socialmediasuperstars

CEO talks about ads, innovation, and Facebook.

In an effort to expand Hellmann’s relevancy beyond the sandwich, the company and ad agency Ogilvy Brazil recently launched a campaign that told consumers how the groceries they had just purchased could be used to make a new mayonnaise-intensive dish.

They partnered with a large supermarket chain called St Marche to install software in cash registers at about 100 stores. When customers purchased Hellmann’s mayo at these stores, the software automatically looked at the other ingredients in their cart and compiled a recipe that used them. The recipe, complete with preparation instructions, was then printed on the customer’s receipt.

Within the first month, sales of Hellmann’s mayonnaise increased by 44% at stores with recipe receipts, according to a video about the campaign.

“We needed to take advantage of the moment when customers had all of the right ingredients at hand,” explains the same video.

More About: Advertising, Hellmann's, Marketing, retail

Technology. It’s supposed to be a marketer’s friend -- the tool that democratizes and empowers marketing everywhere. Except ... how often does that happen?

Instead of empowering, it paralyzes. Marketers see all the choices -- marketing automation, social media, landing pages, content management systems, pay-per-click platforms, social tracking tools, social publishing tools, social advertising tools, marketing analytics, lead management tools, lead tracking tools -- they get overwhelmed, and they freeze or veer off course into a doomed solution.

So sure, maybe you've got the top of your marketing funnel all figured out. You've got a good amount of traffic flowing into your website, and your visitor-to-lead conversion rate is solid. But if you're like so many marketers, you may still be unsatisfied with your ability to generate the customers and revenue you want to be generating. If this is your case, the following excerpt from our new ebook, How to Avoid Marketing Technology Paralysis: A Guide for Marketing Technology Buyers, will help you understand the technology you need to help you convert leads into customers.

What to Look for in Lead Nurturing Tools

There is no shortage of email marketing software options, and you could read volumes about the differences between the various flavors. Here are the most important things to consider:

Choose Sending and Tracking Tools That Your Team Can Manage

There are lots of different levels of sending and tracking in email marketing software, but you have to make sure you pick the sending and tracking tools that you can manage. Make sure you don’t get stuck with a sending and tracking tool that goes beyond your needs and that is too complicated for you -- or one that is under-powered. The best way to find this fit is to run a trial of a potential new vendor.

If You’re Using a Shared IP, Make Sure You Have a High Sender Score

For most marketers, a shared IP address is the way to go. It’s far more cost-efficient, and less complicated to manage. Only there’s a catch: If your email service provider’s shared IP has a low Sender Score, many of your emails won’t be delivered. Make sure you find out if your ESP has a good Sender Score to ensure people actually see your emails.

Make Sure It's Easy to Manage Lists

Many email marketing programs make it difficult to manage lists. You have to export your lists from one app, then load them to another app, then deal with all the footing issues. You want a seamless way to manage lists, ideally within the email creation process itself.

 

 

Utilize Suppression Lists

Be sure any new email service provider you use allows you to upload suppression lists. A suppression list will prevent you from sending to all the email addresses on your main list that have unsubscribed. If you don’t upload a suppression list, you’ll end up emailing people who have already unsubscribed -- and those recipients will be unhappy, mark your message as SPAM, and hurt your Sender Score and deliverability rate.

Be Happy With Your Email Templates

Many marketers sign up for a new email service provider only to discover, halfway through producing their first email, that they can’t live with the template. Set up a trial with your new email service provider and make sure you’re happy with the email templates they have available.

 

Make Sure There Are Custom Fields

The ability to customize and personalize email messages doesn’t have to be a complicated feature. If you collect your leads in the same application as the one the one from which you send your emails, you should be able to add custom fields in just a click!

Look for Integration

Your email tool should have good integration with your marketing database and list management tools. Without that integration, you’ll end up wasting a lot of time going back and forth between different tools as you download and upload lists. You should also ensure that your email tool has good integration with your marketing analytics platform.

