. With the accompanying Vysk QS app (available for Android and iOS), you can make private VoIP calls to other subscribers over Vysk’s encrypted network. The company says no one will be able to listen in on your call, and no data, such as caller ID, phone numbers and call times, is recorded.

The Vysk QS1 will also generate an untraceable number when making calls to non-Vysk users, and if someone does try to hack into your phone call, they’ll be met with a piercing buzzing sound. Other features of the subscription service include encrypted private messaging, voicemail and pictures, remote wipe and password protection, among other things.

Meanwhile, Lockdown Mode jams your phone’s microphones and blocks the cameras. A subscription is not required to use these features.

But why choose a clunky and expensive ($229) case over one of the free or cheap security and privacy apps?

Vysk believes its hardware approach is stronger because software-based solutions are still vulnerable to malware and hackers. The company also considers the QS1 to be a better alternative to the upcoming Blackphone, since it allows people to keep the phone that they like and use every day.

The Vysk QS1 is compatible with the iPhone 5 and 5S and the Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5. Preorders begin on May 15, and the case is expected to ship in early Q4.

Read the full blog post on re/code

The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest

This is disheartening because, according to the article, we are still the world’s richest nation.

Where is the money going then if not to the huge middle class, the upper middle class or lower-middle class? It’s increasingly going to the top 1%!  I fully believe that those who start or successfully lead companies and take the greatest risks, should be duly rewarded. This is after all a free-market economy. However, there needs to be more balance in the equation or the entire system will break down.

This is not about being number one in the world, it is about working harder and having less and less to show for it. People are growing tired of this inequity and it needs to be addressed.

The U.S. Middle Class is losing ground

Article By David Leonhardt and Kevin Quely

Read the full New York Times article…

Google Follows Facebook and Twitter Into App-Installation Ads

Adds Targeted App-Install Ads Within YouTube and Mobile Search

The news comes a weeks after Twitter started selling app install ads, following Facebook’s lead. Yahoo is floating the idea as well.

YouTube’s app install ads will run with TrueView, the in-stream service that allows users to skip through videos, the company said. It was added to mobile in August of 2012.

A mobile ad with the new capability of opening an installed app on a user’s phone.

Read more…

Twitter to Offer Mobile Ads Beyond Twitter In Bid for Revenue

Twitter to Sell App Install Ads Across Mobile Apps Through MoPub

Twitter’s ad world just got a little bigger.

The messaging service — whose business is already 75% mobile — started selling ads in mobile apps beyond Twitter today, a key rationale of its purchase of MoPub, a mobile adexchange it purchased in September.

MoPub will allow Twitter’s advertisers to buy mobile app install ads through the exchange. App install ads are today the mobile web’s dominant form of advertising and a key source of revenue for Facebook and other publishers.

Via the integration, advertisers can buy mobile app install and app engagement ads on Twitter, as well as on the thousands of apps within MoPub’s network, which include WordPress, OpenTable, the mobile messaging app Tango, and the music-streaming app Songza.

Twitter’s intention to launch mobile app install ads has been a poorly kept secret. Promoted tweets with Twitter “Cards” attached in which users can click to install an app have been materializing in users’ Twitter streams over the last few weeks.

Though still in a private beta, mobile app install ads will be available for purchase in Twitter’s ad auction, and other targeting parameters can be applied to them. But separately, advertisers will be able to participate in real-time bidding to buy mobile app install and app engagement ad inventory programmatically via MoPub within the Twitter ad system. Those ads will appear as banners, interstitials, video and sometimes in native formats.

Read more on Ad Age.com…

BlackBerry’s meltdown sparks start-up boom in Canada’s Silicon Valley

Very interesting case study about how Blackberry’s implosion sparks a wave of new start-ups.

STORY BY SAYANTANI GHOSH, ASHUTOSH PANDEY AND EUAN ROCHA Wed Apr 16, 2014 2:42pm EDT

(Reuters) – The troubles at BlackBerry Ltd, which fired more than half its staff and lost more than 90 percent of its market value as consumers shunned its smart phones, might have spelled disaster for the company’s hometown of Waterloo, Ontario. Instead, there are hot sports cars in the streets and new companies filling the refurbished office buildings.

