#this is more of a survey of points i found interesting than any cohesive post

[housemdork]

house md rewatch: 2x09, "deception"

it makes sense that house would be so averse to a munchausen's diagnosis.

the (first) foreman era has made landfall, and it's already spelling out chaos. it's been AGES since we've had a foreman-forward episode, too, and i think this one slots nicely in with 2x01. back when foreman was so troubled by the patient on death row, we learned about his crucial trait that sets him apart from house: his ability and willingness to reflect. 2x09 features that trait of his pushed to its limit (among what we've seen thus far).

my experience with foreman has been that, so far, he respects what house does but does not like him, but even this respect is floundering a bit in light of recent events, like the chase and house debacle of 2x08. foreman enters the Boss Man Role with a naive idea of cooperation - if he can find a way to control house (his words) without being so blatant, he can introduce proper hospital ethics and morals and guidelines while also keeping house at ease. it's a silly endeavor from the outset and predicated on foreman's refusal/inability to see any part of house in himself.

it's not just audiences who pinpoint this as a doomed endeavor - wilson calls bullshit immediately. :"can i talk to you about something in confidence?" "of course." "it's about house." "oh, then. no."

i mention this mostly because the conversation reads not like words of wisdom or chastisement from wilson to foreman, but more so wilson saing "only i can fuck with house like that." little protective moment that doesn't do too much to advance the plot, but it does confirm that foreman does not have an ally in wilson. and ofc wilson has to be all theater kid/greek tragedy about it, comparing the idea of "controlling" house to "usurping" caesar.

what 2x09 also highlights are the leadership qualities, or lack thereof, between the fellows. foreman tries his hand at diplomacy here, but at the cost of his usual brilliance. house (rightly) accuses him of taking the safe route when he folds to a combination of both his and cameron's diagnoses; the resulting ridicule, while most inspired by how angry house is that he's not in charge atm, also comes from disappointment. he knows foreman is more than this, and he, at some level, wants foreman to see what he's sacrificing by playing cuddy's game.

chase, meanwhile, isn't granted any opportunity to showcase his leadership skills - instead, he gets back to scheming. this is so fucking funny given that in 2x08 both house and chase's entire careers were threatened because of their combined devilry. but what i also like about this little alliance between them is so prophetic it is - chase, despite claiming otherwise, still thinks that house considered loyalty to be transactional. he still thinks that, by sticking at his side, he'll be rewarded in the end. and while this is technically true come season 8, house firing chase in season 3 is one of the most insane moments of the show for me.

chase does make the important realization that, "no matter what i do, you're still going to treat me like crap," to which house makes a threat: "crap is a relative term." so chase's decision to conspire house against foreman here is equal parts an internal and externally motivated choice. but it's not like we haven't seen chase relish in this sort of thing before.

cameron, meanwhile, looks for ways to improve her leadership skills by appealing to leadership. i love and relate to her lol. i think house being needlessly harsh to her is a symptom of his unwillingness to acknowledge the moral effect she has on him and the team at large; that's leadership, but at a deeply subconscious level. yet his invitation for her to take a ride on his motorcycle with him is a powerful statement of equality - house shares the embodiment of his freedom with someone who's nearly survived the gauntlet of Having A Thing For House lmfao.

she deserves this moment of favoritism lol. also it's crazy that we've had no mention of cameron and HIV yet.

amidst all of that, however, i think the root of this episode's tensions comes from a rock (foreman) and a hard place (house) trying to communicate. foreman, saddled with new authority that he instantly takes very seriously, makes futile attempts at getting house to budge without understanding why house is being particularly petulant about this case. the patient, anica, has munchausen's disease, but beneath that, she harbors a real and dangerous condition.

house, just like in 2x07, can relate to her, and this idea of nonexistent pain haunts house and the viewer from 1x21. house refuses to write off anica because a real problem may be lingering beneath her mental illness, and that mental illness doesn't negate the resulting pain. house's vicodin addiction does not negate his leg pain and disability.

i think this shot/scene is very effective in drawing this parallel. it definitely looks like he's helping someone shoot up. but he's right, to a point, and to the chagrin of the team. he doesn't undo their diagnosis of munchausen's (he can't deny his addiction), but he can see to the heart of the issue (they can't deny his leg pain).

that's why i found cameron and house's exchange at anica's house so captivating. she says, about munchausen's patients, that "attention is attention," and house gets immediately defensive. he understands that need for attention and the chaotic ways he's tempted to get it, without exposing himself as lonely. and admitting to cameron, of all people, that he's lonely would be worse than death for him lol.

later, foreman reiterates this house/patient parallel to anika after they confirm the aplastic anemia: "you jumped through a lot of hoops to be here." anika returns with: "i just want to be healthy." in house's shoes, people are loath to believe that house wants any help because he refuses to ask; he complicates his life and his health with his vicodin addiction, but he just wants that pain to go away. i'm pretty confident in this comparison since we have 2x13 waiting for us in the wings.

moving forward, i'm interested in keeping tabs on all the moments where house is especially sensitive to medical negligence...despute having nearly been charged with it in 2x08. i also consider this to me ground zero for the never-ending tension between foreman and house that carries us alllll the way to about 8x02.

[creativitycache]

ngl asking for people who self-identify as "antis" is already biasing your results because the term originated from fans being defensive over getting called out (eg the types who sincerely think fandom culture is ""puritan""). fair number of people started to use the term ironically and it might be evening out but overall the post calling for responses on the survey still comes off as something written in bad faith?

I wrote a rather long and involved response and then tumblr ate it. Goshdarn.

Fair warning, this is a hyperfixation and I’m coming off of a migraine so this may not be very cogent. Please read this in the over excited tones of someone infodumping about emulsifiers, with no animosity intended.

So, tl;dr and with a lot fewer links, I’m incredibly interested by your perspective that “anti” originated as a derogatory term.

As far as I am aware, the etymological history of the word “anti” being used pejoratively is coming from some very new debates.

I’m also noting that you had no feedback regarding the content of the questions themselves, which I would be interested in hearing as I am genuinely coming from a place without censure.

The term “anti” actually is a self-descriptor that arose in the Livejournal days, where you’d tag something as “Anti ___” for other like minded people to find. (For example, my cursory google search pulled up 10 Anti Amy Lee communities on LJ).

I’m a self-confessed old. I was back in fandom before Livejournal, aaaall the way back in the Angelfire days. Webrings children! We had webrings! And guest books for you to sign!

I’m going to take a swing for the fences here Anon, so if I’m wrong please let me know, but I’m going to guess you became active as a fan in the past 5-8 years based of your use of the term puritan.

There’s actually a HUGELY new debate in fandom spaces! Previously, it was assumed that:

a) All fandom spaces are created and used by adults only.

b) If you were seeing something, it’s because you dug for it.

These assumptions were predicated upon what spaces fandoms grew in. First you had Star Trek TOS fandom, which grew in 1970s housewives kitchens. They were all friends irl, and everyone was an adult, and you actively had to reach out to other adults to talk about things. (By the way- a woman lost custody of her children in the divorce when her ex husband brought up to the judge she kept a Kirk/Spock zine under her bed. The judge ruled this as obvious signs of moral deficiency. That was in the 80s! Everyone is still alive and the parents are younger than my coworkers!)

Time: 1967-1980s. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Then, when the internet came about, it was almost exclusively used by adults until The Eternal September. 1993 was the year that changed the internet for good, but even years after that the internet was a majority adult space. Most kids and teens didn’t have unlimited access if their parents even had a home computer in the 90s.

This is the rise of Angelfire, which were fansites all connected to each other in “rings”. You had to hunt for content. If you found something you didn’t like, well, you clicked out and went on with your day because you’d never see it again unless you really dug. This was truly the wild west, tagging did not exist and you could go from fluff to vore in the blink of an eye with nothing warning you before hand. All fannish spaces were marked “here be dragons” and attempts were made to at least adopt the “R/NC-17″ ratings on works to some limited success, depending on webmaster.

Time: 1990-1999. Is Anti a term? No. Who is the term used by? N/A Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

In 1999 LiveJournal arose like a leviathan, and here is where the term Anti emerges as a self descriptor. Larger communities began to form, and with them, divisions. Now, you could reach so many fans you could reach a critical mass of them for enough of them to dislike a ship. The phrase “Anti” became a self-used tag, as people tagged their works, communities, and blogs with “anti” (NB: this is at far, far smaller rates than today). Anti was first and foremost a tagging tool used and created by the people who were vehemently against something.

You could find content more easily than in the past, but you still had to put some serious elbow grease into it.

In 2007, Livejournal bans users for art "depicting minors in explicit sexual situations”. The Livejournal community explodes in anger- towards Livejournal staff. The account holders/fans view this as corporate puritanical meddling. The outrage continues as it is revealed these bans were part of a pre-sale operation to SUP Services. SUP Services, upon taking over Livejournal in 2008, proceeds to filter the topics “bisexuality, depression, faeries, girls, boys, and fanfiction”.

The Great LiveJournal Migration begins, as fans leave the site in droves.

Time: 1999-2009. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing, seeking to create communities based off a dislike of something. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? No.

Where do fans go? Well, in the last decade, they migrated to Tumblr and Twitter (sorry Pillowfort- you gave it a good try!)

What’s different about all of these sites? Individuals are able to create and access content streams. These are hugely impactful in how communities are formed! Because now:

a) finding content is easier

b) finding content you dislike by accident is easier

c) content you dislike requires active curation to avoid

d) truly anonymous outreach is possible and easy (for example, you anon! Isn’t it much easier to go on anon to bring up awkward or sensitive topics? I’m happy you did by the way, and that’s why I keep my anons open. It’s an important contextual tool in the online communications world!)

Now the term Anti gets sprightly. Previously, if you didn’t like content, there was nothing you could really do about it. For example, I, at the tender age of way-too-young, opened up a page of my favorite Star Trek Deep Space 9 fansite and pixel by pixel with all the loading speed of a stoned turtle a very anatomically incorrect orgy appeared.

I backed out.

1. Who could I contact? There was no “message me here” button, no way to summon any mods on Angelfire sites.

2. If I did manage to find a contact button, I would have had to admit I went onto a site that wasn’t designed to keep me safe. I knew this was a site for adults, I knew there wasn’t a way to stop it from showing something. There was no such thing as tags. I knew all of this before going in. So the assumption was, it was on me for looking. (Some may have argued it was on my parents for not supervising me- all I can say is thank GOD no one else was in the living room and my mom was around the corner in the kitchen.)

But now? On Tumblr? On Twitter? In a decade in which tagging is so easy and ubiquitous it’s expected?

Now people who describe themselves as antis start to have actual tools and social conventions to utilize.

Which leads to immediate backlash! Content creators are confused and upset- fandom spaces have been the wild west for decades, and there’s still no sherriff in town. So the immediate go-to argument is that these people who are messaging them are “puritans”.

And that’s actually an interesting argument! A huge factor in shaping the internet’s social mores in the latest decades is cleanliness for stockbrokers. Websites can become toxic to investors and to sales if they contain sexual content. Over time, corporations perfected a mechanism for “cleaning” a site for sale.

Please note there is no personal opinion or judgement in this next list, it is simply a description of corporate strategies you can read during the minute meetings of shareholders for Tumblr, Twitter, Paypal, Venmo, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo Answers, and Livejournal.

1. Remove sex workers. Ban any sex work of any kind, deplatform, keep any money you may have been holding.

2. Remove pedophilia. This is where the jump begins between content depicting real people vs content depicting fictional characters begins.

3. Remove all sexual image content, including artwork of fictional characters.

4. Remove all sexual content, including written works. If needed, loop back to step 2 as a justification, and claim you do not have the moderators to prevent written works depicting children.

I would like to reiterate these are actual gameplans, so much so that they’ve made their way into business textbooks. (Or at least they did for my Modern Marketing & App Design classes back in the early 2010s. Venmo, of course, wasn’t mentioned, but I did read the shareholder’s speeches when they banned sex workers from the platform so I added them in the list above because it seems they’re following the same pattern.)

So you have two groups who are actively seeking to remove NSFW content from the site.

A) Corporate shareholders

B) People are upset they’re seeing NSFW content they didn’t seek out and squicks them

Now, why does this matter for the debates using the term “puritan” as an insult? 

Because the reasons corporate shareholders hate NSFW material is founded in American puritanism. It’s a really interesting conflation of private sector values! And if Wall Street were in another cultural context, it would be a completely different discussion which I find fascinating!

But here’s the rub- that second group? They're not doing this for money. If there are any puritanical drives, it’s personal, not a widespread cohesive ideology driving them. HOWEVER! The section of that group that spent the early 2010s on tumblr did pick up some of the same rhetoric as puritanical talking points (which is an entirely separate discussion involving radfems, 4chan raids, fourth wave feminism, and a huge very nuanced set of influences I would love to talk about at a later time!)

