Latest News 

5 Slackbots to Improve Your Business Operations in 2018

Slack has become one of the most widely used team collaboration tools on the market due in large part to its flexibility. More than just a messaging platform, Slack offers a variety of customizable tools and apps to its over six million daily active users, two million of which are paid.  Among the tools that make Slack flexible and easy to use are chatbots. Called Slackbots, these chatbot assistants are integrated into Slack conversations. And contrary to what their name suggests, these bots do not slack off. They are designed to…

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Marketing 

5 Brands That Used Influencer Marketing to Raise Their Profile

Influencer marketing is more than just a marketing buzzword these days. More companies are utilizing this marketing method to boost sales and grow their brands. For those still confused about what influencer marketing is, it’s simply the act of promoting or selling products or services via influencers, or people who have the ability to affect a brand. Where the main influencers before were celebrities and industry leaders, today’s influencers are more varied. Nowadays, top brands are seeking out bloggers, food critics, makeup mavens and celebrities who rose to fame on…

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Bing 

Bing announces Bing AMP viewer & JSON-LD support in Bing Webmaster Tools

Microsoft unveiled two new features within Bing during principal program manager Fabrice Canel’s appearance at SMX Advanced this morning. First, he announced support within Bing Webmaster Tools to debug and view your JSON-LD markup. Second, he announced support for a Bing AMP viewer. Bing AMP viewer Bing AMP viewer will be rolled out this summer and will make AMP-enabled web pages work directly from Bing’s mobile search results. This will work similarly to the way Google returns AMP pages within its mobile search results. Here is a photo of the announcement from…

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google 

Trolls propel Trump to top Google ratings for ‘idiot’

The practice, known as “Googlebombing,” is the latest stunt in a longstanding cat-and-mouse game between Google and activists who have the technical savvy to influence search rankings. In the current exploit, several posts on Reddit associating Trump’s name, photo and the word “idiot” received tens of thousands of upvotes, which Google uses as an important ranking signal. Media sources such as The Guardian, Fortune, The Hill and others writing about the story also influenced the placement of images in search results. Often broadly referred to as Googlebombing, this manipulation of…

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Social 

Snap Inc. Responds to Critics of Its App’s Redesign

They say humans are creatures of habit which explains why most people are a bit resistant to change. And Snapchat’s recent redesign proved to be a bit too much for its users to endure. A reported 1.2 million Snapchat users have now joined hands in a petition for the app to revert back to its old ways. However, it seems that Snapchat is bent on making those redesigns permanent. In fact, the company issued an official response to the petition by explaining that the changes are meant to enable users to…

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SEM 

Enterprise Call Analytics Platforms: A Marketer’s Guide — updated for 2018

Inbound callers are proving to be highly engaged with brands, and they convert more quickly than customers who do not use the phone to interact with businesses. According to “Pick Up the Phone: Your Best Customer Is On the Line,” published by Forrester Consulting, the majority of marketers deploying ads that prompt customers to initiate a phone call say those customers convert an average of 30 percent faster and spend an average of 28 percent more. As a result, 70 percent of marketers surveyed by Forrester say they currently use…

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SEO 

How to project SEO traffic levels and avoid saying, ‘It depends’

Have you ever had this conversation with someone from upper management? Boss: “If we implement your recommendations, how will this impact traffic?” You:  “It depends.” Boss: “If we create a new content project, will it generate a lot of traffic? You: “It depends.” “It depends” is the typical response by a search engine optimization specialist (SEO) to questions about traffic projections and is a top response that infuriates management. As any SEO knows, you can’t predict with any accuracy what a change will do to your traffic, since there are…

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