Time’s Up: Mobile-Friendly Websites To Be Rewarded, Others To Be Penalized

Here’s where the rubber meets the road.

For the last several years, Website publishers including mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms have been encouraged to focus on the mobile user’s experience. This includes reducing the time a Website takes to load on a mobile device and enabling the taking of action via call-to-click functionality. While Google has been leading the charge, Bing also is checking sites for “mobile compatibility.”

But yesterday Google made it all real with the announcement that it will be adding a mobile-friendly label to mobile search results. At the same time, it acknowledged that it’s experimenting using mobile-friendly criteria as a ranking signal.

Awesome And Not Awesome

If your firm has made your site’s mobile friendliness a priority, it's all good. As Google rolls out the mobile-friendly label in the next few weeks, you could conceivably benefit from the designation and possibly a boost in Google search engine rankings.

But a spot-check yesterday of the largest asset management Websites, using Google’s mobile-friendly test, suggests that many firms have work to do. Note that root domains were tested, I noticed that some firms with mobile-unfriendly sites have mobile-friendly blogs.

In addition to returning either an "Awesome" or "Not mobile-friendly" result, the tool's analysis provides specific reasons and information on how Googlebot sees the page. The tool is part of a developer's guide to mobile-friendly Websites. 

The Consequences

The desktop computer is no longer the leading way people access the Web. As reported by comScore, by July, 60% of U.S. digital media time was being spent on mobile devices. Financial advisors, in particular, use smartphones and tablets.

If there was any doubt before, it is now crystal clear that Google is serious about eliminating frustration for mobile searchers. When text is too small, links tiny and sideways scrolling is the only way to see all the content on a mobile device, a site will be penalized.

At the minimum, a ranking boost for sites that are mobile-friendly disadvantages the unfriendly. But also last month Search Engine Watch reported that Google was testing a mobile-unfriendly icon in search results. It’s unknown if a decision was made to eliminate the negative and accentuate the positive but OMG. No brand or Web team wants that badge of shame.

Here’s hoping you do whatever you can—as soon as you can—to avoid the unfriendly label and the resultant loss in ranking, traffic and relevance. I'm working on the same with this site.

Voice Search And Why It's Time To Show Bing A Little Love

Just because you ignore something doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

Take Bing, for example. If it’s been a while since you reviewed how your mutual fund or exchange-traded fund (ETF) Website ranked in the #2 search engine, you might want to get to that sooner rather than later.

While Bing is unlikely to ever topple Google on the desktop (and Google continues to enhance its own Google Now voice search capability), Bing is the search engine that Apple’s Siri sources for voice search results.

Of course, you care how your site performs for all searchers. But a quick look at your Web analytics will likely show that most of your financial advisor mobile (smartphone and tablet) traffic comes from Apple products. Heightened advisor adoption of voice search—including on the Apple watch coming next year—may mean that Bing could lead advisors to more search results.

I’ve had reason to research the topic lately and thought you might be interested in a few questions I’ve had and the answers that I found.

Q. Are people really searching with their voices?

A. More than half (56%) of adults now use a personal assistant, up from 30% over the prior 12 months. This is according to a Thrive Analytics report, “Is the Personal Assistant the Successor to Search?”, published in October. Usage of personal assistants such as Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana, have increased by 87% over the past 12 months, the report says.

Google’s own Mobile Voice Study, released last month, reported that 41% of adults and 55% of teens use voice search more than once a day.

Market or investment-related topics failed to rate among the more common searches reported. A likely scenario that I could imagine would be advisor voice searches when they're leaning back, during after-hours iPad use, for example.

Q. Are voice searches relevant to non-local businesses?

A. According to this SearchEngineWatch.com article by David Cato of Covario, mobile voice-related searches are three times more likely to be local-based than text. That makes sense.

But non-local searches—such as those that would conceivably lead to asset manager sites—using voice do take place and they’re different from text searches.

“Voice search users typically search in more complete sentences or questions. Additionally, the user tends to complete more searches on a faster basis, adding more words around their main query,” Cato wrote in September of last year.

