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You probably won’t see the revenue bump in Facebook’s earnings report today from all its new monetization schemes. But with this quarter’s rollout of Gifts, a mobile ad network, app install ads, FBX, and Sponsored Results, Facebook tried show the world that it has new engines to power profits. Earnings and share price may drag for a while longer, but here’s how they have the potential to kick into high gear eventually.

Facebook VP of corporate development Vaughn Smith said at a conference last week, “It’s funny to reflect back that in the first quarter of this year we had no ads on our mobile product.” Wall Street sure didn’t get the joke. Facebook’s user base is shifting to the small screen, and investors were right to worry the social network might not have a way to squeeze dollars from them there. That’s partly why its share price has stumbled to $19.32 down from $38 where $FB IPO’d.

So Facebook has been pushing itself through a transformation to become a company that thinks mobile first. From a product development standpoint, that shift has been rapid. A year ago it was designing for the web and then porting those designs to mobile. Now Facebook spec’s out products with mobile as the priority. Most teams ship their own mobile code too, instead of relying on a specific “mobile” team like it did last year.

But transforming into a mobile money-maker takes longer and Facebook still has to prove it’s possible. When it builds new commerce channels, it has to raise awareness and then get people actually opening their wallets. When it offers new ways to advertise, it must demonstrate to businesses that the ads deliver return on investment, and then recruit big spenders to buy them. It could take several quarters for the bump from new monetization schemes to appear in the bottom line if they even work.

Facebook’s existing mobile ad formats are performing well and all the ads tech companies saybusinesses are eager to buy them. But Facebook needs whole new ways to make money if it’s going to get to a more reasonable price-to-earnings ratio.

So let’s take a look at the five big revenue drivers Facebook announced or implemented this quarter, and how close they are to actually giving it a revenue boost:

FACEBOOK GIFTS

Launched September 27th, Facebook Gifts is the company’s big entrance into ecommerce that lets users buy presents for friends when it’s their birthday, wedding, engagement, graduation, other special occasion, or just whenever. Users see alerts about these special occasions and a chance to buy Gifts on the top right of the desktop homepage and at the top of the mobile news feed. The gifts range from digital gift cards to physical shipments of flowers, chocolate or toys that Facebook sources from and has delivered by its partners. Facebook earns an undisclosed, varying revenue cut on each gift sold.

Facebook Gifts has big potential because it knows who people are likely to buy gifts for better than anyone else. Whose statuses we like, who we have the most friends in common with, who our family members are, and who we’re tagged in photos with all factor into its affinity rankings. Many people visit daily and spend lots of time on Facebook, so there are plenty of opportunities to get them to purchase.’

Facebook also built the shopping experience around convenience, using profile data to suggest what people should buy friends. Young dude? It’ll say to buy him Bourbon-barrel aged maple syrup. Middle aged woman? A Starbucks card or box of chocolate might be the top recommendations. It could get people to buy gifts when they otherwise might just say “happy birthday”, and could pull dollars away from Amazon, gift card providers, flower delivery services, and brick-and-mortar stores.

Unfortunately, even if a reasonable percentage of US users bought a few Gifts a year, the margins may not be big enough to seriously move the needle. There’s also no international roll out in sight. In any case, that would definitely complicate shipping and many markets don’t have the disposable income to buy Gifts. Facebook may need to find a way to convince people in its key markets to buy as often as once every two months for Gifts.

Status: Gifts is still being slowly rolled out to U.S. users. By the end of next quarter it should have reached most of the U.S. and we may hear if people are actually buying Gifts.

MOBILE AD NETWORK

Announced September 18th, Facebook’s mobile ad network allows advertisers to pay it to improve the targeting of ads they buy within non-Facebook mobile apps and sites. It solves a major problem for both ad buyers and sellers — namely that ads are often inaccurately targeted. That means a buyer’s message doesn’t reach the right audience and they don’t get clicks. Meanwhile, ad hosts like apps and website can’t charge advertisers for clicks and the irrelevant content worsens the experience for their users.

While traditional ad networks make educated guesses about who their visitors are, Facebook knows a ton about its users because they volunteer their data. With Facebook’s bio, social, and app usage data, this new mobile ad network lets marketing messages be pinpointed to appear to 30-year-old engaged women, 26-year-old guys who Like surfing and live in Los Angeles, or 22-year-old recent Harvard alumni who use apps similar to one made by an advertiser.

The mobile ad network is huge for Facebook because it earns the company more money without forcing it put more ads or commerce options in its own apps. That lets it maintain the quality of its user experience, and avoid drowning out organic social content with paid ads. As the Internet is increasingly accessed through apps that need ways to monetize, Facebook could earn a lot of money by getting them to host its ads.

