Digital Marketing, Analytics and Music

August 17, 2015December 23, 2017

Welcome to the Social Media Election

Social Media – Think most everyone saw this coming.

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Social media is driving the 2016 presidential race, as candidates of both parties increasingly view Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as key battlegrounds in the fight for the White House.

Campaigns have used social media in past elections. But in recent months, it has threatened to overtake traditional news outlets, paid advertising and the campaign stump as the top venue for candidates to rally voters, hit their rivals — and even make news.

And those best able to harness the power of social media are showing they can use it to generate the most buzz.

The Bernie Sanders campaign has parlayed the liberal senator’s formidable social media presence and a #feeltheBern hashtag into record attendance at rallies around the country.

When Donald Trump fires off a late-night Twitter tirade, it shows up in the feeds of more than 3.7 million followers.

“I think one of the most interesting things this year is that it’s no longer a question of if candidates should be using these platforms, it’s how and how often,” said Erin Lindsay, a principal for digital at Precision Strategies, a consulting firm founded by veterans of Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

In recent days, social media has even doubled as a virtual debate stage, with candidates sparring in a manner inconceivable just a few election cycles ago.

When former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) said at a conservative forum, “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues,” Clinton’s team pounced. “.@JebBush: You are absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” her account said, retweeting a reporter who had covered Bush’s remarks.

The two tangled again on Twitter this week. When Clinton sent out a graphic detailing the amount of student debt held by Americans, Bush’s campaign sent back with a similar image slamming what they called a 100 percent increase in student debt during the Obama presidency.

The beef was on. “Fixed it for you,” Clinton responded, having modified the graphic to read “F. The grade given to Florida for college affordability under Jeb Bush’s leadership.”

Bush then posted a version of Clinton’s campaign logo — the letter “H” where the bar in the middle has been replaced by a right-facing arrow — with the arrow pointed up and the rest of the “H” was comprised of the word “taxes,” repeated over and over.

Interactions like that can make news. “Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush Are Having a Photoshop Battle on Twitter,” AdWeek declared; “Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton Got into a Twitter Fight” saidVanity Fair; and Wired went as far as to call the back-and-forth an “Epic Photoshop Battle.”

Campaign aides also use their own accounts to respond to rival staffers and reporters who write stories they disagree with.

Just as frequently, candidates are using social media to connect with and energize their supporters.

Sometimes, that takes the form of a glimpse into a candidate’s life: Bush posted a picture to Instagram recently of a tortoise on a lawn at the Reagan Library. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) gave supporters an inside look at his announcement via Snapchat. And Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) has made a habit of posting pictures of his unglamorous meals, including a slice of sausage pizza in the Charlotte, N.C., airport.

Strategists say that candidates are most successful when they customize their message to each individual platform and can respond swiftly.

“I think depending on the platform you’re on, you need to be either more playful or clever,” said Marie Danzig, the global head of creative and delivery for Blue State Digital and a former Obama campaign staffer. “You need to operate more quickly on Twitter than you do on Facebook. I think Snapchat and Periscope will continue to become more of the norm in terms of providing behind-the-scenes content.”

Clinton’s campaign has been particularly aggressive about finding novel ways to engage with her supporters. Her Instagram account likes photos that mention the campaign and, earlier this year, her Facebook account left a supportive comment under a photo from the popular blog Humans of New York that purported to show a young boy distraught that he would not be accepted because he was gay. Signed with an “-H,” it received over 94,000 “likes.”

“It forces candidates to show more personality,” said Lindsay. “Authenticity is a big thing in social media. I think the candidates that are the most successful are the ones that are clearly the most comfortable.” Teddy Goff, one of the co-founders of Precision, also works as a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton on digital communications.

This strategy has its limits. In a piece addressing politicians’ social media presences more broadly, BuzzFeed News’s politics editor Katherine Miller said that Clinton’s “tweets often evoke an elaborate pasteurization process, wherein aides calculate what needs to be said (topic) with the maximal amount of safety (substance, tone).”

Danzig said that “there is a little bit of risk of fatigue” when candidates are taking shots at one another on social media.

But the continued rise of social media in presidential politics is, in many ways, a case of candidates meeting supporters where they have their conversations. A Pew survey released this year found that in 2014, 71 percent of online adults used Facebook, 26 percent used Instagram and 23 percent used Twitter.

Since 2012’s election, the number of mature, major social media networks has grown — with platforms such as Pinterest and Snapchat growing in popularity. As Americans continue to make using social media a part of their routines, candidates are as well.

