Category Archives: Facebook

Creative Market Gives Photoshop an App Store of Its Own

Designers aren't known for being organized. Creative Market is helping change that with a tool makes it easy for creatives to search for, buy, and store fonts, patterns, textures, and other tools of the digital trade. Their new Photoshop extension and API gives the industry standard photo software package an app store of its own. Continue reading

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Worth It: What I Use on My Face

While a lot of this video resonated with me (like my insane jealousy that she’s still allowed to eat gouda…”you look like bad news, I gotta have you”), my favorite part is where she says “I’ve got wrinkles and acne at the same time, it’s miserable.” (Not magical, just miserable.) More worried abou … Continue reading

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COMLINK Employs Blue Planet for Datacenter

( The Hosting News ) – Cyan today announced that COMLINK, a Michigan-based hosting and cloud services provider, has selected Cyan’s Blue Planet software-defined network (SDN) system and Z Series family of packet-optical transport platforms to expand its core network and facilitate the opening of a new datacenter in Grand Rapids. COMLINK operates a 9,000-mile upper Midwest fiber network providing wholesale and business transport services at speeds up to 100Gbps. With the opening of the new datacenter, COMLINK will be in a position to offer a broad array of transport and geographically diverse and redundant hosting services. According to John Summersett, COMLINK chief operating officer, “We view COMLINK as a software company that happens to operate a large fiber network. As a result, software-defined networking and Blue Planet are critically important for COMLINK and its customers. In addition to reducing our operating costs and facilitating more rapid service turn-up, Blue Planet actually puts us in a position to develop our own apps, thereby giving us a powerful competitive differentiator and a way to add future value to the services we offer to customers.” COMLINK employs Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN system in order to better orchestrate services over its complex multi-layer network. COMLINK can also use Blue Planet apps, such as Planet View, to afford its customers real-time and historical views into the operation of their services. Adds Michael Hatfield, Cyan President, “COMLINK is setting the benchmark in terms of what advanced network and data center operators can accomplish by utilizing software as a means to differentiate. The bottom line is that they now can deliver a superior customer experience at lower costs, more rapidly, and with flexibility to evolve into the future.” COMLINK’s fiber network is centered in Michigan and extends into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. COMLINK’s newest datacenter houses the company’s Datasphere business hosting service and Medisphere medical services division. Anchored by Cyan’s 2.8Tbps Z77 platform, the COMLINK network can deliver wavelength and Ethernet services at speeds up to 100Gbps. Join us at the Open Network Summit 2013: Cyan will be exhibiting at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara, California, April 15-17. Visit us at booth number 407 and learn more about Cyan’s Blue Planet SDN system. About Cyan Cyan is a global supplier of software-defined networks (SDNs) for service providers, data center operators, and private networks. Cyan solutions include Blue Planet SDN software, Z-Series multi-layer packet-optical transport platforms, and Cyan PRO comprehensive professional services. With hundreds of deployments around the globe, including some of the largest telecommunication companies in the world, Cyan allows its customers to scale their networks, reduce costs, simplify operations, and accelerate service delivery. For more information, please visit http://www.cyaninc.com or follow Cyan on Twitter at  http://twitter.com/CyanNews . For Cyan inquiries, please contact: Joe Cumello +1 410.227.7487 | joe.cumello(at)cyaninc(dot)com | Twitter: @CyanNews Merritt Group for Cyan Melissa Chadwick +1 571.382.8513 | chadwick(at)merrittgrp(dot)com About COMLINK With datacenters that host clients residing in over 100 countries, COMLINK is a leading provider of cloud services, dedicated and virtual private servers, storage, colocation, all connected over a private, protected Ethernet backbone with bandwidth up to 100Gbps. Using our private fiber network and multiple certified datacenters (HIPAA, SAE 16, PCI) strategically located, COMLINK can provide your business with redundant (hot) servers, granular backup and restore capabilities, a true disaster recovery and business continuity plan. COMLINK’s rapidly expanding fiber optic network is headquartered in Michigan and extends through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. With over 9,000 miles of fiber and metro rings extending throughout the areas major markets. COMLINK’s Network Management Center is manned 24X7 to ensure the security of our network, the reliability of our services, and satisfaction for our clients. COMLINK provides leading edge services such as optical wave, Ethernet, DS1, DS3, and OCx, DSL. COMLINK offers the premier neutral access and local tandem in Michigan. In addition COMLINK offers an array of voice services; PRI, SIP, long distance, conferencing and hosted VoIP. For more information, please visit  http://www.comlink.net or follow COMLINK on Twitter: @TeamComlink Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/TeamComlink LinkedIn:  http://www.linkedin.com/company/2702894?trk=NUS_CMPY_TWIT Google+:  https://plus.google.com/117115639945176142009 For COMLINK inquiries, please contact: Rebecca Girard | 517.742.4115 | rgirard(at)comlink(dot)net or 517.664.1900 | info(at)comlink(dot)net COMLINK Employs Blue Planet for Datacenter Continue reading