“Brands can optimize for conversational or long tail queries by deploying an FAQ or Q&A content strategy. A Q&A strategy would not only improve customer service by answering common questions, but it may increase search presence by ranking for more long tail keywords,” Cato concludes.

Helpful but, again, think of the context of the device. FAQs may be overkill on a watch.

Q. How different are the Bing and Google search results?

A. The prevailing opinion has been that if you optimize your site for Google, you should rank similarly—without any additional specific work—in Bing. But there is plenty of commentary online about the differences between the algorithms used by the two.

At the highest level, Google’s indexing is more mature, typically more thorough, more text-based and relies more on linking authority. Bing does better with images, flash and social. You may find this Ultimate Guide To Optimizing Your SEO for Bing from July helpful.

And, you’ll definitely want to check out Bing’s SEO analysis tool and get going with Bing Webmaster Tools. 

Your firm and Rock The Boat Marketing have very little in common. But I can tell you that when I forced myself out of my own all-Google world to confirm that all was showing as expected on Bing, I was shocked to see that Bing located my business at an address from six years ago. A trip to Bing Places remedied that.

More helpful for you, probably: See the difference between the results of a Siri search on the iPad for “retirement planning” and a Google voice search on an (Android) Samsung Galaxy S5.

In this search you can see one possible byproduct of searches shifting to Bing: If you’re a Google AdWords advertiser hoping to snag some searching advisors, you may be headed for a decline in volumes. Then again, you might consider the Yahoo Bing Network. An AdGooroo study (here’s a link to the PDF) conducted a year ago reported that Yahoo Bing led in ad impressions in the financial services category, probably due to the popularity of financial news on the Yahoo! and MSN portals.

For a more exhaustive analysis, see the results of a comparison by Stone Temple Consulting of the search results returned by Google Now, Siri and Cortana. As of October 2014, the firm concluded, "Google Now has a clear lead in terms of the sheer volume of queries addressed, and more complete accuracy with its queries than either Siri or Cortana."

The video below illustrates some of the points made. Note that a few searches are answered on the spot, without leading to an additional Web page. That's a discussion for another day.

Q. How can we spot voice searches in Web analytics?

A. Don’t expect to see a pronounced rise in traffic sourced by Bing. Voice requests are encrypted so they can’t be intercepted and no one can listen to them, according to this LocalVox post.

That being the case, voice searches aren’t distinguishable in Google Analytics, for example. Sessions that initiate via voice search are lumped in the “direct traffic” bucket. To see this for yourself, use voice search to go to your site and check out your real-time traffic sources. The source for your session will be listed as Direct.

Your thoughts, or experiences, on any of the above? They're always welcome below. 

The Gladys Kravitz Guide To Snooping On Your Neighbors

Gladys Kravitz, the Bewitched character who felt it was her duty to keep tabs on her neighbors—I’m hoping you’re familiar with this 1960s sitcom via Nick At Nite or maybe the half-hearted movie—was simply ahead of her time. Today, she might be Director of Competitive Intelligence and Strategic Benchmarking Insights for an asset management firm.

Something was going on over there, Gladys was right, and she was relying on only her keen powers of observation.

If you are equally as passionate about your neighbors/competitors online, today you have many more tools at your disposal. I’ve written previously about SharedCount, SimilarWeb, App Annie and SpyFu, among others. Here’s a quick look at four more that you can use to snoop with.

How Do They Do That?

If you’re wondering how a competitor is working its own brand magic, just use BuiltWith.com to check under the lid.

Information on the enabling technologies running a Website can be valuable to technology solutions salespeople (BuildWith’s target audience) and the pricing packages reflect the value and power available, including SalesForce and LinkedIn integrations.

My needs (e.g., which firms are using WordPress as their blogging platforms?) are simple, and yours may be too. For us, the Chrome extension provides more than enough intelligence on the content management, Web analytics and marketing automation solutions powering mutual fund and exchange-traded (ETF) fund sites.

For example, here’s an excerpt of the American Funds technology profile, showing the analytics and tracking technologies employed.

