30. January 2012 by admin.

According to the Harvard researchers, there is performance persistence in entrepreneurship.

They write, “All else equal, a venture-capital-backed entrepreneur who succeeds in a venture (by our definition, starts a company that goes public) has a 30% chance of succeeding in his next venture. By contrast, first-time entrepreneurs have only an 18% chance of succeeding and entrepreneurs who previously failed have a 20% chance of succeeding.”

Posted in Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

16. January 2012 by admin.

http://www.dtic.mil/ndia/2007systems/Thursday/AM/Track8/UnderstandingSocialNetworks_BriefingFINAL.pdf

It is possible to correlate the product of the social interaction of

the individuals involved, with the properties of wicked problems.

• Relevant correlations:  Requirement articulation

– Property 1:  There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem.

– Property 7: Every wicked problem is essentially unique

– Property 6:  Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively

describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of

permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan

“Social network analysis is based on an assumption of the importance of relationships

among interacting units.  The social network perspective encompasses theories,

models, and applications that are expressed in terms of relational concepts or

processes.”

[1]

• Social network analysis should not be outside the capability of a systems engineer,

but rather its benefits would fold nicely into mission engineering—a core component

of systems engineering.

– Mission engineering is that often overlooked aspect in which the system

developers ask the ‘big picture’ question: “why is this system being

developed?”

[2]

– Social network analysis makes the question more fundamental: “Why is this

system being developed and who is important to its sustained success?”

• “The purpose of social network analysis is to provide insightful information and

inferences on the organization and structural properties of a network, given its nodes

and relations.

– Property 8: Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another

problem

– Property 5: Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”;

because there is no opportunity to learn by trial-and-error, every attempt counts

significantly

Posted in Marketing, Programming Code Help, Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

9. January 2012 by admin.

Frigyes Karinthy, in his 1929 short story “L\’aancszemek” (”Chains”) suggested that any two persons are distanced by at most six friendship links. (The exact wording of the story is slightly ambiguous: “He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual […]”. It is not completely clear whether the selected individual is part of the five, so this could actually allude to distance five or six in the language of graph theory, but the “six degrees of separation” phrase stuck after John Guare’s 1990 eponymous play. Following Milgram’s definition and Guare’s interpretation, we will assume that “degrees of separation” is the same as “distance minus one”, where “distance” is the usual path length-the number of arcs in the path.) Stanley Milgram in his famous experiment challenged people to route postcards to a fixed recipient by passing them only through direct acquaintances. The average number of intermediaries on the path of the postcards lay between 4.4 and 5.7, depending on the sample of people chosen. 
We report the results of the first world-scale social-network graph-distance computations, using the entire Facebook network of active users (\approx721 million users, \approx69 billion friendship links). The average distance we observe is 4.74, corresponding to 3.74 intermediaries or “degrees of separation”, showing that the world is even smaller than we expected, and prompting the title of this paper. More generally, we study the distance distribution of Facebook and of some interesting geographic subgraphs, looking also at their evolution over time. 
The networks we are able to explore are almost two orders of magnitude larger than those analysed in the previous literature. We report detailed statistical metadata showing that our measurements (which rely on probabilistic algorithms) are very accurate.

Posted in Marketing, Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

9. January 2012 by admin.

Anatomy of Facebook

by Lars Backstrom on Monday, November 21, 2011 at 5:04pm

Think back to the last time you were in a crowded airport or bus terminal far from home. Did you consider that the person sitting next to you probably knew a friend of a friend of a friend of yours? In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment” famously tested the idea that any two people in the world are separated by only a small number of intermediate connections, arguably the first experimental study to reveal the surprising structure of social networks.

With the rise of modern computing, social networks are now being mapped in digital form, giving researchers the ability to study them on a much grander, even global, scale. Continuing this tradition of social network research, Facebook, in collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, is today releasing two studies of the Facebook social graph.

First, we measured how many friends people have, and found that this distribution differs significantly from previous studies of large-scale social networks. Second, we found that the degrees of separation between any two Facebook users is smaller than the commonly cited six degrees, and has been shrinking over the past three years as Facebook has grown. Finally, we observed that while the entire world is only a few degrees away, a user’s friends are most likely to be of a similar age and come from the same country.

In our studies, performed earlier this year, we examined all 721 million active Facebook users (more than 10% of the global population), with 69 billion friendships among them. To date, these are the largest social network studies ever released.

How many friends?

