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Anthony Davis sent Ron Baker into oblivion with another Dunk of the Year candidate http://ift.tt/2C2Y6Gy
In the second quarter of Saturday's game, Davis escaped the defense of Kristaps Porzingis after an inbound and drove to the hoop. In a valiant effort, Ron Baker came sprinted down into the lane to attempt to stop Davis, but his effort was futile from the start. You can watch the carnage below. The dunk is even more vicious in slow motion. Baker immediately left the game with an injury, but after the game he took to Instagram to address the dunk. He had an appreciative, light-hearted response to getting dunked on, posting a picture of his black eye with the caption, "When you wake up and turn on #ESPN, and see you made @sportscenter Top 10." Even with Davis' monstrous dunk, the Knicks were still able to prevail in the game, winning by a final score of 105-103. Still, despite not getting the win, Davis' dunk will put him in the conversation for Dunk of the Year come the end of the season. NOW WATCH: Here's how LeBron James stays in incredible shape See Also:
SEE ALSO: Lakers forward Larry Nance Jr. destroyed Kevin Durant with what is being called the Dunk of the Year Business via Business Insider http://ift.tt/eKERsB December 31, 2017 at 03:48PM
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Meet The Immigrant Changing America's Dairy Aisle http://ift.tt/2lsqwnp When Kamilya Abilova was a graduate student at Columbia University in New York City she used to use walks to and from campus to ponder life and solve the problems flying through her mind. One such walk led her to what would become Misha, a company selling a cultured dairy product that’s a staple in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but that was missing from the U.S. market. The product is called quark in Germany, topfen in Austria and variations of tvarog in Russia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. “It’s something between yogurt and cottage cheese,” Abilova said. “It doesn't have the sourness of yogurt, but it doesn't have the saltiness of cottage cheese.” Abilova grew up in Kazakhstan, and she grew up eating quark. “I come from a big family. My father has like 8 siblings, so aunts, cousins were always around. It's a very tight family and in the house to accommodate everyone we had two fridges,” she said. “I just vividly remember one of the fridges was just kind of cultured dairy stuff.” When she moved to New York for school, Abilova missed eating quark. On her walks to and from Columbia, she started thinking about how she could get it in New York. “What hypothetically would it take to bring quark to the U.S.,” she asked herself. She obsessed over the idea and when she talked it through with a friend from school, they wanted in too. Together, determined to bring quark to American grocery store shelves, they founded Misha. Abilova knew she wanted to create her own quark recipe so she got in touch with cheese associations and worked with producers until she found a fourth generation farmer in Upstate New York who could help. “They are very much passionate about farmers, about being sustainable so we lucked out with them,” Abilova said. “They allowed us to use their production facility for runs, pilot runs and we finally got to what we actually are selling right now.” For Abilova, entrepreneurship just kind of “goes by inertia.” She never intended to found a business. She was studying history at school when the idea for Misha hit her. But she thinks that background has helped. “You think about the origins of things a lot,” she said. “You’re taught to ask the right questions.” One of the most important questions in her business venture has been: Can you help? “You work in this bubble for some time,” she said. “It’s easy to lose touch.” Along the way, Abilova has learned how to delegate tasks, expand her network, and interact with consumers. Branding has been a focus of Misha since they bring a relatively unknown product to consumers. “Don’t underestimate the educational process. Help consumers understand you,” she advises. For an American audience, the Misha team turned quark into a something people could grab-and-go almost like a yogurt. But, Abilova said, it’s a multipurpose food and can be used as an ingredient in recipes. She also likes eating quark mixed with fruit preserves. “When people try our product, creamy is the most frequently used descriptor,” she said. Misha is now two years old and comes in five flavors. You can find them in over 160 shops in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf December 31, 2017 at 03:41PM
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How Fresh Prince's Karyn Parsons Became The Founder Of A Creative Nonprofit http://ift.tt/2lA3V7A Karyn Parsons is the change she wishes to see in the world. As the founder and Executive Director at Sweet Blackberry, she writes the histories of untold figures in African-American culture and ensures their legacies come to life as children-friendly animations. Since 2005, Parsons' nonprofit has produced three illustrated shorts, The Journey of Henry ‘Box’ Brown, Garrett's Gift and Dancing in the Light: The Janet Collins Story, respectively narrated by Alfre Woodard, Queen Latifah and Chris Rock. And after a successful Kickstarter in 2017, Parsons is now hard at work on her fourth animation, The Bessie Coleman Story, about the first Black woman to receive her pilot's license (debuting in January 2018). Her personal story is also one for the books. If you recognize Parsons' name, you might be familiar with her role as Hillary Banks in 90s TV favorite The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. That's actually how