Banner Bonanza

Are you in need of inspiration for an upcoming digital campaign? Well, you could make a nuisance of yourself on the trade media sites, reloading and reloading hoping to catch different creative. Or you could head on over to Moat.com, where you can search by advertiser and find multiple ad units. Clicking on one of the ads will reveal some information about where it last ran.

Media planners would do much more with this site, and brand analytics are what Moat sells. Here again, I'm appreciating what Moat gives away.  

The screenshot below shows the detail provided on one of 765 Vanguard ads Moat has logged.

Watch This

YouTube success requires standing out from the crowd, because the crowd is adding 100 hours of video each minute of every day.

If you’re not familiar with optimizing for YouTube or if you’re unhappy with your results, VidIQ Vision is a terrific tool that enables you to learn from how others do it. Just add this Chrome extension to your browser and you’ll see detailed publishing information about every video you review on YouTube.

While you could limit your research to just mutual fund and ETF firms, why not learn from what the top brands on YouTube are doing? The screenshot below shows the optimization supporting a GoPro video published a week ago, which now has almost 2 million views. Note that strong social support and a large follower base helped drive views, too.

What’s Working?

As I blogged about last week, content marketers need to focus on what’s working and produce more of that while producing less of what isn’t working. Simple.

Your analytics on your content are central to that analysis, of course. But—since your competitors are also writing for the same audiences—there’s something to be learned from the content that’s taking off on others’ sites.

Use Buzzsumo for this.

Let’s look at the BlackRock blog, which is not just the most prolific but probably the most socially shared. Check out the Total Shares column at the far right. Quality, frequency and social appeal can be a powerful combination.

You could spend hours on this site. Note the advanced filtering and exporting capability. It produces results for Web pages as well as for blog posts. Buzzsumo sells solutions for influencer analysis but you can see a lot with a trial account.

Now let’s go out there and make Gladys proud.

Do Google+ And Fund Companies Have A Future Together?

How much longer can asset managers keep their distance from Google+?

The table at right demonstrates the shallowness of fund company engagement on Google+ across the board. Of course, these companies have few followers—there’s almost nothing to follow! Vanguard stands out as an exception but more on that later.

Many fund companies have Google+ pages only because a Google+ account is required to establish a YouTube channel. Fourteen of the 24 names on the list have never posted an update.

From most of the other firms, there are relatively few public posts, almost zero sharing and, as you can see, followers in the low double digits. Engagement data for all the accounts can be found on AllMyPlus.com. It’s mostly goose eggs.

Fidelity Investments, the Mikey of the investment industry (Fidelity will usually try anything), has a page but it doesn’t have any branding, let alone any activity. I, and its 61 other followers, think this is its official page. Two titans on other networks, PIMCO and iShares, are distant also-rans on Google+.

Why is there such indifference to Google+? I can think of a few reasons. If you have other ideas, please add them in the comments below.

Not enough people, not worth the time

Since its launch in June 2011, Google+ has had its doubters. Critics continue to contend that the site is no more than a ghost town where accounts are created and then abandoned.

Google is steadily fighting back on two fronts. For one, it’s increasingly integrating Google properties. In addition to yoking YouTube channel creation to Google+, Google now requires commenters on YouTube to have Google+ accounts.

Google is also steadily enhancing the network’s features (e.g., post embedding, image handling and Google Hangouts—which I've loved for this business from Day 1), all of which help drive usage. In October 2013, Google reported that 540 million people were active across Google each month, and that 300 million people were active in the Google+ stream. 

With its growth trajectory, sharing on Google+ is on track to overtake Facebook sharing in two years, according to Searchmetrics projections.

Not enough relevant discussion

When you consider the composition of Google+ users, it could be tempting to conclude that investment topics would be out of place. According to a third quarter 2013 study by Global WebIndex, almost one-third of users are IT workers (and lots of them employed by Google, it’s believed). Since Day 1, it was reported that techies had found a new haunt.

And, not shown here but reported elsewhere, photographers and others in the visual arts gravitate to Google+ because of the gorgeous way it displays images.

