An amazing speech to a graduating class. Words of wisdom we could all live by.
Written by Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook (1988), was the guest-of-honour at a recent NTU convocation ceremony. This was his speech to the graduating class of 2008.
I must say thank you to the faculty…
(via tyabernethy)
Source: techedblog
In addition to audience acquisition, Parrut drives user engagement. This is evident in the sustained increases our clients have experienced with Parrut’s Facebook App. But what’s it look like?
Well, there are a couple of places to look. First, you see it on Parrut Analytics. A spike in ‘Likes’, sign-ups and sharing is obviously a sure sign of engagement.
And then there’s that thing right there on the left side of your Facebook Page called “talking about this”.
Most of the companies we speak with understand this as a measure of engagement. But there’s a little confusion on the definition.
The metric’s name sounds as if it’s counting mentions across Facebook. It’s not. It’s counting unique users creating a “story” about the Page in the trailing seven day period.
Users create a story about a Page when they do any of the following: Like a Page, post on a Page wall, comment, share a post, mention the Page in a post, tag a photo, or check-in.
So what kind of increases have we seen with our clients? Nearly 100% in recent campaigns after launch, with smaller but still significant increases sustained even after the campaign ends.
The companies that are successful at driving this number up treat it as a process, continually engaging users with great content, direct interaction, and regular sweepstakes and promotions. Give us a shout to hear more or just go ahead and sign up to get started.
Happy new year! Whew, it’s been warm in the Northeast. With no need to tend to the fire at Parrut HQ, we’ve had plenty of time to dig through some recent sweepstakes data. We’ll be sharing some of the more interesting findings in the next few posts.
First up is a look at speed to open by channel. We’re talking about the time elapsed from when a user shares/sends and when the recipient clicks on the sender’s unique link (created by Parrut). In other words, how long does it take to generate a real lead?
We know Twitter feeds move faster than Facebook, so we we weren’t surprised to see Twitter shares in Parrut sweepstakes getting a quicker response. But the difference is quite profound.*
The median “open” on Twitter occurs just 30 seconds after the “send”. As compared to nearly four minutes on Facebook. And more than 39 minutes on email.
Wow. That’s eight times faster than Facebook. Looks like the Parrut’s found its Hare.
(* Note: The data set we looked at numbers in the tens of thousands of sweepstakes shares. We appreciate that this isn’t tens of millions. Not to worry - we promise to report back when we have that much data too.)
Mashable chats with Parrut co-founder Tarek Pertew on next year’s tech predictions: How will Digital Change Small Business in 2012? (See #6 on daily deals.)
Tarek points out how companies are increasing their focus on their own content and new social marketing technologies to drive long-term, sustainable customer acquisition.
Last year, Cyber Monday sales topped a billion bucks. Tomorrow’s supposed to be bigger yet, maybe hitting $1.2 billion per Andrew Lipsman at comScore. And it’s estimated that 76 million (!) people - 6 out of 10 - will shop for gifts while at the office.
But it wasn’t always so. 2010 was the first year that Cyber Monday was tops for online shopping. Previously, it had only once ranked in the top 5 online shopping days of the year. So what’s behind the ascent?
Scott Silverman just wrote a great post on this for Techcrunch. He ran Shop.org when it coined the term Cyber Monday. He draws the correlation to the growth of Facebook and Twitter, and specifically the explosion of peer-to-peer sharing of deals and promotions.
He also notes that the Cyber Monday fruits are disproportionately going to the retailers that have invested in social (the 25 US retailers with the most Facebook fans have a combined 260 million fans).
Pretty amazing.
Parrut’s customers are across this spectrum. Some are making their first investments in social. Others have sophisticated social strategies and lots of followers, and they’re using our platform to improve their sharing functions, or leverage our analytics and ability to make product iterations quickly. Regardless, they’ve recognized the critical role that peer-to-peer sharing can play in their growth. It seems that Cyber Monday may highlight that dynamic more than any other day of the year.
[Focus on] interaction. Not merely a click that leads to a sale. I’m talking about any sort of interaction with you or your organization, whether it’s an online chat, a phone call or navigating your site. Too often, online marketers are focused on pennies per click instead of long-term value per engagement.
— Seth Godin
[Check out the Parrut shout-out on NY1 by reporter Asa Aarons, who also interviewed one of our co-founders, Tarek.]
As we wrote about recently, Parrut was a featured sponsor of the Silicon Alley Talent Fair in NYC this past Friday, 11/11/11.
For us (and I’m sure many others) the event was a huge success. We expect to sit down and have longer conversations with a handful of the many bright candidates we met and perhaps add another member to Team Parrut!
In addition to meeting great people, we enjoyed nice music and hung out with our new friends Nancy & her African Grey Parrot, Rusty (pictured above).
We expect strong ecommerce growth for a long time to come (it’s one of the principal reasons we started Parrut). So we were weren’t shocked by headlines of the comScore Q3 report, but a few things did catch our eye.
The 13% year-over-year increase for Q3 makes four quarters in a row of double digit increases in the US. The last time we saw four quarters in a row with 10%+ growth was the run ending with Q2 2008.
It’s a pretty remarkable statistic when you consider the economic backdrop for that period vs. today’s environment. ‘07 and ‘08 were, of course, the end of an extraordinary run up in economic growth, stock market gains, and discretionary consumer spending.
But the last three years have been pure sludge. Consumers have been hanging on to their dough, and unemployment has been stuck at 9-10%. (Sure, consumer spending had quietly ticked up for nearly two years straight until the June surprise, but that doesn’t seem like enough of an offset to the unemployment issues, stagnant wages, and general uncertainty.)
So what did it then? Turns out its all user growth.
comScore cites a 22% year-over-year increase in the number of online buyers, noting that nearly 75% of the all Internet users are now buying something every quarter.
Wow.