What to Look for in Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is another key tool to help improve your lead-to-customer conversion rate. If you’re able to create well-timed, relevant, personalized interactions with leads, you’ll be able to engage them, build their trust, and turn them into customers. Of course, marketing automation runs the risk of appearing overly automated and spammy, too, so you need to proceed with caution. Here’s what you should look for in marketing automation software:

Be Clear on the Staffing Level it Requires

Marketing automation automates the email flow, but not the process of managing those email flows. Make sure you’re clear with your marketing automation vendor about the amount of time it typically takes to manage the types of marketing automation campaigns you need to run to achieve your goals. You don’t want to sign up for a marketing automation package, then get a big bad surprise when you discover how much time it takes to run it.

Don’t Pay for Tools You Don’t Use

Many marketers sign up for expensive automation solutions loaded with deep, sophisticated features, but end up only using a handful of them. Make sure you buy the tools you use ... and use the tools you buy. If you buy too much, the complexity will be overwhelming and will get in the way of doing what you wanted to do.

Make Sure You Have Content or Conversion Assist Reporting

Content is the fuel for marketing automation campaigns. It’s the stuff that produces engagement in your emails and draws prospects in. Most marketers guess which content will create the best engagement with their users. Don’t do that. Use tools like Conversion Assists reporting to measure which pieces of content are helping to convert the most prospects to leads and customers. Then use that content in your automation flow.

 

 

Get Support for the Trigger Actions You Want

Marketing automation typically means setting up flows of actions to take on a prospect once they hit a specific trigger or condition in your system. Before you commit to any specific system, make sure it supports the triggers and actions you want. Key actions to look for are emailing, list actions (adding a contact to a list) and contact actions (changing a value in the contact record).

Yet Again, Look for Integration

Your marketing automation platform should be tightly integrated with your email marketing, list management, and marketing database tools. For example, you should be able to use emails created in your email marketing tool as part of your marketing automation flow. Your contacts lists should be able to trigger automation actions. And, of course, all this should be measurable in the same marketing analytics platform that you use to measure everything else.

What to Look for in Your Marketing Database

As a marketer, you need to be able to manage all of your contacts. You need a place to collect all of the leads that you accumulate, and add data to their record as you gather it. Which emails did a contact click on? Which pages on the site did they visit? When did they tweet about you? All this information should be stored in your contact database -- and if you do it the right way with the right tools, it will help you improve your lead-to-customer conversion rate. Here are the keys for tracking your marketing database:

Robust Contact Tracking

Your contacts are the core of your business -- they’re the people you are trying to build relationships with so that you can nurture them down the funnel. The more information a contact database tracks, the more it will help you in that nurturing process. Before you decide on a marketing database tool, go through all of your marketing activities, and make sure that as many of them as possible are being collected in your new marketing database.

 

 

Robust List-Building Capabilities

You need to be able to slice and dice your database so that you can zero in on specific segments of leads and actually do the work of nurturing. You should be able to create dynamic lists (a list defined by a set of criteria that is updated with every new contact that matches the criteria); static lists (a list that meets a specific set of criteria at a specific point in time); and list imports (lists that come from an external source via a manual upload).

It Should Feel Like Sending Email, Not Database Programing

Your marketing database should be easy to use. Too many marketing database programs are all database and no marketing. You don’t need to sacrifice one to get the other. Anybody on your team should be able to navigate their way around your marketing database and become an expert.

Integration, Integration, Integration

To be most effective, your marketing database needs to be the hub of all your marketing activity. It needs to be (you guessed it) integrated with all your marketing activities, because it’s the place where you need to record all the activities of your contacts. That means blog activity, social media activity, webinar activity -- you name it. In addition to collecting a record of all your prospects’ activity, you need to be able pass that activity into your CRM, so make sure that your marketing database also has a great integration with your CRM.

To learn how to overcome marketing technology paralysis to help you solve problems such as no funnel data, low traffic, and low visit-to-lead conversion rates, download your free copy of our guide today.

Image Credit: Zach Klein

The Leaders in Digital Series is supported by Samsung. Follow Samsung USA on Google+ and Twitter, and like it on Facebook.

On Monday, Hulu revealed a slate of 10 original shows it plans to premiere on the site this summer.

The news followed a slew of announcements from the likes of Yahoo, AOL and other big media companies that are now developing original video content for the web — much of which looks much like traditional television (Mashable also recently premiered its first episodic series, Behind the Launch).