Look at the chart of the bottom 10 types of people who use Google+ and you’ll see two groups that make up a significant percentage of investment firm clients—those in the 45-54 and 55-64 age groups.

Even top financial services accounts on other networks have relatively poor showings on Google+. One of the leading financial services Twitter accounts, Bank of America, has fewer than 23,000 followers on Google+.

Except…then there’s Vanguard. Vanguard’s Google+ page has attracted 770,000-some followers and 928,000 who have +1ed the page. Vanguard has six times the number of followers it has on Twitter.

Props to Vanguard for doing its typical outstanding job in consistently publishing engaging content, appropriate to the network. According to AllMyPlus.com, Vanguard’s single most popular posts have attracted 49 +1s, 18 comments and nine reshares.

Admittedly, this is nowhere near the same kinds of engagement numbers that some consumer brands rack up. For now, Google+ isn't where the home runs are being hit, just singles and doubles.

Vanguard’s success is unique, even among the largest brokerage accounts Charles Schwab (1,200 Google+ followers) and TD Ameritrade (963 Google+ followers).

But, presumably, Vanguard’s followers are people who are interested in investment-type content and could conceivably follow other investment-related accounts.

And get this: While Barron’s has no more than 100 Google+ followers and Yahoo! Finance fewer than 8,000 followers (maybe they’re not trying too hard on Google’s property), the Wall Street Journal has been circled by more than 3 million accounts. (Note the presence of senior decision makers in the top 10 users table above.)

With more than 6 million followers, The Economist account is #10 on the Google+ most followed accounts leaderboard, according to GPlus.com. The numbers lag what's reported on the Google+page but this line chart is a compelling argument against the ghost town claims.

Here’s one of The Economist's recent popular G+ posts. How is this content different from what your firm might share? Note that it attracted 644 +1s and 323 shares.

Not available to regulated firms

With LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook access, technology enablement was the first hurdle for most asset managers contemplating a presence on a site that wasn’t their own. Firms couldn’t make any plans unless they were certain they’d have a reliable way of archiving what they posted.

I doubt this has been the primary inhibitor to Google+ participation. But the ability to archive Google+ content has been slow in coming, confirms my buddy Blane Warrene, founder of Arkovi and most recently of RegEd. 

“The Google API is improving on the Plus front. Google initially released access to the individual profiles, and in mid-2013 to the Business pages. That makes a big difference as a firm can get the data to archive. Many of the known social archivers are adopting the G+ API as it sees momentum,” Blane says.

Although publishing to Google+ from a third-party app is still limited, the posts, interactive data (links, photos, videos et al) and engagement data all are now available, he says.

Nobody we know is there

Participation on Google+ offers significant, not-available-anywhere-else SEO benefits that alone could be justification for posting to it. But, as a social network, it also offers the lift that come when others support posts by +1s and sharing.

Even if hundreds of millions of users are on Google+, it can still be a lonely place when you post and all you hear is crickets.

I continue to be intrigued with a finding in a 2013 Putnam report on social media and advisors. Almost one-third of advisors surveyed (31%) said they used Google+ in the past year for business purposes. It was second only to LinkedIn, as I noted in a post last year. 

Financial advisors today have more of a business imperative to commit to Google+. Their brands need to be discoverable in local Google searches, and Google’s integration of Google+ accounts and whatever online content the advisors author play a key role in search engine rankings.

With archiving capabilities in place for them, expect more advisors to sign up for Google+ and spend some time there, whether browsing or posting content or taking part in communities and Hangouts.

As one measure of advisor activity, I checked two Google+ accounts that might be assumed to have strong advisor interest—+Michael Kitces, a financial planning thought leader, and +Bill Winterberg, a leading commentator on technology for advisors. Both accounts get a healthy level of engagement. 

In short, there are signs of relevant life on Google+.

Should you/can you commit?

In the last year, it’s become urban legend that financial services is the second most discussed topic on Twitter, after entertainment but before sports. Most recently, this was quoted to me from someone who heard it from his Twitter sales rep. I'd still like to see some data on that, but I do believe that if you’re an investment firm, you belong on Twitter, no question.