These are largely fans who have “grown up” in the modern sites- no matter how old they actually are, their fandom habits and expectations have been shaped by the algorithms of these modern sites.

Now HERE‘s the fascinating bit that’s new to me! This is the interpretation of the data I’m getting, and so I’m out on a limb but I think this is a valid premise!

The major conflict in fandom at this time is a struggle over personal space online.

Content creators are getting messages telling them to stop, degrading them, following them from platform to platform.

They say “Hey! What gives- we were here first. The cardinal rule of fandom is don’t like, don’t read. Fandom space has always been understood to be adult- it’s been this way for decades! To find our content, you had to come to us! This is our space! This is my space, this is my blog! If you don’t like it, you’re not obligated to look!”

Meanwhile, at the exact same time, antis are saying “Hey! What gives- this content is appearing on my screen! That’s my space!  I didn’t agree to this, I don’t like this! I want it to be as far away from me as possible! I will actively drive it away.”

This is a major cultural shift! This is a huge change and a huge source of friction! And I directly credit it to the concept of “content stream” and algorithms driving similar-content to users despite them not wanting it!

Curating your online space used to be much simpler, because there wasn’t much of it! Now with millions of users spread out over a wide age range, all feeding in to the same 4-5 websites, we are seeing people be cramped in a technically limitless space!

Now people feel that they have to go on the offense to defend themselves against content they don’t like, which is predicated upon not only the algorithms of modern websites but ALSO talking points fed from the top down of what is and what is not acceptable on various platforms.

Time: 2010-2020. Is Anti a term? Yes. Who is the term used by? People self describing,and people using it to describe others. Is fandom space considered Puritanical? Depends!

So I, a fandom ancient, a creaky thing of old HTML codes and broken tags, am watching this transformation and am wildly curious for data.

Also...I uh....I can’t believe this is the short version. My ADHD is how you say “buckwild” tonight.

Anyways...um...if anyone has read to the bottom, give me data?

[dipulb3]

Analysis: How Dr. Seuss explains Biden's big win on Covid bill

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/analysis-how-dr-seuss-explains-bidens-big-win-on-covid-bill/

Analysis: How Dr. Seuss explains Biden's big win on Covid bill

That stress on cultural complaints reflects the shifting source of motivation inside the GOP coalition, with fewer voters responding to the warnings against “big government” once central to the party’s appeal and more viscerally responding to alarms that Democrats intend to transform “our country,” as former President Donald Trump often calls it, into something culturally unrecognizable.

Rahm Emanuel lived through both of those earlier fights as a top White House side to Clinton and Obama’s chief of staff. Compared with the gyrations required to pass those economic plans, he told me, the changes that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other moderates demanded this time were “a nip and tuck. It’s not even plastic surgery.” The modest changes, he says, shows that compared with those earlier periods, the Democratic congressional caucus today is “much more ideologically cohesive.”

Some Democratic strategists warn that the cumulative price tag of the Biden agenda might still trigger a backlash, particularly if interest rates and/or inflation rise, as some economists warn. But for now it’s clear that Democratic moderates are displaying less fear of being tagged with the “big government” label from the right than their counterparts did during the early months of the Clinton and Obama presidencies. That could help Biden consolidate his party for another expensive proposal he’s likely to unveil soon: a broader, infrastructure-centered, economic recovery plan whose price tag will also likely reach the trillion-dollar level.

“I think it’s very clear that on economic issues, the voters … want them to pass stuff and take action, and there’s not a lot of opposition out there,” says Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch. “So Biden’s got running room.”

Why it’s different this time

As in the famous Sherlock Holmes story, the most revealing dynamic in the legislative debate over the Covid plan may have been “the dog that didn’t bark”: in this case, the absence of a grassroots conservative uprising against the plan, even though its price tag vastly exceeded the Clinton and Obama proposals that ignited more resistance. Polls have consistently found significant majorities of Americans support the Covid relief plan, with Gourevitch’s firm releasing one survey last week that showed it winning support from more than two-thirds of adults, including a plurality of Republicans.

Democratic Rep. Ron Kind, who represents a rural-flavored western Wisconsin district that Trump carried by almost 5 percentage points last November, told me he felt no hesitation about backing the Covid bill. Calls coming into his office, Kind told me, have been “10 to one positive. … The reaction has been amazing: overwhelming support.”

Likewise, Democratic Rep. Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, who also holds a seat in a blue-collar district Trump won by more than 4 points, says that among his colleagues in swing districts, “Teeth-gnashing, hand-wringing, pearl-clutching: All of those were absent in this.”

Changed circumstances partly explain the GOP’s inability to stir serious resistance to the plan. Obama’s economic recovery package was buffeted by the broader public anger over financial institutions’ role in triggering the 2008 housing crisis and severe recession. This time, despite Trump’s frequent efforts to blame the virus on China, Americans seem much more inclined to view the outbreak as a kind of natural disaster that demands a collective response.

“In ’09 there was so much anger in the air, the big fat cats being bailed out … and people were looking for blood and who do we hold accountable,” Kind says. “And that’s not as easy to do when you’ve got a global pandemic.”

Different, too, is the breadth of the pain the virus has inflicted. Clinton’s economic plan followed a relatively mild recession; and while Obama’s responded to a much more serious downturn, the housing crisis still spared most homeowners while crushing others. The small-government “tea party” movement that helped power the huge GOP gains in the 2010 election began with a television rant by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli, who asked, “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

By contrast, the coronavirus outbreak has touched virtually all Americans: Even those who haven’t faced illness in their families, or disruption to their incomes, have seen the routines of daily life disintegrate.

In his central Pennsylvania district, Cartwright says, “you would struggle to find somebody who wasn’t affected by this pandemic negatively in some way.”

That includes local Republican officials in cities and towns, Kind notes, who are eager for the bill’s assistance — despite congressional Republican attempts to tag its aid for local governments as a bailout to poorly run Democratic cities and states. “The [congressional] Republicans are overplaying their hand by trying to make this more partisan than it is back home,” he says. One Republican police chief in his district, Kind says, even told him that by opposing the local aid, Republicans “are the ones who are really defunding law enforcement and our first responders.”

Yet just as important as the changed circumstances may be the evolving priorities of the GOP voter base.

“Donald Trump may have shifted the GOP coalition to a more economically populist position or revealed that there’s just less appetite for spending discipline on the right than there was before,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson told me in an email.

If anything, questions about whether to increase or shrink government are now more likely to divide than unite Republican voters, notes Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. Though Republican partisans still generally recoil at higher taxes and oppose programs they view as transfer payments for the poor, a recent poll of Trump voters that Olsen supervised, for instance, found substantial support among them for spending on Social Security and Medicare (entitlements that benefit the predominantly White senior population).

“I think it’s pretty clear that in the modern Republican Party, spending control for its own sake is a minority taste, not a majority taste, and that partly explains why there hasn’t been this massive uprising at a $1.9 trillion bill,” Olsen says.

GOP anxiety about way of life widespread

As concerns about big government recede, anxiety about America’s changing identity in an era of growing racial and religious diversity has emerged as the core unifying principle of the GOP coalition. A February poll from Echelon Insights, Anderson’s firm, offers one measure of that shift. Asked their top priorities, Republican voters identified illegal immigration, lack of support for the police, liberal bias in media and general moral decline among their top five concerns; high taxes was the sole economic issue that cracked the list.

Olsen’s national survey of Trump voters, conducted in January, found them crackling with the sense that they are culturally and demographically besieged. In that poll, roughly 9 in 10 Trump voters agreed with a series of stark propositions: that America is losing faith in the ideas that make the country great, that Christianity is under attack in the US and that discrimination against Whites “will increase a lot” in years ahead. Overwhelming majorities rejected the idea that Whites have any intrinsic advantage in American society or that Hispanic and Asian immigrants face discrimination. In the recent national American Enterprise Institute survey supervised by Cox, three-fourths of Republicans asserted that discrimination against Whites was as big a problem as bias against minorities.

Olsen argues that racial resentment is overstated as a unifying principle for Trump supporters, instead portraying the common thread as a more general “sense that the American way of life is under attack.” Cox, along with many other political scientists and opinion analysts, disagrees: They argue the claim that Whites face discrimination has been the best predictor of not only support for Trump but also of the belief that the “American way of life” is under such threat that anti-democratic means, including violence, are justified to protect it.

Either way, whether these cultural anxieties are motivated primarily by racial resentment or not, what’s clear is they are burning brighter for GOP voters now than hostility to “big government.” “As conservative White Protestants moved from operating at the periphery of Republican politics to becoming the most critical part of the GOP base, their manifest cultural concerns, which have always incredibly important to these voters, have overshadowed the GOP’s traditional economic agenda,” says Cox.

House Republicans effectively acknowledged that shift by devoting so much attention to the controversy over Dr. Seuss — the National Republican Congressional Committee offered copies of his books to donors — while Democrats were passing a spending bill that towered over anything they had approved under Clinton or Obama. Other Republicans, meanwhile, tried to portray Biden’s use of the word “Neanderthal” to criticize GOP governor rollbacks of Covid restrictions as a slur on Republican voters, like Hillary Clinton’s description of some Trump backers as “deplorables.” While congressional Republicans called the Covid plan “socialist” or charged it was stuffed with Democratic pet projects, they hardly pressed that case with as much enthusiasm as these cultural attacks: “It doesn’t seem like they are even really trying” to discredit the package, says Gourevitch, in a verdict privately echoed by some Republicans.

Next up: Big spending on infrastructure

That half-hearted resistance seems likely to encourage Democrats to go big on the next stage of Biden’s economic agenda: the “Build Back Better” long-term growth proposal that will include a substantial infrastructure investment. Though the White House has not decided when to introduce the proposal, it will almost certainly include infrastructure spending in the range of about $300 billion annually, for a cumulative price tag over 10 years in the trillions.

Yet both inside the White House and Congress, Democrats are showing little hesitation about proposing that much new spending immediately after a package this big. Both Kind and Cartwright, holding districts that stretch deep into Trump country, say they would enthusiastically support a big infrastructure plan.

“I’d be very comfortable with it,” Cartwright says. “I have been serving in the US House since January 2013 and the whole time I have been saying out loud we need a big, big infrastructure package. It’s not just that the folks around here who build things for a living will benefit, it’s that the entire American economy will benefit.”

Steve Ricchetti, the White House counselor to Biden, told me the administration expects broad support for the infrastructure package when the President eventually unveils it.

“I believe there will be wide, deep bipartisan support for infrastructure because the need is so great,” he says. “I believe there’s a prospect for securing bipartisan support in Congress for this, but I am certain there will be bipartisan support throughout the country for this: governors, mayors, local officials whose economies are dependent on infrastructure investment, digital, energy, transportation, water. The business community will be enormously supportive of this; it’s an engine for the recovery.”

The open question for Biden, as he finalizes his next proposals, is whether there’s a cumulative weight of proposed spending that awakens the slumbering conservative recoil against “big government.” Both Clinton and Obama saw the grassroots backlashes against their agendas intensify when they followed their initial economic plans with other expensive proposals, particularly their efforts to overhaul the health care system. Each of those dynamics culminated in crushing losses for them in the first midterm after their election.

Compared with the Clinton or Obama experience, Democrats unquestionably feel they have more runway to advance new programs today, largely because the GOP coalition no longer seems as energized by opposition to spending. But if the political limits on new spending seem relaxed, that doesn’t ensure they have been eliminated. It’s possible Americans will accept trillions in spending beyond the Covid plan, but it’s also possible Biden and fellow Democrats might trigger a circuit breaker in public opinion if they go too far — particularly if inflation and interest rates rise from all the economic stimulus as even some Democratic economists have warned. Demands from moderates such as Manchin to find offsetting tax revenues for some or all of the infrastructure plan could also stir more conservative opposition.

The problem is that both the cost of the federal response and the underlying disruption to society from the pandemic are so unprecedented that no one can confidently predict how much more spending Biden can add to his tab without provoking the backlash he has conspicuously avoided so far. Even Emanuel, who rarely expresses doubt, acknowledges, “I’m not even sure I can give you an educated guess on that.”

The safest bet is that so long as the GOP remains fixated on cultural and racial grievance, Democrats will feel confident pushing forward the most aggressive expansion of government’s role in the economy since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society during the 1960s.

[enterprisemag]

This is How 2020 Changed Art Fairs for Good

It has been a tumultuous year for art fairs: the vast majority of organizers had to cancel or postpone their events. Those who were lucky enough won not only experience but important lessons for the long run, too. Now organizers and prominent stakeholders share their 5 tips for a successful art event in the coming years.

 The pandemic posed the biggest ordeal in the history of art fairs – it jolted the art industry more than any other crisis of our time. Although most events had to be canceled, the now ending art fair season hasn’t been uneventful, and we can learn crucial lessons from those who could organize despite all circumstances.