An important basic view of any social network is the cumulative degree distribution, which shows the percentage of individuals that have less than a given number of friends. As you can see above, only 10% of people have less than 10 friends, 20% have less than 25 friends, while 50% (the median) have over 100 friends. Meanwhile, because the distribution is highly skewed, the average friend count is 190. An important finding from our study, however, is that the distribution is not nearly as skewed as earlier studies of social networks have suggested.

At first glance, the median friend count on Facebook — 100 — may seem surprisingly low; a quick survey of my own friends reveals that they almost all have more than 100 friends. But no, your friends are not atypically social – a classic paradox regarding social networks dictates that, for most people, the median friend count of their friends is higher than their own friend count. On Facebook, that’s the case for 84% of our users. Why? Scott Feld wrote about this phenomenon in his 1991 paper Why Your Friends Have More Friends than You Do, showing that the same phenomenon dictates that college students typically find that their classes to be larger than the average class size, and that when sitting on an airplane, it will typically be more crowded than the average occupancy. These effects all arise because for people, classes, and flights to be popular, you must be much more likely to choose them. So you shouldn’t feel bad if it seems like all your friends are more popular than you: it appears this way to most of us.

Four degrees of separation.

The idea of ‘six degrees of separation’ — that any two people are on average separated by no more than six intermediate connections — was first proposed in 1929 in a short story by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, and made popular by the John Guare play and movie, Six Degrees of Separation. The idea was first put to the test by Stanley Milgram in the 1960’s. Milgram selected 296 volunteers and asked them to dispatch a message to a specific individual, a stockholder living in the Boston suburb of Sharon, Massachusetts. The volunteers were told that they couldn’t send the message directly to the target person (unless the sender knew them personally), but that they should route the message to a personal acquaintance that was more likely than the sender to know the target person. Milgram found that the average number of intermediate persons in these chains was 5.2 (representing about 6 hops). The experiment showed that not only are there few degrees of separation between any two people, but that individuals can successfully navigate these short paths, even though they have no way of seeing the entire network.

While we will never know if it was true in 1929, the scale and international reach of Facebook allows us to finally perform this study on a global scale. Using state-of-the-art algorithms developed at the Laboratory for Web Algorithmics of the Università degli Studi di Milano, we were able to approximate the number of hops between all pairs of individuals on Facebook. We found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users: While 99.6% of all pairs of users are connected by paths with 5 degrees (6 hops), 92% are connected by only four degrees (5 hops). And as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become steadily more connected. The average distance in 2008 was 5.28 hops, while now it is 4.74.

Thus, when considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops). It is important to note that while Milgram was motivated by the same question (how many individuals separate any two people), these numbers are not directly comparable; his subjects only had limited knowledge of the social network, while we have a nearly complete representation of the entire thing. Our measurements essentially describe the shortest possible routes that his subjects could have found.

Your friends and you.

It’s easy for me to imagine that a path from me to a random person in Siberia goes first to one of my few Russian friends in California, and then hops around the globe to a friend of theirs living in Russia. But, while I can imagine these short paths connecting all pairs of people in the world, this notion stands in sharp contrast to my day-to-day experience. Most of my friends live in the US, and the ones I am closest to live within just a few miles of me.

This is what makes social networks somewhat unique: they are both well-connected in the sense that you can reach anyone from anyone else in a relatively short number of hops, but at the same time, they are very locally clustered, with the vast majority of connections spanning a short distance. In our study, we found that 84% of all connections are between users in the same country. But this isn’t the only dimension along which people tend to cluster. We also find that people tend to have a similar, albeit typically smaller, number of friends as their neighbors, and tend to be about the same age. Somewhat surprisingly, even for individuals aged 60, the distribution of their friends’ ages is sharply peaked at exactly 60.

Conclusions

To facilitate open access within the scientific community, the two works are available for download:

J. Ugander, B. Karrer, L. Backstrom, C. Marlow.

The Anatomy of the Facebook Social Graph,

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4503

L. Backstrom, P. Boldi, M. Rosa, J. Ugander, S. Vigna.

Four Degrees of Separation,

http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4570

In these two works, we show how the Facebook social network is at once both global and local. It connects people who are far apart, but also has the dense local structure we see in small communities. We show that, as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become even more connected. In the years to come, we look forward to continuing to illuminate social trends and helping people understand how the world is becoming more connected.

Posted in Marketing, Programming Code Help, Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

9. January 2012 by admin.

The Basics of Facebook Advertising

Targeted Ads in the Right Rail – Facebook allows businesses to promote themselves to a specific set of Facebook users.  You can choose to show your ad to specific people based on their location, age, gender, education level, relationship status, specific interests, etc. etc.  You can easily create an ad by scrolling to the bottom of any page on Facebook and clicking on “Advertising“.