Status: Facebook’s still calling this a test, and only a few trusted partners can use it. Facebook hasn’t released details of the ad network’s partners, design, or performance, and it is unlikely to have produced noticeable revenue yet. But mobile ad spend nearly doubled this year, and Facebook could rollout expand the similar ad network for the web that it’s testing on Zynga.com. By next quarter there should studies available on its performance. It should also be accessible to more advertisers and visible on more apps. In 6 months we’ll see if it’s gained traction.

APP INSTALL ADS

Announced on August 7th, app install ads allow developers to pay to inject “Install Now” ads into the mobile news feed. They show their app’s name, icon, description, Facebook App Center rating, and friends who use them. When clicked they lead straight to the App Store or Google Play market where users can download the apps.

If the mobile web is all about apps, Facebook wants to be the way developers pay to get people to discover and install them. There’s already a huge industry around paid app discovery that Facebook is vying for a cut of. It could succeed by leveraging the amount of time users spend browsing its mobile apps and the knowledge of which apps their friends use.

Mobile app install ads are also Facebook’s first serious foray into showing non-social ads in the news feed, which includes some risk.. Friends don’t have to have Liked a developer or used an app for ads promoting it to show up in someones feed. As showing too many of these pure ads could drive users way, the revenue Facebook could earn on them is constrained.

Status: Last week all developers gained the ability to buy app install ads. Expect studies on their performance to arrive soon and Facebook to highlight the money they’re generating in its Q4 earnings.

FACEBOOK EXCHANGE

Though it was revealed late in the previous quarter on June 13th, we didn’t hear the first results from the Facebook Exchange (FBX) cookie-based retargeted ads program until late August. FBX lets advertisers target their ads on Facebook to users who’ve recently visited specific websites. For example a travel company could target users who viewed but didn’t buy a flight to Hawaii with ads promoting that same flight.

The early rumors said they were working very well, and by September Facebook permitted the demand-side platforms that buy the ads to share performance results, which were extremely promising. For some advertisers, each dollar they spent on FBX ads brought in $16 in sales. And I’ve heard that while DSPs are still learning how to use FBX, they are getting as good of results from it as they get from Google’s retargeted ads that they’ve been buying and optimizing for years.

FBX lets Facebook break into the realm of advertising to people with purchase intent, similar to search ads. Because the return on investment can be linked more directly to ad spend, advertisers may be willing to pay more for FBX ads than the traditional brand advertising seen on Facebook. Many advertisers have specific budgets for retargeted ads that Facebook can now tap into. If it can provide conclusive evidence that FBX works better than Google’s ad exchange, massive spend could pour in.

Status: Over a dozen DSP partners can now buy FBX ads, initial results are strong, and more advertisers are getting excited about the program. They’ll still need time to learn how to master the ad format, but we may see notable revenue from the product on the earnings call. By next quarter spend should ramp up and FBX could become a significant part of Facebook’s business.

IT’S GONNA GET WORSE BEFORE IT GETS BETTER

Until these products gain traction, Facebook’s earnings may not be too impressive. And next month, nearly 1.2 billion additional shares will become eligible for sale by employees and investors when a big part of the company’s stock lock-up expires on November 16th. That means the share price is likely to dip lower.

$FB may rise again once this major post-lockup flood subsides and these new money-makers kick in, but at least until then Facebook will need to sell Wall Street on the future, not the present. It has to communicate that the evolution of advertising and commerce depend on the data only Facebook has.

Tags: Facebook, Starbucks, Wall Street, FBX, Facebook Gifts, Facebook features, Mobile code, Mobile payment

Recently, I wrote about employees as brand ambassadors and how they can help – or hurt – an organization’s global and social brand. It depends on how well the lines between personal brand and company brand are drawn.

Once a company and leadership has the brand issue sorted out, it’s time to think more deeply about social community and the actual role of community managers.

Companies which value collaboration, understand the value of social buzz, and see the need to add (or subtract) a step in the sales process are all ripe for social community development. So are brands which have sustained brand damage. So what are the guidelines for establishing a community manager role in your organization?

Here are 5 ways to empower a great community manager (s):

1) Know the boundaries of your existing community. Is there a Facebook page? A corporate Twitter handle? How about G+, LinkedIn, YouTube, wikis, or a customer portal? Good, then you have community. At least the start of one. Now it’s time to show them the love. It’s time to manage it actively (and positively) with a community manager.

2) Build guardrails around your community with a very light touch. Don’t tell your various communities of interest that you’re putting them in a big box – craft a community entity (think brand) by gradually bringing them closer. Try surveys, outreach, and blogs asking people what they’d like to see from your company’s brand, and build from there.

3) Hire carefully. There are lots of self-styled community managers out there. Look at Jono Bacon’s book The Art of Community. Use it as a guide as you build the job description. Or better yet – start “actively listening” in on social channels about what people are saying. And take the time to figure out what you want to accomplish with the community.

4) Don’t forget the importance of process. Communities work best when all understand the ground rules. Craft a community manifesto or a similar guidebook and share it.