 
Read more…

 

Akamai Heartbleed patch not a fix after all

The Web infrastructure company’s patch was supposed to have handled the problem. Turns out it protects only three of six critical encryption values.

 

Akamai, the network provider that handles nearly one-third of the Internet’s traffic, released a Heartbleed patch to the community on Friday, saying that it would protect against the critical Web threat. Now it appears that’s not the case.

Writing on his company’s blog Sunday night, Akamai chief security officer Andy Ellis said that while he had believed the Akamai Heartbleed patch fully fixed the issue, a security researcher discovered it had a bug that caused it to be a partial, not full, patch.

More…

 

Link

 

Forget the Selfie: Samsung Is Out-Innovating Apple in Marketing Samsung’s Agency May Be Exaggerating, But It Has Something To Brag About

What was the brand and advertising value for Samsung of the infamous “selfie” taken by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars? Do we really know?

It was the tweet heard around the world, but was it worth $1 billion?

That was the value Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy put on the star-studded Oscar smartphone “selfie” during an interview in Cannes earlier this week. He also immodestly took credit for it, which is a stretch because while Publicisbuying arm Starcom Mediavest did broker Samsung‘s sponsorship of the Oscars, the tweet itself was spontaneous, according to two sources with knowledge of Samsung’s marketing.

Now, without that $20 million Oscars sponsorship, Ellen DeGeneres would likely have taken the shot with her preferred iPhone, so Mr. Levy can indeed take some credit for setting the stage (the Wall Street Journal reported the agency negotiated with ABC to integrate Galaxy phones into the show).

More…

 

Why the Trend of Global CMO Has Reached Its Tipping Point

 

Hint: It’s Not Just About Having a Single Brand Image Worldwide. Digitization and Globalization of Media Are Now Driving the Shift

 

By: Jack Neff, Advertising Age

Published: June 13, 2011

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(from l.) Keith Weed, Marc Menesguen, Candace Matthews, Tony Palmer and Jim Farley

The year 2010 will be known for many things, but in the marketing world, it might be the tipping point of the global CMO.

Last September, L’Oreal tapped Marc Menesguen as its first global chief marketing officer, a month after Ford Motor Co. appointed Jim Farley group VP-global marketing. In December, General Motors Corp. broadened U.S. marketing chief Joel Ewanick’s responsibilities to global CMO. Last April, Estee Lauder anointed its first executives with global scope across all brands.

While global marketing has been a growing force for decades, chief marketers with truly global scope have only become the norm in the past few years among global players like Unilever, Nestle, Levi’s and Wal-Mart Stores.

It’s not just about making the most efficient use of resources or presenting a single brand image worldwide. Part of the rationale is speeding up the process of finding what works in one place, then making it work everywhere else.

“If you went back four years ago there was a huge disparity between markets where we had really good marketing and the markets in which we didn’t,” said Tony Palmer, who became chief marketing officer of Kimberly-Clark Corp. in 2007. “If you looked at the markets where we were renowned as a great marketing company, our margins were better and we had much better market positions. Basically we had the same brands, but the marketing and innovation was better in those countries.”

Those weren’t necessarily the big high-profile ones you might expect, but rather Australia, Israel, Brazil and South Korea. Mr. Palmer said K-C determined that if it raised marketing performance everywhere to the level of those four, it would produce a sales bump “in the billions of dollars.”

Another big reason Unilever and others are turning to global CMOs is, as Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Keith Weed puts it, “The twin-headed trends of digitization and globalization feed off each other and accelerate the combination.”

Facebook and YouTube either didn’t exist or had very limited impact in 2005, he noted, and their growth alone has made marketing more global. They’re among the stops that make his annual trip to Silicon Valley a necessity.

The globalization and digitization of media have made it both more possible and necessary to focus on the global Unilever brand, Mr. Weed said. “People are much more aware of the companies behind the product brands now.”

As Amway was about to turn 50 years old, it took a strategic look at what it needed to do to keep growing in the next 50, said Candace Matthews, who came on as the company’s first global CMO more than three years ago. “Part of that was really realizing we needed to become a global enterprise instead of independent affiliates rolled up in a holding company,” Ms. Matthews said.