The Google+ decision to fully participate is not so cut-and-dried. You’d have to be convinced that there’s a community there that’s sufficiently vital to follow your account and then be continually active on Google+ to see and interact with your content.

And if you’re hoping for anywhere near Vanguard-type results, you’ll have to be all-in. That includes “listening” to what’s being said and exploring what's unique to Google+. Sharing others’ content—something practically no investment-related firm does today on Google+—may be needed, too.

May I be direct? In the two-plus years since Google+ launched, we just haven’t seen the kinds of efforts from this industry that other industries have made or that firms in this space have made on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.

Some firms have yet to even populate the About tabs of their Google business pages. Few of the firms that are posting are doing anything more than posting their YouTube videos or blog posts. Almost none have added the badges to their Websites or include the link to their business pages in their signatures, along with their other social identities.

Hanging back was a relatively no-risk strategy that worked on Google+ in its early days when probably no one was paying attention to you or your sketchy page. It may be time to revisit the decision. Google+ offers an increasingly attractive opportunity to raise awareness and broaden the reach for investment firms willing to work for it.

It’s your prerogative to take a pass on Google+. Just make sure that you have an updated understanding of what you may be forgoing.  

22 Content Highlights To Remember From 2013

“And, the audience sprang to its feet and cheered…”

If you’re in the online content business, such physical signs of positive reinforcement are hard to come by. But, know that what you do is appreciated and often celebrated.

The following list contains 22 pieces of content. I cheered these gems when I learned about them at one point or another in 2013 and they've stood the test of as much as 12 months' time.

As in previous Rock The Boat Marketing annual content highlights (last year’s), this is an idiosyncratic compilation across multiple digital marketing subject domains. Most of these I like for their content, some for their design, their delivery or the evolution they represent. They're presented in no particular order.

Want to play along next year? Come join me on Twitter where the majority of these highlights were surfaced by the awesome information hounds I either follow or am led to. In 2013, I also explored more content on LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest—follow me on those networks or just check in once in a while on this site's Resources page.

1. How Google Reads Minds

The results that Google presents to you the searcher are based on how it “understands” the words you type into the search engine. You know what you want but your search query may have literal meanings that you don’t intend.

This excellent Vertical Measures graphic from April details what Google has in place to read your mind, and how that's evolving. The screenshot below is just a slice of the full infographic.

2. No Money Manager Is An Island

Part of being social is taking part in the broader community. Quite a few mutual fund and exchange-traded fund (ETF) firms seemed to acknowledge that this year with how they managed their social accounts. We saw more accounts following others, more sharing of others’ content and an occasional #FF (Follow Friday) recommendation.

No less than PIMCO’s Bill Gross acknowledged that investment and economic insight takes a village—and people showed a lot of interest in who influences this influential money manager. From August, this is one of PIMCO’s all-time most favorited tweets. It would have been too much to expect him to use the Twitter handles.

Gross: Strategists/writers I follow? Dalio, Durden, Bianco, Arnott, Aitken, Santelli, Grant, Grantham, Inker, Marks, Quaintenance & Brodsky

— PIMCO (@PIMCO) August 9, 2013

3. And We Are Doing This Why?

“…The silence around the economics of content is deafening,” says Forrester analyst Ryan Skinner in this July post 16 Ways to Turn Content Marketing into Business Value. Skinner then proceeds to break down what he names as catalysts of content marketing value: brand, next click, relationship, reach, data.

Many firms aspire to be content factories today, which is all well and good. Before you plow ahead into production, read the Skinner post to make sure you’re aligning what you’re doing with what drives value.

4. While You're At It, Throw In Some Sincerity, Too

It’s a good idea to present yourself as authentic and transparent. But, um, as this Tom Fishburne cartoon from June suggests, you may need to bring that in-house.

5. DIY Dashboard Help

Marketers need to be more analytical. That drumbeat got louder and louder as the year progressed. If you’ve ever found yourself looking for Excel training applied for marketers online, you may be happy to learn about this Excel dashboard series. Written by Annie Cushing and augmented by a video or two, it started in June on Search Engine Land and then continued on Marketing Land. 