5) Empower your communities. Once you have the community manager in place, and the goals, build an action plan. Make the goals both short and long-term; monthly, yearly, five years. Know what you want, and put the plan in place to get there. Make it measureable, and make sure your leadership and the community manager is accountable. This is a team effort.

Communities are critical to building a business which can navigate channels – direct to customer, social, sales, partner and employee. Leaders need to act now to gather community around their brands.

It’s 2012, talented people. Time to climb in the social sandbox. Maybe it’s time to show the community manager some love and respect as an essential and valued role within your organization. Let’s keep talking. This is only the beginning.

Tags: Twitter, LinkedIn, Art of Community, Jono Bacon, YouTube, Community manager, Leadership, Facebook

Fitness has always been a part of my life. From swimming in high school, playing rugby in college, to the relentless focus on fitness as a Navy SEAL, I have always prioritized health and wellness in order to stay competitive in everything I do. I passionately believe being healthy and physically fit has a direct correlation to happiness and success, whatever your personal definition of that may be.

Before my SEAL training began, I kept hearing that BUD/s (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) is mostly mental. I understand why people said that because generally guys quit early on because of the extreme mental and emotional stress placed on the students, not to mention being constantly cold and wet. So, my philosophy in preparing for the toughest special operations training in the world was to let my fitness level be the last thing I had to worry about. I knew there would be plenty of other challenges to face. After quitting my finance job in Dallas, I moved to Crested Butte, CO. for three months to train at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The extreme training paid off. Fitness was never an issue for me during BUD/s.

The Officers in any SEAL training class are expected to lead from the front, literally. Officers need to motivate their classmates by being in even greater physical condition that the enlisted students. This is not always the case, of course, but I found it generally to be true. Fitness is part of the SEAL culture and an essential ingredient for mission success. Similarly, in a fast paced entrepreneurial organization, I believe a good leader must maintain mental and physical wellness in order to effectively drive the business forward and inspire the team.

I strongly believe that a fit leader is a better leader, and here are the five reasons why:

Energy and Productivity: Maintaining a regular exercise routine will give you more energy throughout the day. Leading a growing company is tough enough. Make sure you have the energy to do so effectively. As a leader when you have more energy, you are more likely to face the challenges of the day aggressively and confidently.
Confidence and Creativity: A fit leader will have more confidence and solve problems more creatively. Studies show that our cognitive ability to be creative increases with even moderate levels of exercise. Whenever I have a speaking engagement or important presentation, I make sure to exercise that day prior to the event.
Facing Challenges: In SEAL training you are constantly pushed beyond your pain threshold, so much so that your “comfort zone” takes on a whole new definition. I follow the same theory when training by always pushing myself beyond my existing comfort zone. Doing so increases your stamina and mental ability to endure physical and mental suffering. As a business leader, you have to be able to face tough challenges every day while maintaining mental focus on priorities.
Mental Wellness: Exercise is one of the best ways to manage stress because it boosts your brain’s “feel-good” neurotransmitters called endorphins. Also, by solely focusing on your body’s motions for a period of time, you focus less on the day’s stresses, at least for a while. According to an article by the Mayo Clinic, exercise also reduces symptoms associated with anxiety and depression, while also improving sleeping patterns.
Influence: If all this is true for the leader of an organization, it must be true for the whole team, right? It is widely believed that healthy employees are happier and more productive. A fit workforce is also less likely to get sick; thereby, improving attendance and reducing healthcare costs. In this article, DigiFitprovides some great reasons why a healthy workforce will improve the bottom line. This, of course, takes us back to leading by example. You can’t expect to foster a culture of fitness unless you, as the leader, are physically fit and promote overall wellness. For example, I occaisionally run boot camps for team members and IMI’s Culture Club holds recess every Thursday afternoon. My business partner and I specifically chose our new office building because it has a great gym right downstairs. Our team has even held several “Biggest Loser” contests. Fitness permeates our culture.

My favorite quote from the Navy SEAL Creed is about always being physically and mentally prepared and never quitting. This paragraph is what drove me in combat and what pushes me forward every day in the chaotic environment of a growing business:

“I will never quit. I persevere and thrive on adversity. My Nation expects me to be physically harder and mentally stronger than my enemies. If knocked down, I will get back up, every time. I will draw on every remaining ounce of strength to protect my teammates and to accomplish our mission. I am never out of the fight.”

As a business leader what are you currently doing to ensure a happy, healthy, and productive workforce? I would love to hear your thoughts!

Tags: United States Navy SEALs, Mental health, Mayo Clinic, United States Navy SEAL selection and training, Physical fitness, Crested Butte Colorado, Health, Leadership

Chelsea P. Gladden is the Director of Marketing & PR for FlexJobs, an award-winning service that helps job-seekers find professional opportunities that also offer work flexibility, such as telecommuting, freelance, part-time or alternative schedules. To learn more about Chelsea, visit FlexJobs.com or tweet her @FlexJobsChelsea

A U.S. Census report released this month shows that the number of people who work from has soared by 41% in the past decade. These findings demonstrate that there is hope for moms (and dads!) who prefer the flexibility to work from home while raising children.