Ad Components – Each ad has four elements:

1. Headline (25 characters)
2. Description (135 characters)
3. Image (thumbnail size)
4. A Link – You can send traffic to a specific Facebook page for which you are an administrator or your own website/landing page.

So How Much? – Ads can be run on a cost per click (CPC) or cost per impression basis (CPM).  Typical cost per click rates vary from about 35¢  to $1.65 depending on the level of competition.  You can choose to limit your budget on a daily basis (e.g. $50 per day) to control spending.

Think Banners, Not AdWords – No one is actually searching for the information these advertisements provide like they would in Google, Bing or other popular search engines.  Seth Godin calls this, “interruption marketing.”  A click through rate (CTR) of 0.05% is actually pretty standard for Facebook Ads.  Please note, that is not 1 click in 200 ad impressions.  It’s 1 click in 2,000 impressions.

And Why Should I Use Them? – If your goal is to create awareness, bring in more Fans or to promote a specific event or deal, Facebook advertising should be considered as a component of your plan.  You may also consider focusing on providing amazing content on your Facebook page, enlisting current customer contacts from an email database or those who frequent your site, or even promoting your Facebook presence with other mediums.

Now that you’ve got the basics, here are some tips to help you best utilize Facebook advertising.

1. Choose Selects Carefully – Despite the fact that typical click through rates are so low, people will click.  It’s important to make your campaign as narrow-focused as possible to get a good result.  Do you have two or more primary audiences you are looking to target?  OK. Create two or more ads.

2. Adhere to the Guidelines – This tip really goes without saying, but here’s a quick primer on some of the guidelines that truly matter.  You cannot offer incentives in exchange for providing customer contact information or clicking on the ad.  No ads for tobacco, guns, gambling, drugs, adult toys/videos, hate speech and ring tones.  Ring tones have to be the most incorrigible from that list. Ads for dating services or sites must be targeted at Single people.  Sorry, Ashley Madison.  Anything related to alcohol must be targeted to people over the age of 21.

3. Run Multiple Ads in One Campaign – This is important not only for targeting purposes but also for testing.  You have the ability to run multiple ads in single campaign all pulling from the same daily spend.  Test different audiences, different messages, different graphics, different offers, different pricing models (CPC vs. CPM) and bids, etc.  Find out what works and then test again.

4. Refresh Ads Often – Unlike dealing with Google Adwords’ quality score in which campaigns must gaini a certain level of impressions, clicks and “trust” before they rise in paid search rankings no matter the bid, Facebook ads spark and fizzle quickly.  Ads are given great momentum to start and then the level of impressions an ad is given slowly falls off.  Modify your ads at least once per week to get the best results.  Big companies running campaigns with huge budgets (upwards of $1,000 per week) should alter their ads every day.

5. Check Out Connections Targeting – Recently released by Facebook in November ’09, Connections targeting allows advertisers to target people who are connected to a page, event, group or application.  One caveat is that you must be the administrator/owner of the page, group, app, etc. Connections helps save from wasted clicks if you are trying to target people who are not already Fans  of your page.  You can also target friends of your Fans, which may be beneficial considering friends likely share similar interests.

Posted in Marketing, Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

9. January 2012 by admin.

http://wiki.akosma.com/IPhone_URL_Schemes

These inventions are quite ingenious.  I have had an IPhone 4S, I hope to be able to stop typing and dictate. This is a nice hack as the inventor gathers a nice stream of “connectors”

Rememberthemilk.com

Open Settings on your iPhone 4

Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Tap Add Account…

Tap Other

Underneath Calendars, tap Add CalDav Account

In the ‘Server’ field enter: www.rememberthemilk.com

In the ‘User Name’ field and ‘Password’ fields, enter your Rememter The Milk details

Tap Next

You should be returned to Mail, contacts, Calendars, with the account added.  Scroll to the bottm of the screen, and tap Default List

Tap Remember The Milk

All your “remind me” commands in Siri should now go through Remember The Milk. Once you do this, you will get e-mail reminders from Remember the Milk instead of push Notifications from the default Reminders app.

Contact me if you can do the same for kewler.com

Posted in Programming Code Help, Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

6. January 2012 by admin.

http://info.awarenessnetworks.com/rs/awarenessnetworks/images/THE-STATE-OF-SOCIAL-MEDIA-MARKETING.pdf

Affiliate Sites

SBIR gateway, Challenge.gov

According to the Facebook consultants at BrandGlue, 1 in 500 updates make it to the news feed. How does it work? If you like or comment on updates from one particular friend quite often, you are likely to see that person’s update in your news feed on a regular basis.