the idea for Sweet Blackberry came to be. When Parsons became a new mother in the early 2000s, she began to search for culturally appropriate films to share with her daughter—and she found herself coming up short. Motivated, passionate and connected to talent through her own acting career, she decided to simply tell these stories herself. In this interview with Karyn Parsons, we explore her 12-year journey as a social entrepreneur at Sweet Blackberry and how storytelling shapes culture, community and children's understandings of themselves. Jane Claire Hervey: Basic, simple question—who are you and what do you do? Karyn Parsons: I’m the President and CEO—it’s so funny to hear that—but yeah, the founder of Sweet Blackberry. It’s a nonprofit, and the mission is to bring little-known stories of African American history to children. We create short, animated films with a single narrator and the way that they’re animated makes it more like a picture book that comes to life. For a young audience, the idea is to bring stories to them where they are and make it really engaging, like a fairy tale. For example, Little Red Riding Hood: wouldn’t it be great if those fairy tales featured real people? We want to show kids that big obstacles are actually opportunities to do big things. It’s important to shed the light on people that we don’t hear about; there are so many stories that are so inspiring and offer so much to all children. For children of color, they offer something really great and fortifying. We don’t have enough of that. Hervey: Sweet Blackberry got its start in 2005—can you provide some initial context to that starting environment? Was there anything that triggered the manifestation of Sweet Blackberry’s vision and goals? Parsons: I came from being an actor, and I didn't know anything about business at all. And actually it makes me kind of laugh looking at it now. I didn’t think practically, and I never have. I’m not a practical person—I just dove into it with passion and not necessarily what it would take to sustain something like this (which is good because if I had known I probably would have thought it was too daunting and not started it). My mother—she was a librarian—she worked at the Black Resource Library when I was on Fresh Prince, and she would tell me these stories that were fascinating. She told me the story of Henry 'Box' Brown who literally mailed himself to freedom in a box, and I thought it was incredible. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t heard the story, and my friends hadn’t heard it, either. So, when I started, I was just hoping to get these stories out that inspired me, and I was just trying to figure out how to do it. Self-publishing wasn’t as easy then, so I felt I could instead make a film. I started talking to people, and I met an animator and got very exciting about working with her. I then met some illustrators and started working with one and pulled it altogether. I had no idea how to do it; I even had to get a personal loan to help make it happen. I also didn’t have a business plan or a business model; I just dove into the deep end of the pool, and I made a lot of mistakes. As time went on, I started to gain a better idea of what the company was, who responded to it and how. Something that started off as a very modest vision become much larger, because I was living with it. Eventually, I started thinking a lot about becoming a nonprofit, because I had these ideas like, "Oh, I want to do a contest and get older kids to have them involved," and I started realizing that the contests I was developing were actually programs that a nonprofit could have—that we could get sponsors to help fund—and that there were grants out there for the kind of work we do. I realized there were more ways for people to support a business like this. Also, I've got to say, the vision was so modest, I wasn’t going to get an investment, because there wasn’t necessarily going to be a return. Now, I’ve got a lot of ideas I just need to find funding for. As a nonprofit, I’m hoping I can find it. People kept telling me it would be so hard to do a nonprofit, and I just realized I’m not getting investors and I couldn’t, at the time, just artificially come up with some things to satisfy people—it had to be organic and what I wanted to accomplish. I finally went the route of the nonprofit world, and it’s been really great. Everyone is right; it’s hard and it’s constant work, but I know now that you can do both. You can have a for-profit arm, and that’s probably something that will happen soon for us, as well. Hervey: Sweet Blackberry is currently in production on its fourth animation. What has changed since your initial launch? What have you learned? Parsons: One thing I’ve learned is that when you find people you work well with and they understand you and you enjoy working with them, stick with them. I’ve had a lot of people that I’ve worked with in one way or another, and sometimes things seem promising. It seems like you’re talking the same stuff, but when you start working it feels clunky and wrong. You can try to force those things through, but so many times I found the end result is not good. You just weren’t aligned in some way. The flip is that with people who are a pleasure to you, who you feel good talking to, who seem to get you and you get them, that stuff is really important. That’s right at the top of the list. It changes the way I operate. I pay attention to what I feel and what they feel about me, and I don't intellectualize it. What looks good on paper might not be real. I've learned from experience as far as making the films, and I'm not completely flying by the seat of my pants anymore, so that helps knowing more about what