 The consequences of COVID have been catastrophic in the art world. Galleries’ turnover collapsed (sometimes even by 90%) due to closures and the lack of physical sales – even worsened by the mass cancellation of art fairs, from which they reported only 16% of their income in 2020, compared to 46% last year. Major museums will struggle to survive into 2021 and 2022: the American Alliance of Museums reports that 30% of US museums are still closed, and even those that are open receive only 35% of normal attendance. In the UK, 60% of museums and galleries are facing an existential threat, according to Art Fund’s survey. Most major art fairs (e.g. Art Basel in Hong Kong, Basel and Miami Beach, Frieze in New York and London, FIAC, Paris Photo in Paris and New York, etc.) were canceled or moved online, others were trustingly postponed to 2021. Only a handful of them could stick to their schedule and keep their live, physical events. Those who did had a few months to learn about safe organization, had a strong mission to support artists and galleries before their eyes and shifted focus to comply with the new realities. These successfully held events present important lessons for the future of art fairs.

 Art Market Budapest – the largest art fair in the Eastern and Central European region – organized their 10th edition in October, with a virtual platform running until November 8, for those who could not attend personally. With 80 exhibitors from 20 countries, it lost only 10% of its viewership – with as many visitors as pandemic regulations allowed. The experience – along with the wisdom of fellow organizers and other top stakeholders in the field (such as Georgina Adam – editor-at-large and journalist at The Art Newspaper, Juan Canela – Artistic Director of ZONAMACO Mexico City, Attila Ledényi – founding director of Art Market Budapest, Mandla Sibeko – founder of FNB Art Joburg, and Carlos Urroz – former Director of the International Contemporary Art Fair ARCOmadrid) at the panel discussion of the adjoining Inside Art conference – shed light on 5 recent expectations of a successful art fair for the upcoming years. As they see it, these are the 5 key trends for a post-COVID art fair in 2021 and beyond.

 1.   Regionality

 Of all art fairs since the outbreak, only those with a regional focus could endure. This shouldn’t mean seclusion at all. Instead, we have to be aware of our regional peculiarities, represent them in a global context and find connections between local and global. An illustrative example of this were the two Paris art fairs: while the global FIAC had to be canceled, Art Paris Art Fair of regional interest could run successfully. 

 Even without COVID-19, many collectors already prefer “treasure hunting” at less overhyped regional fairs instead of global ones, looking for uniqueness and new impulses. Whenever the crisis ends, regional events will retain their attractiveness as an original meeting point of like-minded enthusiasts, who are willing to travel for an exciting regional fair rather than a mainstream global one.

 This was already a tendency before the pandemic, consolidated by this year’s developments.

 2.   Community

 Art fairs play a crucial role in creating communities – no wonder 70 percent of collectors say they still prefer seeing art in person, despite their unbroken eagerness to purchase and the indisputable advantages of online sales. Successful organizers such as Art Market Budapest consider their community-building capacity and the “soul” – its friendly, inclusive atmosphere – to be one of the event’s all-time key features. Its cohesive capacity even helped the formation of a strong professional community around the event which turned out to be a crucial factor in 2020. 

 This has been a ‘nice-to-have’ until now, but it has now become a ‘must-have’: a social responsibility to bring artists, gallerists, and the audience together. Creating this community has become imperative for creating irreplaceable connections, subsidizing artists’ livelihood, and stimulating the economy. The organizers’ responsibility for a reliable income doesn’t stop at gallerists and artists: it serves all members of a broader community, from technical staff through to framers and builders – many of whom lost all their other revenue streams due to the pandemic.

  3.   Sustainability

 The question which has been up in the air in the past few years: can the world sustain such a huge number of art fairs? Attila Ledényi emphasized at Inside Art’s panel discussion: “An art fair is not just an art event but a commercial and business event, too. Market and demand should decide how many art fairs should exist, how many it can support. Those who can survive in difficult situations can succeed in the long term. It’s a test. The audience will always be there, as there is a hunger for physical art enjoyment. The key question is whether galleries can be there and guarantee the level the audience is used to. I believe they will continue to attend as long as they can gain new audiences and clients at the art fair.”

 Carlos Urroz added: “International art fairs have reached their peak in growth and visibility, and the communities they created became too big. Then a consolidation followed, some started pulling back even before the pandemic, holding exclusive views and so on – it’s a danger of halting an already started democratization process. Art fairs should be the center of recovery after the crisis. They have to lose their expensive, exclusive format and find publicity and visibility. Organizers also have to consider environmental aspects, such as the carbon footprint of the art world. We should reconsider the way we travel. The art fairs that will survive will be linked to a community, be sustainable, affordable, environmentally conscious and run by nice people.”

 It’s an open question whether online versions can fully replace larger events as a more sustainable, environmentally conscious alternative. So far, their popularity and sales volumes are lagging far behind traditional events, indicating that they won’t become adequate substitutes. 

 4.   Mission

 All art fairs that could thrive despite wartime conditions have a strong mission – from community creation to social causes, such as supporting black communities. 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair in London was a great example of a successfully organized event, despite the cancellation of Frieze of which 1-54 is normally considered a satellite or even accessory event. 1-54 owes its success to its strong, timely mission: its focus on African art and on supporting African artists – a pivotal cause in the heyday of social causes and movements around racial equality and attention to previously neglected sources of cultural values.

 Mandla Sibeko stressed the timeliness of the necessity of this shift: “African art seems to be getting overhyped, but there are 54 countries in Africa, which are not equally represented, and it still has a lot to catch up with. The continent still has a huge potential, and art fairs can be great opportunities for more and more black and African artists receiving the prominence they deserve.”

 Art Market Budapest, as an Eastern European fair, serves other, previously discounted groups as their mission: they expose the region’s underrepresented art to the global audience – a mission that benefits the global public and the regional artists alike.

 5.   Hybridity

 Despite spectacular results in OVRs, online will never entirely replace in-person attendance and buying. However, online versions bring some benefits that complement physical events. “It brings price transparency – prices are visible at OVRs. Many people would feel embarrassed to ask personally at the booth, they would feel humiliated that they can’t afford a work of art. Online can’t replace the experience but people are discovering new names, new directions through it.” says Georgina Adam. This brings about a long-awaited democratization process after the over-exclusivity of the largest physical fairs of recent years.

 Merging physical encounters with online platforms also opens opportunities for widening both the audience and the selection of artwork and galleries. And, for those who can’t attend personally, it remains their only option to stay in touch. As well, galleries on virtual platforms may more easily become physical exhibitors in the future.

  The common denominator among these five trends is that none of them came out of nowhere. Industry experts had already expressed their wishes, warnings and concerns on these topics years ago. COVID brought nothing unfamiliar into the picture, it just accelerated the process. It made certain features indispensable, which some events had already implemented before as an ‘extra’. Those who can innovate along these values can become big winners in the art fair industry. And those who keep them in mind for the future can thrive in the long run, too.

 The year 2020 entails experiences and conclusions that, though often being born amid panic and haste, will last long and change the future of art fairs. Hopefully, this year will not only be memorable for its catastrophic events, but also for the positive changes they consolidated.

[evamariagarcia-blog]

My Survey Lines are Now Closed and the Results are in!!

To start with below are my key stats for the survey:

I was a little disappointed with there being 47 visits and only 28 people filled in my survey. I do feel like I got a good amount fo responses that I can use for my research.

The results are now in...

Question 1 - What age bracket do you fall under?

I was thinking my target audience would just be designers. Which as we know come in all different ages. I assumed I would probably split them into students and then working designers. My results where pretty ranged and fell under my expectations.

There was:

35.7% for 18-24

42.9% for 25-34

14.3% for 35-44

7.1% for 45-54

This fall under my brackets as I assume the audience above 25+ are working designers but now reflecting on this that could have been a question I asked in my survey instead of just assuming.

Question 2 - What tools do you currently use when doing design research?

I listed out a few options of research/inspiration tools that I use myself and had found when doing competitor research.

This list was:

Dribbble

Behance

Design Inspiration

Usepanda

Muzli

Awwwards

Out of these, I was expecting Dribbble to be the most used.

The three top results where:

75% Dribbble with 21 responses

60.7% Behance with 17 responses

25% Awwwards with 7 responses.

A few people have other as an option and suggested something that myself feel silly for not putting down as an option which was BOOKS!! I am thinking now maybe having a section in my web application with books for designers.

Question 3 - If you have any, what would be your main frustrations when doing research?

For this question peoples, biggest frustration was “Having too many tabs open and losing websites”. The other highest result was “Trying to stay organised”. These are answers that I assumed people would answer with but it is what people wrote in the other section that was interesting.

Responses from the other section:

Having a no-show for a user interview

Finding examples that meet my use case

Most available design inspiration is superficial, showing one element or one page of an entire project. This doesn't allow for a deeper UX understanding of how these elements fit together and create a cohesive user experience.

The last point was interesting as I can understand this sometimes with the likes of Dribblbe and Pinterest you don’t see the design thinking behind the design. This is something I could help with my app I think and something I can do more research into. Definitely has given me food for thought.

Question 4 - Do you think we have a responsibility as designers to keep up to date with design news?

I think from a biased perspective this was my biggest question. 82.1% people said “Yes” with 23 responses out of 28. I think this shows that it is important we keep up to date with design news which I knew from the start.

There was one comment I got in the other section that I found interesting it was:

“Design trends don't always = good design. Keeping up with news such as new tools, new techniques, new lines of thinking can be very beneficial however also overwhelming.”

I do agree with the first statement for example when I did my research into light and dark theme which you can see in a previous post. I read that dark theme now is trendy and a lot of people are using it because it is trendy and thats not right as we should be using it based on our user's environment. I also think that design trends help us evolve and grow as designers. This statement has made me think of this from two points of views which is helpful.

Question 5 - What tools/sites do you use to read up on design news?

The three highest results in this question where:

82.1% Medium with 23 responses

25% Designer News with 7 responses

17.9% The Designest with 5 responses

I was expecting Medium to be the highest result. I am starting to realise that the best information is in the other sections of my survey. There is some really interesting suggestions for this question.

They are:

4 people said twitter

UX Collective

UX Collective and Sidebar newsletters

Panda

Designtaxi

A custom feed of various blogs and sites

I have never heard of DesignTaxi so that will be something I can do competitor research into. I also have never used twitter for design news so that is something I can look into for my project and also myself.

Question 6 - If you have any, what would be your main frustrations when keeping up to date on design news?

The three highest frustrations where:

67.9% It is easy to miss things when you are busy with 19 responses

35.7% A lot of different sites with 10 responses

35.7% Not being able to go back and read later with 10 responses

These are interesting as a feature of being able to save back and reading later was something I was thinking about so it is helpful to see this is something designers have frustrations with.

Question 7 - Can you suggest anything that would improve your experience when doing research for a project?

This question was an open question.

Some of the useful suggestion where:

One central platform for everything design research related

Quickly finding examples that suit my use case

Documenting ideas, sources, analysis, images as you go.

Finding resources with more detailed case studies e.g. how a company designed ftux from start to finish, how that evolved over time or as new features/products were introduced. Things that worked and didn’t work and why.

Access to previous research archives from other designers

Getting snippets of information so if I don't have time to read the entire article I can get the highlights. Also if I can get all the sites, inspirations in one location will be super helpful.

Better categorization / easier browsing (i.e., not just search). Something visual skin to Pinterest?

A more diverse range of sources

A place to store and collect inspiration/articles/notes/thoughts easily using an accessible and simple method. Possibly a Chrome plug-in (see Pinterest's plug-in - however, it is all visual, it doesn't really allow for the collection of articles, quotes, concepts etc)

trending/top rated articles appear at the top

For me, the most important thing is the understanding of colour trends, trend styles and several other trends.

Category specification and thematic distribution of art online

A place where I can keep all my bookmarked sites that help with research and design in a visual way. possibly a website that reposted hot topics from other sites into their own so you would only have to go to one place (sorta like how you can have a fb news feed embedded into sites)

There is a lot here that I find useful and will go through each one individually and do research and see if I can think of any features for my application that will help or anything I could use to make my application experience better.

Question 8 - Can you also suggest anything that would improve your experience when keeping up to date on design?

This question was also an open question.

Some of the useful comments where:

One central platform for anything design related

A resource curated by the design community would be nice but it would have to be supported by the whole community and design leaders.

Take notes on ideas, takeaways so that you can refer to them later!

More blog posts or article that show how long it takes to read so that you might be less likely to bookmark to read later (which is what I do a lot)

Having a single source of truth, there are so many views and opinions it's sometimes hard to know what best practice is actually best. Maybe some way to centralise this info and maybe vote among designers

reminders to see latest design inspirations which will be like a min or 2 ...so basically quick view but also relevant to me

Better, curated content. Like design journalism by good writers, rather than just link posting

Time :D

Subscribe to sites like Medium so they are in your inbox

Keeping Information Overload low

A streamlined edited view that wades through all the ideas, "pretty" visuals and egos to show the best work happening in design/UX right now.

quickly get updates, I don't have all-day

Know how much exactly you need time for specific design so you can easily manage multiple projects

Better bookmarking/saving system

A single platform dedicated to such updates.

