Neck tattoo? Yes please...

The reputation of the tattoo has changed quite a bit throughout the years. According to Smithsonian.com, humans have marked their bodies with tattoos for thousands of years. These permanent designs-sometimes plain, sometimes elaborate, always personal- have served as amulets, status symbols, declarations of love, signs of religious beliefs  adornments and even forms of punishment. But never before have they performed a legitimate function. Not until now. 

Thanks to Google, tattoos aren't just for bad boys anymore. Google's mobility division has applied for a patent on a neck tattoo that electronically provides voice input to a mobile communication device (MCD) for hands free communication. I have always made fun of people with horrific neck tattoos(in my own head of course), but this is some Sci-Fi, minority report type stuff.  

Apparently the tattoo would include a tiny microphone, receiver and power supply. The tattoo would be able to pick up acoustic signals from a person's throat and submit these to their handset using near field communication or Bluetooth. It is designed to reduce the amount of "extra noise" that phones pick up in our world today.





With Google glass and the new Samsung smart watches I can't wait to see what people are going to look like within the next 10 years. Science fiction is quickly becoming all too real. Neck tattoos seem a bit lame. I think I'll wait until I can get a receiver in my thumb and a microphone in my pinky and make a convenient little hand phone.

Is patience still a virtue?

We have all heard the old saying "patience is a virtue" but does that still apply? And if so, where does it still apply? Definitely not in the world of the modern day consumer. We want what we want and we want it NOW! There are several industries that have gone almost by the wayside due to our impatience.

Love me some Netflix

The first industry that has taken a major hit is the movie and video rental industry. With all the streaming capabilities that most homes have it is unnecessary to wait in line at Blockbuster. I guess there probably aren't many lines left but you still have to get off your butt and drive there, wasting precious petrol, as our friends across the pond would call it. I would tend to agree with the majority. The invention of Netflix, HBO Go and the many other video streaming services has been a god send. Apparently this trend has come to a head and Blockbuster has decided to close all of the store they were still paying to keep the lights on.

A piece of my childhood is dead

The other industry that has taken a hit is the newspaper industry. While this industry has been a bit more resilient, the impatience of the consumer has still taken its toll. We want to know what is going whats going on in the world and again we want it NOW. We don't want to wait for the story in the morning paper. we want play by play updates. We want color commentary of everything from the political climate in the middle east to the hourly weather reports. Again, I am guilty of impatience in this arena as well. I have fallen victim to the necessity of constant updates.

I think I like this better

It has always been important to be able to deliver your products and services in a timely manner or at least a manner that is suitable to the customer. But as of recently the timeliness of the manner is continually shrinking. We must continue to figure out ways to deliver our services more quickly and conveniently.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth?

Cameras have been an essential part of our mobile phones since the beginning of time. Ok fine, they've only been around since the beginning of the new millennium. (the first camera phone was released in 2000 and it is debated whether it was South Korea or Japan who got there first) But it seems like it.

Either way, mothers really have been around since the beginning of time and if I know anything about mothers, having one myself, it is that they LOVE taking pictures. Now that love has begun to transfer to their children. With almost every major social media site making it so convenient to post pictures and videos the hunger to do so is almost unbearable.

According to a study done by the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project 54% of Internet users have posted original photos or videos to websites and 47% share photos or videos they found elsewhere online. Now that's a lot of selfies and the cameras on our phones can shoulder quite a bit of the blame.



Nailed It!!

 All of the technological advancements on our mobile phones make it incredibly easy to take high quality pictures and videos and even easier to send them out into the vast universe that is the internet. Photo specific apps like instagram and snapchat are the partners in crime. In the same Pew study it was found that 9% of cell phone owners use Snapchat and 18% use Instagram. 91% of American adults own a cell phone, so almost 1 in every 5 Americans is using Instagram and almost 1 in every 10 is snapchatting.


Oh the Internet

I know I have a sarcastic tone but the truth is I am part of both the 9 and 18 percentiles. I admit, snapchat is pretty fun. You can take random pictures. Draw funny things on them. Caption them any way your heart desires. But I digress. The point I'm trying to make is that in this ever evolving word we(especially Americans) are becoming more and more inpatient. We want to be entertained and we want it now. That might mean less text and more pictures, videos and selfies.

Is it word of mouth if it is given with a type and a click?

As we all know Facebook is a the place to be when it comes to a bit of free press. Today more than ever. With millions of potential customers online at any given second why would we not want a significant presence on Facebook?

Online marketers are continually trying to pry information out of internet users and internet users are continually fighting back. It is a never ending battle. According to searchenginewatch.com “nearly two-thirds of Americans said they’ve had something to hide with past online searchers". Now this study was basically about hiding your search history from work or anyone else that may have access to your computer. The question is, if most of us want to hide something from people that we know wouldn't we try even harder to hide it from those that we don't?

Stories to Share Dashboard

 

So how do we get people to our sites without having to fight them to the death? Word of mouth. And Facebook is the best place to get that done. According to mashable.com, media sites saw a 170 percent increase in traffic from Facebook between September 2012 and 2013, with some sites, like the pop culture site Buzzfeed, seeing as much as an 855 percent increase.

Never trust a bunch of girls

On October 21st Facebook added a new service called "stories to share". This will show links from “liked” pages based on the volume of friends posting a certain link, whether or not the actual fan page has posted it. Pages won't even need to post an article for it to hit newfeeds around the world.

As with any relationship trust is key. We all tend trust our friends, for the most part. Even our high school classmates we haven't seen in a decade.

Should We Be Disconnected?