6. Showing Signs Of Life On Google+

This November update isn’t on the list because the content is break-out. It’s a little more Facebook-y than I like for Google+.

But it’s an example of how the largest mutual fund company is not just experimenting but succeeding (relatively speaking) in engaging people on a social network that most investment companies have decided to ignore.

More than 700,000 people have circled the Vanguard account, 22 people +1ed this post, three shared it and 13 commented. And, what other social network (i.e., somebody else’s platform) provides such open real estate (no ads) for your message and yours alone?

7. A Map Can Show You Where You Need To Go

Infographics were so 2010. Still, I couldn’t resist spending several minutes of my life with this Gartner Digital Marketing Transit Map released in June.

Gartner says, "Organizations should use the map to identify the connection among business functions, applications tracks and providers. Map elements can be used to find additional research or structure questions about strategy and best practices as well as providers, products and selection criteria. It is also a useful device for mediating discussions between marketing and IT."

Show this to the people in your life who think all digital marketers do is email and the Website.

8. Right Time, Right Place

Advertising a financial advisor-only conference call? On Twitter? By Royce Funds? Yes, yes and yes. In October, Royce Funds showed its leading edge lead-generation chops by employing a Twitter card to drive sign-ups.

9. Lovely To Learn From

Design is rarely front and center for digital marketers, and yet it's especially important at a time when so many clients and prospects access information via mobile devices. You’ll take a lot from this Prophets Agency presentation published last January—and follow the account to learn when the 2014 outlook is available.

Trends in interactive design 2013

from

Prophets Agency

10. Where Do I Sign Up?

Few of us have high expectations when we go to a conference Website. Oh sure, the highest-profile events command the resources to deliver a functional, pleasant experience, but the majority of event sites lack luster.

That’s not the case with this vibrant LPL Connect 2013 site. I’d bookmarked it during the August event (which I attended by hashtag only) and hoped it would still be reachable when I returned to it for this list.

Outstanding—not only did it not go dark after the event, it’s been updated. Why would you go to a conference site afterward? Just one reason, probably. LPL lets the presentation archive dominate the home page, while most event sites require attendees to go looking. All that’s missing from my cursory review of the site is a Search capability. 

11. Sharing The Data

TD Ameritrade knew there was value in providing insights on what its investors were thinking. Previously, according to their Website, they'd satisfied media and others’ requests for information with opinion surveys.

That approach was upgraded considerably in January with the release of a quantitative, behavior-based index that reports on what retail investors are actually doing.

The Investor Movement Index, based on a sample of the firm’s 6 million accounts, is a tool that has ongoing marketing and communications utility. It raises the bar for other investment companies whose proprietary data contains insights when aggregated.

Wouldn’t it be cool (and ostensibly instructive) to someday get a full picture of what investors and 401(k) participants are doing, via a single site driven by the sampled and anonymized data from individual brokerage and investment firms?

12. Two Pictures = 1,000 Words

Nowadays, people are relying on mobile devices to share what they see around them and especially the news. We all need to plan accordingly.

Not that you needed the previous two sentences after looking at these photos comparing people anticipating a 2005 papal announcement in St. Peter's Square, Vatican City, and those in March 2013. 

If your client or boss isn't taking mobile strategy seriously, show them this picture of the Vatican crowd: pic.twitter.com/CPlrCbwrnp

— Fike (@MichaelFeldman) March 15, 2013

13. We Were Right There With You

From Google Earth to Reddit to Twitter, the Internet was focused on April’s Boston Marathon-related bombings.

From my perspective, this is the best content that came out of it. The rest of us were worried about Bostonians. In an inevitably schmaltzy way (is there any other when Neil Diamond is involved?), this video demonstrated their resilience. 

14. The Dope On SERPs

Google’s search engine results page (SERP) changed big-time in 2013. In October Moz provided a visual guide to all the variables that could possibly appear in (mostly organic) search results and why. Study the full guide (the screenshot below is just an excerpt) but don’t bother printing it—things may have changed since you started this post.  

