Author: Dylan Kissane
The 2016 Webby Awards have been announced and the winners of the best homepage feted. Congratulations to National Geographic (Webby) and BBC America (People’s Choice). But what makes both of these homepages stand out from the rest? What makes them the best examples of what web design gets right? Why are these homepages so much better than yours. While we’re not about to go through every homepage everywhere in a search for answers to these questions, we can point to the things that both National Geographic and BBC America get right. And, by emulating their strategies, you might just find…
You’ve read it everywhere: when it comes to content marketing and inbound marketing, it’s all about telling a great story. Storytelling is the way that marketers connect with readers and potential customers, and it is what separates a blog post or article from a sales pitch or ‘take it or leave it’ offer. Fast Company nailed the reason that storytelling is an attractive marketing technique online in the opening lines of a 2014 article titled Why Our Brains Crave Storytelling in Marketing: What grabs your attention more: a list full of ingredients like acacia gum, oligiosaccharide, and glutemate or a…
It’s something that most every blogger faces at one point or another: what am I going to blog about tomorrow? When you’re just getting started in blogging it’s hard to imagine there might come a day when you can’t think of anything to blog about. After all, you’ve just launched your blog, you’re excited, and you’ve either written a bunch of posts you have scheduled to land in the weeks ahead, or you’re so motivated to get writing and have so much to say that running out of ideas seems ludicrous. But maybe a couple of months in or perhaps…
Twitter is a social network that is in trouble. It’s not because it lacks users. Indeed, Twitter counts hundreds of millions of active users monthly. Twitter may not be available in China but then most major US-based social networks are not available there. In the rest of the world Twitter has either established a strong foothold or is building strong foundations for growth. Despite a quarter at the beginning of the year where, for the first time, Twitter user numbers declined, the company still has a huge audience and is growing, if slower, still. It’s also not because no one…
A few weeks ago a couple of the DOZ team and I went along to see Independence Day: Resurgence and it was everything I knew it would be. Big explosions, aliens getting their butts kicked, improbably escapes, patriotic speeches, and world landmarks being destroyed by things from another world – the movie had it all. Of course, Independence Day: Resurgence is a sequel to the original Independence Day of 1996. Twenty years might seem like a long time between episodes in a franchise but, this summer, it’s well behind the 32-year gap between the original Ghostbusters and its 2016 summer…
If coming up with ideas is one of the toughest tasks for a blogger, writing the actual blog post is usually up there, too. Distilling all that research down into something useful, building on a structure, optimizing for search, and making sure you hit the goals for length, depth, and style can be hard work. It’d be great if you could hand it off to someone else but your team is tight and everyone else has something to do already. If only the computer could type for itself… Well now it can. With Wordsmith there’s now no need to create…
We’ve written a lot about effectively using hashtags on the DOZ blog before. We’ve explained that hashtags can help categorize a social media post, can help you reach out to interested audiences, and help you ride the great social media wave of popularity that viral events offer to digital marketers. But one thing we’ve never covered before is who owns a hashtag. Your first response might be, “nobody owns a hashtag”. After all, the only real use of a hashtag is getting other people to spread it far and wide and a price tag attached to a hashtag is only…
Some of the biggest success stories in technology in recent years have been part of the sharing economy. Among the highest profile of these firms are the two unicorns, Uber and airbnb. Both have revitalized industries that had long stagnated under over-regulation and incredibly high barriers to entry. The stories are familiar. For Uber it meant taking on the world’s taxi industries. Instead of starting a competing car service, investing in the hundreds or even thousands of vehicles required to serve a single large city and hiring the drivers to pilot them, Uber instead developed an app that allowed regular…
The Euro 2016 football championship is entering its final weeks. After dozens of matches involving teams from Iceland to Russia the finals are underway and the excitement is rising across Europe – and especially in France – as the race to crown the European champion narrows to a final few nations. With every match now a knock-out, every minute on the pitch counts. Tens of thousands of fans and tens of millions more watching on television, online, listening to official radio feeds, and even on official smartphone apps hang on every kick, every save, and every last-minute shot. Buying access…
Welcome to the week! This time last week the world was looking rosy, the global economy was kicking along, and the international environment for business seemed as good as it had been for the last couple of years. And then, on Friday morning, the world had a Brexit moment. A couple of trillion – yep, trillion with a ‘T’ – wiped off global exchanges, the British pound falling through the floor, if only temporarily, and one of the world’s leading economies all set to pull out of one of the largest trading, political, and social blocks anywhere on the planet.…