In our ever shrinking world we are "connected" more now than at any point in history. We can log onto the Internet and search for information about almost anything we want. With one caveat. We are being watched. Everything we search is being tracked and recorded. Not just by the government, which I am totally fine with by the way. They can watch my boring, nerdy Internet habits all they want. Anyway, not just by the government but by anyone trying to make a buck, which turns out to be quite a few people.

If you are a dedicated disciple of Ron Swanson you would consider all this tracking to be a huge invasion of privacy and are looking to get off the grid. Now if you can't get off the grid completely and still have Internet duties to attend to there are options for you. Disconnect is a service that helps Internet users "visualize and block the invisible websites that track you".



 

Ron Swanson getting disconnected

Disconnect started out in 2010 as a service for blocking ad tracking on Facebook but has since grown to block tracking on several web browsers, namely Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox with Internet Explorer soon to come. They also have apps for mobile devices but are limited to those with iOS.

 

 

 

What they are most excited about is the service they have just released for search engines. Disconnect Search is an extension( only for Chrome and Firefox browsers at the moment) that lets users searching on Google, Bing and Yahoo, as well as Blekko and DuckDuckGo, remain private while doing so.

 

While Disconnect is not the first service of it's kind, it does seem to have quite a bit of momentum. They say that as of today that over 1 Million people use there service every week. Even though this service is not going to get you around PRISM, I think that the causal effect will be that many people will want to control at least a little bit of what remains of their Internet privacy.

 

What impact is this kind of service going to have on SEO and other business related Internet activities? If it grows big enough I think this could have a significant impact. I'm sure there are people at Google right now working on ways to get around these types of services but it seems, that as of now, the battle is on.

Omnipotent App Adds App Ads... say that ten times fast

Turns out the all powerful Facebook has decided to further saturate our lives with advertisements. I guess we can't complain too much seeing as we collectively use their FREE services, on average, around 20 Billion minutes per DAY. So I guess we have to pay for it somehow, as the old saying goes... Nothing's Free.

So, whether we Like it or not, Facebook is going to be adding more ads to the news feeds within the mobile application. This means we get to scroll through a couple more ads a day to get to the important stuff, like our friends' dogs and babies and let us not forget all of the highly educated political opinions. What we would do without Facebook I don't know.

Now for some this won't be the end of the world. In fact, it may be a blessing. Many of you can get your Candy Crush updates faster than ever. I know those stages are important milestones in many people's day.

I know I sound cynical and sarcastic but all joking aside this is going to be a good thing for both Facebook and for App marketers. We will be able to see many of the cool new apps right on our news feed without having to search for them. That's pretty cool right?

A good thing for Facebook is a good thing for us all right? Considering the amount many of us use Facebook everyday the logic only seems sound. I'm willing to scroll a little bit more for the betterment of the human race. You can thank me later.    

Twitter joins forces with Criss Angel!!... OK not really

OK, I lied. Chris Angel hasn't taken any of his glorious and completely realistic act anywhere near the social media giant. Not that I know of anyway. But Twitter is using a bit of magic to improve their product and, dare I say, levitate their stock before their IPO. Magic Recs that is.


Magic Recs is an experimental account on Twitter which has been used to send personalized recommendations to followers via direct messages. These messages could be anything from a specific tweet you might like to a person that Twitter thinks you might want to follow.


It is based on algorithms that track each person's network and recognizes similar activity from multiple people within a network. If everyone in your network starts following Harry Potter you will get a message faster than you can say Quidditch.

This service launches very soon for both iPhone and Android devices so you can have it at all at your fingertips, literally. Of course, there are those that hate push notifications more than "He Who Must Not Be Named" so Twitter has made it possible to turn them off as well. That was the last Harry Potter reference I swear.


For people like me, who tend to get behind on the times, especially during football season, this seems like a pretty useful new feature. I think I'll just let Twitter do my following for me. Especially since I don't really like my friends that much anyway.

Click here if you want more information or to check out the article I read about this.

Don't make me angry, you wouldn't like me when im angry... or would I?

Typically, making your customers angry is a No-No. I seem to remember something about "The customer is always right" and what not. Something about a happy customer is a happy home right? Wait. That's happy wife, happy life. I haven't quite gotten there yet, so my apologies. Anyway, it turns out a little bit of anger is just what the doctor ordered.

According to a very interesting study by a group at Beihang University in China anger is the most influential emotion in Chinese social media. Now, I don't want to butcher the description of the highly scientific methods they used in study so let's just say that they collected some pretty big data over a six month period. 70 million tweets kind of big. Coming from a 200+ tweet guy(and I consider myself fairly active) that is a lot of tweets. They studied how often the recipient of a message containing a certain emotion would pass that message along. What they found was that messages containing the lousy, good for nuthin, no-fun emotions of sadness and disgust were rarely passed along while the much more enjoyable emotion of joy was passed along at a much higher rate. But what they didn't expect was that anger was the most impressive social media jumper at an average rate of 3 "hops" or "degrees". Even though the Real Housewives are saddening and disgusting at times the drama is real(well the jury is still out) and people are weirdly drawn to it. Insert lame Fergie joke(No no drama, we don't want no drama).


Of course, this research has only been done in China and would need to be done in the western world if it were to be applied to marketing campaigns in the US. Also, figuring out how to get your target market riled up just enough and the right way would be a challenge as well. Obviously if you want to make a splash in social media you have to get everyone talking about you. Unfortunately, for now, anger seems to be the best way to do that.

Article: Most Influential Emotions on Social Networks Revealed  http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519306/most-influential-emotions-on-social-networks-revealed/

Research link: arxiv.org/abs/1309.2402: Anger is More Influential Than Joy: Sentiment Correlation in Weibo