Earlier this month at Mashable Connect, we caught up with Wilson Cleveland, who is the creator and executive producer of Leap Year, a scripted series that debuted in 2011 and will go live with its second season in June. We chatted with Cleveland about what’s behind the sudden boom in premium web video content, why advertisers are jumping on board (Leap Year is funded by Hiscox insurance) and how audience consumption habits are changing.

Check out the interview above. You can also watch the first season of Leap Year on Mashable Video.

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Series presented by Samsung

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The Leaders in Digital Series is supported by Samsung. Follow Samsung USA on Google+ and Twitter, and like them on Facebook.

More About: features, leaders in digital series, mashable, mashable connect, mashable video, TV, web video

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A report released Tuesday argues that high-tech immigration reform is a vital ingredient in the economic recovery of the United States.

The report, commissioned by the Partnership for New York City and the Partnership for a New American Economy, suggests U.S. immigration policy is bogged down by bureaucracy and politics — while other highly competitive countries tie immigration rules to the economic needs of the country.

“Artificially low limits on visas and serious bureaucratic obstacles prevent employers from hiring the people they need –- and send entrepreneurs to other countries, who are quick to welcome them,” reads the report.

“In fact, other nations have learned from the American experience and are employing aggressive recruitment strategies to attract the key high- and low-skilled workers that their economies need to compete and grow.”

If the U.S. is to turn its economic ship around, argues the report, it must follow the example of other countries, such as Canada and Singapore, and prioritize economic over political goals in terms of immigration policy — particularly in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields.

The report warns the United States will have a deficit of 230,800 advanced degree holders in STEM by the end of the decade, despite the country’s numerous top-tier technology universities.

The source of the problem? Currently, foreign students earning advanced STEM degrees in the U.S. are given a short window to find work and an unclear path to citizenship.

Part of the solution, says the report, is to staple permanent visas to advanced STEM degrees.

John Feinblatt, chief policy advisor to New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, backs that notion wholeheartedly. “When you look at our universities, people in our STEM programs are populated by people from other countries,” Feinblatt told Mashable.

“We’re shooting ourselves in the foot by sending them back home, no company would ever do that. It used to be the gold rush, now it’s the talent rush.”

SEE ALSO: Lawmakers Want High-Tech Foreigners to Stay in the U.S.

Another high-tech immigration reform idea backed by the report and by Mayor Bloomberg himself involves giving visas to foreign entrepreneurs to build businesses in the U.S., an idea modeled on a similar law in Singapore.

The report found that in 2006, technology and engineering firms founded in the U.S. by immigrants made $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2006, and for every immigrant with an advanced STEM degree from an American university working in the U.S., 2.62 jobs were created for other Americans.

“If you want best and brightest, you’ve got to go out and get them,” said Bloomberg of the idea during a panel discussion about the report at the New York Forum.

Allowing state governments the flexibility to set their own visa requirements, a policy currently in place in Canada, is an additional solution pitched by the report and supported by Bloomberg. New York could, for example, set requirements that attract investors and entrepreneurs, while other states could pull in agricultural workers.

“There’s no reason you need the same immigration policy across the nation,” said Bloomberg. “In New York we’d be first in line for immigrants, we’d take as many as we could get. There are states in America that don’t believe that and that’s up to them. Why not let us do that and let them do what they want to do?”

Read the full report here.

What do you think the United States can do to attract and keep the world’s top technology talent? Let us know in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, selimaksan

More About: immigration, Politics, US, World

A couple of days ago, I said that the best way to keep traffic flowing to your website was to create solid usable and / or enjoyable content. Whether you’re selling a product, service or yourself, a static page of information won’t bring customers back over and over again. Content does that. Articles, short posts, videos, how-tos, tip sheets, photos, user submissions, games, stories, interviews — these are things customers come back for and search engine spiders, literally, eat them up.

The Huffington Post knows this, so they’re expanding their content reach by reaching out to brands who want to become publishers.

According to AdAge, Huffington Post is currently working with a major consumer goods advertisers to create an online lifestyle publication. The site will include articles curated from HuffPo’s extensive archive as well as new works created specifically to support the brand. And since HuffPo is an extension of AOL, it’s likely that these new sites will carry ads from their platform so it’s a big win for everyone involved.

It’s also a win for consumers because good information is good information, it doesn’t matter if it’s back by a specific brand, newspaper, or a lone opinionated person.

