ThinkUp: A Totally New Take On Analytics

If you are a social media junkie, you will be familiar with analytics, such as Facebook Insights. But a new service called ThinkUp aims to turn the concept of analytics on its head. It does so by providing information about social media in a totally new, and easy-to-understand way.

ThinkUp, launched by Lifehacker Founder Gina Trapani and former Six Apart employee Anil Dash, is a different sort of analytics company. Instead of measuring engagement, it tells you all the specific little interactions that make up engagement.

So instead of telling you that 500 people viewed your Facebook page, it will instead tell you which status updates were viewed the most, and how many. Instead of telling you that you got 50 retweets, it will tell you something about some of the people who did the retweeting.

The tool breaks things down into personalized little chunks of information. It even analyzes which words appear the most often in your tweets and status updates.

When asked why they thought there was a market for this kind of service, Anil told Small Business Trends:

“Gina and I have been involved in social networks online for as long as they’ve existed. We’ve seen them come and go. And what’s become clear over the years is that many people care about getting some value out of the effort they put in online, but the only ones that are being well-served are marketers and advertisers. We knew there are millions of regular people being underserved.”

Another interesting thing about ThinkUp is that it will tell you which of your contacts aren’t really engaging with you. There are updates, for example, that tell you that one of your friends hasn’t replied to a contact in over a year. Instead of giving you just a single graph and letting you try to figure out what it means, ThinkUp gives you this ongoing feed of little insights that are all different.

It’s like a “stream of factoids” about your social engagement with your community. It’s a single ongoing report showing you complete analytics for all your engagement on Facebook and Twitter. It condenses the number of replies, favorites and retweets you got during the week in one window. And in another, it tells you your status update of the week (in terms of the number of comments and likes it garnered).

Being a company that would like to stay in business by turning a profit, ThinkUp unfortunately cannot offer the service for free. The regular service allows you to connect one Facebook account and one Twitter account, and will cost $60 a year.

But those who are social media power-users (or companies juggling many social media balls) can connect up to 5 Facebook and Twitter accounts each for $120 a year. Anil, explains:

“We focused on fair pricing that immediately makes the product sustainable and independent. The reality is, when you work with people’s social data, there’s enormous pressure to monetize it by selling it, aggregating it, and using it to power ads. So we wanted to have a strong baseline where nobody is wondering how we pay our bills, so they don’t have to worry what we’ll do with their data.”

ThinkUp prides itself on its inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. On the official ThinkUp blog, Anil reveals the analytics tool was built by a community of mostly women coders. It is also open-source, unlike many social networks today which hide behind walls. In addition to the few thousand people currently using ThinkUp, Anil said many more thousands are using the open-source version on their own.

One curious thing though is that there doesn’t seem to be any way to access an archive of your analytics. On your profile page, it stops after about a week, and you can’t go any further back. So it’s best to screenshot everything when it appears.

But apart from that, this is a service worth using if you use social media for your business. When asked why a small business owner should pay for this service, Anil replied :

“The simplest value for a small business is to know at a human level if the things you’re sharing online are really connecting with anyone. If you run a coffee shop or a flower shop, you don’t care about having a million followers on Twitter - a million people can’t come to your store. But you care a lot about whether they thought your tweet was interesting, or whether posting a photo of your newest product offering got a lot of responses from people who are actually in your neighborhood.”

ThinkUp can tell you that story in plain English, on any device, without having to learn how to dig through some complicated analytics tool to figure it out.”

The Amazing Reason to Include Video in Your Next Email

If you include a video in your next email, there’s a 96 percent greater chance the recipient will click through. Also, when someone looks you up online, they’re more likely to click a video link than a text link.

This information comes from a new video called, “Show Me Something,” created by Shutterstock with data from comScore. The video explores the growing world of online video, and it contains a number of interesting stats that could pertain to your company’s video marketing strategy.

View the complete video here:

The video includes information about just how many people watch online videos:

“In January 2014, 190 million Americans watched 75.6 billion videos online. That’s more than 60% of the entire us population, whether they’re connected or not.”

That’s a huge amount of people online videos are reaching, meaning it’s almost certainly a format your company should explore for reaching consumers.