“It’s become much more interactive, less about your posting your own beliefs in your own feed,” said Danzig. “So I think we are seeing the candidates wake up to that and make sure that they’re having more of a conversation rather than using it as a PR channel.”

By David McCabe

Original POST

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August 11, 2015December 23, 2017

A way to get fit and also have… fun?

Love this idea and agree with the philosophy behind it. Change up your routine and give this fitness approach a try!

Can exercise that is intense also be fun?

Researchers in Denmark recently began delving into that issue and in the process developed a new approach to intense interval training that could appeal even to those of us who, until now, have been disinclined to push ourselves during exercise.

High-intensity exercise, usually in the form of short bursts of very arduous intervals interspersed with rest, has much to recommend it. Many studies have shown that even a few minutes of these intervals can substantially improve health and cardiovascular fitness.

But high-intensity interval workouts have a drawback that is seldom acknowledged. Many people don’t like them and soon abandon the program.

In a telling study published last year,researchers in New Zealand asked overweight, out-of-shape adults to complete three months of high-intensity interval training, using one of two common types of training programs. One consisted of either four minutes of fast jogging, a rest, and four more minutes of strenuous jogging. The other consisted of 30 seconds of all-out effort, followed by rest, and was repeated three times.

Some of the exercisers’ sessions were supervised, and some were supposed to be done on their own.

Both programs would have been expected to round the volunteer into much better shape.

They didn’t. Few of the participants became significantly more fit, especially in the 30-second hard interval group. The probable reason, the researchers speculate, was that most of the participants had quit doing most or all of their assigned exercise early on in the study.

This finding and others like it troubled Jens Bangsbo, a professor of physiology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, who studies high-intensity interval training. In studies at his lab, repeated hard intervals had almost invariably made people fitter, faster and healthier.

But those studies typically had involved highly motivated athletes riding high-tech stationary bicycles and had been supervised by the scientists, who personally had cajoled the participants to complete each interval.

Those were hardly real-world circumstances, Dr. Bangsbo realized.

So he and his colleagues began to wonder if there might be more practical and palatable approaches to high-intensity interval training.

“We wanted to create a workout that could be employed by everyone, from the nonexperienced person to the elite athlete,” Dr. Bangsbo said.

After some trial and error, they came up with a candidate routine and named it 10-20-30 training.

It has become my favorite interval program.

The essentials of 10-20-30 training are simple. Run, ride or perhaps row on a rowing machine gently for 30 seconds, accelerate to a moderate pace for 20 seconds, then sprint as hard as you can for 10 seconds. (It should be called 30-20-10 training, obviously, but that is not as catchy.) Repeat.

The enticements of this particular program are many. It is easy to remember and low-tech, requiring no gym membership, heart rate monitor, or flow chart, as some complicated interval programs seem to demand. You don’t even need a stopwatch to monitor the 30-, 20-, and 10-second time changes. You can, like me, count to yourself, which seems to make the intervals pass quickly.

Perhaps best of all, the grueling, all-out portion of the workout lasts for only 10 seconds, which is far more manageable for most of us than 30 seconds or 4 minutes.

But of course the program must be effective if scientists are to recommend it. So for a study published in December in The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, Dr. Bangsbo and his colleagues set out to test the routine with a large group of average exercisers.

Approaching running clubs throughout Denmark, the scientists found 132 mostly middle-aged, recreational runners who agreed to substitute 10-20-30 training for two of their usual weekly workouts.

As a result, their weekly mileage fell by about half.

The scientists also recruited 28 runners to serve as controls and continue their normal training.

All of the runners underwent physiological testing at the start of the study, including a simulated 5K race.

Then the scientists turned the runners loose to continue with or abandon their training as they chose.

After eight weeks, almost all of the runners in the 10-20-30 group were still following the program. And when they repeated their 5K runs, they had shaved an average of 38 seconds from their times. Most also had lower blood pressure and other markers of improved health.

There were no changes among the runners in the control group.

Of course, any regular interval training should improve someone’s athletic endurance and health if it replaces slower training, which is why serious athletes incorporate interval sessions into their regimens.

But in Dr. Bangsbo’s study, the 10-20-30 program not only allowed the runners to train less while growing faster, it seemed to make the workouts pleasurable.

“The running clubs in our study reported much improved social interactions between members” during the workouts, Dr. Bangsbo said, because when the fastest runners turned around after each set of five 10-20-30 sprints, as most did, they found themselves following the slower runners, who had the satisfaction of being in the lead, at least for the moment.