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Measuring the ROI of Your Social Media Campaigns

Social media marketing can be a great tool for promoting your brand and engaging directly with customers and potential buyers.  But at the end of the day, you should be getting more from your marketing efforts than simply being a part of “the conversation.”  If you want your actions on popular social platforms to translate into increased sales and profits, you need to learn how to measure the ROI of your social media campaigns. So, without further ado, here’s a simple process that any business can implement, using the free Google Analytics program:   Step #1 – Set your social media campaign goals The first step to measuring ROI in any situation is to determine the specific goals you’ll be tracking.  In this case, let’s assume that your goal is to use social media marketing to drive additional buyers to your website.  As a result, a sample goal might be to have 5% of the visitors your business receives from social media sites convert into paid product purchasers. Now that you know what goal you’re measuring – in this case, sales – you’ll need to set up goal tracking within Google Analytics. Begin by logging into the admin area of your account and clicking on the profile of the site for which you’ll be creating goals.  From there, select the “Goals” tab and click the “+ Goal” link in one of your goal sets.  This will pull up a screen that allows you to select between the four different types of goals that can be tracked within Google Analytics:   If your website’s sales funnel results in visitors landing on a defined “thank you” page (for example, “http://www.yourdomain.com/thankyou.html”), select the “URL Destination” goal option and fill out the additional fields that this action triggers.  If you use a more complicated ecommerce system, select the “Event” goal type and use the instructions found in Google Help’s “ Conversion Overview ” documentation to accurately set up your goals.   Step #2 – Measure goal conversions from social media traffic Once your goal is set up and activated, it will immediately start generating data on the number of sales occurring on your website.  However, setting up a conversion goal alone isn’t enough to provide meaningful information regarding the ROI of your social media campaigns, as this reporting feature will detail sales that occur from all sources – not just your social visitors. To filter out the goal conversions that have occurred from social visitors from those triggered by other referral sources, you’ll need to set up an Advanced Traffic Segment within your Google Analytics account. To do this, navigate to the “Traffic Sources Overview” screen within your reporting dashboard.  Immediately under the page’s main header, you’ll see a button labeled “Advanced Segments.”  Click this, and then click the “+ New Custom Segment” button that appears in the lower right-hand corner of the segmentation menu. From the new screen that appears, add “OR” statements utilizing the “Source” metric to specify visitors that come from particular social media sources.  As an example below, the custom segment “Facebook Traffic” captures all site visitors that arrive via both desktop and mobile Facebook platforms:   Create a custom segment for every social media website your site receives traffic from, being sure to include desktop and mobile domains, as well as any platform-specific URL shortening services (for example, “t.co” from Twitter).  Don’t group all social domains into one “Social Media Traffic” custom segment, as this will diminish the value of the data you generate.   Step #3 – Adjust your social media marketing strategy based on data Once your custom social segments have been created, return to the “Goals Overview” reporting dashboard within the “Conversions” menu and apply the custom filters you’ve created to your data by clicking on the “Advanced Segments” button.  This will allow you to determine how many of your website’s conversions your social media visitors are responsible for. Finally, to fully capture your social media marketing ROI, compare the number of sales your social efforts have generated to the amount of time and money you’ve invested into these campaigns.  Measure your ROI on a platform-specific basis, as it’s not uncommon for a site to see a positive ROI from one social site and a negative ROI from another. Use this information to adjust your social media marketing strategy.  If you’re seeing a negative ROI across all the social properties you’ve invested in, you need to either improve your social media marketing techniques or cut back on the amount of resources you commit to this promotional strategy. But even if you’re seeing a positive ROI, use the platform-specific information you’ve generated to drill down further into your social media marketing strategies to see what’s working and what isn’t.  By consistently evaluating the performance of your social media activities and adjusting your strategies accordingly, you’ll see an improvement in both your social network engagement levels and in your company’s bottom line. Continue reading

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