Which leads to this question: What kinds of professional job opportunities are there for telecommuting parents? Generally, parents want a job with little to no travel keeps them closer to home in time for after school pick up, and preferably a position that doesn’t involve risking one’s life by jumping from a capsule to break the sound barrier … there have to be easier ways.

And indeed there are. In fact, the following are some of the more popular options that junior’s folks can do from home.

1. Accounting: Some typical positions include: supervisory auditor, bookkeeper and senior tax manager.

2. Marketing: Some typical positions include: product strategy manager, marketing copywriter and social media coordinator.

3. Computer & IT: Some typical positions include: systems analyst, technical support, computer studies instructor, programmer and graphic designer.

4. Education & Training: Some typical positions include: online tutor, virtual K-12 teacher and academic program director.

5. Medical & Health: Some typical positions include: at-home health coach, registered nurse and billing specialist.

Though these fields are only a subset of 50+ career fields that offer the option to work from home, they were chosen for having the most positions available and their ability to work remotely while staying within the home office.

Part-time hours and job sharing are also an option for better life flexibility. Though the Labor Department foundthat 582,000 new part-time jobs were added in September, most of them were in the 16-24 age brackets. However, many companies are offering these types of hours at the professional level as well, including the positions mentioned above.

As for the types of companies that cater to parents, Working Mother releases its list of the Top 100 every year and, in addition to flexibility, factors in perks such as fitness programs. This year’s list included companies from AOL to Yale University.

Specialty positions are often catering to remote staff in order to secure the top experts. Though there are more common jobs and less standard titles, the Census Bureau’s findings indicate the number of employees who work from home will continue to rise, with plenty of ideal jobs for parents — that don’t involve jumping at an altitude of 128,100 feet.

Tags: Telecommuting, Yale University, AOL, Part-time, Employment, United States Census, Working Mother, FlexJobs

“Predictive analytics can figure out how to land on Mars, but not who will buy a Mars bar…. You should expect big data to have big impact. And you can bet that it will help machines interact more usefully with our unstructured, changing, and sometimes downright confused human ways. But if you’re counting on it to make people much more predictable, you’re expecting too much”–Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro

“’Forming a data team is kind of like planning a heist’ [said Hunch.com’s co-founder Matt Gattis]. He meant that you need people with all sorts of skills, and that one person probably can’t do everything by herself. Think Ocean’s Eleven but sexier”–Cathy “Mathbabe” O’Neil

“The data warehouse architecture of the 1980s, to which I was a major contributor, of course, was based largely on the… single-version-of-the-truth simplification. There’s little doubt it has served us well. But, big data and other trends are forcing us to look again at the underlying assumptions. And find them lacking”–Barry Devlin

“Security today is a real-time Big Data challenge”–Steven Mills, IBM

“…big data will once again become ‘just data’ by 2020 and architectural approaches, infrastructure and hardware/software that does not adapt to this ‘new normal’ will be retired. Organizations resisting this change will suffer severe economic impacts”–Gartner

Tags: Big data, IBM, Gartner, Matt Gattis, Barry Devlin, Cathy, Mars, Data warehouse

You’ve read countless case studies of how small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have turned to cloud computing to raise productivity, improve customer service and stay ahead of the competition. But is your company ready to jump onto the bandwagon? Here’s what you need to know before moving to the cloud:

1. Define your needs
While cloud computing may seem like hype, it has leveled the playing field for SMBs that would not have been able to afford sophisticated business applications. 87 percent of SMBs surveyed said cloud applications have given them a competitive advantage, while 85 percent agreed that cloud applications have improved employee productivity. However, to realize the full benefits of the cloud, it is important to define what you want to achieve. Are you hoping to improve customer service by allowing your sales team to respond to customer requests quickly? Or, do you want improve collaboration among employees? Articulating those needs clearly will go a long way in choosing the right cloud service provider.

2. Choose the right service provider
Choosing a cloud service provider can be a daunting task. There are several criteria that you can use to evaluate a service provider, including performance, support and security. The Asia Cloud Computing Association has published a useful evaluation matrix that will help you prioritize your requirements. For example, if you have customers that demand strict data security, a potential cloud provider would have to score higher for that criterion over others. A company with limited IT resources may demand the highest level of support, while an engineering firm may place performance as its highest priority.