You can undertake the program solo, too, or, as I have, with dogs. They are likely to be enthusiasts. This is how they always have run.

If you wish to try 10-20-30 training, Dr. Bangsbo recommends starting by replacing one or two of your normal weekly workouts with a 10-20-30 session.

Warm up with an easy jog (or pedaling or rowing), then ease into the intervals. The 30-second portion should feel relaxed; the next 20 seconds moderately hard; and the final 10 seconds a full gallop. “The aim is to cover as much distance as possible in those 10 seconds,” Dr. Bangsbo said.

Do five of the 10-20-30 intervals in a row without pause, then rest for two minutes by standing or very slowly walking about. Repeat the five consecutive intervals one more time, cool down, and you are done. The whole session, minus warm-up and cool-down, will have lasted 12 minutes.

If you are already in fine shape, Dr. Bangsbo said, add another set of the five uninterrupted intervals.

Rest the next day, he said, or very lightly exercise; don’t do two of the intense interval sessions in a row. Although a smaller percentage of runners in the 10-20-30 group sustained injuries than did runners in the control group in his study, “we recommend very slow progress.”

Original POST

Author: Gretchen Reynolds

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August 9, 2015December 23, 2017

3 advantages to being an ‘Intrapreneur’

Intrapreneur – Perhaps that entrepreneurial drive can be used to help established companies, and in return, earn you a regular paycheck. Read on…

NEW YORK (TheStreet) — Starting a company isn’t for everyone. I should know: I founded one and failed.

After licking my wounds, I realized that I could still be a self-starter. While working at an investment bank, I traveled the world helping the firm to grow its revenue in new markets.

With all the time on the road, I found time to write a book on money, and my paycheck helped me to finance my other interests. Instead of being a classic “entrepreneur,” I was an “intrapreneur,” someone who builds within an established organization, or uses his or her paycheck to finance other interests. Here are three advantages to being an intrapreneur.

1. You Get a Paycheck

Intrapreneurs get paid. You’ll receive a biweekly influx of capital to spend as you choose: buying groceries, donating to charities, or investing in your (or your friend’s) start-up company.

Behind every successful start-up company is a group of angel investors also known as intrapreneurs. They work traditional jobs at investment banks, law firms and fax machine companies. Usually they’re top performers, making enough discretionary income that they can invest in other ventures.

Sara Blakely, the founder of SPANX, was an intrapreneur before she was an entrepreneur. She worked as a fax machine salesperson in Florida and noticed that traditional pantyhose didn’t work well with her open-toe sandals. This gave her the idea for SPANX, a hosiery and slimming undergarment company. But she didn’t quit her job — at least, not at first. Her job helped her cover some of the initial costs of her company. This went on for years until she resigned two weeks before SPANX was featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Starting a company isn’t for the faint of heart. Not everyone can raise millions of dollars in seed capital, so you will likely be on your own. An intrapreneur knows that he or she doesn’t have to leave a steady-paying job to invest in a company or start one.

2. You Have Better Odds of Succeeding

Intrapreneurs have better odds at becoming successful: making enough money to live comfortably. They can afford to go on vacations while also building their retirement savings.

On the other hand, most entrepreneurs fail. In her provocative and well-argued book The Entrepreneur Equation, Carol Roth, a former investment banker, exposes the stark reality: Ninety percent of those who start their own companies fail within a few years.

“Nobody has been telling you and the other aspiring entrepreneurs that there is a chance that owning your own business isn’t the right path at all,” Roth writes. “Just because you are passionate about something … you might not be so excellent at having it manufactured, finding customers for it, or managing the cash flow in between.”

She bluntly deconstructs the myth of Bill Gates’s success, summarizing facts from Rick Smith’s book The Leap.

Many people know that Gates dropped out of college to found Microsoft (MSFT). What they may not know, Roth writes, is that he came from wealthy family with very useful connections and had amassed years of experience with computers while still young.

“So, Gates had around a decade of experience, limited downside risk, awareness of the huge potential of the upside, the right connections, and many other items that balanced his risks and rewards and stacked the odds in his favor,” she writes.

Roth has done us all a favor in pointing out the oh-so-forgotten parts of the legendary Microsoft co-founder’s story.

“I tell people all the time — don’t quit your day job,” Roth said in an interview. “People don’t do the math about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. They work from the wrong assumptions.”