Of course, not all of these viewers are looking for advertisements or business-created content. But the video suggests that many of them are, stating that 36% of videos watched are advertisements.

And more and more businesses are using this information to their advantage. According to the “Show Me Something” video, spending on online video has more than doubled over the past two years.

While this data means that more consumers are interested in watching online videos from businesses, it also means that more of these videos are appearing daily. So you can’t just add online videos to your marketing strategy. You have to make your videos stand out. This means creating unique and useful or entertaining content. But it also means making it as easy as possible for your target market to find, enjoy and share them.

Another changing aspect of the online video industry is the move to mobile. More people are beginning to use smartphones and tablets for everyday browsing. So it’s important to have mobile friendly videos to reach them.

In fact, the video states that one in six online videos were viewed on a mobile device this year, which is about twice as much as the amount of mobile videos viewed the previous year.

So What Should You Do With All This Information?

First, it’s important to simply understand the power that videos can have on people. It’s a format that allows people to experience your message more fully than they would be able to with text, photos, or audio on their own. And because of this, people are simply drawn to videos.

It doesn’t matter if your business sells a tangible product, offers a creative service, or provides information. There are ways you can use videos to your advantage. And simply including them in an email or on a website can mean more clicks and conversions for your business or brand.

Image: Video Still

Eventbrite Enables Event Organizers To Sell Tickets Based on Seating

Eventbrite is one of the best services enabling small businesses to manage ticket sales at events. I’ve used Eventbrite for over 5 years to manage dozens and dozens of big and small events.

Recently Eventbrite launched a new service letter event organizers sell tickets to specific seats in a venue.

Eventbrite Seat Designer, according to Eventbrite is an intuitive, self-service product gives event organizers the power to generate more revenue from their events and guarantee a better experience for their attendees.

Facebook Hack: Programming Language for Improved User Experience

The advent of social media changed the way the world used to be. It’s brought about major transformations in both business and personal lives of people. Among the large number of social media websites which emerged over the years, Facebook has remained a major player. In fact, it was almost the monolith of the social media world for quite some time.

Despite being a favorite of a large number of people, Facebook has always looked forward to make the user experience even better. This has been a major force that has been driving new innovations at Facebook. The latest among them has been the official introduction of Facebook Hack.

Continuous R&D to Enhance User Experience

Over the years, Facebook has been performing in an enviable manner as a major social media website. Yet, the company has not stopped its R&D (research and development) activities.

Even just a few weeks back, Facebook had introduced Facebook Paper, an application to help users remain updated with all types of news on the social media platform.

Facebook Hack, often quoted as the programming language of the future, appears to be a continuation of such activities. It reveals Facebook’s commitment to provide the best to users in the field of social media.

Even a few months earlier, Facebook depended completely on common programming languages. However, this is an age of stiff competition and things need to be done as fast as possible nowadays.

But such an environment under intense work pressure used to have a negative impact on the performance of the programmers and common coding mistakes could not be avoided. Earlier forms of programming languages did not have any procedure to find errors. They could only be found during runtime. This used to slow down the performance of a site.

For a social media website like Facebook, which has millions of users, this can be a huge problem. And if it was not addressed immediately, it magnified. Facebook Hack was introduced as a solution to this problem.

A Perfect Platform for Engineers

Facebook Hack is expected to be a dream come true for engineers - a perfect programming language that helps them enjoy their work through a seamless procedure. It is also expected to make the results more error free.

This programming language combines the elements of both dynamic programming language and its static counterpart. It offers the chance to have the speed that earlier dynamic programming languages, such as Ruby or PHP, used to deliver. Moreover, akin to a static programming language, it also helps to catch mistakes before runtime of the website.

Thus, the process of error detection ensures that the website runs without a hitch.

A Tried and Tested Programming Language

It has been quite some time since Facebook has been using Facebook Hack, however, it was used on a trial basis until now. Satisfactory results have inspired Facebook to officially unveil Facebook Hack as a major programming language.

According to Bryan O’Sullivan, the engineer who shaped this programming language, Facebook Hack has been “as battle tested as it can possibly be.” Users will surely enjoy the way this language is likely to enhance the user friendliness of Facebook.