How do you get in on this? Easy. Create your own content site. It probably won’t be as big, fancy and well connected as a HuffPo / AOL / Brand collaboration, but it doesn’t have to be. Look at Craigslist.org if you don’t think simple sells.

3 Steps to Creating Your Own Content Site

1. Hire help and pay them. Writers, video makers, graphic artist, find them on Craigslist and pay them something. Seriously. People who are good at what they do get paid to do it. None of this, labor of love or work for credit nonsense.

2. Brainstorm ideas that relate to your brand but aren’t brand specific. For example, a bike store could put together a directory of bike trails, a shoe company can write about celebrity style. Your content must be generic enough to have mass appeal.

3. Post new content regularly. That means at least once a week. Posting new content once every other month or so is a waste of time. To build up readers and to connect with search engines you need to post on a schedule. Once or twice a week is plenty for a branded website. Believe me, unless you have a dedicated content person, even that will be hard to keep up.

Creating content is easy at the start. You have lots of ideas and enthusiasm. But creating a content-rich site is a long term project. What you post a year from now has to be as fresh and intriguing as what you post next week. So don’t burn yourself out with a big push at the start. Try a few things and let the audience response be your guide.

What are your thoughts on content creation? Fun? Easy? Or last on your list of things to do?

It’s a little like Facebook’s version of the Easter egg extra you can find in a DVD of one of your favorite movies. Only instead of getting inside director’s jokes that you might not have known otherwise, these features are here to make the experience of having a profile on Facebook one you can customize deeper while still protecting the privacy of.

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski has some short words for Internet providers that want to charge customers by how much bandwidth we use: Go right ahead.

“Usage-based pricing would help drive efficiency in the networks,” Genachowski told the cable industry’s annual confab NCTA, in Boston Tuesday, according to Reuters.

Even if the FCC chief had wanted to shut the Net Neutrality stable door on per-use pricing, the horse appears to have bolted.

As of last week, Time Warner and Comcast have both introduced limited trial pay-per-use services — despite the fact that previous trials of monitoring users’ bandwidth haven’t gone over well.

According to a large number of comments, customers suspected the cable companies were mostly exploring the option as a way to raise prices overall.

What do you think? Is it reasonable to insist that consumers pay by how much bandwidth they use? Or should we all pay a flat fee? Take our poll and share your thoughts in the comments.

Should the FCC Let Internet Companies Charge By How Much You Use?

More About: fcc, net neutrality

Democratic Newark Mayor Cory Booker has been taking heat for the controversial comments he made about President Obama’s campaign during a Meet the Press panel discussion on Sunday morning. Booker, one of the prolific tweeters in politics, has since taken to his social media accounts to defend himself.

Booker originally called the Obama campaign’s attack ads against Republican rival Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital “nauseating,” suggesting that the company’s record isn’t as bad as the Obama campaign has been making it out to be. Booker was equally critical of a Republican Super PAC’s reported plan to invoke Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a controversial pastor from President Obama’s former church, in advertisements.

During the discussion, Booker said that negative ads distract from the real issues which most Americans worry about every day.

Republicans almost immediately took advantage of the gaffe by launching a web petition and Twitter hashtag, “I Stand With Cory,” labeling Booker a campaign surrogate gone rouge. Republicans across Twitter are using the hashtag to lambast Booker’s comments and Obama’s anti-Romney ads. The GOP has also purchased sponsored tweets and Google ads which appear when searching for “Cory Booker” and direct users to the petition.

On Sunday evening and into the earlier part of the week, Booker used Twitter and YouTube to explain his statement and launch a hashtag of his own, #IStandWithObama.

SEE ALSO: Super-Mayor Cory Booker Gets Memed

“I made it clear on Meet the Press this morning how I believe that President Barack Obama has done such a strong job as a leader of our nation and how he more than deserves re-election,” said Booker in his YouTube video. “I also expressed my profound frustration with the kind of the campaigning that’s becoming too much the norm in our nation, which is generally negative campaigning. And this campaigning is about to become an avalanche, and in many ways, I believe, could risk muting out the important voices of the candidates themselves talking about the issues that matter.”

Is Booker’s use of social media to defend and explain his comments appropriate? Sound off in the comments below.