One platform with multiple feeds

A website that had a list of high rated design articles, other sites, news etc

As you can see there is a good amount of feedback here that I will need to sort through and do research into and figure things out with it. One of the answers was “Time” if only I could give people more time!

Question 8 - What do you think of an app just for designers to help with research and design news?

I then summed up my survey with my idea and if people would find it useful.

I got 23 responses out of 28 saying that they thought it was a great idea this is really encouraging. I hope I am going on the right track with all my research and from this survey I feel like I am.

I was able to generate a report with Typeform so that you can view my results here: https://evagarcia643343.typeform.com/report/xVxzyg/vYfzRJ6MGIL1dcU6

[personalcoachingcenter]

When You Pitch an Idea, Gestures Matter More Than Words

New Post has been published on https://personalcoachingcenter.com/when-you-pitch-an-idea-gestures-matter-more-than-words/

When You Pitch an Idea, Gestures Matter More Than Words

Paper Boat Creative/Getty Images

Joep Cornelissen of Erasmus University and his team asked experienced investors to watch a video of an entrepreneur pitching a new device. He did four versions of the presentation: One used a lot of figurative language; one included frequent hand motions; one deployed both; and one used neither. People who saw the video with only the frequent gestures were on average 12% more interested in investing. The conclusion: When you pitch an idea, gestures matter more than words.

Professor Cornelissen, defend your research.

Cornelissen: We did find that gestures were a really important way to get investors to buy into a fictional device that helped people recover from sports injuries. When the “entrepreneur”—an actor we’d hired—used his hands to explain the idea, investors were more interested in it than when he described it in straightforward technical terms or with metaphors, analogies, and anecdotes. Gesturing had a more direct impact than either kind of language did. We were surprised that the findings were so clear, given the emphasis on the use of rhetoric and storytelling in venture pitches and other kinds of persuasion. We tend to overlook nonverbal communication, but it seems to be critical.

HBR: Why would investors be so swayed by gesturing?

The data suggests that the hand motions gave them a better sense of what the product would look like and how it would work. The unfamiliar idea was made more concrete. We think this kind of information is especially important in uncertain, high-stakes contexts like pitch meetings, where investors are looking for a variety of cues that will help them evaluate ideas’ potential.

Or maybe people who gesture a lot seem more charismatic and therefore worth investing in?

Studies have certainly shown that gestures can convey excitement and make investors attribute more passion to entrepreneurs. But we found that gestures communicate more about the business ideas, too. When we surveyed the investors who’d watched the pitches, we found that people who’d seen the gesturing version were more likely to say they had a good understanding of the new device.

Are certain kinds of motions helpful? I often talk with my hands, but I’m not intentional about it.

Most of us gesture all the time, sometimes unconsciously, though this varies from culture to culture. Generally, without noticing, we make a lot of “beat” gestures: repetitive motions that mark the rhythm of our speech. We use “cohesive,” or speech-structuring, gestures to indicate the start or end of a sentence or points we’re going to make. There are also symbolic gestures that convey information. You can use your hands to reproduce the form of an object, point to a prop, describe a movement, or even express a feeling. We identified and coded all these kinds of gestures in a qualitative field study analyzing 17 actual entrepreneurs as they pitched ideas. Then we instructed our actor to make certain motions in his videos, such as sweeping his hands out to represent the growing market for the product.

Too much gesturing could be off-putting, making the pitch more of a pantomime.

Should everyone add symbolic hand movements to pitches?

If you can be strategic and find one or two killer gestures that really mark your ideas or where you are with a venture—or that clarify what the product or service is about—that could do wonders. And just as you would rehearse what you’re going to say, you should practice your body language. We’ve seen lots of tech entrepreneurs coming right out of university who just stand behind the lectern and give very dry, technical pitches, without any hand movements at all. These don’t stand out as much as pitches by skilled presenters who gesture frequently.

How can you teach yourself to be good at gesturing if it doesn’t come naturally?

Being attentive to how other people do it skillfully is a first step. Many politicians have started to use knuckle-pointing gestures—with the index figure curled—as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair do to emphasize points in speeches. Try out a few gestures and see which feel most powerful and authentic to you. Then, through repetition, you can train yourself to make them a natural part of your communication style.

Couldn’t all the gesturing backfire? Might people find it distracting?

Too much could indeed be off-putting, making the pitch more of a pantomime. But this doesn’t happen in most pitches. Even when entrepreneurs use a lot more gestures than normal, if the motions are aligned with the speech, they do work.

Still, we don’t want to overemphasize their effect. In our study we were asking general investors, who had no medical-device expertise, to evaluate the pitch, so they were probably keen for any information that could help them understand the product. In a real-world setting, they’d do further due diligence; a pitch isn’t the one and only moment that determines whether people put money into a venture. But it can either move them away from an idea or make them want to explore it further. What we measured, first with the professional investor group and then with students playing the role of investor, was intention to invest, not an actual handover of cash.

Why did you also look at students?

While our focus was on seeing what made a pitch effective with investors, we wanted to see if we could replicate the findings with another sample, and we did. But we found an interesting difference: Though investors didn’t seem to be swayed by how something was described or framed, the students were affected by figurative language. This suggests that investors primarily attend to the entrepreneurs’ physical cues and signals; they may strip away other details of the pitch to focus more on the people themselves.

What other factors influence how investors react?

We know gender does. Male entrepreneurs are much more likely to secure funding than female entrepreneurs are. Studies have also shown that investors base decisions on gut feelings about entrepreneurs and their teams. But surprisingly, no one had really explored what aspects of a pitch determine investors’ overall assessments. Teasing those apart is key. There are many other things to look at: whether people have certain objects in their hands, refer to a prototype, or take a certain position on stage.

So the next time I propose an idea, I need some gestures to go with it?

Yes—find one or two that convey the main points you want to get across. In my own classes, I let groups of MBA students pitch the same idea and then ask them to rate who was the most memorable and persuasive. They usually choose presenters who used a few gestures around their main points. In other instances, I first have students do a pitch on their own and then train them to change their story and strategically add hand motions. The whole class can then see the before and after versions and how much difference carefully crafted body language makes.

A version of this article appeared in the

May–June 2019

issue (pp.36–37) of

Harvard Business Review

.

Source, N;

[kadobeclothing]

7 Amazingly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics

As companies adopt inbound marketing as a way to generate more leads, the importance of having an effective lead nurturing strategy becomes very clear. In most cases only a relatively small percentage of your inbound leads will be ready to make an immediate purchase, leaving upwards of 90% of your inbound leads on the table.

Implementing an effective lead nurturing strategy can have a huge impact on the results of your inbound marketing strategy.

In 2018, lead generation, sales, and lead nurturing were the top three organizational objectives for content marketers. 

How to Nurture Leads Lead nurturing is the purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey. 

You want to actively move the prospects you’ve created through your marketing and lead generation efforts, to the point where they become paying customers. Some tactics on how to nurture leads are through targeted content, multi-channel nurturing, multiple touches, timely follow-ups, and personalization. Despite the clear benefits of lead nurturing, marketers can struggle to build the right strategy around it. According to the 2019 Lead Nurturing & Acceleration Survey, 60% of respondents gave their nurture programs a failing grade. There’s a huge opportunity for savvy marketers like you to implement effective lead nurturing strategies and gain an advantage over your competition.So you are probably wondering… Which lead nurturing tactics work best? What do super successful marketers do differently? Or how do I get started with lead nurturing? Lead nurturing is of course just one component that goes into executing an inbound marketing strategy. If you’d like to learn what super successful inbound marketers are doing differently to attract traffic, convert leads and close customers you can check out this comprehensive resource – An Epic Guide to Creating an Inbound Marketing Strategy. Now let’s get down to it – we’ve read through dozens of reports, dug into the most recent data about lead nurturing and compiled this list of the seven amazingly effective lead nurturing tactics. 7 Amazingly Effective Lead Nurturing Tactics 1. Leverage targeted content. When it comes to lead nurturing, one size certainly does not fit all. As the research proves, strategically nurturing your leads using targeted content can significantly improve the results of your inbound marketing strategy.Using targeted content for lead nurturing may seem obvious, but it’s something that marketers are struggling with. Last year Forrester Research reported that 33% of B2B marketers cite “targeted delivery of content” (i.e., delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time) as their biggest lead nurturing challenge. There are a few prerequisites for using targeted content for lead nurturing. First of all, you need to understand each of your unique buyer personas. Of course, you then need to create an assortment of targeted content designed to nurture each of your personas based on their interests, goals, objectives, and marketing triggers. Lastly, you need to have a marketing automation platform in place to help you identify, segment and target your unique buyer personas as you scale your inbound marketing strategy. 2. Use multi-channel lead nurturing techniques. In the past, most lead nurturing strategies involved setting up a simple email drip campaign that would send out generic emails to a list of prospects. Today, marketers like you are looking for new lead nurturing tactics and technologies that go beyond the limits of email. With the help of powerful marketing automation platforms, savvy marketers are now executing multi-channel lead nurturing strategies.Effective multi-channel lead nurturing most commonly involve a combination of marketing automation, email marketing, social media, paid retargeting, dynamic website content and direct sales outreach. Because there are so many tactics involved, to execute this properly, you really need to ensure that your sales and marketing teams are well aligned and working cohesively. 3. Focus on multiple touches. While the buyers journey for every product and service can be quite different, research from the Marketing Lead Management Report indicates that on average, prospects receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter the top of funnel until they’re a closed won customers. Interestingly, another research study from Demand Gen suggests that 49% of marketers include less than five touches in their lead nurturing programs. If you’re in this category, it might be time to revamp your lead nurturing efforts a bit. As you can imagine, the most successful lead nurturing strategies deliver content that helps prospects progress through the buyer’s journey by addressing common questions and concerns. In addition to email tactics, consider how you can use a mix of content types like social media, blog posts, whitepapers, interactive calculators, or even direct mail, to nurture your prospects into customers. 4. Follow up with leads in a timely manner.  The benefits of immediate follow up calls seem quite evident, but most organizations still aren’t acting very quickly. A recent article in Harvard Business Review highlighted the surprisingly slow response times of most US based companies. Here are a few benchmarks from the study which included feedback from more than 2,240 US companies: The average first response time of B2B companies to their leads was 42 hours Only 37% of companies responded to their leads within an hour 24% of companies took more than 24 hours 23% of the companies never responded at all Automated lead nurturing can help you reach large groups of prospects, but a timely followup email or a phone call is still quite often the best way to convert inbound leads into qualified sales opportunities. As several research studies have shown, the odds of converting a lead into a sales opportunity are exponentially higher when the lead is contacted immediately following a website conversion. When you make a timely, well researched call to an inbound lead it’s far more effective than any volume of cold calling. You know exactly what the prospects is researching based their recent browsing behaviour and you also have enough information about the prospect to do some initial research about the organization they work for and their specific role within the company. 5. Send personalized emails. Several research studies indicate that email marketing continues to be the most effective tactic for lead nurturing. The research also consistently shows that personalization tends to produce significantly better results than generic marketing. A study by Accenture found that 41% of consumers switched businesses due to a lack of personalization. As highlighted in this helpful blog post, there are all kinds of ways you can personalize your emails to improve your lead nurturing strategy. You can send triggered emails when someone downloads your gated content, clicks on links in your emails, visits certain pages on your website, or when they demonstrate a high level of engagement. When you combine the power of marketing personalization with behavioral triggered emails you can deliver the right marketing messages to the right people, at exactly the right times. 6. Use lead-scoring tactics. For those who are new to the concept of lead scoring, it is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. Lead scoring can be implemented in most marketing automation platforms by assigning numeric values to certain website browsing behaviors, conversion events, or even social media interactions. The resulting score is used to determine which leads should be followed up with directly by a sales rep or which leads need to be nurtured further down the funnel. Based on this research, it seems as though lead scoring is an effective lead nurturing tactic that most marketers simply aren’t taking advantage of yet. 7. Be sure your sales and marketing strategies are aligned. According to a study by market research firm CSO Insights, when both sales and marketing share responsibility for lead nurturing, companies experience a significant financial boosts. In fact, organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer retention rates. In order for both sales and marketing to contribute to lead nurturing you’ll need to identity when prospects should be transitioned between teams as they progress through the funnel. In creating your lead nurturing strategy, think about how you can use triggers like lead scoring, page views, workflow enrollment, conversion events or sales contact to transition leads from automation to direct one-on-one outreach. The shared expectations, responsibilities and goals for this collaboration between sales and marketing should be outlined in a sales and marketing service level agreement (SLA). Creating a formal sales and marketing SLA will help the two teams hold each other accountable for converting leads and effectively nurturing them into paying customers. Leveraging Lead Nurturing Tactics In review, let’s quickly recap the seven most effective lead nurturing tactics: 1. Targeted content: Content intrigues, entertains, and delights audiences that could become qualified leads. 2. Multi-channel lead nurturing: Try to reach your audiences on multiple online channels, rather than just relying on email. 3. Multiple Touches – Prospects receive an average of 10 touches from the time they enter the top of the funnel until they’re a closed-won customer. 4. Timely Follow Ups: The odds of a lead entering the sales process, or becoming qualified, are much greater when contacted within five minutes versus 30 minutes after an inbound lead converts on your website. 5. Personalized Emails: Personalization benefits both your marketing and your customer retention. 6. Lead Scoring: This strategy helps you determine which leads you should really take time to follow up with. 7. Sales and Marketing Alignment: Organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing teams experience 36% higher customer retention rates. Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally published in March 2016, but was updated for comprehensiveness in March 2020. 