Roth said that an acquaintance asked for advice on a business plan. Even if everything went according to plan, the business would have generated only $22,000 in revenue, she said.

“People need to get educated about entrepreneurship,” said Roth.

That’s why she says she wrote her book, which is one of the most realistic and forthright takes on the hard-knock life of an entrepreneur.

After you read it, you might realize that you should be happy where you are: being an intrapreneur, with a higher probability of “success” over the long term.

3. You Can Make a Greater Impact

Intrapreneurs can make a greater impact on the world than entrepreneurs. Let’s say you are passionate about creating clothes that are made in an environmentally responsible manner. You could start your own clothing line, hire designers, build out a marketing team — and maybe you will be successful.

Or, you could be an intrapreneur and work at Levi Strauss & Co. Social intrapreneurs launched Levi’s Water<Less jeans initiative, which has already saved 172 million liters of water. In fact, Levi has made more than 13 million products with its Water<Less finishing.

If you want to have a global impact, help reform a multinational corporation. A small change at a large company can ripple throughout the world. Of course, working at a large company presents its own challenges, such as change-resistant bureaucracy and strict compliance policies. But you don’t have to leave your company to challenge it.

As an intrapreneur, you know that it pays to keep your day job.

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July 26, 2015December 28, 2017

5 strategies to start and grow a successful business with only $200

Ha! 2009 was rough. Very. Finished my master’s that year, experienced similar circumstances and implemented a lot of the same strategies, but not the performance-based pricing listed below. As it turns out, it was a terrific idea for a start-up PR business. Congrats, Zach and an excellent read from Entrepreneur.

I graduated from college in the worst year for finding a job in recent history: 2009. I had one interview after another, and the one offer I did receive kept getting delayed. I needed to find a job fast or move back home to California from D.C.

Having always been entrepreneurial, and with a passion for marketing, I decided to form a PR firm with only $200, and a whole lot of unknowns and risks. Six years later, Cutler PR is a leading boutique tech PR firm based in New York that has serviced over 70 clients including major adtech, edtech, fintech and consumer tech companies.

Like many entrepreneurs, I was starting a business with little to no capital. While a generous line of credit, a handful of investors or an attractive inheritance can make starting a business easier, it’s possible to start a business with very little funding. But to do so, the sweat equity will be tremendous.

Don’t let a limited budget stand in the way of what could be a successful business and rewarding career. Here are five ways first-time entrepreneurs can bootstrap their way to startup success. It will be incredibly difficult, but it can be done.

1. Utilize a personal network.

The most important step in turning an idea into an actual business is to build a customer or user base. For startup companies with no real footing within the industry, that can be particularly difficult. That being the case, entrepreneurs need to turn to their personal networks.

When I started my business, one of the first things I did was contact various people in my network to tell them about what I was doing to see if I could muster my first few clients. I landed three clients initially — one was a company a relative worked for, another was a company I interned at in college and the third was a company a friend introduced me to.

Until we started getting search engine optimization and inbound leads, all of our clients came from word-of-mouth referrals, most of which stemmed from our original clients. Today, more than 40 of our clients can be traced back to our first half dozen clients.

Build a strong client or customer base in the beginning, and business will blossom from there.

2. Be scrappy.

Running a startup requires entrepreneurs to be unbelievably scrappy. First-time business owners don’t always have the money or resources needed to perform certain tasks or hire consultants, freelancers or employees, which means they have to take matters into their own hands. Sometimes that means figuring things out on the fly or just winging it — doing what they can with what they have.

My firm was so bootstrapped in the beginning that I didn’t even want to pay for accounting software — something I lived to regret because my finances were nowhere near as organized as I would have liked them to be. My advice? New entrepreneurs should save where they can, but not be afraid to spend where they need to.

3. Seek advice.

First-time entrepreneurs should aim to learn from the failures and successes of people who have done what they’re trying to do. Why try to reinvent the wheel? Seek advice from people who have been there, done that.

Articles and books, while helpful, can only tell a person so much about starting and running a business. Seek out entrepreneurs in similar sectors, speak to them and learn firsthand from their experiences.

I did this multiple times with owners of various PR firms. Find seasoned entrepreneurs who are willing to be open and honest about their experiences. Sometimes that can be tricky. The key to doing it is to approach them as an admirer who has something to learn — not competition who wants something to take.

4. Differentiate the offering.

Standing out in a sea of businesses boasting similar offerings can be difficult, which is why entrepreneurs need to strive to differentiate themselves and their products or services from the competition. How can entrepreneurs attract various shareholders to a business with no reputation or track record?