[View the story "Cory Booker Uses Twitter, YouTube to Defend Himself" on Storify]

More About: 2012 presidential campaign, Politics, US

This guest post is by Keith Bishop of Online Digital Junkie.

Google’s Panda Update, as well as the recent post from Darren about hosting a guest post series, has prompted me to take a deeper look into the implementation and search benefits associated with putting series on my own sites.

What I found tells me that publishing a series can be a good move if it’s done correctly. So let’s look at when a series is a good idea, as well as some of the issues that need to be avoided for the optimal search performance of the series you publish.

When to use a series

A series is best used when you have a lot of material and media that would slow your page load time if you published it all in one article. Long load times can have a negative effect on your search ranking, as well as causing users to hit the Back button before your post ever finishes loading.

You can check page download speeds on sites like Pingdom. My personal goals are to have all of my main landing pages load with 1.5 seconds, and the rest no longer than two seconds.

Another great time to use series is if you find a group of posts on your site that have similar content with overlapping keywords. This scenario causes your own pages to compete with each other and suffer in search rank. Under these circumstances it would be beneficial to rework your content into a series and allow it to build upon itself. The result of this, as I will explain later, will harness all of the combined SEO benefits and push your series up in the SERP.

The last, and probably most applicable, reason to publish series is when you have a lengthy subject that you are covering over an extended period of time. I certainly don’t want to read a 10,000 word article on the same subject—or have it delivered to my email. Everyone needs a little variety.

The negative aspects of series

Series have their downsides, as far as usability and search rank go. The worst part is the increased load time that the user experiences while navigating to each article, instead of having it load all at once on a single page. Most of the time, this is a good trade-off—the only exception being a long text article which will likely load quickly as a single post, and won’t benefit from being split into parts.

Another issue arises when the middle or last part of the series ranks better in the search results than the first part, and that becomes the landing page for search users. This is sort of like showing a guest your home by walking them through the garage first, and it’s something you want to avoid. The solution? Optimizing your series navigation.

How to link your series for greatest SEO and usability

Proper linking is accomplished by using the [link] element in the [head] section of the post page. This hints to Google that the page is part of a series, and also indicates the position of the document within the series.

To accomplish page ordering, we use the [rel=”prev” and rel=”next”] attributes that in the [link] pagination. This will ensure that the first part of your series will almost always be the one to show up in the search results. Note, though, that Google says “almost always” when it discusses this, so there must be occasions where the search engine likes an article deeper in the series for some reason.

Pagination is easy in WordPress, and there are probably some short codes for the other content management systems that will make it easy to implement in those as well.

Let’s imagine that you want to publish all the material in a series at once. All you need to do in WP is to put the entire series of articles into one post, then add [<!--nextpage-->] wherever you want to break the content up into separate pages or parts. You can then modify the look of your pagination links with CSS.

If you want to drip-feed your series to users over an extended period of time—perhaps in weekly installments—use a head injection plugin that will allow you to add the [] information to the series manually as you publish each article.

A good WordPress plugin that takes care of this is HiFi (Head injection / Foot injection).

Hand-coded blogs will need to have this information added manually into the head section. Here is an example of what the code looks like.

<head>

<title>Your Page Title</title>

<link rel=”prev” href=”http://yoursite.com/previouspage/”>

<link rel=”next” href=”http://yoursite.com/nextpage/”>

</head>

Naturally, the first page in the series will not have a [prev]  attribute and the last page will not have a [next] attribute. This is how the search bots know where the series starts and ends. Clickable navigation links will also need to be coded at the end of each article in the series.

The most beneficial reason to use the [prev/next] attributes is that the search engines will count the series as one article and funnel all the SEO benefits from the series through to the page that’s shown in the search results.

This means that all of the likes, G+, tweets, and links back from the entire series will count together, instead of competing with one another. I don’t know about you, but that gets me excited.

What not to do

You may still find information about this online, but what you do not want to do is link your series using the [rel=”canonical”] attribute on your links.

This method will prevent the wrong post (e.g. a later part in a series) from ranking higher than the one you wanted (the first part in the series), but it also tells the search engine that this is duplicate content and it shouldn’t be indexed. The canonical attribute was used in the past under a slightly different set of circumstances, and is no longer applicable to series.