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source https://www.kadobeclothing.store/7-amazingly-effective-lead-nurturing-tactics/

[stevenshartus]

326 Your Questions: Giving too Much Away and Creating Review Blogs

In today’s episode, I switch things up a little.

I answer two questions that were left on my voicemail hotline. If you’d like your question to be answered in a future episode, call (888) 835 – 2414.

Listen to This Episode

Question 1: How do you start and grow a review blog? – Marco

More than just reviewing a blog, provide value and high-quality education to your audience.

This is a great question. A lot of people are interested in creating review blogs because it’s easier to see how these blogs can be monetized – affiliate links.

If you review a product and someone clicks your affiliate link to buy, you earn a commission. But most people approach this the wrong way.

Instead of trying to be a blog that focuses on providing reviews to make money, be one that focuses on providing value to your target audience.

In other words, the principles are very similar to starting and growing any blog that’s focused on educating others.

It starts by having a clear picture of who your target audience is. Ask yourself:

Who he/she?

What are his/her goals?

What is he/she struggling with?

Once you know those things, your goal is to create the perfect review blog for that person.

To do that, it has to be more than a review blog. It needs to provide value and high-quality education.

The best example I’ve found: The Points Guy (more than a review blog).

The Points Guy is more than a review blog. It aims to educate their readers, too.

Here’s what they do (and what I would recommend for you to emulate):

They understand who their audience is – people who are looking for smart ways to travel and maximize any trip while saving money and maximizing their experience.

To cater to that audience they publish:

Hands-on travel advice

Creative ways to book flights

Details about the latest changes to all major airlines, hotels and credit cards

And of course, a MAJOR feature of the blog is that they have all kinds of reviews of hotels, flights and credit cards.

Whenever I want to find out something related to travel, I go there.

I recently signed up for the American Express Platinum Card after reading a bunch of credit card reviews on their site.

Now my entire travel experience has been transformed because I was well-informed before signing up.

The question is – how can you provide as much value as is humanly possible for the person who is looking for the kinds of reviews you want to write?

Here are a few more practical tips:

Start by reviewing what you already own.

One of the things that attracts people to the idea of having a review blog is the ability to get free stuff to review.

Well, that comes as your reputation grows. To grow that reputation, start by reviewing the things you already own.

Do your research.

Do your research

Analyse what other reviewers in your industry are doing. What’s working for them? What are they missing?

Know the products you are reviewing. Research the features and benefits. Become an expert on that product.

Don’t cut corners.

The best reviews are thorough. When you are finished with the review, ask yourself this question – Is this the best review I can make.

The better your review, the more trust you’ll earn. Go all out.

This will also help in the future when you start reaching out to brands for free products.

Don’t be a reviewer. Be an educator.

Your job isn’t to review the product to get a sale. Your job is to educate your audience so that they can make the best decisions for THEM.

When you do that, you will earn their trust. When you earn their trust, you will be more likely to earn the sale.

Connect with the product creator.

Connect with the product creator

One thing companies love seeing is awesome reviews of the products they create. If you do a great job at the things above, you should be proud to share it with them.

Also they will be excited to see what you’ve done. These relationships go a long way to help you grow as a blogger.

I’ve had some of the best opportunities as a result of my reviews.

Connect with similar companies.

Once you have a portfolio of great reviews under your belt, reach out to other companies. Explain what you do and show them examples of your work.

Let them know that you would love to work with them to create high-quality training/reviews about their products.

You never know – you just might get stuff for free.

Question 2: How much value can I give away without giving away too much? If I give all my value, I have nothing else to sell. – Chris Morgan

This is a very common question. In fact, it’s one that I’ve even asked.

It makes sense on the surface – If you give everything away, you won’t have anything to sell. However, I look at it differently.

As a blogger, my goal is to provide value to my audience. The more value I provide, the easier it is for them to get to know, like and trust me.

Give as much as you can

Instead of asking how much I should hold back, I focus on giving as much as I can.

I know what you’re thinking – then you won’t have anything to sell.

Wrong.

People will always pay for what’s valuable to them if it’s presented in the right way as a solution to their problem.

Here’s an example . . .

When I build my biology blog (which I sold last year), I gave everything away. I created videos teaching biology, without holding back.

But I also knew I wanted to make money.

So I took the same content I gave away for free, repackaged it as an ebook and sold that.

Why did people pay for something that was available for free? They were actually paying for convenience.

Yes, they could go to my blog and click around to every page to find the content. Or they could buy it as one simple ebook.

Something they could take with them, consume from any device, whether they were online or off.

Here’s another example . . .

I never hold anything back on Become a Blogger or in my podcast. I give as much as I can.

But I also have my coaching club.

Yes – you can go through all of my podcast episodes and put together a cohesive picture of how to build a successful blogging business.

Or you can get access to me, and the structure of my coaching club.

Here are a few tips to help you decide how to do this . . .

Give generously.

I said this already, but it’s worth mentioning again. It’s not about how much you should hold back. It’s about how much you can serve your audience. Serve first.

Charge for structure and convenience.

If you give generously, there will be LOTS of info on your blog. They can find what they need. Or you can create products, courses, etc to provide structure to the value you provide.

People will pay for structure and convenience because it makes their lives easier.

Charge for access.

Charge for access

Your time is your most valuable asset. Charge accordingly. Yes, they can get superficial access to you via your blog. But there are lots of opportunities for you to charge for access to your time.

Make business decisions based on data.

Regardless of how much you give, there will always be more you can give. Yes, you can repackage what you already offer, but there’s always room for you to create something new.

I recommend using data to make those decisions. Survey your audience. See what they are struggling with. Use that data to come up with interesting products or services you can sell.

Do you have questions?

I’m going to be including more questions in my podcast episodes from now on. If you have questions, go ahead and ask them by leaving a voice message on the hotline.

The number is (888) 835 – 2414

The post 326 Your Questions: Giving too Much Away and Creating Review Blogs appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

from SEO and SM Tips https://www.becomeablogger.com/25991/your-questions-giving-too-much-review/

[robertrluc85]

326 Your Questions: Giving too Much Away and Creating Review Blogs

In today’s episode, I switch things up a little.

I answer two questions that were left on my voicemail hotline. If you’d like your question to be answered in a future episode, call (888) 835 – 2414.

Listen to This Episode

Question 1: How do you start and grow a review blog? – Marco

More than just reviewing a blog, provide value and high-quality education to your audience.

This is a great question. A lot of people are interested in creating review blogs because it’s easier to see how these blogs can be monetized – affiliate links.

If you review a product and someone clicks your affiliate link to buy, you earn a commission. But most people approach this the wrong way.

Instead of trying to be a blog that focuses on providing reviews to make money, be one that focuses on providing value to your target audience.

In other words, the principles are very similar to starting and growing any blog that’s focused on educating others.

It starts by having a clear picture of who your target audience is. Ask yourself:

Who he/she?

What are his/her goals?

What is he/she struggling with?

Once you know those things, your goal is to create the perfect review blog for that person.

To do that, it has to be more than a review blog. It needs to provide value and high-quality education.

The best example I’ve found: The Points Guy (more than a review blog).

The Points Guy is more than a review blog. It aims to educate their readers, too.

Here’s what they do (and what I would recommend for you to emulate):

They understand who their audience is – people who are looking for smart ways to travel and maximize any trip while saving money and maximizing their experience.

To cater to that audience they publish:

Hands-on travel advice

Creative ways to book flights

Details about the latest changes to all major airlines, hotels and credit cards

And of course, a MAJOR feature of the blog is that they have all kinds of reviews of hotels, flights and credit cards.

Whenever I want to find out something related to travel, I go there.

I recently signed up for the American Express Platinum Card after reading a bunch of credit card reviews on their site.

Now my entire travel experience has been transformed because I was well-informed before signing up.

The question is – how can you provide as much value as is humanly possible for the person who is looking for the kinds of reviews you want to write?

Here are a few more practical tips:

Start by reviewing what you already own.

One of the things that attracts people to the idea of having a review blog is the ability to get free stuff to review.

Well, that comes as your reputation grows. To grow that reputation, start by reviewing the things you already own.

Do your research.

Do your research

Analyse what other reviewers in your industry are doing. What’s working for them? What are they missing?

Know the products you are reviewing. Research the features and benefits. Become an expert on that product.

Don’t cut corners.

The best reviews are thorough. When you are finished with the review, ask yourself this question – Is this the best review I can make.

The better your review, the more trust you’ll earn. Go all out.

This will also help in the future when you start reaching out to brands for free products.

Don’t be a reviewer. Be an educator.

Your job isn’t to review the product to get a sale. Your job is to educate your audience so that they can make the best decisions for THEM.

When you do that, you will earn their trust. When you earn their trust, you will be more likely to earn the sale.

Connect with the product creator.

Connect with the product creator

One thing companies love seeing is awesome reviews of the products they create. If you do a great job at the things above, you should be proud to share it with them.

Also they will be excited to see what you’ve done. These relationships go a long way to help you grow as a blogger.

I’ve had some of the best opportunities as a result of my reviews.

Connect with similar companies.

Once you have a portfolio of great reviews under your belt, reach out to other companies. Explain what you do and show them examples of your work.

Let them know that you would love to work with them to create high-quality training/reviews about their products.

You never know – you just might get stuff for free.

Question 2: How much value can I give away without giving away too much? If I give all my value, I have nothing else to sell. – Chris Morgan

This is a very common question. In fact, it’s one that I’ve even asked.

It makes sense on the surface – If you give everything away, you won’t have anything to sell. However, I look at it differently.

As a blogger, my goal is to provide value to my audience. The more value I provide, the easier it is for them to get to know, like and trust me.

Give as much as you can

Instead of asking how much I should hold back, I focus on giving as much as I can.

I know what you’re thinking – then you won’t have anything to sell.

Wrong.

People will always pay for what’s valuable to them if it’s presented in the right way as a solution to their problem.

Here’s an example . . .

When I build my biology blog (which I sold last year), I gave everything away. I created videos teaching biology, without holding back.

But I also knew I wanted to make money.

So I took the same content I gave away for free, repackaged it as an ebook and sold that.

Why did people pay for something that was available for free? They were actually paying for convenience.

Yes, they could go to my blog and click around to every page to find the content. Or they could buy it as one simple ebook.

Something they could take with them, consume from any device, whether they were online or off.

Here’s another example . . .

I never hold anything back on Become a Blogger or in my podcast. I give as much as I can.

But I also have my coaching club.

Yes – you can go through all of my podcast episodes and put together a cohesive picture of how to build a successful blogging business.

Or you can get access to me, and the structure of my coaching club.

Here are a few tips to help you decide how to do this . . .

Give generously.

I said this already, but it’s worth mentioning again. It’s not about how much you should hold back. It’s about how much you can serve your audience. Serve first.

Charge for structure and convenience.

If you give generously, there will be LOTS of info on your blog. They can find what they need. Or you can create products, courses, etc to provide structure to the value you provide.

People will pay for structure and convenience because it makes their lives easier.

Charge for access.

Charge for access

Your time is your most valuable asset. Charge accordingly. Yes, they can get superficial access to you via your blog. But there are lots of opportunities for you to charge for access to your time.

Make business decisions based on data.

Regardless of how much you give, there will always be more you can give. Yes, you can repackage what you already offer, but there’s always room for you to create something new.

I recommend using data to make those decisions. Survey your audience. See what they are struggling with. Use that data to come up with interesting products or services you can sell.

Do you have questions?

I’m going to be including more questions in my podcast episodes from now on. If you have questions, go ahead and ask them by leaving a voice message on the hotline.

The number is (888) 835 – 2414

The post 326 Your Questions: Giving too Much Away and Creating Review Blogs appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

from SEO and SM Tips https://www.becomeablogger.com/25991/your-questions-giving-too-much-review/

[laurendcameron]

326 Your Questions: Giving too Much Away and Creating Review Blogs

In today’s episode, I switch things up a little.

I answer two questions that were left on my voicemail hotline. If you’d like your question to be answered in a future episode, call (888) 835 – 2414.

Listen to This Episode

Question 1: How do you start and grow a review blog? – Marco

More than just reviewing a blog, provide value and high-quality education to your audience.