3. Back up and secure your data
Most cloud service providers will assure you that your data is safe. Bigger cloud players like Salesforce.com will enforce strict data protection policies to protect your data, but when an employee downloads or copies that data, security could go out the window. Consider employing cloud-based data loss protection (DLP) technology that takes digital fingerprints of data in the cloud. So, if someone tries to download, copy and paste, or e-mail confidential data, DLP technology will recognize the fingerprinted data as sensitive, and takes action to prevent misuse. Finally, backing up your data is a no-brainer. Most cloud services will allow you to export a copy of your data which you can restore if things go awry, or when you switch service providers.

4. Data integration services
Do you need to integrate existing data that you are housing on your in-house IT systems with your cloud service? This is especially important if you’re not ready to move all your data to the cloud. Your customer profile data, for example, may be tied closely to a legacy system which may be difficult to decouple. While integration is usually done through APIs, consider tapping on integration services provided by systems integrators to speed up the process.

5. Plan your deployment
Early cloud adopters agree that adequate planning and preparation would have made their implementation efforts easier and more successful. It is thus important for SMBs to develop a clear implementation plan, which should involve a deployment roadmap, as well as identifying key business and IT transformations with measurable benefits. Upfront planning would help you avoid issues like long deployment cycles, limited integration with other applications and lack of proper training.

Tags: Cloud computing, Information technology, Information privacy, Small and medium enterprises, Business, Service provider, Salesforce.com, E-Commerce

When you are a software services startup, business development is your lifeblood. In a country like Pakistan, where the development of intellectual property in the software space is stunted by a variety of factors, including limited investment channels, software houses are often set up around services models.

Business development is key for staying cash flow positive. While project managers can orchestrate the teams of software engineers to assure quality, your company critically must depend upon a dedicated team of business development and sales professionals who work to earn the company sufficient business.

This is a continuous process; while business development professionals often start with a very large number of leads, many fizzle out very early in the process. It’s important to persevere in order to win an acceptable number of projects.

Based on my experiences in this space, I’d like to share a few tips for the many people looking to earn business in software exports from countries like the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom:

1. Develop a Niche.

While you may believe that your engineering team is stellar enough to pick up new technologies and frameworks, the entire industry is gravitating towards more niche specialization. It doesn’t matter if you have the best iPhone engineers on the planet, if they’ve only worked on productivity applications until now, clients in the gaming space will be reluctant to award work to your team. Identifying specific genres, platforms and products in which your team wishes to specialize will make it a lot easier to target the right clients who are often spoiled for choice among the wealth of services setups across Asia and Eastern Europe.

2. Increase Your Offerings.

The truth is that finding new clients is always a low percentage business. You might be making dozens of cold calls over LinkedIn and sending hundreds of emails a month, with less than 10% of the people contacted even responding. The best way to expand business is to extract more work from your existing clients. One way to do this is to transform yourself into a one-stop shop offering all the related services: graphic design, project management, interface design and quality assurance. Another way is to remain proactive in your relationship with your client: hold regular calls to understand the client’s strategy and anticipate when its demand for services will grow. The client will appreciate the strategic role you are playing as a services partner and will always see more value in expanding its relationship with an existing partner than building a fresh relationship with someone else.

3. Nothing Beats Face-Time.

While there are success stories of business development conducted entirely in the virtual domain, it is difficult to develop a long-term relationship with a client without ever meeting it in person. The most successful services setups regularly send their business development and sales people to attend relevant conferences and meet up with foreign clients in person. This is the best way to forge tangible bonds with the client and communicate how serious you are about serving it. The costs of traveling and attending conferences are quite low relative to the value of the business you might win by meeting a potential client in person.

4. Takes More to Tango.

Business Development novices often think that their potential success at winning the project is based on the initial call. The truth is that most contracts are won based on multiple calls between the client and services company, spread out over several weeks. The initial call might just be a chance for the client to put out feelers and understand the credibility of the potential services outfit. The same client would probably expect a follow-up call with a senior technical person on your team to grasp your technical ability as an enterprise, and they might expect a third call with individual engineers working on the project. Sometimes clients are hesitant to suggest so many follow-ups, but they will feel more at ease if the services setup suggests it.

5. Do Your Homework.

Ultimately nothing beats being prepared. When initiating a business development call, you should know that the client expects you to have case studies and references prepared in advance as a matter of principle. Many potential clients ask to see formal corporate presentations and lists of successful projects. It is always worth investing time and money in developing and burnishing this marketing material and having it at your fingertips when needed.

Tags: iPhone, Business development, United States, LinkedIn, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, Project management, Business

There are hundreds of social media and web metrics that you could look at everyday if there was enough time and context to understand each of them. But without overwhelming you with data and drowning out what is important, there are a few key metrics that you should be monitoring at all times. Today we’ll cover the 5 metrics social media metrics that you should be aware of and monitoring for a pulse on your social business.

Let’s jump in, and happy monitoring!

1. Engagement – Engagement is one of the most critical areas of social to measure. Are conversations happening with your brand when you release content? Are fans liking or commenting on your Facebook page? Are users pinning images, or retweeting tweets? There are a slew of different ways to look at engagement depending on the social outposts your are participating on, but the key is that people see your message and interact with your brand.