I'm doing. I also love the collaborative process; I write the stories, and I usually have them in mind for a really long time, and then I sit down and write it with kinds in mind. Writing Henry 'Box' Brown—writing about an enslaved man—was no joke. You sit and write and you absorb this person and their experiences and try to give it children. And then I hand the script off, and it’s so exciting to have an art director and animator start storyboarding their vision and see it come to life with all of these interesting perspectives that tell the story emotionally, and then to see Gray Christie, our illustrator, bring the art director’s storyboard to life through his imagery—it’s beautiful. He’s got this childlike feeling in his work and it comes across in such sweet, simple characters that are really accessible for kids. It’s so fun to start with who I want to tackle, write the story and then see these really brilliant people put their spin on it and bring life to it. I love the collaborative part of it, and I can't stress it enough: communication, communication, communication. When you think you've crossed every "t" and dotted every "i," nine times out of ten you need to go back and do it all again. Even if you think you’ve laid it all out. Hervey: So how do you determine which stories to tell? I’m sure there are many stories to choose from! Parsons: I did Garret Morgan, the inventor, who invented the traffic signal, which a lot of people are not aware was a contribution by an African American. He also did the gas mask and some other things, but the traffic signal is something right where our audience is living. They’re learning about crossing the street and the traffic signal is right their in their lives. I thought this creative-minded person would be a good character. What was interesting right away in writing the story is that even if someone has a great accomplishment, it's not easy to find the story that's there for children. As I researched, I found out he was from a very large family and how his mind worked. I started to realize that this is a really great story. I think a lot of us know children, especially little boys, whose energy is all over the place and they don’t know how to direct it and then they get into a lot of trouble. I brought that into Garrett’s character more clearly and showed he was creative. But when he started focusing on his inventions he also made a lot of really great things. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf December 31, 2017 at 03:34PM
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Can This Brooklyn Entrepreneur Reinvent Public Relations? http://ift.tt/2q846MZ Working in the startup scene in the San Francisco Bay area, Dmitry Dragilev landed an exciting job. As head of marketing for fledgling applications developer Input Marketing, he helped the company grow its web presence for two years until it was acquired by Google. While others on his team gladly joined Google as employees, Dragilev, 35, who immigrated from what is now Russia in 1993, was looking for something different. “I realized this was not the American Dream I wanted,” says Dragilev. “I wanted to have my own company.” He had soon applied the skills he’d learned in public relations, marketing and search engine optimization to his own business, Criminally Prolific, which he launched in April 2012 while traveling around the world. Dragilev started out doing consulting in public relations and search engine optimization. “My first client was in Bangkok,” he recalls. “We stayed in Thailand for a month.” Based on Brooklyn, the startup has evolved to offer a software Dragilev, who studied computer science at University of New Hampshire, developed called JustReachOut.io, which helps clients do their own PR. The software as a service allows users to find the right people to pitch by searching for keywords, competitors, niches, and publications. It also helps them find reporters who are looking for stories by combing through services such as Profnet and HelpAReporter, as well as Twitter queries, each day and points out opportunities to contribute to relevant discussions on Reddit and Quora. In addition to serving big companies that find the technology useful, Dragilev also works with many smaller firms who can’t afford to put a PR firm on retainer or don't want to. Currently, the company has about 4,000 subscribers. JustReachOut.io enables users to send out 250 emails to influencers such as journalists and bloggers a month for $497, including six calls with its support team. Those who want a PR strategy can purchase that as an add-on for a one-time fee of $1,297. Typically, he says it takes about six months to get a PR strategy off the ground. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf December 31, 2017 at 03:34PM Is Social Media The Tobacco Industry Of The 21st Century? http://ift.tt/2lz9pPM Remember the Marlboro Man, that big cowboy hunk who ended up a shriveled husk in a hospital bed, wracked by lung cancer, having spent the last years of his life on an anti-tobacco crusade? Or Yul Brynner, reaching out from beyond the grave to beg people not to smoke? The mea culpas of late from former Facebook executives have made me think of these images from my childhood, the staying power of big industries, and what turns the tide when it comes to public health. An addiction that pours money into the pockets of powerful elites is a hard thing to break -- something to keep in mind as the public health concerns about social media grow. MarketWatch recently reported:
It’s hard to see how America or American business would be the same if most people unwound social media from their lives. But back in 1964, when the surgeon general officially identified the health risks of tobacco, it would have been hard to imagine life without cigarettes. That year, 42% of Americans smoked. Today, 17.8% do. Tobacco companies sponsored game shows and cartoons, and cigarette ads featured endorsements from doctors, dentists and celebrities, according to this CNN article. It took 60-plus years and a combination of information, regulation, and lawsuits to drive the smoking rate down. The most important factor, perhaps, are the emotional narratives, like the Marlboro Man or Yul Brynner. We haven't seen those yet from the social media backlash, but we are close. As with tobacco in the mid-to-late 20th century, there are crises burning all over the social media world, from questions about social media’s role in the 2016 election scandal, to the platforms’ effect on public life, to research showing social media’s effect on mental health. Last spring, Harvard Business Review published a piece titled: The More You Use Facebook, the Worse You Feel. Former Facebook vice president of user growth Chamath Palihapitiya said that social media is “eroding the core foundations of how people behave” and that he feels “tremendous guilt” about creating tools that are “ripping apart the social fabric.” Facebook defended itself, noting that Palihapitiya hasn’t worked at the company for six years, and may not be aware of how the company is working to live up to its responsibilities. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf December 31, 2017 at 03:34PM
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3 Ways Social Entrepreneurs Can Influence Workplace Culture This Year http://ift.tt/2Epa52U Tweet ThisI'll never forget a conversation I had with my lawyer after establishing my first nonprofit organization: "One day someone will replace you, and that's not always a bad thing," he said. It was hard to hear at first, but he was right. And in the time that has followed that conversation, I've come to understand more that if you've done anything right in your organization, it should be healthy enough to live on years after you transition out of it – and it all starts with culture. Setting a healthy culture today will keep you focused on the long-term health of your organization, not just your place in it. So whether you're transitioning out or just getting started, here are three ways to influence your company culture this year:
Have the courage to accept your organization might outlive your leadership for it – and that's something to strive for. In the meantime, do good work for the people you serve, and take care of those serving your people. A healthy culture paves the way for innovation, trust and collaboration, where new ideas can flourish and your people will thrive. Business via Forbes - Entrepreneurs http://ift.tt/dTEDZf December 31, 2017 at 03:34PM
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The 25 worst movies of 2017, according to critics http://ift.tt/2lxwz9i Universal Pictures Another year is about to end, and as we all praise the movies that we loved (and made billions), it's also a time to look back on the ones that didn't turn out so great. The list of 2017's worst-reviewed movies has a little bit of everything in it: the colossal box office duds, the movies that became nothing more than a joke on social media, and the one that cost its director a "Star Wars" movie. Here are the 25 worst-reviewed movies of 2017, as rated by critics' scores on Metacritic: 25. “The Book of Henry”Focus FeaturesMetacritic score: 31/100 What a critic said: “‘The Book of Henry’ is the most misguided film since the 2003 Gary Oldman abomination ‘Tiptoes.’ [Director Colin] Trevorrow is slated to helm an upcoming ‘Star Wars’ film, so y’all have fun with that.” — The Austin Chronicle (Editor’s Note: Three months after the release of this movie, Lucasfilm announced it had “mutually chosen to part ways” with Trevorrow on “Star Wars: Episode IX.”) 24. “Absolutely Anything”LionsgateMetacritic score: 31/100 What a critic said: “[A] depressingly inept comedy.” — Screen Daily 23. “Friend Request”Warner Bros.Metacritic score: 31/100 What a critic said: “An utterly idiotic movie that uses social media as a conduit for witchcraft and mayhem.” — The Wrap See the rest of the story at Business Insider See Also:
SEE ALSO: RANKED: The 11 best movies of 2017 Business via Business Insider http://ift.tt/eKERsB December 31, 2017 at 03:12PM
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What Are the Best Ways to Build Candor on a Small Team? http://ift.tt/2CqYhze What are the best ways to build candor on a small team? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Mills Baker, Product Design Manager, on Quora: A first point: nothing you do will be effective unless everyone agrees that candor is valuable, that its benefits are worth its costs. After all, for every improvement to e.g. information transparency or coordination or hypothesis preservation, there is a potential cost to individual personalities, emotional and creative safety, and so on; and these costs are real even when subtle. As such, it's worth having explicit reasons for pursuing candor both to persuade people to work on it at all and to have a framework for thinking about its benefits and costs in an aligned, collective way. I won't provide any arguments for (or against) candor here, as they'd not be strictly germane to this question and the issues involved are sufficiently complex as to merit their own discussion. But for what it's worth: I'm personally sensitive to candor's costs, and I'm ambivalent about the fetishist notions of candor popular in some circles. I do think correctly understood and practiced, candor is immensely positive, but I dislike that caricatural kind of candor that seems to mostly appeal to already-expressive personalities and cliques, the variety that encourages jerks, domineering tyrants, and so on. It's also vital to respect genuine differences of personality, taste, culture, and etiquette; for every person that is thrilled to "speak their mind", there are others who can feel crowded out, ignored, bullied, or disadvantaged in various ways by such a mandate. All that said, assuming you have an explanatory framework justifying candor and want to respectfully build it on your team, the next point to remember is that teams are made of individuals, and from an individual's point of view, "candor" can mean two things:
One of these is a more naturally palatable experience than the other! Indeed, the only reason why we're not all naturally candid at all times with others is that we (accurately) predictively model their reactions: they will not like it, and they'll then be candid --or worse!-- with us. As such, building candor is often more about demonstrating how to accept candor than it is about showing how to be candid. Leaders can do this by encouraging reports to be candid and demonstrating how they themselves accept such candor, even if they disagree or feel bad about it, sharing the tools they use to do so (for example, something as simple as "I try to wait one day to respond to challenging feedback" can be tactically useful for people to consider doing). The hardest part of candid exchanges is avoiding reaction and remaining calmly open; the reason this is hard is because we're conditioned to react to the treatment of our utterances, ideas, and criticisms as treatment of ourselves. But if you accept that people are not their utterances or ideas --that these change over time; that these all come from elsewhere and wind up elsewhere; that your team's work is more like the scientific process than some "test" where the "good people" are separated from the "bad people"; that good information and ideas and perspectives can come from anywhere; and so on-- it gets much easier. Note that these are abnormal concepts for a work environment, and in many team contexts talking about "what the self is" will seem bizarre. But if we want people to change their ingrained, socialized norms, it may be necessary to challenge the bases for some of those norms. All that said: if you can establish a baseline expectation that everyone ought to be able to accept candid feedback and direct communication --an expectation you hold yourself to to an even higher degree, one you meet even when it's painful for you-- you can then move on to encouraging increasingly candid feedback. So to sum:
Note that improving one's capacity for candor may have long-term benefits that you cannot point to immediately for members of the team. You can also emphasize those. Being able to clearly and directly communicate useful information no matter the emotional tenor of the situation is obviously a great skill to have, and one you'll need in leadership and which is helpful in life generally, so it's to everyone's benefit to work on it. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: Business via Inc.com https://www.inc.com/ December 31, 2017 at 02:58PM
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Is Bitcoin a Good Investment Heading Into 2018? http://ift.tt/2C0jhJn Should I invest in Bitcoin? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Auren Hoffman, SafeGraph CEO, on Quora: There are two questions one should think through. 1. Will Bitcoin become a long-term trusted store of value? Whether one should invest in bitcoin or not depends on whether you think Bitcoin will become a long-term trusted store of value. If it does become a long-term trusted store of value, BTC should trade around $2,000,000 a coin (depending on how many coins are lost and are actually in circulation). That is over 100x the price of where BTC is today. If BTC does not become a long-term trusted store of value, its likely price will be close to zero (unless it becomes a "cool" collectible... which is a possibility). So if you think BTC has a 10% chance of becoming a long-term trusted store of value, it is a good investment with a nice expected return. It is still very risky but professional investors should invest some small portion of their portfolio in this case. If you think BTC has a 1% chance of becoming a long-term trusted store of value, you should not invest. If you think BTC has a 0.001% chance of becoming a long-term trusted store of value, you might consider a short. 2. Bitcoin is a religion... how good are the evangelists? Like all stores of value and collectibles, Bitcoin is a religion. It is like gold or a Rembrandt painting... it has no cash flows so its value is only what others think it should be. And like all religions, Bitcoin has evangelists and early disciples. Bitcoin has a few things going for it in this regard: 1. The savior, Satoshi Nakamoto, is unknown and potentially not alive anymore. So we can only attribute wonderful things to Satoshi and cannot see her/his faults. If Satoshi Nakamoto eventually becomes known, it will make it harder for Bitcoin to become a true religion and this harder to become a long-term store of value. 2. Early bitcoin disciples and enthusiasts are super smart, great at marketing, and mostly were already very wealthy before bitcoin. There are about 1000 people that were very early public Bitcoin backers... at least 50 of whom were already worth over $100 million before they got into Bitcoin (and a few were billionaires). These people are incredible connected, smart, media savvy, good at PR, and tapped into the world of finance (some run large financial institutions). They are "rebels" in a sense but they are also very much part of the establishment. They have the ability to help get Bitcoin to go mainstream. Should you invest in Bitcoin? I'm not going to give advice on that. In even the best-case scenario, Bitcoin is incredibly risky... so if you do invest, you should go in expecting to lose all of it. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: Business via Inc.com https://www.inc.com/ December 31, 2017 at 02:58PM