This is a great question. A lot of people are interested in creating review blogs because it’s easier to see how these blogs can be monetized – affiliate links.

If you review a product and someone clicks your affiliate link to buy, you earn a commission. But most people approach this the wrong way.

Instead of trying to be a blog that focuses on providing reviews to make money, be one that focuses on providing value to your target audience.

In other words, the principles are very similar to starting and growing any blog that’s focused on educating others.

It starts by having a clear picture of who your target audience is. Ask yourself:

Who he/she?

What are his/her goals?

What is he/she struggling with?

Once you know those things, your goal is to create the perfect review blog for that person.

To do that, it has to be more than a review blog. It needs to provide value and high-quality education.

The best example I’ve found: The Points Guy (more than a review blog).

The Points Guy is more than a review blog. It aims to educate their readers, too.

Here’s what they do (and what I would recommend for you to emulate):

They understand who their audience is – people who are looking for smart ways to travel and maximize any trip while saving money and maximizing their experience.

To cater to that audience they publish:

Hands-on travel advice

Creative ways to book flights

Details about the latest changes to all major airlines, hotels and credit cards

And of course, a MAJOR feature of the blog is that they have all kinds of reviews of hotels, flights and credit cards.

Whenever I want to find out something related to travel, I go there.

I recently signed up for the American Express Platinum Card after reading a bunch of credit card reviews on their site.

Now my entire travel experience has been transformed because I was well-informed before signing up.

The question is – how can you provide as much value as is humanly possible for the person who is looking for the kinds of reviews you want to write?

Here are a few more practical tips:

Start by reviewing what you already own.

One of the things that attracts people to the idea of having a review blog is the ability to get free stuff to review.

Well, that comes as your reputation grows. To grow that reputation, start by reviewing the things you already own.

Do your research.

Do your research

Analyse what other reviewers in your industry are doing. What’s working for them? What are they missing?

Know the products you are reviewing. Research the features and benefits. Become an expert on that product.

Don’t cut corners.

The best reviews are thorough. When you are finished with the review, ask yourself this question – Is this the best review I can make.

The better your review, the more trust you’ll earn. Go all out.

This will also help in the future when you start reaching out to brands for free products.

Don’t be a reviewer. Be an educator.

Your job isn’t to review the product to get a sale. Your job is to educate your audience so that they can make the best decisions for THEM.

When you do that, you will earn their trust. When you earn their trust, you will be more likely to earn the sale.

Connect with the product creator.

Connect with the product creator

One thing companies love seeing is awesome reviews of the products they create. If you do a great job at the things above, you should be proud to share it with them.

Also they will be excited to see what you’ve done. These relationships go a long way to help you grow as a blogger.

I’ve had some of the best opportunities as a result of my reviews.

Connect with similar companies.

Once you have a portfolio of great reviews under your belt, reach out to other companies. Explain what you do and show them examples of your work.

Let them know that you would love to work with them to create high-quality training/reviews about their products.

You never know – you just might get stuff for free.

Question 2: How much value can I give away without giving away too much? If I give all my value, I have nothing else to sell. – Chris Morgan

This is a very common question. In fact, it’s one that I’ve even asked.

It makes sense on the surface – If you give everything away, you won’t have anything to sell. However, I look at it differently.

As a blogger, my goal is to provide value to my audience. The more value I provide, the easier it is for them to get to know, like and trust me.

Give as much as you can

Instead of asking how much I should hold back, I focus on giving as much as I can.

I know what you’re thinking – then you won’t have anything to sell.

Wrong.

People will always pay for what’s valuable to them if it’s presented in the right way as a solution to their problem.

Here’s an example . . .

When I build my biology blog (which I sold last year), I gave everything away. I created videos teaching biology, without holding back.

But I also knew I wanted to make money.

So I took the same content I gave away for free, repackaged it as an ebook and sold that.

Why did people pay for something that was available for free? They were actually paying for convenience.

Yes, they could go to my blog and click around to every page to find the content. Or they could buy it as one simple ebook.

Something they could take with them, consume from any device, whether they were online or off.

Here’s another example . . .

I never hold anything back on Become a Blogger or in my podcast. I give as much as I can.

But I also have my coaching club.

Yes – you can go through all of my podcast episodes and put together a cohesive picture of how to build a successful blogging business.

Or you can get access to me, and the structure of my coaching club.

Here are a few tips to help you decide how to do this . . .

Give generously.

I said this already, but it’s worth mentioning again. It’s not about how much you should hold back. It’s about how much you can serve your audience. Serve first.

Charge for structure and convenience.

If you give generously, there will be LOTS of info on your blog. They can find what they need. Or you can create products, courses, etc to provide structure to the value you provide.

People will pay for structure and convenience because it makes their lives easier.

Charge for access.

Charge for access

Your time is your most valuable asset. Charge accordingly. Yes, they can get superficial access to you via your blog. But there are lots of opportunities for you to charge for access to your time.

Make business decisions based on data.

Regardless of how much you give, there will always be more you can give. Yes, you can repackage what you already offer, but there’s always room for you to create something new.

I recommend using data to make those decisions. Survey your audience. See what they are struggling with. Use that data to come up with interesting products or services you can sell.

Do you have questions?

I’m going to be including more questions in my podcast episodes from now on. If you have questions, go ahead and ask them by leaving a voice message on the hotline.

The number is (888) 835 – 2414

The post 326 Your Questions: Giving too Much Away and Creating Review Blogs appeared first on Become A Blogger by Leslie Samuel.

from Lauren Cameron Updates https://www.becomeablogger.com/25991/your-questions-giving-too-much-review/

[mediacalling]

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new research and stats and a cool new infographic.

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there.

I’d imagine that a social media marketing strategy could feel the same way.

If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan.

We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media strategy—the data and research and personal experience behind what works on social media.

Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint that you can use to get started. If you need a social media marketing plan, start here.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here is our overview of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

I like to think of this plan like a road trip. Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track, and have some fun along the way.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

Step 3: Find your voice and tone

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

Step 5: Analyze and test

Step 6: Automate and engage

Step 1: Which social media sites you should use

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Social networks like Facebook emphasize quality content. Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and videos. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

For the first part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last year, of the demographics for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the major social media platforms’ user demographics.

For Snapchat’s user demographics, you can check out this “Who’s on Snapchat, anyway?” blog post by Snapchat.

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

One of our monthly checks here at Buffer is to visit each of our social media profiles and make sure that our profile photos, cover photos, bio, and profile info are up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our profile photo on Instagram matches our profile photo on Facebook. Our cover photo on Twitter is similar to our cover on LinkedIn.

To create these images, you can consult a social media image size chart that will show you the exact breakdown of dimensions for each photo on each network. For an even easier time of it, you can use a tool like Crello or Canva, which comes with prebuilt templates that set the proper sizes for you.

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio can be broken down into six simple rules.

Show, don’t tell: “What have I done” often works better than “Who I am”

Tailor your keywords to your audience

Keep language fresh; avoid buzzwords

Answer the question of your potential followers: “What’s in it for me?”

Be personal and personable

Revisit often

Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base. These are all well and good. But for a social media marketing plan just getting off the ground, you can make this process a bit easier.

Start with questions like these:

If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would it have?

If your brand was a person, what’s their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc)

Describe in adjectives what your company’s personality is not.

Are there any companies that have a similar personality to yours? Why are they similar?

How do you want your customers to think about your company?

At the end of this exercise, you should end up with a handful of adjectives that describe the voice and tone of your marketing. Consider this to keep you on track:

Voice is the mission statement; tone is the implementation of that mission.

MailChimp has created a standalone website simply for its voice and tone. Here’s an example of how they implement these qualities into their communication:

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you post? When should you post? What should you post? The solid gold, ironclad answer for questions like these is:

It depends.

So much of the social media experience is about your individual audience and niche. What works for you might not work for me, and you never know until you try (we’ll get to trying in step five).

That being said, there is some pretty good data and insight about where to start. Here’s what we’ve found to be good jumping off points.

What should you be posting?

Videos are ideal for engagement.

The push toward video content has plenty of anecdotal evidence—as you browse your Facebook News Feed and Twitter timeline, you’re likely to see videos all over. There’s data to back up this trend: Videos posts get more views, shares, and Likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, video posts get higher average engagement than link posts or image posts, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed 68 million Facebook posts.

On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs, according to Twitter.

If you want to get started on creating social videos, here’s our video marketing guide on creating epic content on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The 4:1 Strategy

Now that you know what works, you can place these different types of updates into a consistent strategy. One of my favorite systems is the one used by Buffer’s co-founder Joel Gascoigne. It works like this:

Start with the basic six types of updates we all post: Links, videos, images, quotes, reshares, plain-text updates

Choose a “staple” update, a single type that will make up the majority of your shares

Create a 4:1 ratio of sharing: for every four “staple” updates, publish one different type for variety

This way your followers know what to expect from you, and you can hone your sharing to a specific type, making it easier to perfect and to experiment.

(Note: You might not want to post the exact same updates across each of your social networks. Consider composing your updates in a unique way to complement each network’s own best practices, culture, and language.)

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates. The social network you’re using will have its own best practices, too.

If people love your updates, you can typically always get away with posting more.

For a specific number, here’re some guidelines we’ve put together based on some really helpful research into how often to post to social media.

Facebook – Once or twice per day

Instagram – Once or twice per day

Instagram Stories – Eight to 16 Stories, twice per week

Twitter – Three to ten times per day

LinkedIn – Once or twice per day

Pinterest – Five to ten times per day

Snapchat – Five to 20 times per week

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.

So what’s someone to do who’s just starting out on these social networks, with no audience and no history?

Again, this is where best practices come in. Perhaps the most helpful (and adorable) infographic I’ve seen about timing comes from SumAll, which compiled timing research from sites like Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today to create its awesome visual. Here’s an overview of what they found in terms of timing (all times are Eastern Time).

Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays

Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays

LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays

Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6pm

Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best

Google+ – 9-11am weekdays

I would recommend experimenting with these times (in your local time) and a few randomly-picked times as you’re starting out.

Once you have been posting a while, you can use your own data and tools like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and Followerwonk to find your brand’s best time to post and refine your posting strategy.

Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a social media analytics tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

These tools (I’ll use Buffer’s analytics as an example) can show you a breakdown of how each post performed in the important areas of views, clicks, shares, Likes, and comments.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement statistic on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way to analyze your performance.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. This’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grow.

Test something new. We’re open to testing just about anything at Buffer. We’re in the midst of some tests right now on our Facebook account. Do Facebook Live videos get more views than non-live videos? Does the video length matter? We’ll often hear about someone’s new strategy or get a new idea and then test right away.

Did it work? Check the stats from your test versus the stats of your benchmark. If your test performed well, then you can implement the changes into your regular strategy. And once your test is over, test something new!

Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engage with your community.

To start with, automate posting of your social media content.

Tools like Buffer allow you to create all the content that you want to, all at once, and then place everything into a queue to be sent out according to whatever schedule you choose. Automation is the secret weapon for consistently excellent sharing, day after day.

Your plan doesn’t end with automation, though. Social media requires engagement, too.

When people talk to you, talk back. Set aside time during your day to follow up with conversations that are happening on social media. These are conversations with potential customers, references, friends, and colleagues. They’re too important to ignore.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening and engaging. Tools like Buffer Reply and Mention will collect all social media mentions and comments on your posts in a single place, where you can quickly reply your followers.

What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.

Pick your networks

Fill out your info

Find your voice

Choose your strategy

Analyze and test

Automate and engage

Bingo!

How did you develop your social media strategy? I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass this along. If you can use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

Want more social media tips? Take our free email course!

I’ve put together a list of 25 practical social media strategies that work for us here at Buffer—and I’d love to share them with you via email.

Join here

—

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it with new research, statistics, and a cool new infographic on September 2017.

Image sources: Will Scullin, MailChimp, Crello, SumAll, and Pew Research

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch posted first on http://ift.tt/2qbaJ0t

[mariemary1]

How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it here with new research and stats and a cool new infographic.

When I went rock climbing for the first time, I had no idea what I was doing. My friends and I were complete newbies about ropes and rappelling and every other bit of jargon and technique that goes with climbing. We saw others doing it spectacularly well. We were thrilled at the thought of reaching the top of the climbing wall; we had no idea how to get there.

I’d imagine that a social media marketing strategy could feel the same way.

If you’re starting from square one, it might feel equal parts thrilling and overwhelming. You know what you want to do and why. You can see that others have climbed the social media mountain; you’ve got few ideas how to get there yourself.

It’d help to have a plan.

We’ve shared before about different parts of a social media strategy—the data and research and personal experience behind what works on social media.

Now we’re pleased to put it all into a cohesive, step-by-step blueprint that you can use to get started. If you need a social media marketing plan, start here.

Social Media Marketing Plan

Starting at the ground floor and building up, here is our overview of how to create a social media marketing plan from scratch.