If you notice a particular set of messages is not working, dont give up but try changing the messaging and measure the type of response that you achieve. Look at what and how your competitors are doing across their social outposts, are they achieving a level of engagement? If so what are they posting that’s different? Evaluate their outreach and share information that makes your brand unique, that will likely bring the most engagement of all.

Tip: Make it fun to interact with your brand. You dont have to post your latest press release on Facebook all the time, try some humor (if your audience will react well to it) and different variations of content to get fans involved.

2. Reach – What size is the audience seeing your content over all of the social networks that you participate in? Is this audience growing or shrinking and at what rate? These are key questions to consider when looking at your total social reach think of it as the number of potential people that have potential to see your content.

Reach by itself does not tell the whole story but should be used in conjunction with other metrics to calculate the specific metrics that you are looking for. For example, if we wanted to find out the percentage of people that were engaged with your page this week and tallied up all our ‘likes’ (let’s assume 609,750), then we would use the following formula:

Weekly Total Engagement Rate = 609,750/ 12,449,380 or 4.898%.

The point is that you can use total reach for a number of different metrics that are important to you and your business and simply calculate them by switching out the formula. Try it out on your own metrics.

3. Referral Traffic - Getting fans to interact with your brand at various social outposts is great, but the real goal should ideally be to drive more sustainable and repeat traffic to your website. To determine if you are accomplishing this look in your web analytics tool at referral traffic to see specifically where traffic is coming from. For Google Analytics users, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals.

Once in this dashboard take a look at your top performing referral source, and the respective time on site and bounce rate for each. If one particular source is producing a number of visitors but they are only staying on your page for minimal time and driving your bounce rate up – then it is likely not the right source for that particular piece of content.

Diving one level deeper, you can click on any content referrer to see which specific content is driving traffic or switch the primary dimension to landing page and then viewing the referring source that is driving traffic to that content. This is important as if you have different series of blog posts and your first series is generating great traffic through Facebook, and your second through Pinterest than you now know where to target these different segments of posts for sharing. On the whole that is simplifying the concept a lot but you should understand that if sharing content on a network is driving down your time on site, and your bounce rate up then it’s worth re-evaluating that as a real traffic source.

4. Share of Voice - Share of Voice (SOV) is basically a measure of how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison with your competitors. If your competitors are being mentioned far more often share of voice is an easy measure of showing you this. Ensure that you are participating in all of the relevant conversations for your brand regardless of where they occur, but most importantly wherever your key customers are. There is a free tool to help determine your SOV Socialmention or if you have a budget it’s worth looking into a tool like Radian6 (now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud).

5. Influence - There are a number of different influence startups emerging like Klout, PeerIndex, andKred. Influence is an important metric to monitor because even if the people talking about your brand have large followings, whether they can influence others to take action is critical. It’s also a great quick snapshot at how your brand is participating in social media against some competitors.

Tags: Facebook, Google Analytics, Social media, Social network

Introducing from today, 5 Big Data news of the day.

1. IBM Takes a Big Data Approach to Security

Companies will spend an estimated $50 billion on computer security this year, but they are not feeling particularly secure these days.

Blame innovation, if you like. Every big digital advance opens the door to both opportunity and mischief. Smartphones, cloud computing and the data explosion promise a revolution in communications, cost-savings and knowledge discovery. But those three trends in technology also create security headaches.

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2. Big Data Hype (and Reality)

The potential of "big data" has been receiving tremendous attention lately, and not just on HBR's site. With interest in the topic growing exponentially, it has been the focus of countless articles and perhaps too many meetings and conferences.

But to the extent that big data will have big impact, it might not be in the classic territory addressed by analytics. Most applications of data mining and analysis have been, at their hearts, attempts to get better at prediction. Decision-makers want to understand the patterns in the past and present in order to anticipate what is most likely to happen in the future. As big data offers unprecedented awareness of phenomena — particularly of consumers' actions and attitudes — will we see much improvement on the predictions of previous-generation methods? Let's look at the evidence so far, in three areas where better prediction of consumer behavior would clearly be valuable.

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3. Twitter: The human face of big data

Every day, Twitter users send 400 million Tweets expressing a vast array of ideas and opinions. Collectively, and studied in aggregate, public Tweets are not only measurable. They can reveal any number of clues and trends about who we are: our cultures, our mindsets, who we favor or disfavor, and much more.

For instance, analyzing billions of Tweets helped two researchers unlock new insightsabout public health issues and the way disease is spread.

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4. BloomReach nets $25M to turn big data into marketing gold

BloomReach raked in $25 million in new venture funding in a C Series round led by New Enterprise Associates, bringing total venture funding to a healthy $41 million. The be-all-and-end-all for BloomReach, which emerged from stealth in February, is to help online retailers make the stuff they sell more easily found by would-be buyers so they’ll actually sell more of it.