To use a personal example, I tend to like or comment on updates from my friend Juan because he is hilarious, my sister who is expecting her first baby, and Arizona Highways’ page because they are always providing great content. Because of my tendency to do so, my personal news feed usually includes an update from one if not all of those profiles.

That’s the non-scientific method for determining what happens on the Facebook news feed. During the f8 conference, Facebook did what Google has never done; they provided the mathematic formula behind news feed optimization. Here it is:

Facebook EdgeRank Algorithm

Note: From this point forward I’ll use Facbook’s terminology regarding objects and edges. If you don’t speak Facebook, an object = a status update or post. An edge is a comment, like or interaction with that object.

Based on this formula, an object’s likelihood of appearing in a news feed is a function of three elements:

1. Affinity
2. Weight
3. Recency

Let’s discuss each in plain English. I’ll also provide a brief explanation of what Facebook page administrators can do to take full advantage of this formula.

Affinity Score – This number defines the relationship between object creator and recipient. Those who comment and like your personal updates have a higher affinity than those that do not.

What this means to you: Create objects that appeal to different kinds of connections. If you see the same people commenting and liking a specific type of object like photos, create a different kinds of objects like questions or polls to elicit a response from other connections. The more variety you have with the profiles that provide feedback and like your objects, the greater overall reach your page will have in the news feed.

Weight Score – Each object is assigned a score based on the number of comments and likes it earns. An object with 15 comments and 20 likes has a much greater weight than an object with 0 comments and likes.

What this means to you: Develop a strategy for creating objects that will generate feedback from your connections. Entertain, educate/enlighten, make invitations, say “thank you”, ask questions, etc. View every post opportunity as a method for garnering important insights and learning more about your page connections.

Time / Recency Score – This number is a reflection of how long ago the edge was created. Each edge will lose its mojo very quickly. For example, the oldest edge in my news feed right now was created 42 hours ago. Most were created in the past 18 hours.

What this means to you: Allow each object you create to gain some exposure. Creating back to back to back objects in a single afternoon will stifle each object’s ability to garner comments and likes. Meanwhile, adopt a regular posting schedule (like once or twice a day) so that you always have an object and its related edges placed in the news feed of your most loyal connections.

Posted in Invention, Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

6. January 2012 by admin.

Posted in Managing Business | Print | No Comments »

6. January 2012 by admin.

http://xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-3392&y=-2816&z=1

Link to the poster - awesome!

Posted in Managing Business, Probably a RANT | Print | No Comments »

6. January 2012 by admin.

Quite the announcement! For those who have simultaneously managed social media marketing campaigns and organic search engine optimization strategies this is great news. It also brings up a lot of questions. Start checking questions off your list, with the elements of the Tweet Algorithm explained below.

Tweet Algorithm is made up of the social sharing factors on Twitter that impact SEO . Here is the breakdown the Tweet Algorithm.

Authority : Author Authority of Tweeting Source and Sharing Source

The number of followers, engagement level of followers and ratio of followers to followed are all important factors in determining the authority of a Twitter account. The higher the authority of the source, the better effect it will have on search engine rankings.

Target authoritative Twitter users and interact with them to get your content on their radar.

Lasting Power

The more a piece of content is shared or retweeted the more valuable the content is in the eyes of Google.The number of times a tweet is shared over a given period of time offers additional insight. For instance, if a tweet is retweeted for weeks after the original date of publications, (QDF=Time of Tweet) it indicates that the content left a lasting impression. The more relevant and valuable a piece of content the more often and longer it will be shared across social channels.

Engagement

The quantity and quality of retweets indicates how engaged the audience is with a piece of content. The more a content is shared the more engaged the audience is . If highly authoritative authors retweet a piece of content it gives the content more authority in the eyes of the search engines.

Quantity of Clicks

The number of times a piece of content is clicked on shows popularity. The more clicks, the more popular the content. Search engines want to return results that are accepted by their search engine users because this is what their audience wants.

As more and more SEO’s test the Tweet algorithm and incorporate other social sharing influences in their SEO campaigns, the more insight we will have into how much and what factors influence rankings.

Stay tuned for more research on social sharing and how it influences search engine rankings. This is a hot topic and high priority topic on my continuing seo education.

Posted in Managing Business | Print | No Comments »