15. Starting With Why

Water Investing, Calvert’s iPhone/iPad app launched in November, is different from other investment manager apps in at least four ways:

• It’s about something—the world's water crisis—as opposed to being a container of investment commentary and investment product information. The embedded video is effective at using the medium to communicate more than just words and images could.
• Its Daily Drip is an aggregation of others’ (non-Calvert) views and updates.
• It offers the tweets of not just the firm but three analysts using a #CalvertH20 hashtag.
• It includes a "Play" feature that uses the device's camera to simulate a water effect. Kinda corny but something to build on.

16. A Framework For Your Work

You could land on any blog post on Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor site and find Web analytics gold. But, make a special effort to read See-Think-Do: A Content, Marketing, Measurement Business Framework. Your entire day every day can be filled in the pursuit of digital marketing tactics. This post is a nudge to be more strategic in how you think about your work and its effectiveness.

BREAKING: Sorry, I can’t let this post fly without also mentioning a December post in which Kaushik lays out a digital marketing “ladder of awesomeness.” Another must-read. You might just want to subscribe to this site.

17. Endorse Me As Father of The Bride

A chuckle is the last thing I expect when I log into LinkedIn but, no kidding, some of the photos being used for profiles are funny. This MarketingProfs 19 More Reasons Your LinkedIn Headshot May Be an Epic Fail presentation is not exaggerating. Too bad it doesn't touch on one of the types of photos I commonly see. Men in tuxedos, really?

19 Reasons Your LinkedIn Photo Is an Epic Fail

from

MarketingProfs

18. Looking Under The Hood

Last week was all about learning an hour of code. I’m guessing most of you sat that one out. But this week, how about learning to just read the source code on your Website?

If your work has anything to do with optimizing your site for search engines, this KISSmetrics post from August provides an excellent foundation for how to confirm what's happening on your site. Bonus: Check other sites' source code to learn what they're up to. This screenshot is just the first example the post provides.

19. Out Of The Ashes

First there was the dramatic reading by James Earl Jones and Malcolm McDowell of Jenna’s Facebook for a Sprint commercial. I loved that. Moving onto the digital realm, on YouTube two actors re-enacted a YouTube comment war between two One Direction fans.

But the investment industry has nothing to do with most memes. We wouldn’t do the Blurred Lines knock-off videos, twerking is out of the question, and the President of the United States took part in a selfie before an asset manager CEO has. 

So, while I suffered along with other financial services marketers when the #AskJPM Twitterchat imploded, I have to say that a subsequent CNBC video published the next day thrilled me. Stacey Keach provides the dramatic reading. 

It didn’t go anywhere (just one tweet!) but let history show that this may have been the first stab at a meme. Thanks to my buddy Todd Donat for first sending me the link to this.

Too soon? I hope not.

20. In Another's Eyes

When one Website sneezes, do the other Websites catch a cold? Nah, the failings of healthcare.gov just inspired Slate in October to show how iconic sites Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon and Windows would have made the site over in their own image and likeness. Pretty genius. 

21. Borrowing From The Journalists

The introduction of data, including visualization, can add to the usefulness of content you’re creating.

But this is yet another competency that people in marketing positions today will have to learn on the job. Most likely, you will not be crunching the numbers, you’ll be managing the data-driven work. To be an effective partner and contributor you may have to dig in.

It was prepared for journalists and not marketers, but the Data Journalism handbook may be just the resource you need. The handbook, a version of which is also available in print, is a project of the European Journalism Centre’s Data Driven Journalism initiative.  

22. Tech To Watch Out For

The Marketing Arm’s Tom Edwards, the author of this contribution to iMedia Connection, sounds like he has one cool job as an evaluator of interactive/new media and emerging tech.

We’re the beneficiaries as he outlines—and provides plenty of examples of—six marketing technology trends. Included: collaborative commerce, curation, second screen and social TV, rich social media, crowdsourcing and social and CRM. The screenshot below shows the user interface of a social TV app.

This post will do it for me for 2013. Happy Holidays to all and see you back here in the first week of 2014!