Craft a convincing pitch about what makes the business different from others within the same industry. Entrepreneurs should focus on the value their companies will bring and why consumers, potential clients and investors should take a chance on their businesses over others that may be more established.

5. Be creative (and competitive) with pricing.

One tried-and-true way to differentiate a new business from similar businesses is with pricing. For new business owners who are still trying to establish themselves within the industry, offering performance or quality-based pricing can be a huge incentive for clients or customers.

I was able to sign on clients in the beginning who never would have signed because I was willing to be innovative with my pricing model and structure it based on performance. In other words, they had very little to lose if I didn’t deliver results. As Cutler PR has grown spectacularly before my eyes, I’ve kept the barebones philosophy from the first days — that results, alongside awesome service, are what drive us.

Original article HERE.

Author:

ZACH CUTLER

Marketing Entrepreneur, Founder at The Cutler Group

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July 21, 2015July 21, 2015

We’re clean eating our way to new eating disorders

Discussions about what we “can and cannot eat” come up in almost every conversation on fitness. Found this post on Salon interesting.

Is orthorexia about to join the DSM?

Because overdoing it is the American way, we’ve now managed to warp even healthy habits into a new form of eating disorders. Welcome to the era of orthorexia.

As Heather Hansman notes this week in Fast Company, orthorexia differs from other forms of disorders in that the obsessive focus is not on how much or how little one consumes, but the perceived virtue of the food itself. As she reports, “Nutritionists and psychologists say that they’re seeing it more often, especially in the face of restrictive food trends, like gluten-free, and growing information about where food comes from, and how it’s grown and processed.” Though the term has been in use since Dr. Steven Bratman coined it in 1997, the uptick in cases is leading to a new push to formally include it in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – aka the DSM 5.

Along with “gluten-free,” “juice fast” and other phrases, you may have been hearing “orthorexia” a lot more lately. Last summer, popular health and food blogger Jordan Younger made headlines – and faced intense criticism – when she announced that she was “transitioning away from veganism” as she realized that she had “started fearing a LOT of things when it came to food,” and had been struggling with orthorexia. Her blog now is called “The Balanced Blonde,” where she talks honestly about her journey to wellness. In a recent post, she observed, “It. Breaks. My. Heart. to see and hear beautiful, motivated, capable young women being sucked in to an extreme diet and way of life because it has been branded to them as ‘THE HEALTHIEST WAY TO LIVE’ above all else.”

It’s true, this kind of disordered mentality does seem to disproportionately target “beautiful, motivated, capable young women.” Because I like to cook and eat, and because I’ve had life threatening cancer, in recent years I’ve grown more conscious and curious about how I feed myself and my family. To that end, I read a fair number of cookbooks and food blogs, in particular those with a bent toward healthy eating. And it has not escaped my attention that there have been several wildly successful books in the past few years – often featuring pretty, thin, blond women – that I have had to put down and think, “Oh my God, these people should not be giving advice.” But the creeping fear of food isn’t just for women who look like pilates instructors. Just last week, my spouse attempted to make dinner plans with an old friend, who quickly rejected multiple suggestions of places to eat after citing a litany of foods he would no longer touch. This is not a thigh gap aspiring, crunchy young woman we’re talking about here. This is a man in his 50s.

Reading some of the “clean” living writing out there, including bestselling books by authors with cult-like followings, you can find dubious claims about “detoxing” – which is not a real thing unless maybe you don’t have a liver. Enthusiastic endorsements of extreme juice cleanses and fasting – sometimes with a side of colonics. Blanket and inaccurate statements about grains, dairy, animal products, even seemingly innocuous foods like spinach or fruit. But what’s always the tipoff for me that something is a little off is when writing about food and health veers into near obsessive mathematical precision – detailed tips on exactly how much to eat, when to eat, what to combine it with. (For what it’s worth, in contrast, I find the work of Mark Bittman and Jamie Oliver reliably sane and inspiring.)

Food sensitivities and intolerances are real, and there’s zero denying that the Standard American Diet is flat-out deadly. It’s making us fatter and sicker than we’ve ever been at any point in our history, and it’s hurting our children worst of all. But for those who are vulnerable, a quest to eat right can lead to a seriously dysfunctional relationship with food. And we need to have better understanding of eating disorders and support for those who are struggling, because being healthy of body means being healthy of mind too.

Original post HERE

Follow the author – Mary Elizabeth Williams – on Twitter: @embeedub

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