Google Classroom Preview Announced

As part of yesterday's Teacher's Appreciation Day, Google announced a preview of the new, free tool - Google Classroom as a product in Google Apps for Education. This tool can help teachers create and organize assignments quickly, provide feedback efficiently, and communicate with their classes with ease.

According to Google, teachers can:

Create and collect assignments: Classroom weaves together Google Docs, Drive and Gmail to help teachers create and collect assignments paperlessly. They can quickly see who has or hasn't completed the work, and provide direct, real-time feedback to individual students.

Improve class communications: Teachers can make announcements, ask questions and comment with students in real time—improving communication inside and outside of class.

Stay organized: Classroom automatically creates Drive folders for each assignment and for each student. Students can easily see what’s due on their Assignments page.

Gmail and Google Wallet Integration: Send Money To Friends Easily

    

Travis Green, Google Wallet's Product Manager announced today that they now integrate Google Wallet with Gmail. Google is always improving its services and this is indeed one that will be very convenient for users. We all know that online and mobile shoppers continue to increase over the years so this will be beneficial for businesses as well.

What is Google Wallet anyway?

According to Wiki, Google Wallet is a mobile payment system developed by Google that allows its users to store debit cards, credit cards, loyalty cards, and gift cards among other things, as well as redeeming sales promotions on their mobile phone.

Pretty much clear. Or in other words - a competitor to Paypal.

The Integration:

So if you want to send money using Gmail, just hover on the attachment paperclip and click the "$" icon to attach money to you email. Just enter the amount you want to send and click "send". That easy!

This feature (sending money through Gmail) is currently available only in desktop version (so I may blog once the App comes out). However, you can still send money from Google Wallet and access from wallet.google.com on your laptop or mobile phone.

Of course Google Wallet promises that it will also cover users with the Purchase Protection Policy.

Additional notes: This is not a fully rolled-out feature and is coming to U.S. Gmail users over the coming months. Applicable only to users over 18 years old.

Twitter: Keyword Targeting in Timelines

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013, Twitter announced the newest feature Keyword Targeting in Timelines. This feature enables advertisers to run their advertisements based on tweets of the reported 500 million total users and over 200 million active users. It is available in the full Twitter Ads UI and through the Ads API. Twitter said that "This new feature enables advertisers to reach users based on the keywords in their recent Tweets and the Tweets with which users recently engaged. This is an important new capability – especially for those advertisers looking for signals of intent – because it lets marketers reach users at the right moment, in the right context."

How it works is for example a user will tweet about enjoying a pair of running shoes recently bought. Through a geotargeted campaign using keywords, the user may see a Promoted Tweet of that brand having a sale nearby - the user may then be able to retweet or share this to interested followers wanting to buy the pair. Of course this not only works for items bought, it also works for craving products and services such as a specific drink or a massage service.

Twitter promised that users won't see any difference on the application and ads are not shown frequently, plus users will have a way of dismissing Promoted Tweets if they find it irrelevant. They collaborated with test partners such as GoPro (@GoPro), a leader in wearable and gear-mountable cameras to ensure that the implementation and API will deliver promising results.

Furthermore, Twitter expressed their excitement as to how advertisers will take advantage of this new feature. It is by the thorough and active use of advertisers that paid ads such as Google Adwords transformed to how it is today. With Twitter's whopping number of over 400 million tweets per day, this is an avenue where advertisers should really consider to be dabbling on - a great option or addition to investing in search and display ads.

Adobe® Search&Promote: Business Rules and its Considerations

I drafted this post back in 2012 and never had the chance to publish. These are my thoughts in Adobe Search and Promote and how I came to understand the gems behind this marketing software. So here I am continuing what I started. :)

I had the chance to use Adobe Search and Promote for a value-added direct marketing company some 2 years ago. Adobe® Search&Promote is a cloud-based software that lets online marketers supercharge how visitors find, browse, and promote significant products and content on web and mobile sites. With Adobe® Search&Promote, you can easily push priority items based on company objectives and what visitors are actually looking for. It gives you the option to push promotions and merchandising activities by KPI-based triggers.

As I was working on implementing the front-end business rules, I came to realize just how powerful this tool is. It can push products - via category, brand or SKU. This tool can really be beneficial to especially to an e-commerce business. Imagine having the way to show your "not-so-converting" products to a search term? In one way or another, this will give you a possible plus on conversion for that item. I was able to test and play around the software, pushing products that will give more value to the company. I was in control. This is until I figured out the gem of using a great understanding of SEO best pratices and an in-depth web analytics along with this.

It is true that at the end of the day, "sales", "revenue" or "conversions" are important to many business above anything else. But how about user satisfaction, usability and customer impression? How would you feel that you are looking for let's say an optical mouse and you're getting the Bluetooth ones as first group results? Yeah probably you will refine your search but how about getting the same thing? Here are some points I realized and sharing with you:

• Website or internal search should be formatted in such a way like how Google does in their SERPs. Business rules and triggers need to balance your organization's objective and user intent. 

• Optimize Adobe® Search&Promote's feature of setting up categories and pricing to help users refine their searches. This will need proper implementation - a back-end team to make sure it works. Facilitate on the testing and be mindful of the bugs. With proper categories setup, users can easily navigate through your site considering their budget and brands they want. Again, give them what they want.

• If you need to push something - an old stock probably that needed to be converted, use the banners feature rather than giving it in the results list. Banners are not intrusive and users are aware that these are optional aspect of the site. If they are interested, they will click on it. Of course you can still sell your keywords to brand managers for banners ;)

• Respect top internal search terms and top landing pages. People are coming to your site looking for something. Understand your internal searches, what users clicked on, and where they bounce. This will give you a clear insight on where you are doing right, and wrong. 

I can attest that this software is powerful if implemented correctly. Through its wide range of customization including regular expressions, your triggers and business rules can make your business requirements far from impossible.

Remember, in any website reaching out to customers - may it be e-commerce or services, web usability should always be practiced and this can mean more returning visitors and loyal clients to your organization. Customer usability consideration is imperative in digital marketing success.

Extract HyperLinks in Excel

It's been a while since my last post - I know. :))

Here's a quick macros and function I find very helpful and would like to share with you.

Copy and paste the following macros function for your sheet in Excel:


Function HyperLinkText(pRange As Range) As String

   Dim ST1 As String
   Dim ST2 As String
   
   If pRange.Hyperlinks.Count = 0 Then
      Exit Function
   End If
   
   ST1 = pRange.Hyperlinks(1).Address
   ST2 = pRange.Hyperlinks(1).SubAddress
   
   If ST2 <> "" Then
      ST1 = "[" & ST1 & "]" & ST2
   End If
   
   HyperLinkText = ST1
   
End Function


After that, you can easily extract by keying in a new function. Let's say column A is where your Hyper Links are:

=HyperLinkText(A1)

Copy and paste the above new function in column B and viola! :)

Hope this helps!