Too bad there isn’t some way to certify our content so that we could get the SEO benefits from our content when it gets scraped or syndicated. That would be awesome, but it is likely a dream for another day…

Keith currently writes for Beauty & Bandaids and is currently obsessed with his new outdoor adventure watch. Watch obsession to new blog is OCD at its finest.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

How to SEO Your Blog Post Series

If you’re itching to get your hands on Samsung’s new Galaxy S III, you may not have to wait much longer. Amazon put the phone up for pre-order on its website, with a delivery date of June 1.

Priced at $800 the handset isn’t exactly something you’re going to pick up on a whim, and comes with a few compromises beyond the hefty price.

The $800 model for sale on Amazon is the unlocked international version on the phone. Samsung has yet to announce a version of the phone for the U.S (although that announcement is expected this summer). So you’ll be getting the same version of the phone that’s up for sale overseas.

SEE ALSO: Samsung Reveals Galaxy S III

Since the phone is unlocked, you can use it with any GSM carrier you’d like, which in the U.S. means you can use a SIM card from T-Mobile or AT&T (the only GSM carriers in the country) in the phone and make calls. Unfortunately, the phone doesn’t support the data network T-Mobile uses, so while you’ll be able to make calls using a T-Mobile SIM, you won’t be able to hop on the data network to surf the web or use any of the phone’s cool new S-voice capabilities.

The international version of the phone is also not compatible with AT&T’s LTE network, so while you’ll be able to use the phone on the carrier’s HSPA+ network (slightly faster than 3G), you won’t be able to speed along on the much faster LTE network with all your friends who hold out to buy the U.S. version of the phone later this year.

What you will get, however, is a quad-core 1.4 GHz Exynos processor. That particular processor isn’t compatible with LTE, so chances are good when the S III does make it to the United States it will be rocking a slower dual-core processor instead. We’ll have to wait and see what difference the processor might potentially make in the phone when Samsung releases the U.S. version of the phone later this year.

Are any of you planning on buying the Samsung Galaxy S III? Are you tempted to buy the unlocked international version rather than hold out for the U.S. version of the phone? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Galaxy S III

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: android, galaxy sIII, samsung, trending

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The chart-topping songstress Beyonce sent her first tweet, launched a Tumblr blog and redesigned Beyonce.com on April 5. This week, the singer is revealing her #BeyHive app in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

#BeyHive is the new mobile home for fans. The colorful app — which looks like a mix of Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare — was built for Beyonce buzz.

Users must sign into the free app with a Twitter account. Fans can access Beyonce-related news, her entire discography (with sample audio and links to buy tracks) and current concert schedule. Badges are also up for grabs with activity.

Fans are encouraged to generate their own news. They can earn points for tweeting about #BeyHive, checking in at events and liking photos within the app. Hashtags such as #BeyVideos, #BeyNewSite and #BeyLove are used.

Tweets with the #BeyHive hashtag are collected and showcased in a live stream on the website.

SEE ALSO: First Photos of Beyonce’s and Jay-Z’s Baby Emerge on Tumblr [PICS]

See the video above for more about the app’s social features. The digital community, with Queen Bey, at its center has its own vocabulary — to which it’s good to have a guide handy.

Do you think digital fan bases for celebrities will be a hot trend? Sound off in the comments.

More About: beyonce, Mobile, Social Media

Losing your iPhone is worse than losing your wallet these days, considering all the information we store on it. But does it require a 10-man police hunt?

Berkeley, Calif. Police Chief Michael Meehan and a crew of 10 police officers searched for his son’s missing cellphone on taxpayer dollars this January after it went missing from the boy’s unlocked locker at school.

After that, eight members of the department’s drug task force worked on overtime to track down the cellphone, which was equipped with the Find My iPhone tracking software.

The search was unsuccessful, but did succeed in stirring up more controversy for the police chief.

In March, Meehan sent a sergeant to a reporter’s home at around 1 a.m. to ask for changes to an online article, Inside Bay Area reported.

The city of Berkeley hired a San Francisco law firm to investigate the chief’s actions that night.

Another issues with the January incident is that no report was filed. “At minimum there should have been a police report. If a department is going to put people onto an investigation, they should have a police report,” said Michael Sherman, vice chairman of the Berkeley Police Review, according to Inside Bay Area.