What Amway found was that the company everywhere stood for “a business opportunity [for distributors] with great products.” Simply put, Ms. Matthews has been charged with tweaking that to be “a great business opportunity that also has great brands.”

The rise of the global CMO also reflects a rise of more globally oriented consumers and a much broader cadre of lower-ranking global marketers.

Georgia Garinois-Melenikiotou, senior VP-corporate marketing of Estee Lauder Cos., points out that she is not a CMO, but she does occupy the company’s new global marketing role in part because of growth in the number of cosmopolitan consumers who are the core of the company’s consumer base. By 2020, she said, “1.6 billion people will be global travelers living in megacities, and they will be my prime target.”

Beyond the C-suite, the population of global marketers is exploding, too. Marc de Swaan Arons, chairman of EffectiveBrands, noted in his book “The Global Brand CEO” last year that he estimates only about 25,000 marketers had the descriptor “global” in their titles in 1999. As of last year, per LinkedIn, more than 540,000 marketers had “global” in their titles.

 

A Recipe for Building and Implementing a Social Media Plan

So, you work in the corporate marketing department and your boss wants to know what “your” plan is for social media in 2011 and beyond. After clearing your throat and fumbling with a few papers on your desk, you tell him or her that you have been working on it and should have the plan ready to present in the next week or two.

So you’ve bought yourself some time but what next? Well you do a web search for how to build and implement a social media plan and come across some articles like this one which provide you with enough of a framework to put together a sound plan. What would we do without the internet?

There are a number of variations to this approach but the fundamentals remain about the same. This particular process is intended for a large company but can just as easily be followed by smaller organizations.

Step 1 – Define your Objective(s). Objectives can be things like building brand recognition or loyalty or providing customer service or indirect sales (direct sales via social media is best left to those who have already followed and implemented a plan like this). Be careful not to make your objectives so broad that they cannot be measured. It’s also worth stating the obvious – one person or one group for that matter should not be defining the social media objective(s) for the entire company without input from other key internal stakeholders and ideally one or more subject matter experts.

Step 2 – Understand Your Audience. Will you be interacting with happy or unhappy customers, former customers or prospects, or all of the above? Also don’t forget that whoever your intended audience is, there will be others watching and listening. This includes shareholders, the competition, legislators, regulators, current, former and prospective employees, your business partners, vendors and more.

In order to fully understand your audience you also need to know where they are. Are they on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, industry or competitor blogs, Digg, Delicious, etc.? Are they passive, meaning they are mostly in read-only mode, or are they active in generating messages and commenting on others’ messages? To fully understand this you will need to learn about social media monitoring tools. These tools help track sentiment towards your company or brand as well as the volume of mentions and how influential the person or people talking about your company or product are. Influence is usually gauged by the number of followers someone has, but that is not the only factor. You may be familiar with TweetDeck or Seesmic which are among many basic and free social media interface and monitoring tools. More sophisticated and expensive tools include Radian6, Sysomos, Lithium and others.

You can also do some basic look-alike modeling where you input the demographics of the audience you will be engaging (for example your customer demographics) and find out where others who share the same demographic profile are and understand what their social tendencies are as well. Forrester offers a free Social Technographics profile tool on their web site.

Understanding your audience, where and how they engage is an important step in the process, especially as it relates to staffing and operations which is discussed later on.

Step 3 – Assemble a Cross-functional Team. This is a step which arguably can be skipped if you work in a small company, but beware of the dangers of leaving out key internal stakeholders if you do. Generally speaking, a cross-functional team should include members from marketing, sales, public relations, internal communications, human resources, legal and customer service. Obviously this list of departments should be adjusted to suit each organizations unique structure. Also, the level of the participants should be such that they are close to the day-to-day operations and therefore aware of potential challenges, yet empowered to make day-to-day decisions on behalf of that department.

All teams need leaders and it is customary though not mandatory that someone from the marketing department lead a team such as this. Having a strong project manager on the team is a tremendous asset as well as there is no substitute for excellent process and project management.

Once the team is assembled, make sure that they understand their objectives and what is in and out of scope. Ideally there will be an executive-level sponsor of this initiative who has or will take on some of the tougher decision-making assignments with his or her peers.

The cross-functional team (team) should understand and agree with the social media strategy and objective(s) and understand the make-up of the primary and any secondary audiences. If this is not the case, then this is a good way to build some team dynamics and synergy.