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Why Digital Marketing Is Crucial to Your Business's Success http://ift.tt/2EjZ4jo What are the pros and cons to a career in digital marketing? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. Answer by Mario Peshev, CEO of DevriX and SME Digital Consultant, on Quora: Digital marketing is a fairly new field which aims to improve the digital presence of a business and support the brand across different digital outlets (also transferring to the offline world). Professional marketing teams engage in different activities in the digital landscape, including:
Large enterprises excel at building outstanding marketing campaigns that combine the inbound marketing landscape with advertisement, on-site presence at events (as sponsors, speakers, volunteers), PR and other outbound campaigns. One of my favorite resources covering the entire scope of marketing in large organizations is Chief Marketing Officers at Work by Josh Steimle. The book contains 29 interviews with CMOs at some of the leading brands out there, including GE, Spotify, Target, The Home Depot and Harvard Business School. Digital marketing can and should be employed in organizations of all sizes - from solopreneurs and freelancers through small and medium-sized businesses to large enterprises. The art of building corporate identity or even a personal brand depends on successful and creative marketing strategies online. Millennials are the largest group of consumers online. They spend approximately 18 hours a day consuming media, part of the research conducted showed that they spend 223 minutes a day on mobile. Generation Z is also joining the digital force now - with teenagers up to age twenty-two now using different channels such as Snapchat and Instagram for communication and forming opinions of the surrounding world. Professional marketers can identify their target market and build a sensible strategy based on their product or service. This could be instrumental to any business striving for growth and establishing dominance among their competitors. Moreover, an experienced digital marketer could be instrumental for any type of business. This allows flexibility for professional consultants supporting different organizations or launching their own products or professional services (being able to sell themselves). The negative end of digital marketing is the lack of structure. Everyone can freely offer marketing services nowadays. There are no formal certification courses or training programs that are adopted by the corporate world. Every teen can offer social media marketing services or content writing - without the right background or actual experience. Most organizations also struggle with the actionable KPIs for their business. Simply growing the number of blog posts on your site or the number of followers won't have a direct impact on your sales or ad revenue. For example, a traditional digital sale is usually formed through three factors:
Increasing the traffic may seem like a natural way to grow the sales of a business. However, the equation is more complicated. Traffic that doesn't target the right audience at the right step of the buyer's journey won't lead to a sale and will decrease the conversion rates. In fact, decreasing the traffic may increase the total revenue. Better targeted campaigns can double or triple the sales of a business, reduce the bounce rate per page, and increase the exposure in SERP rankings. This complicated process requires a lot of research and experience with different campaigns conducted for other businesses. Since the number of experienced digital marketers is small overall, businesses end up hiring recent graduates or marketing assistants, relying on them for increasing the digital footprint of a business. Or even worse, relying on a random agency online that offers marketing solutions without offering case studies showcasing their success stories. So, the market is flooded by self-proclaimed influencers and rockstar digital marketers who often fail to deliver when they land a job. All in all, digital marketing is crucial to every business. Most self-taught marketers don't have practical experience that allows them to provide professional services that make an impact for a business. Customers are also clueless, expecting results quickly at a low cost. The lack of standardization or best practices online lead to a chaotic digital space with plenty of dissatisfied customers. Fresh graduates interested in digital marketing can succeed by joining reputable organizations and learning from experienced marketers. Thoroughly reading about the marketing landscape is incredibly helpful as well. Different businesses can benefit from different strategies (depending on their niche, target audience, and their competitors) and working with different businesses often helps testing various strategies and measuring the results of each campaign over time. Just don't buy every single digital marketing ebook or course out there. Most of those are carefully designed to attract a large audience of people buying into false assumptions and fake stats. This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions: Business via Inc.com https://www.inc.com/ December 31, 2017 at 02:58PM |
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