A spokesperson from the department said it’s not “uncommon” for patrol officers to track a stolen phone if they get an active signal while on the streets.

The Berkeley Police Department offers these guidelines for phone theft cases online. It did not respond to our request for comment.

If you walked into your local police department to report a missing cellphone and had the cellphone finder app, do you think the police in your area would jump on the case right away? Tell us in the comments.

‪Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Antonprado ‬

More About: cellphone, iphone, legal, police, smartphone, trending

There’s a good chance that last year around this time you didn’t know about Google+ — which wasn’t even in beta form yet — and “Hanging out” was something you only did in person. But the search engine giant has made big strides with its social network in the past 12 months, so much so that it’s hosting its first-ever Google+ conference in San Francisco this week for photographers.

For the next two days Google is hosting what it calls a “HIRL” or “Hang Out in Real Life,” bringing together some of the biggest photographers with presences on Google+.

The conference is designed to help photographers to refine their photography skills, grow their brand and get the most out of their Google+ experience.

“We are photographers ourselves,” Bradley Horowitz, VP of product at Google, said during the opening keynote for the conference Tuesday. “We are geeks. Photography geeks are a sublayer of geek, and there are a lot of us on the Google+ team”

While Google+ may be not be as popular on the social networking side as Facebook, the service is exceptionally popular for photographers, partly for how it handles content.

“Photos are the lifeblood of our service,” says Horowitz. “We wanted to make the content the hero.”

Photos on Google+ are typically displayed larger than they are on other services and offer several advantages for photographers, including the ability to carefully tailor which groups of people are able to see the photos uploaded to the service.

If you’re not in San Francisco for the conference but love photography and Google+, you can still participate in the various sessions taking place over the next two days virtually via Google+ hangouts. Sessions are streamed live, and if you sign up for sessions via the Google+ Photographers conference app, you can ask questions during the talks and participate as if you were attending in person.

What do you think about Google+ from a photography perspective? Will you attend the conference virtually? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

More About: Google, photography

IBM sat down to talk one-on-one with 1,700 CEO’s in 64 countries to discuss changes in how they do business.

First, let’s marvel at the logistics behind that. All those busy people. All those languages. All that data. Seriously, I don’t think we appreciate the effort that goes into these things. Now, let’s move on to the results.

To the right you see a chart with a surprising message. The CEO’s were asked how they engage with their customers. The top line represents where they are today, the bottom line where they expect to be in 3 to 5 years.

Right now, social media came in dead last but it’s expected to climb to the second spot in the coming years. At a glance, I would say that these results relate to B2B companies, but the report doesn’t say one way or the other. I understand B2B being heavily face-to-face. I don’t see it in business to consumer. But again, the study doesn’t specify one or the other so I have to assume it’s a mix.

Technology in general came up as the aspect most likely to impact business in the coming year. Their second choice was “People Skills.” It’s not well defined in the report, but I’m sure old school CEO’s are worried that technology is erasing our ability to connect one-on-one.

Looking internally, the top CEO’s agreed that the old corporate structure doesn’t work anymore. They said they were working toward an open and honest environment where collaboration and new ideas are encouraged at every level. They also stressed the importance of values and making sure that everyone in the company is on board and working toward the same goal.

But even with social media chipping away at face-to-face, the CEO’s said that personalization was still important. They believe that technology is giving us new ways to collect that data we need to listen and respond to our customers. IBM calls data a “critical new natural resource” that can be harnessed to propel a company to new heights.

What do you think? Has technology made it easier to listen and respond to our customers? Or are we moving farther and farther away from personalized, customer service?

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Analytics give us feedback that allows us to marry the right brain, or the emotional side of marketing, with the left brain, or the rational, side. It’s easy to get excited about 10,000 likes on Facebook, but what if you’ve only really engaged with five of those people? Your right brain can throw an “I’m so popular!” party while your left brain is left wondering, “Exactly how much will this cost and what kind of revenue will it generate?”

Interestingly, the two top strategies identified for top performers for getting “closer to customers” were first, face-to-face interactions and close behind, at 57%, using social media.

An analyst at the lead underwriter on the Facebook IPO cut his revenue estimates on the company before it went public, though most investors were not aware of it, according to a report.