A Shift from the Earlier Versions

Facebook’s programming language used to be PHP and HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), an advanced version of PHP execution engines. PHP usually functions efficiently to help the website run in the best possible way. However, once the size of a PHP-based website grows, more servers are required to manage all the relevant codes.

Moreover, it’s necessary to keep bugs away and ensure that the site functions in a seamless manner. Facebook Hack brings offers exactly this and more. It ensures that the site works faster and the time taken by the website for various functions is reduced significantly.

Contrary to what the name suggest, Facebook Hack takes the security of the social media platform to the next level. It is a major step forward for the website.

Facebook Photo via Shutterstock

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Leaders: Learn How to Stay “Grounded” in an Uncertain World

Leaders: Learn How to Stay “Grounded” in an Uncertain World

“The only way to survive gale-force winds is to have deep healthy roots.” - Bob Rosen When only change is constant, how do business leaders maintain their balance? Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World by Bob Rosen thoroughly answers this question and shares the personal stories of numerous CEOs who used these ideas …

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Summary

Learn to develop your untapped potential and drive significantly better results for yourself, your teams and your organization.

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“The only way to survive gale-force winds is to have deep healthy roots.” - Bob Rosen

When only change is constant, how do business leaders maintain their balance?

Grounded: How Leaders Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World by Bob Rosen thoroughly answers this question and shares the personal stories of numerous CEOs who used these ideas to benefit themselves, their employees and their companies.

How to Stay Rooted in an Uncertain World

As a Small Business Trends book reviewer, I am constantly on the lookout for insightful books to share. When I saw that ExecuNet had awarded Grounded their coveted Sirius Award, The Best Business and Career Book for 2013, I had to learn more.

The award is an ExecuNet members’ choice honor bestowed upon new books that enlightened business executives in leadership and their careers during the past year. Grounded comes highly recommended.

Why Use Grounded?

Rosen suggests that personally healthy leaders can more easily withstand chaos. The healthier the leader is - the stronger the organization will be as a whole.

The book argues that leaders at every level can be more self-aware, and as described in the book’s description, does it by:

• Showing readers how to build a personal leadership model that works with their values, goals and capabilities.
• Featuring stories from leaders in a variety of organizations including the New York Fire Department, PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Lego Group, and Medstar Health.
• Giving leaders practical tools to face their toughest challenges with greater skill, confidence, and impact.

Part one of the book outlines the crisis facing today’s leaders with overwhelming and chaotic forces at work such as:

• Speed of change
• Impermanence
• Demands for transparency
• Complexity
• Intense competition
• Global interconnectedness

In additional to all of this disruptive change and economic turbulence, many leaders must also contend with clamoring shareholders, cynical employees, and personal burnout.

Part two describes the six roots of healthy leadership as:

• Physical health
• Emotional health
• Intellectual health
• Social health
• Vocational health
• Spiritual health

Part three puts these leadership ideas into action. Grounded shows how healthy leaders always start with human relations through expressing core values, inspiring leadership and by developing a clearly defined culture.

Then, and only then, can financial results be used as the scorecard of their success.

The Author

Bob Rosen is a global CEO advisor and organizational psychologist. His clients include Global 2000 corporations, government and non-governmental organizations, and selected associations around the world. He founded Healthy Companies International over 20 years ago where he created the Healthy Leadership Model, which shows leaders how to develop themselves for greater impact.

Bob earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a frequent media commentator who has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, Financial Times, Time, and Chief Executive Magazine.

Who Benefits from Grounded?

If you realize that the bottom line isn’t enough anymore in today’s unstable global economy and that what seems to be missing from your success as a leader is the inability to bring your values to the corporate table - then Grounded is for you.

While it may seem that Grounded only applies to CEOs, it truly strives to help leaders at every level to develop themselves personally so they can take confident action to build healthy organizations and positively impact their company’s success.

The Bottom Line

Successful businesses are based on healthy relationships - and leaders who are self-aware.

This pragmatic book shows how leaders can develop their untapped potential and drive significantly better results for themselves, their teams and their organizations.

It uses interviews and case studies to stress this important message to leaders - focus on improving yourself before you try to fix your company.