As BloomReach CEO Raj De Datta told my colleague Derrick Harris early this year, companies don’t know how to show off their product catalogs in a way that best aligns with how customers search. Less than a quarter of web pages get any traffic from natural or paid search in a given month – a problem that will only get worse as the amount of online data grows. Their products are needles in an ever-expanding haystack. But if they know how people are searching for things and learn how to display their content better to suit that behavior, they can boost discoverability and thus sales.

“Understanding relevance of content to the way people express themselves turns out to be a difficult problem,” De Datta told Harris.

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5. Big Data to drive $28bn of IT spending: Gartner

The figure is expected to increase to $34bn by 2013.

The rise in businesses dealing with more information will see Big Bata contribute $28bn to global IT spending in 2012, according to a new report from Gartner.Gartner revealed that the figure is expected to increase to $34bn by 2013, with 10% of new spending each year swayed by investment in big data, when compared to storage software, database management system, data integration/quality, business intelligence or supply chain management (SCM).
Currently, most Big Data spending is used on deploying traditional solutions to the Big Data demands, including machine data, social data, widely varied data and unpredictable velocity.
The research firm also revealed that the demands for new Big Data functionality in 2012 will directly drive only about $4.3bn of sales of software.

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Tags: #Big Data News

Fortune 500 companies can expect to push more than a gigabyte a day in raw web analytics data, which can be easily tripled for media companies. Big data is anything anyone ever talks about anymore, so the C-suite has never been more interested in integrated analytics, shining a spotlight on the web analyst team to deliver more than just pretty charts and high-level talking points.

Pulling the information from web analytics software should be less than 10 percent of the work, with an overwhelming 90 percent of time dedicated to deriving insights your organization can use to drive change.

So how to you go from pulling numbers to authoring insights?

1. Compare Trends, Not Just Differences

Web analytics software makes it extremely easy to compare equal periods of adjacent data, such as month-over-month or year-over-year, but other logical comparisons such as average weekday, current day versus the same day last week and other options are much more difficult to configure.

Unfortunately, the best way to find meaning in trends is by exporting data into Excel and crunching these numbers manually or by using pivot tables. You can then add layers of additional analysis such as calculating the long term mean, variance, and standard deviation.

2. Analyze the Significance of Your Data Before Drawing Conclusions

Nothing is worse than a web analyst that “cries wolf” over every little hiccup in a conversion rate. I once had a colleague that was very worried about a campaign’s performance, which dropped off sharply 8 weeks after launch, only later to learn that it was a back-to-school campaign and we were approaching Thanksgiving.

As discussed in the previous tip, calculating standard deviation is an easy way to determine whether the change you see in absolute numbers is statistically significant, if your data falls outside of two standard deviations of the mean.

3. Dig Deeper With Segmentation

Deciding on a driving force for statistically significant change is where you’re likely to spend 90 percent of your time in formulating insights.

Sometimes the driving force behind observed changes can be painfully obvious, such as broken functionality on a website, but other times a change can be like searching for a needle in a haystack. By segmenting your analytics data, you can quickly find commonly-shared behavioural traits that are influencing the changes in trends observed.

4. Correlate Reported Trends With Business Impact

This is the part of the report that should answer: why do I care? As a simple rule of thumb, try to attribute fair assumptions in revenue generation, cost savings, or visitor satisfaction back to the trends you observe.

For instance, did the landing page for a seasonal campaign perform significantly better last year? If so, how quickly could a change be made and what is the overall effect the change would make on bottom-line sales dollars?

5. Make Insights Actionable

The easiest way to make insights actionable is to derive ideas for a complementary optimization program. While there are many places to start optimizing, the goal for your web analytics reports is to include insights that can actually be completed within a short amount of time and have a significant impact.

It neither make sense to test modifications to pages with less than 1 percent of your overall site’s traffic, nor does it make any sense to recommend changes to pages beyond your organization’s control.

How do you make your web analytics reporting more insightful? Share your comments and ideas below!

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If you are a freelance writer/blogger, your copyright is quite literally your livelihood. After all, if you lose the ability to sell and trade on your work, you lose your revenue stream.

However, many freelance writers are woefully unaware of the copyright issues that surround their craft, either finding the issues too confusing or relying instead on misinformation and bad advice.

If you make your living selling your work, no matter what the content is, you owe it to yourself and your future to understand the laws that surround your craft and that is a big part of what Plagiarism Today is about.

However, for freelance writers, here are a few specific tips and points to be aware of in copyright law. Needless to say, this isn’t a thorough overview of all the issues you need to be aware of, but rather, just a few of the finer points that are often misunderstood.