The Morgan Stanley consumer Internet analyst, Scott Devitt, revised his forecasts as Facebook was in the midst of its roadshow, according to Reuters.

Devitt lowered his projections for Facebook’s revenues in both the second quarter and full-year 2012, according to Reuters, which did not provide further details.

Devitt’s report may have contributed to the stock’s so-far lackluster performance. Though analysts like Devitt operate independently of the firm’s investors, it is highly unusual for the lead underwriter or a looming IPO to declare such a bearish opinion on the company at such a late date.

The report came after Facebook amended its prospectus on May 9 to highlight caution about the company’s lack of monetization strategy for the consumer shift to mobile devices. Two other underwriters on the IPO — JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs — also cut their estimates based on that filing, according to the report.

Reps from Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs could not be reached for comment on the report.

More About: facebook ipo, Morgan Stanley

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One of the new customer service representatives at New York City’s three major airports this summer will stand out from the rest. She is friendly, helpful, and made out of plexiglass.

In other words, she’s North America’s first avatar airport customer service representative.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey unveiled the virtual assistant Tuesday morning. It works by projecting video from a human spokesperson onto a life-size cutout of a woman.

In early July, the hologram-like gadget will be installed in terminals at Newark Liberty, LaGuardia and JFK airports. New York City airports handled a combined 106 million passenger-trips last year.

“I never take a break, don’t charge overtime, hardly ever take a sick day and I don’t need a background check,” says the avatar in a promotional video from the company who created her, Arius Media.

Each avatar costs about $250,000, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The Port Authority purchased its new virtual help as part of a broader effort to improve airport customer service that includes a 20% increase in human customer service staff, additional power poles for charging hand-held devices and cleaner restrooms.

More About: Airports, avatar

We’re pleased to have Farah Mohamed join us today to talk about her organization, the G(irls)20 Summit, of which Google is a proud sponsor. The mission of the G(irls)20 Summit is to showcase how girls and women can impact a country’s economic prosperity, political stability and social innovation. - Ed.

Research shows that investing in girls and women can help the global economy. Consider the following examples:

• According to Plan UK, an extra year of education increases a girl’s income by 10 to 20% and is a significant step on the road to breaking the cycle of poverty.
• In Kenya, adolescent pregnancies cost the economy $500 million per year, while investing in girls could potentially add $32 billion to the economy (NIKE Foundation, 2009, Girl Effect).
• If men and women had equal influence in decision-making , an additional 1.7 million children would be adequately nourished in sub-Saharan Africa (International Labour Organization, 2009).

These are significant estimates, and they highlight a real opportunity for global economic growth. That’s why the G(irls)20 Summit is working with Google and many other corporate and foundation partners to empower girls and women.

Launched in 2010 at the Clinton Global Initiative, the G(irls)20 Summit precedes the G20 Leaders Summit, and brings together one girl aged 18 to 20 from each G20 country plus the African Union. The delegates attend workshops and participate in panel discussions to come up with tangible, scalable solutions for how to engage and empower girls and women around the world. Then, at the end of the summit, they lead a press conference and present a set of recommendations for the G20 leaders to consider.

This year, the Summit will take place in Mexico City from May 28-31. But the impact of the Summit will be ongoing, thanks in part to the power of the Internet and social media. Take past Summit participants July Lee of the U.S. and Noma Sibayoni of South Africa, who launched Write With A Smile to encourage teens to continue with their education. Or Riana Shah of India who co-founded Independent Thought & Social Action (ITSA India), an education reform organization that aims to empower socially responsible youth leaders. And the African Union’s Lilian Kithiri continues to persevere creating awareness around reproductive health to communities living in the rural areas of Kenya.

There are a few ways you can experience the Summit:

• Join us in Mexico City on May 28
• Sign up for your number in support of girls and women
• Join the conversation via our live stream on www.girls20summit.com on May 28, 29 and 31

Whether you’re a girl, boy, woman or man, we all have a role to play in empowering girls and women. As UN Under Secretary-General Michelle Bachelet once said, “gender equality and women’s empowerment are goals in their own right and central to all other goals—must be more than a mantra. It must become a lived reality for women and men and boys and girls in all countries.”

Posted by Farah Mohamed, President & CEO, G(irls)20 Summit