Step 4 – Study Best Practices & Lessons Learned. Once you begin searching the internet, you will find that there is no lack of free information or best practices and lessons learned as it relates to social media. What’s more, the information is in a constant state of change and evolution and requires regular monitoring and engagement. Join online discussion groups and forums like those on LinkedIn and elsewhere. Read AdAge DIGITAL and other online publications and blogs and subscribe to Twitter accounts that blog about social media. Also pay close attention to your competition so that you know where the bar is set in your industry. You may see things that you want to emulate and other things that you want to avoid.

Step 5 – Set Goals. Again, depending on how your company operates, goals may have been set at the beginning of the process. Regardless, take the time to socialize the goals with the team and to ensure they pass the test of being measurable and attainable. Start with simple goals like getting a certain number of people to “Like” your company’s Facebook page or a certain number of followers on Twitter within a defined period of time. If your goals include customer service, you may include resolving a certain number of issues per month via social media. You can also set goals for positive versus negative mentions of your company or brand but beware that sentiment is an inexact science. Even the best monitoring tools can only approximate sentiment because they cannot account for human sarcasm or cynicism in text comments. Goals can also include clicks from Facebook, Twitter, etc. to a specific offer landing page but remember that wherever possible you do not want to disrupt the user’s social networking experience. Generally speaking, people are not engaging in social media to click on a bunch of links to corporate pages. You can however set up separate Twitter accounts and Facebook tabs just for offers and promotions or provide people with an opportunity to opt-in to receive emails or text messages for special offers.

Step 6 – Operationalize. Now comes the fun part – figuring out how to support your social media efforts on an ongoing basis. I underscored the last two words to emphasize the point that social media efforts do not have a hard start and stop date like a direct mail campaign or a print ad campaign. Once a comment or promotion begins, it takes on a life of its own and you need to be prepared to support the conversation until your audience tires of engaging on the subject. This is where most companies fail. They don’t understand that in the digital age, companies don’t really own their brand or the conversation with the consumer. The consumer owns them. As marketers, we now guide, nudge, polish and influence our brand and the conversation, but we no longer own it. This is what marketing 2.0 is all about – giving up control in return for an honest and open dialogue and partnership with your external customers, prospects and other important constituents. It’s no longer “push” marketing, it’s a partnership with your customers for the good of everyone involved. If you try to “control” your social media efforts as opposed to managing them, you will fail. It is important to manage the expectations of senior management on the topic or control versus transparency and partnership.

Back to the operations decisions that need to be addressed. The team must make decisions about when and where to begin. It is often best to start small, like starting a Twitter dialogue. This will help limit mistakes and also help with resourcing the effort. By the way, if you work for one of those companies that need to see a business case with a documented positive ROI on social media before investing in it, you have a huge uphill battle on your hands. That doesn’t mean that social media cant or doesn’t contribute to the bottom line, because it does. My point is you do not begin engaging in social media purely for the ROI. It’s an indirect outcome but not the initial objective of social media efforts.

Different departments will have different objectives. For example, customer service may be focused on servicing customers while marketing may be interested in raising brand awareness or raising positive sentiment. Public affairs may simply be interested in more positive mentions. Additionally, Twitter may be the best venue for customer service while marketing may prefer Facebook or YouTube. This doesn’t mean that departments or objectives should be limited to only one social media channel. I am simply suggesting that the team establish a preferred channel for each main objective.

The team will also need to address monitoring, establishing a policy or as I like to call it, “rules of engagement” which is about who in the company is allowed to engage in social media in an official capacity. Staffing and training will need to be discussed as will in-sourcing versus outsourcing, internal communications to employees and more.

Step 7 – Pilot. Once the team has made all key decisions and senior management has signed off with a full understanding of what to expect, it’s time to cross your fingers and soft-launch your social media efforts. Soft-launching means no major announcements in the media. This will give you a better chance of becoming confortable with whatever you are doing, before you announce it to the world and get more volume than you can handle. Also keep in mind that whatever you are doing, social media should provide at least the same if not a better experience than conventional channels. What I mean is that if your call centers for customer service are 24×7, then your social care efforts should be 24×7.

