10. Lists can keep us from procrastinating. We put this one off until the end. Making a list enables us to get our heads around really big tasks — and helps us tackle the work one aspect at a time. But a list is only useful if it reveals a truth, solves a problem or leads to action. Making a list, for instance, does not necessarily help procrastinators. As DePaul University psychologist Joseph Ferrari told Psychology Today in 2008, people don’t put off work they must do because they lack list-making skills. And, in turn, making a list does not get the job done.
Monthly Archives: April 2012
The Benefits and Pitfalls of Gamification | Webdesigntuts+
Gamification is becoming a hot commodity around the web, but what is it? Is it being used correctly? Let’s have a look at various aspects of gamification and how they can be used and misused.
Gamification is one of those buzz words you’ve probably heard if you’re involved in the internet industry. You’ve probably run across it at some point (perhaps even on Envato sites!) In the same way that personification is the act of attributing characteristics of a person onto another object, gamification is the process of implementing game mechanics into a non-game activity or entity. The purpose is to increase engagement and investment of a user base.
via The Benefits and Pitfalls of Gamification | Webdesigntuts+.
Gamasutra – News – Ask Gamasutra: How to annoy a games journalist with a press release
For this, our second edition of Ask Gamasutra, we addressed an issue that’s important to big game companies, and small indie developers: the dos and don’ts of reaching out to media using press releases.
via Gamasutra – News – Ask Gamasutra: How to annoy a games journalist with a press release.
Capturing The Value Of Social Media Using Google Analytics – Analytics Blog
Measuring the value of social media has been a challenge for marketers. And with good reason: it’s hard to understand exactly what is happening in an environment where activity occurs both on and off your website. Since social media is often an upper funnel player in a shopper’s journey, it’s not always easy to determine which social channels actually drive value for your business and which tactics are most effective.
But as the social industry matures, marketers and web analysts need true outcome-oriented reports. After all, although social is growing in popularity, brand websites – not social networks – remain the place where people most often purchase or convert.
via Capturing The Value Of Social Media Using Google Analytics – Analytics Blog.
Keep Your Analytics Data Safe And Clean | Smashing Magazine
Whoever works with analytics on a day-to-to-day basis knows how important it is to have a continuity with the data. Any slip might be fatal: data can disappear, trends misunderstood and jobs lost. Losing data can have long-lasting consequences, as very often it isn’t possible to reprocess the data—so what is lost cannot be recovered.
via Keep Your Analytics Data Safe And Clean | Smashing Magazine.
Using Social Media to Be a Better Leader – WSJ.com
The solution is to stop looking at social media as another platform you have to learn—yet another responsibility—and start seeing it for what it can be instead: a personal toolbox for improving your practice of leadership.
Rhetological Fallacies
InformationisBeautiful
Less than 10 percent of people rely on Facebook and Twitter for news | The Verge
Facebook and Twitter might not be as important for news sharing as we once thought — at least for the time being. A new survey of 3,000 people by the Pew Research Center found that just 9 percent get their news “very often” from people they follow on Facebook and Twitter. 36 percent of people still get news by going directly to news websites themselves, while 32 percent use search engines to find news and 29 percent use news aggregating websites to hunt down articles to read.
via Less than 10 percent of people rely on Facebook and Twitter for news | The Verge.
Marketers Struggle to Link Digital Data to ‘Big Data’ Picture – eMarketer
Marketers are abuzz over “Big Data” for its promise to deliver a more complete understanding of each customer, who can then be targeted with advertising tailored exactly to the individual.
But according to February 2012 research from Columbia Business School’s Center on Global Brand Leadership and the New York American Marketing Association (NYAMA), organizational hurdles and barriers to data implementation were some of the biggest challenges to Big Data integration.
via Marketers Struggle to Link Digital Data to ‘Big Data’ Picture – eMarketer.
Visualized: Incorrect information travels farther, faster on Twitter than corrections | Poynter.
The goal should be to make the correction as viral as the mistake. But that’s a challenge, and Tuesday at Harvard’s Truthiness in Digital Media conference, I saw (for the first time) what it looks like when we fail.
The presentation by Gilad Lotan, the vice president of research and development for SocialFlow, included a chart that compared the Twitter traffic of an incorrect report to the traffic for the ensuing correction. It’s the Law of Incorrect Tweets visualized:
via Visualized: Incorrect information travels farther, faster on Twitter than corrections | Poynter..