1. Work for Hire May Not Apply

Work for hire law (PDF) is a sticky issue but, for most freelance writers, it doesn’t apply. If you are not an actual employee of the company that you’re writing for, which a freelancer generally wouldn’t be, then for a work to be considered a work for hire it has to meet two conditions:

(1) it comes within one of the nine categories of works listed in part 2 of the definition and (2) there is a written agreement between the parties specifying that the work is a work made for hire.

The nine categories referenced in that paragraph are as follow:

(1) a contribution to a collective work, (2) a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, (3) a translation, (4) a supplementary work, (5) a compilation, (6) an instructional text, (7) a test, (8) answer material for a test, (9) an atlas;

Clearly, a freelance writing project does not fit neatly into any of those nine categories though it may be considered a contribution to a compilation sometimes.

What this means is that, in many cases, though paid for their work, a freelance author has the copyright in it and can do with it what they please. This includes reselling the work to others, stopping infringement and so forth.

The question then becomes can an author demand removal of a work that has been paid for? The answer is less clear. When you sell a work or write it for a site, there is at least an implied license to allow the customer to use it (what else did they pay for?) but how long the terms last and how other changes in the situation affect it remain unclear.

This is why it is best to get a contract with every project though, bear in mind, buyers can protect themselves with contracts to, mandating exclusivity for example.

2. No Registration, No Lawsuit

Though you have copyright protection in a work the moment it is fixed into a tangible medium of expression, to enforce those rights you need to have a registration on file with the U.S. Copyright Office and, ideally, you need to have done so either within three months of publication or before the infringement took place.

Without a registration, there is no means of filing a lawsuit in the U.S., unless you are a foreign copyright holder, and without a timely registration there is no way to collect statutory damages or attorney’s fees, which makes a suit impractical in most cases (this is true for both U.S. citizens and foreign copyright holders).

If you’re serious about enforcing your legal rights, you need to regularly register your work and maintain those registrations. Without them, though you can file takedown notices and take other action, you can not take the case before a court.

3. Attribution Not Always Required

Though some freelancers ghostwrite content by choice, and are paid well for it hopefully, others do not and are upset when they don’t receive attribution for their work.

Unfortunately, in the U.S., there is no protection for moral rights, at least not for writers and non-visual artists. as such, Attribution is usually not a requirement for such content use, unless it is stipulated in the contract.

This is an area where the U.S. deviates sharply from other countries, which usually have a very robust protection for moral rights and mandate that attribution be included, even when the copyright in the work has been sold.

However, even in countries with moral rights, authors can often times sign away their right to enforce them, which effectively negates them and such clauses are common.

4. Copyright Transfer Requires a Signed Contract

This is a related issue to the work for hire one mentioned above, but it is important to note that the law very explicitly states that, without a written and signed contract (at least one signed by the original rights holder), a transfer of copyright can not take place.

According to the law, copyright is very much like any other piece of property you have in that you can sell it, lease it, rent it or give it away. However, you can not transfer a copyright without a signed agreement, meaning that oral agreements and “handshake deals” are not valid.

In short, if you have not signed over the copyright to your work, you haven’t given up your copyright.

That being said, in many cases, as with the terms of service on various sites, you may grant licenses of use that can, in some cases, behave much like a transfer of copyright. It is a situation similar to being the owner of a car but not being able to drive or otherwise use it as those rights are assigned to someone else.

5. The Messy World of Joint Authorship

Under copyright law, the copyright of a work almost always transfers directly to the creator of it. But what happens if more than one person collaborate on a work? Things often get messy.

Joint authorship is a very confusing and difficult area of copyright law but the fundamentals are pretty easy.

First, all authors have an equal share of the work, regardless of the size of their contribution, and all can independently, without the agreement of the other parties, enter into non-exclusive license arrangements (though revenue earned has to be shared equally). However, exclusive licenses require the input of all authors.

Second, each author can do what they want with their portion of the copyright, including selling it, leasing it, etc. The exact same with any other copyright they hold. Finally, the authors are all given an undivided share, meaning that they own part of other’s contributions as well as their own.

However, a work only qualifies as a joint authorship when the authors work together “with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole.” In short, if the contributions can be easily separated, such as separate chapters in a book, joint authorship doesn’t apply.

Enter into joint authorships at your own risk and, if you do, always have a clear contract and clear understanding of what the rules are before going in. Joint authorships have destroyed many good friendships and partnerships over the years.

Bottom Line

If you don’t understand what your rights are in your works, you can not enforce them or exploit them and, if you’re a freelancer, that can have a very negative impact on your business.

The same as construction companies need to know building codes and delivery companies traffic laws, it is important for freelance writers to understand copyright law.

Once again, this is not meant to be a thorough overview of copyright law for freelancers, but rather, an overview of some of the most commonly misunderstood points of the law that relates to them. Any freelance writer would do well to visit the U.S. Copyright Office site and learn more about the law if they don’t know it well already.

A few hours of education can save you tons of money and tons of headaches down the road.

It is a worthwhile investment for every freelance writer.

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