Here is an interesting study, Stanford University found out that most students in junior high through college can’t tell the difference between real news articles and fake news, according to Fortune.
Stanford’s History Education Group tested for “civic online reasoning” — the ability to assess the credibility of information served up by smartphones, tablets, and computers. From January 2015 through June 2016 the group collected and studied responses from 7,804 students from 12 states. The schools ranged from “under-resourced” inner-city schools in Los Angeles to “well-resourced” suburban schools in Minneapolis. Testing in colleges ranged from large state universities with near-open enrollment, to Stanford University.
Middle school students didn’t get that articles written by company employees about their own industries might be biased. High school and college students alike were often swayed by high-quality design and graphics, and good writing, judging them credible regardless of the actual site content.
“Many people assume that because young people are fluent in social media they are equally perceptive about what they find there,” said Stanford’s professor Sam Wineburg, lead author of the study and the report. “Our work shows the opposite to be true.”
It’s not the case that everyone needs to study journalism or law, but the Stanford study shows clearly that while students may be facile with electronics, they need help learning how to evaluate the credibility of information.
Major publications are bringing their articles to Facebook Newsfeed. This new feature is called Instant Articles. Following the last article about news consumption rising from social media instead of TV and Newspapers, Facebook is on the right path to make its users to be able read news articles without leaving the platform ever.
Instant Articles scheme would work under condition that publications will keep all ad revenue from articles posted on Facebook if the sites themselves sell the ads. If Facebook does the legwork of selling the ads, it will keep 30 percent of the revenue for itself. Those numbers suggest that Facebook doesn’t see Instant Articles as a direct revenue stream, but rather as a way to keep its users on its site — a benefit that can indirectly increase Facebook’s earnings.
Facebook is reportedly arguing in its pitches that Instant Articles will lead to increased readership, since the articles will pop up quickly straight in the app instead of taking upwards of eight seconds to load in a web browser. The largest publications see a massive percentage of their traffic already (and, therefore, ad revenue) come from Facebook referrals. Many sites are wary of giving more control to Facebook, but some see it as a necessary means of survival.
It looks like Facebook Videos are bringing benefits they deserved. Videos are getting 4 billion daily views, which is up from 3 billion daily views announced in January 2015.
The Next Web suggests that YouTube should be scared of Facebook. It’s building a video powerhouse that Google may struggle to match, because it hasn’t managed to successfully build out a social graph like that of Facebook.
As an example, Vox shared a video on Facebook, which received over 1.1 million views since when it was shared on April 10. By contrast, the same video shared on YouTube has only received 85,000 views. That’s a serious amount of reach.
Facebook’s social graph is a potent advantage over YouTube. Videos go directly to newsfeed and load automatically, so users do not even need to leave Facebook and search for more content. As with Youtube, Google Plus does not provide that kind of social reach.
Facebook continues getting more and more video views, possibly taking them away from Youtube. Google is probably planting some strategy to overthrow Facebook, but if they not, then they are in real trouble.
So the tracking cookie is dying, slowly. Facebook, Google, and Apple are changing the way users are being tracked in both great and terrifying ways. New methods are able to track users across multiple devices and platforms. Here how they are doing it:
Facebook relies on its SSO (Single Sign-On) to follow the movement of users. SSO allows you to use your Facebook credentials on third-party websites and apps. When you do this, Facebook is watching, following, and cataloging your destination points, which obviously leads to targeting ads on the newsfeed.
Google also uses SSO technology. By logging into Google accounts users get tied up to the entire Google network, which is massive.
Then Android mobile operating system assigns each user a Google Ad ID. Many of Google’s ad products — AdSense, AdMob, and DoubleClick — pull in your device’s ad identifier. Together with the information it already has from its many web properties, including YouTube, Gmail, Voice, and Search, the company can compile a dossier of a digital history. This allows Google to categories websites and users for precise targeting.
Apple’s tracking techniques are focused primarily on two things: email address, which is tied to all of Apple’s services running on any iOS or OS X device, and iTunes account, which gives Apple credit card data and ties users most closely to its ecosystem.
Login identity is tied to Apple “identifier for advertisers,” or IDFA. It’s a unique string of characters assigned to every user buying and using an iOS device. So when ads run on Apple’s advertising network iAd for example, Apple is able to determine who’s receiving the ad, and potentially to connect that back to everything that person did elsewhere in Apple’s system.
A new report quantifies design and marketing’s most deceptively elusive quality.
Recently “simplicity” became something that everyone is talking about, and it feels like every brand should be simple and have very simplistic approach to marketing. It might be true to some extent.
But the Siegel+Gale Global Brand Simplicity Index attempts to actually define simplicity by polling more than 6,000 consumers on the brands they find most simple (from the clarity of promotional materials to the usability of websites to the actual experience with the company’s products). The report then quantifies simplicity’s dollar value across industries. Their findings are enlightening.
This top 10 represents some incredibly successful companies. Consumers actually are prepared to pay more for simpler experiences–an average of 3-4.1% more, or what could theoretically equate to $30 billion in revenue.
But what may be even more telling is that social media, despite its meteoric rise to prominence in popular culture, was rated horribly. Twitter fell 23 spots to #93 overall. And Facebook is ranked #118 out of 125 brands, actually dropping 31 spots from last year’s branding index. One of the most recognizable brands in the world is getting destroyed in terms of creating a comprehensible product.
Users say they’re frustrated by Facebook’s ‘incomprehensible’ personal privacy policies, frequent changes to the interface, and a lack of usability in general,” summarizes the report authors.
So simplicity does look like a way to go with branding, design, and marketing. And even Facebook should comes up with some clear and simple profile pages.
I’ve recently found this infographics about Facebook advertising.
Although it’s not the best infographics in the world, but it clearly shows what particular posts are used by brands to attract more fans.
Clearly links never really work.
Vampires are huge now, but what actually stands behind the popularity is not really the story but the actual fans.
Although, fans require motivation too, so social media is a great help at this sort of things.
The inforgraphic below shows how vampire’s phenomenon gets spread out all over the social media.
My favourite is True Blood, as the story is amazing and it’s not that cheesy as other vampire movies/tvshows out there now.
True Blood also becomes an ultimate winner in the social media race with very clever way of releasing small teaser videos several month before season premier. The interactive app was also created, as well as, the website truebloodontwitter made just by fans.
Does not look bad for the tv show, which goes out only once a year on a cable network and also quite late at night.
Last Sunday, the premier of the season 5 of True Blood generated nearly 242,000 comments on Facebook and Twitter, making it the most talked about premium cable season premiere ever.
Told you, the absolute winner.