I like to think of this plan like a road trip. Start out by pointing yourself in the right direction, then choose the way you’re going to get there, check in regularly to make sure you’re on track, and have some fun along the way.

Step 1: Choose your social networks

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

Step 3: Find your voice and tone

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

Step 5: Analyze and test

Step 6: Automate and engage

Step 1: Which social media sites you should use

Social media is as homogenous from network to network as soda pop is from brand to brand. Sure, it’s all social media, but Google+ and Twitter might as well be Mountain Dew and Pepsi. Each network is unique, with its own best practices, own style, and own audience.

You should choose the social networks that best fit your strategy and the goals you want to achieve on social media.

You don’t have to be on them all—just the ones that matter to you and your audience.

Some things to consider that can help you choose not only which social networks to try but also how many to try.

Audience – Where do your potential customers hang out? Which social network has the right demographics?

Time – How much time can you devote to a social network? Plan on at least an hour per day per social network, at least at the start. (Once you get going, tools like Buffer can help you save a bit of time.)

Resources – What personnel and skills do you have to work with? Social networks like Facebook emphasize quality content. Visual social networks like Pinterest and Instagram require images and videos. Do you have the resources to create what’s needed?

For the first part of this decision, you can reference the audience research and demographics from surveys like those conducted by Pew Research. For instance, Pew has complete data, collected last year, of the demographics for Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Here is a side-by-side comparison of the major social media platforms’ user demographics.

For Snapchat’s user demographics, you can check out this “Who’s on Snapchat, anyway?” blog post by Snapchat.

Step 2: Fill out your profiles completely

One of our monthly checks here at Buffer is to visit each of our social media profiles and make sure that our profile photos, cover photos, bio, and profile info are up-to-date and complete. It’s a key part to our social media audit. A completed profile shows professionalism, cohesive branding, and a signal to visitors that you’re serious about engaging.

Profiles will require two parts: visuals and text.

For visuals, we aim for consistency and familiarity with the visuals we use on social media. Our profile photo on Instagram matches our profile photo on Facebook. Our cover photo on Twitter is similar to our cover on LinkedIn.

To create these images, you can consult a social media image size chart that will show you the exact breakdown of dimensions for each photo on each network. For an even easier time of it, you can use a tool like Crello or Canva, which comes with prebuilt templates that set the proper sizes for you.

For text, your main area to customize is the bio/info section. Creating a professional social media bio can be broken down into six simple rules.

Show, don’t tell: “What have I done” often works better than “Who I am”

Tailor your keywords to your audience

Keep language fresh; avoid buzzwords

Answer the question of your potential followers: “What’s in it for me?”

Be personal and personable

Revisit often

Step 3: Find your marketing voice and tone

The temptation at this point might be to jump right in and start sharing. Just one more step before you do. Your foray into social media will be more focused and more on point if you come up with a voice and tone for your content right off the bat.

To do so, you could spend time coming up with marketing personas and debating the finer points of your mission statement and customer base. These are all well and good. But for a social media marketing plan just getting off the ground, you can make this process a bit easier.

Start with questions like these:

If your brand was a person, what kind of personality would it have?

If your brand was a person, what’s their relationship to the consumer? (a coach, friend, teacher, dad, etc)

Describe in adjectives what your company’s personality is not.

Are there any companies that have a similar personality to yours? Why are they similar?

How do you want your customers to think about your company?

At the end of this exercise, you should end up with a handful of adjectives that describe the voice and tone of your marketing. Consider this to keep you on track:

Voice is the mission statement; tone is the implementation of that mission.

MailChimp has created a standalone website simply for its voice and tone. Here’s an example of how they implement these qualities into their communication:

Cultivate a voice that delights your customers, then your customers will be thrilled to spread the love about you.

Step 4: Pick your posting strategy

What’s the ideal amount to post per day? How often should you post? When should you post? What should you post? The solid gold, ironclad answer for questions like these is:

It depends.

So much of the social media experience is about your individual audience and niche. What works for you might not work for me, and you never know until you try (we’ll get to trying in step five).

That being said, there is some pretty good data and insight about where to start. Here’s what we’ve found to be good jumping off points.

What should you be posting?

Videos are ideal for engagement.

The push toward video content has plenty of anecdotal evidence—as you browse your Facebook News Feed and Twitter timeline, you’re likely to see videos all over. There’s data to back up this trend: Videos posts get more views, shares, and Likes than any other type of post. And it’s not even close.

On Facebook, video posts get higher average engagement than link posts or image posts, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed 68 million Facebook posts.

On Twitter, videos are six times more likely to be retweeted than photos and three times more likely to be retweeted than GIFs, according to Twitter.

If you want to get started on creating social videos, here’s our video marketing guide on creating epic content on Facebook, Twitter, and more.

The 4:1 Strategy

Now that you know what works, you can place these different types of updates into a consistent strategy. One of my favorite systems is the one used by Buffer’s co-founder Joel Gascoigne. It works like this:

Start with the basic six types of updates we all post: Links, videos, images, quotes, reshares, plain-text updates

Choose a “staple” update, a single type that will make up the majority of your shares

Create a 4:1 ratio of sharing: for every four “staple” updates, publish one different type for variety

This way your followers know what to expect from you, and you can hone your sharing to a specific type, making it easier to perfect and to experiment.

(Note: You might not want to post the exact same updates across each of your social networks. Consider composing your updates in a unique way to complement each network’s own best practices, culture, and language.)

How often should you be posting?

There’s been a lot of interesting data out there about how often to post to social media. Some of the factors that might impact your specific sharing frequency may include your industry, your reach, your resources, and the quality of your updates. The social network you’re using will have its own best practices, too.

If people love your updates, you can typically always get away with posting more.

For a specific number, here’re some guidelines we’ve put together based on some really helpful research into how often to post to social media.

Facebook – Once or twice per day

Instagram – Once or twice per day

Instagram Stories – Eight to 16 Stories, twice per week

Twitter – Three to ten times per day

LinkedIn – Once or twice per day

Pinterest – Five to ten times per day

Snapchat – Five to 20 times per week

When should you be posting?

There are many neat tools to show you the best time of day to post to Facebook, Twitter, and more. These tools look at your followers and your history of posts to see when your audience is online and when historically have been your best times to share.

So what’s someone to do who’s just starting out on these social networks, with no audience and no history?

Again, this is where best practices come in. Perhaps the most helpful (and adorable) infographic I’ve seen about timing comes from SumAll, which compiled timing research from sites like Visual.ly, Search Engine Watch, and Social Media Today to create its awesome visual. Here’s an overview of what they found in terms of timing (all times are Eastern Time).

Twitter – 1-3pm weekdays

Facebook – 1-4pm and 2-5pm weekdays

LinkedIn – 7-8:30am and 5-6pm Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday

Tumblr – 7-10pm weekdays and 4pm on Fridays

Instagram – 5-6pm weekdays and 8pm on Mondays with a sweet spot at 6pm

Pinterest – 2-4pm and 8-11pm weekdays with weekends being the best

Google+ – 9-11am weekdays

I would recommend experimenting with these times (in your local time) and a few randomly-picked times as you’re starting out.

Once you have been posting a while, you can use your own data and tools like Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, and Followerwonk to find your brand’s best time to post and refine your posting strategy.

Step 5: Analyze, test, and iterate

Remember how we talked about social media sharing being a very individual, specific endeavor? Your stats will likely start to bear this out.

The more you post, the more you’ll discover which content, timing, and frequency is right for you.

How will you know? It’s best to get a social media analytics tool. Most major social networks will have basic analytics built into the site; it’s just a little easier to seek and find this information from an all-encompassing dashboard.

These tools (I’ll use Buffer’s analytics as an example) can show you a breakdown of how each post performed in the important areas of views, clicks, shares, Likes, and comments.

Which social media stats are best? We’ve gained some insight from looking at each of these main statistics and the composite engagement statistic on a per-post basis. The resulting stat gives us a great look, over time, of how our social media content tends to perform, and we can then test and iterate from there.

Here’s one way to analyze your performance.

Set a benchmark. After two weeks or a month of sharing, you can go back through your stats and find the average number of clicks, shares, likes, and comments per post. This’ll be your benchmark going forward. You can come back and update this number at any time as your following and influence grow.

Test something new. We’re open to testing just about anything at Buffer. We’re in the midst of some tests right now on our Facebook account. Do Facebook Live videos get more views than non-live videos? Does the video length matter? We’ll often hear about someone’s new strategy or get a new idea and then test right away.

Did it work? Check the stats from your test versus the stats of your benchmark. If your test performed well, then you can implement the changes into your regular strategy. And once your test is over, test something new!

Step 6: Automate, engage, and listen

The final piece of a social media marketing plan involves having a system you can follow to help you stay on top of updates and engage with your community.

To start with, automate posting of your social media content.

Tools like Buffer allow you to create all the content that you want to, all at once, and then place everything into a queue to be sent out according to whatever schedule you choose. Automation is the secret weapon for consistently excellent sharing, day after day.

Your plan doesn’t end with automation, though. Social media requires engagement, too.

When people talk to you, talk back. Set aside time during your day to follow up with conversations that are happening on social media. These are conversations with potential customers, references, friends, and colleagues. They’re too important to ignore.

One way to stay up on all the conversations that are happening around you and your company is to create a system for listening and engaging. Tools like Buffer Reply and Mention will collect all social media mentions and comments on your posts in a single place, where you can quickly reply your followers.

What would you share with someone new to social media?

Coming up with a social media marketing plan is a great step toward diving in to social. If social media looks thrilling and overwhelming all at once, start with a plan. Once you see the blueprint in front of you, it’s a little easier to see what lies ahead.

Pick your networks

Fill out your info

Find your voice

Choose your strategy

Analyze and test

Automate and engage

Bingo!

How did you develop your social media strategy? I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass this along. If you can use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

Want more social media tips? Take our free email course!

I’ve put together a list of 25 practical social media strategies that work for us here at Buffer—and I’d love to share them with you via email.

Join here

—

This post originally published on July 16, 2014. We’ve updated it with new research, statistics, and a cool new infographic on September 2017.

Image sources: Will Scullin, MailChimp, Crello, SumAll, and Pew Research

Thank How to Create a Social Media Marketing Strategy From Scratch for first publishing this post.

[pagedesignhub-blog]

The way to Abandon Android and Switch to iOS

New Post has been published on https://pagedesignhub.com/the-way-to-abandon-android-and-switch-to-ios/

The way to Abandon Android and Switch to iOS

Perhaps you want the curves of the iPhone 7, Maybe you just don’t consider Google together with your information anymore, or Perhaps a person simply gave you an iPhone as a birthday gift. Regardless of the reason, right here’s How to get your entire virtual existence from Android to iOS with as little head-scratching as feasible.

For simplicity’s sake, we’ll anticipate you’re set up on Android along with your records plugged into Google’s services (Gmail, Google Calendar and so forth). In case you’re using some thing else, like a Microsoft or Yahoo email cope with, the manner may be similar, and often simply entails installing the relevant Android-analogous app to your new iPhone.

We need to additionally factor out that a future Field Guide will communicate about shifting within the opposite route, so watch this space for that.

need to Mobile Builders Flip to iOS or Android First? Over the past 18 months, Google has made considerable updates to their Android running device in an attempt to attract Developers who are trying to make excessive excellent applications for the platform. Android-powered phones now make up the general public of the telephone market, but to the marvel of many, lots of Builders nevertheless favor to create programs for Apple’s iOS. Some readers would possibly question how a developer can pick the more constricted iOS-fashion improvement to Android’s open marketplace distribution gadget, however professionally finished surveys and research by means of studies organizations which include Flurry have revealed a selection of various motives as to why this preference may stand up.

Firstly, although there at the moment are extra smartphones going for walks on Android than on iOS, Apple’s iPod Touches and iPads deliver the entire quantity of iOS-powered devices in the marketplace to almost 200 million. No matter the recent boom in pills walking Android, there is no manner Google’s platform could be capable of in shape the range of iOS’ good sized audience individuals any time soon. A larger person base way a better threat at for a developer’s application to be downloaded, and that motive on my own makes it worth sticking to iOS for many — particularly those developing packages for which the person has to pay.

Together with a larger overall range of customers, Apple has their App Keep designed in a way that exposes a massive quantity of different applications to users. Pinnacle rated loose and paid applications, packages of the week, and a group of workers selected programs are many of the special categories where sets of applications are highlighted. Builders need their utility to be found, and the open nature of Android ends in many boring applications cluttering the store, that means customers are going to be less likely to locate and download the pleasant programs they’re after.

IOS is often criticized because of the confined variety of devices that run it, however, in truth, this prevents the disparity among gadgets that Android-powered gadgets often face. Due to the fact that every Android-powered device is so one-of-a-kind, it’s nearly not possible for Developers to make their packages run flawlessly on every tool.