Of course there are many more details and considerations behind each step, but these 7 steps should serve as a good road map to plan your efforts.

Here are some additional tips.

–          Be honest, don’t “spin” the truth or you will lose credibility and your audience will discount your point-of-view in the conversation that is taking place. It really does not matter that you represent the company or brand, if you are not credible, you will be discounted.

–          Know when to just be quiet and listen

–          Identify key influencers and get to know them and understand their social media habits and behavior

I hope you found this article helpful. Please feel free to ask questions or leave comments and stay tuned for a follow-up article about Social Media Communities.

Author:  Steven Copertino

Copyright 2011. All Rights Reserved.

How You Name Your Web Sites, Microsites and Blogs Can Impact Your Search Engine Rankings

Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is very complex, with proprietary algorithms used by each of the major search engines to determine rankings and I am only scratching the surface in this article, but here are some important tips and guidelines.

Background
Many people and companies often talk about web site content and content structure when discussing search engine optimization. Search engine optimization is about making your web site content efficient and effective so your web site ranks as high as possible in organic listings (not sponsored or non-paid advertising, also known as search engine marketing) but did you know that the web site URL you select is also very important?

Many companies like to use vanity URLs instead of a real company name in their URLs. A vanity URL is like a vanity phone number or a vanity license plate. A vanity URL for a fictitious company such as Acme Precision Widgets, whose real web site is www.acmeprecisionwidgets.com could be www.acmespecials.com or www.apw.com.  Typically, the vanity URL would then redirect to the real URL and if you paid close attention you would see this happen in your browser http address listing. For permanent vanity URLs, coders typically use what is called a “301 redirect” to the real page URL shown above, but the user would only need to see (click on) or type the vanity URL. A 301 redirect is a redirect that does not have a time expiration as opposed to a 501 redirect, which does expire at a predefined time interval.

 Vanity URLs Can Suppress Search Engine Rankings
Search engine relevancy scores (the scores that determine which pages will make it to the top of a search engine’s organic search results) take into account page load times. Therefore, making pages too “heavy” with rich media content or having too many URL redirects (hops due to vanity URLs or other hidden structures) will slow page load times and consequently lower your page rankings with the search engines. This means that your web site moves down the list of organic search results, leading to potentially lower organic traffic and a need to rely more heavily on paid search. 

What Is Your Goal?
If your goal is to drive as much online volume as possible through organic search results, versus paid online media, then vanity URLs are not necessarily the best way to go. Instead, use your company’s real URL wherever possible and add a forward slash to drive to a specific landing page which contains content relevant to what you are promoting. Alternatively, you can drive users to your home page and feature whatever you are promoting there in what is called a “hero space”. Many companies use hero spaces that allow you to feature multiple products, services or offers, by rotating them at pre-set short time intervals.

 When Vanity URLs Are a Must
Sometimes there is a justified need for a vanity URL due to the nature of the product or service or promotion, or because your company URL is simply too long and is not easily shortened. When those exceptions are made, here are some helpful tips to follow.

Track Whatever Vanity URLs You Already Have or Create
When creating a vanity URL, keep a central repository of those links because they need to be maintained over time. A simple example is if you choose to move the location of the real page on your web site, then the reference point for the vanity URL needs to be updated or the user will have a broken link that goes nowhere.

Vanity URLs Should Also Have Strong Brand and Key Word Relevancy
Vanity URLs should also have strong brand and key word relevancy as opposed to making up or using words infrequently used by consumers simply because they sound “cool”. Strong brand and key word relevancy will further increase your relevancy scores with search engines. If the intended audience is not familiar with the term, then even if it’s catchy, it will hurt your organic results because you will achieve fewer exact matches. The only exception is if you are going to literally spend millions and millions of dollars advertising offline and online in order to create brand recognition for something like a new term or a new product, service or company name.

 For those who want to delve further into the technical side of how vanity URLs/redirects erode search engine relevancy, please see this article which discusses 301 redirects and confirmation from Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) that some link equity is lost when a 301 is used within a website – but not as much as when the true URL is completely removed from the vanity name.
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/301-redirect-test-how-much-link-juice-are-you-losing/2010/04/09/

Written by: Steven Copertino, Digital Marketer
http://www.linkedin.com/in/copertino