According to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, customers are ways greater willing and possibly to pay for applications on the iOS platform compared to the Android OS. Average selling charge for an iOS utility is $1.forty eight in line with the download. Builders are a long way happier making applications that do not need to earn their profits from classified ads because, in maximum instances, an app will look and run better with out ads filling up the screen. The higher an application looks and runs, the much more likely the developer could be praised for their paintings. Given that many Android packages are uploaded and supplied free of price, Builders sense a stronger duty to launch advert-cluttered programs in the Android Store with out fee a good way to compete for downloads.

there is absolute confidence developing an application for iOS comes with a higher begin-up price than developing one for Android, but in the long run, customers are some distance more likely to find and pay for an utility launched on iOS. This isn’t always to say Android utility improvement have to be deserted with the aid of any method Considering there is nevertheless a good sized marketplace for them, and with Some hard paintings, it is very viable to make outstanding and effective Android apps. But, with the sheer range of iOS-powered devices available on the market nowadays, there is no doubt that any developer need to bounce if iOS utility development as an alternative.

every Guy Is An Island: The Fragmentation of Android Android as a running system has had A few amazing success over a previous couple of years. For a while, Android producers took a lower back seat to Apple; Android turned into precise, but iOS was higher, the critics said. Over the previous few years, Android’s success has critics seeing the Apple enemy in an entire new light, with A few suggesting that the destiny of the phone industry lies with Android manufacturers and now not with the Apple Employer – a organisation that many as soon as concept was invincible and beyond fail.

Android’s achievement changed into purported to become a good element; it was presupposed to assist Android manufacturers see the fulfillment that they might gain and propel them to heights of which they’d never dreamed. Android’s success turned into alleged to be the incentive and influence its producers needed to surpass Apple and iOS. I fear the worst, However: with Android’s rising success, its manufacturers are starting to see their personal man or woman businesses as “superstars,” dividing Android, once a cohesive whole, into man or woman pieces or fragments. We are on the point of the fragmentation of Android.

Before you positioned this newsletter down and stroll away, let me explain. Earlier this week at the International CES, LG Electronics introduced that the Nexus 4 turned into only the first of collaborative efforts with Google:

“Through our collaboration with Google, we released the LG Nexus four smartphone. That is the primary of many gadgets to come from our growing partnership with this very selective employer” (underline mine).

What this indicates is that we can sit up for a Nexus 5 and 6, likely a “Nexus nine” or “Nexus eleven” one of in recent times (depending on how the Nexus smartphones are named, in assessment to the Nexus capsules). some time after LG made this announcement, However, the Worldwide Commercial enterprise Instances claimed that “the Nexus 4 production ‘is claimed to have [been] halted,’ with LG interested in constructing its subsequent-gen devices” (Chris Smith, “Nexus 4 manufacturing reportedly halted, as LG is that specialize in future smartphones, Nexus 5 blanketed?”). What is this intended to mean? To be blunt, LG has decided to desert the Nexus four in favor of its personal smartphones. Supposedly, the LG Optimus G has made the organisation develop confident in transferring ahead to develop its very own reason. As for its challenge with Google? Nicely, LG appears to paintings with them within the future, however no definite time frame changed into given in which the 2 agencies could come collectively. Customers who desired to get their arms on a Nexus 4 are now left expecting the next Nexus mission (which may be in a 12 months or two).

In an article I wrote on the Google X Telephone, I said that it’d not be a wise flow for Google to push Samsung out of the manner. I assumed that Samsung could want to stay within the Android production institution. While Samsung’s phones have made Android the OS to be envied, Samsung has also been running on an OS of its personal: Tizen. Reports have surfaced in the closing weeks that Samsung will produce more Tizen phones this yr than ever Earlier than. What this indicates is that Samsung, who has in no way long past public approximately its “OS inside the wings,” intends to sell its own OS in its very own hardware this yr. A few say that That is in response to Google’s plans to create an X Smartphone; thinking about that Google posted its statement first, I would now not be surprised if Samsung’s decision to press forward has something to do with Google’s choice to rule Android (and Samsung’s preference to rule Tizen).

Now, LG has improved and made the equal circulate as Google: deciding to place its very own work in advance of the partnership among itself and Google. LG’s move may also be a political reaction to Google’s X Telephone statement: Due to the fact that Google is moving forward with its own telephone, LG seems to do the same. In contrast to Google or Samsung, However, it does not have the financial resources to preserve generating one line of smartphones Even as operating on a brand new line so it has determined to tug its sources collectively and start on some other smartphone (beyond the LG Optimus G and Nexus 4). What this says to the purchaser is the subsequent: “At the same time as LG and Google produced a quality Smartphone collectively, not anything matters greater than our personal cellphone line and company call. If left to pick out between our telephones and a partnership Cellphone, the associate Phone challenge might be the primary to go.” This does not bode Well for a organization that, till the Optimus G and Nexus four, changed into no longer known for its Telephone collections.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Spectacular Cross Section of Contemporary Indian Art

Subodh Gupta, “Untitled (Sushi conveyor belt)” (2008), installation view (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

COLUMBUS, Ohio — When it comes to exhibition-making, the Pizzuti Collection works entirely from the contemporary holdings of Ron and Ann Pizzuti, who are as avid in their championing of Columbus as they are in their appetite for diverse acquisitions, largely by living artists, the world over. Looking at the cross section of artists, media, and themes represented within the Pizzuti Collection (as showcased, for example, in the 2016 exhibition, Us Is Them), one could hardly consider this to be a limited pool from which to draw inspiration.

Bharti Kher, “Landscape” (above); Saskhi Gupta, “Landscape of Waking Memories” (below)

Certainly, at first pass, the Pizzuti’s newest exhibition, Visions from India, is a visual menagerie, offering no end of rich detail and kinetic spectacle. Curator Greer Pagano, who worked closely with the Pizzutis over multiple years to construct this exhibition, is quick to emphasize that Visions from India is in no way intended to stand as a comprehensive survey of Indian art — if, indeed, it were even possible to in any way summarize the collective consciousness of a country with a population exceeding 1.2 billion. As always, the Pizzuti Collection is working through the narrow lens of their eponymous collectors’ preferences — collectors who, it must be noted, have a confident and personal approach to art collecting, one that reflects a genuine interest in art and artists more than the market forces that may affect the extrinsic value of the works.

Sudarshan Shetty, “Untitled” (2008), detail

But the very nature of singular vision creates the opportunity for a blind spot. In the case of Visions from India, it took me some time to identify a thread of emotional dissonance arising in response to the tableaux, grouped in galleries on all three floors of the building. This dissonance was initially easy to dismiss, because I am a materialist, and Visions from India is rife with glorious and incredibly textured materials. Visitors are initially and irresistibly drawn from the entry hall into the largest first-floor gallery, which is dominated by a dynamic landscape assembled entirely of metal tiffin boxes — the traditional lunchbox of India — moving along a sushi bar conveyor belt repurposed into a snaking pathway across the top of an industrial steel table. “Untitled (Sushi conveyor belt)” (2008) by Subodh Gupta is the piece for which this gallery was expressly designed when the Pizzuti Collection built out the facility in 2011, and it has only now come to be displayed there. The effect of the piece is both hypnotic and quickly vertigo-inducing, with the moving tiffin towers managing to suggest a quiet, deeply aesthetic cityscape. It’s fun to watch, even as you start to feel your stomach turn. (Perhaps plan your visit before lunch.)

Subodh Gupta “Untitled (Sushi Conveyor Belt)” #pizzuticollection #visionsofindia #subodhgupta

A post shared by Sarah Rose Sharp (@mobilehomesteader) on Mar 28, 2017 at 10:54am PDT

The celebration of material abundance continues in the adjacent gallery, where a colorful triptych wall of huge “landscapes” created by artist Bharti Kher through the application of arrow-shaped bindi marks on board form the backdrop for a floor piece by Gupta comprised largely of discarded and rusting molds for false eyelashes. These two works, each dealing with cosmetic culture, accretion, and abstraction through a process of sheer accumulation, form a fluid conversation with each other: as above, so below. Another side gallery off the main floor is entirely devoted to a second work by Gupta, this one an oversized and rusting approximation of an immobile industrial ceiling fan, with a spray of detached debris languishing on the floor around it. Pagano acknowledged the challenges of working with pieces made by the artist with entropy in mind, conscious of the warring desires to preserve the piece and to allow it to fulfill its destiny of decay.

Bharti Kher, “Landscape” (2006), detail

Saskhi Gupta, “Some Beast” (2008)

Moving upstairs, more wonders are revealed. The Pizzutis have collected a number of works by Sudarshan Shetty — perhaps one of the more widely recognized names in the show — and one of the more striking in the giant, kinetic “For All That We Lose” (2011). Standing nearly 12 feet tall, this freestanding and ornately carved wooden gateway incorporates, like much of Shetty’s work, sections of reclaimed teak salvaged from the wave of fast-moving development that often leaves one of India’s most common historic building materials in discard piles. A swinging sword sweeps through the arched portal, transforming the structure from a gateway to a pendulum clock, its face replaced by the decorative motifs that, like time, are slipping away as India rebuilds structures in the vision of its future.

Sudarshan Shetty, “For All That We Lose” (2011)

There are numerous lovely moments like these throughout Visions from India, but to focus on them exclusively would be to fall into the same blind spot that the exhibition itself does. It is quite easy to lose oneself in this celebration and virtuosic rendering of India’s material, and thus easy to initially discount a lingering feeling that something is missing. But upon reflection, the blind spot in the work emerged: Visions from India seems to have wholly eschewed humans as subjects.

Dia Mehta Bhupal, “WAITING ROOM” (2016). The artist meticulously constructs life-sized sets out of twisted paper in found colors, photographs them, then destroys them.

“WAITING ROOM,” detail view of framed photograph.

I have never been to India, so I hesitate to speak out of turn about issues of representation. And this show, as prefaced by its curator and in the catalog’s introductory essay, is not intended as a comprehensive representation of India. I am a scholar of neither historic nor contemporary Indian art, and so I cannot say definitively whether the collective lack of human figuration in this show is indicative of a trend or tradition, or simply a revealing element of the personal taste of these collectors. What I can say is that, even from a mostly unschooled perspective, India is known to have a lot of people, and the fact that less than five human subjects appear amid a collection of 40+ works certainly feels lacking.

Kanishka Raja, “Double Duty” (2007), detail

Based on Us Is Them, in which the majority of the pieces did feature human subjects, it cannot be argued that the Pizzuti Collection has something against them. And certainly, some of the works here use materials — bindis, tiffin boxes, eyelash molds, broken china — in ways that might be construed as visual proxies for human subjects. A second show, The Progressive Master: Francis Newton Souza from the Rajadhyaksha Collection, sits in a gallery embedded within the wider exhibition, and much of Souza’s work deals in human figures, albeit abstractly at times. But he is also one of only two non-living artists featured in connection with Visions from India.

Collectively, the resistance displayed by either contemporary Indian artists en masse, or these particular collectors of contemporary Indian art, to consider actual Indian subjects creates a kind of vacuum in the space. In fact, a number of pieces seem to consciously elide their human subjects, as with Shetty’s “Untitled” (2008), which features a common clay water vessel rigged atop a mechanical conveyor performing an automated imitation of the human act of pouring — no human required. Two large-scale oil paintings by Kanishka Raja, which share the room with the massive sushi table installation, take as their subject panoramic airport interiors, with the two halves of the painting slightly offset around a median point. The mismatch within these paintings — the visual equivalent of a record scratch — is not their most jarring element, however. In one, “Double Duty” (2007), at least half the canvas is thick with rows of empty green cots. Like India, airports are never empty, never silent, so to see one entirely free of occupants suggests tragedy, apocalypse. A sculpture by Alwar Balasubramanian, “Self in Progress” (2002), the first work to greet visitors as they enter the museum, features a life-sized body casting of the artist sitting in a chair — his legs from the knees down emerge from one side of a dividing wall, his back and that of the chair from the other, and the rest of the figure is obscured, presenting the illusion of being embedded in the space between.

Sudarshan Shetty, “Untitled” (2008)

Visions from India, installation view.

Visions from India presents ghost towns, purgatorial waiting rooms, mythically impassable gates, skeleton dogs, unopened lunchboxes, literal no-mans lands. This seems, at heart, contradictory to a country known for its sounds, its smells, its churning biomass. The preoccupation seems to be with that of environment, material culture, and waste — and to be sure, these are issues as specific to India as they are universal. The works are irreproachable, and the Pizzuti’s collection is nothing if not cohesive — not to mention, offering a rare show that equally represents male and female artists. So the visions of India offered by the Pizzuti Collection is by no means negative, but it is perhaps a bit oddly quiet, oddly spare, presenting a profound contrast to the more common associations of the place from which it draws inspiration.

Visions from India continues at the Pizzuti Collection (632 North Park Street, Columbus) through October 28. 

A portion of the author’s travel expenses were reimbursed by the Pizzuti Collection and Experience Columbus.

The post A Spectacular Cross Section of Contemporary Indian Art appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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