Midterm attackers cited Black Lives Matter in false flag Facebook rally

Unknown midterm election attackers that Facebook has removed were hosting a political rally next month that they pinned on Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and other organizations, according to third-party event websites that scraped the now-removed Facebook events.

Facebook provided an image of the deleted “No Unite The Right 2 – DC” event as part of its announcement today that merely showed its image, title, date, location, and that a Page called “Resisters” was one of the hosts of the propaganda event. But a scraped event description TechCrunch discovered on Rallyist provides deeper insight into the disruptive information operation. Facebook won’t name the source of the election interference but said the attackers shared a connection through a single account to the Russian Internet Research Agency responsible for 2016 presidential election interference on Facebook.

“We are calling all anti-fascists and people of good conscience to participate in international days of action August 10 through August 12 and a mass mobilization in Washington DC” the description reads. “We occupy ICE offices, confront racism, antisemitism, islamaphobia, xenophobia, and white nationalism. We will be in the streets on August 10-12, and we intend to win.”

But what’s especially alarming is how the event description concludes [emphasis mine]. “Signed, Black Lives Matter Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter D.C., Charlottesville Summer of Resistance Welcoming Committee Agency, Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective, Crushing Colonialism, D.C. Antifascist Collective, Future is Feminists, Holler Network, Hoods4Justice, The International, Capoeira Angola Foundation-DC (FICA-DC), Libertarian Socialist Caucus Of The DSA, March For Racial Justice, Maryland Antifa, One People’s Project, Resist This (Former DisruptJ20), Rising Tide North America, Smash Racism D.C., Showing Up for Racial Justice Charlottesville, Suffolk County DSA, Workers Against Racism, 350 DC.”

It’s unclear if the attackers effectively ‘forged’ the signature of these groups, or duped them into signing off on supporting the rally. The attackers were potentially trying to blame these groups for the rallies in an effort to further sow discord in the political landscape.

Facebook initially provided no comment about the description of the event, but then confirmed that it was originally created by the attackers’ since-deleted Page ‘Resisters’ which then later added several legitimate organizations as co-hosts: Millenials For Revolution, March To Confront White Supremacy – from Charlottesville to DC, Workers Against Racism – WAR, Smash Racism DC, and Tune Out Trump. Strangely, those co-hosts have relaunched a new event with a similar name “Nazis Not Welcome No Unite The Right 2” and similar description including a similar but expanded “Signed by” list, and now include BLM Charlottesville and D.C. as co-hosts.

Meanwhile, Facebook also shared an image of a November 4th, 2017 “Trump Nightmare Must End – NYC” event, also without details of the description. A scraped version on the site AllEvents shows the description as “History has shown that fascism must be stopped before it becomes too late. There is only one force that can stop this nightmare: we, the people, acting together. On November 4 we’ll take to the streets demanding that Trump regime must go! We meet at Times Square (42 St and Broadway) at 2 PM!”

The co-opting of left-wing messaging and protests is a powerful strategy for the election interferers. It could provide the right-wing with excuses to claim that all left-wing protest against Trump or white supremacy is actually foreign governments or hackers, and that those protests don’t represent the views of real Americans.

Facebook finds evidence of Russia-linked influence campaigns targeting US midterms

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/false-flag-events/

source https://derekpackard.com/midterm-attackers-cited-black-lives-matter-in-false-flag-facebook-rally/

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has the most unexpectedly hilarious Twitter

This is Ode To…, a weekly column where we share the stuff we’re really into in hopes that you’ll be really into it, too.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is here to warn us about unsafe products and best practices when using certain products. And, it seems, to also keep us entertained with some of the weirdest meme-filled tweets of any government agency. 

Most recently the account has received attention in the past for its unusual approach to education and recently got the attention of unfamiliar users with a single-word tweet. 

Horses.

— US Consumer Product Safety Commission (@USCPSC) July 20, 2018 Read more…

More about Twitter, Memes, Social Media, An Ode To, and Culture

source https://mashable.com/2018/07/31/uscpsc-government-agency-weird-twitter-account/

source https://derekpackard.com/the-u-s-consumer-product-safety-commission-has-the-most-unexpectedly-hilarious-twitter/

See the trippy propaganda images attacking the midterms on Facebook

Facebook just confirmed that an unknown group is waging a propaganda war against the US midterm elections. Using images and event invites to rallies in Washington next week, the attackers are attempting to sow discord into the American political landscape. Facebook has not identified whether Russian intelligence organizations were responsible like with their 2016 election attacks, as this operation was more sophisticated than previous strategies Facebook has implemented safeguards to thwart.

For now, Facebook has removed 32 pages and accounts associated with the group, including “Mindful Being,” and “Resisters”, some of which shared psychedelic memes in an attempt to ingratiate themselves with receptive users. Last week I wrote that Facebook had dodged the question of whether it had evidence of attacks on the midterm elections. Now we have the answer: yes.

Scroll down or click through to see a sample of the images used in the attacks. TechCrunch does not endorse any of this imagery.

For more info, read our full-story on these attacks on democracy.

Facebook has found evidence of influence campaigns targeting U.S. midterms

Dodged questions from Facebook’s press call on misinformation

source https://techcrunch.com/gallery/facebook-midterms/

source https://derekpackard.com/see-the-trippy-propaganda-images-attacking-the-midterms-on-facebook/

Facebook finds evidence of Russia-linked influence campaigns targeting US midterms

In a newsroom post Tuesday, Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” designed to influence U.S. politics on its platform.

According to Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity, Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. So far, the activity encompasses eight Facebook Pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook stated that the activity “violate[s] our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Facebook has declined to attribute the new findings to the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), but an IRA account was found to be a co-admin on one of the newly outed fake events “for only seven minutes.”

Facebook has been in contact with Congress and law enforcement about the discovery, which suggests that social platforms should expect to again detect the kind of coordinated disinformation campaigns that targeted the 2016 election around U.S. midterm elections this November. The company stated that more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the Pages it identified. The Pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and most recently in May of 2018.

The most popular Pages displaying this kind of behavior were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being” and “Resisters.” The other Pages had less than 10 followers each and the Instagram account did not have any followers. That does not necessarily discount other kinds of potential activity, like commenting and messaging.

Like the fake Russia-linked ads and Pages formerly released through the House and Senate, the new content specifically amplifies American tensions around race. The examples released by Facebook appear to mostly target the US political left. Some examples contain explicitly anti-Trump content, but most offer appeals to racial identity targeting black and Mexican-American Facebook users.

According to Facebook, “They ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars” between April 2017 and June of this year. The Pages also made around 30 Facebook events.

As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts are operating more cautiously than the infamous Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election:

For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.

Still, the newly discovered wave of activity pushing polarizing political content on Facebook strongly echoes previous content linked to the IRA. The evidence is sufficient for Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a prominent figure in the investigation into tech’s culpability in disseminating of Russian disinformation, to make the connection.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity,” Warner said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Facebook really doesn’t want users to go to a fake Unite the Right counter-protest next week

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/facebook-midterms-political-influence-campaigns/

source https://derekpackard.com/facebook-finds-evidence-of-russia-linked-influence-campaigns-targeting-us-midterms-3/

Facebook finds evidence of Russia-linked influence campaigns targeting US midterms

In a newsroom post Tuesday, Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” designed to influence U.S. politics on its platform.

According to Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity, Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. So far, the activity encompasses eight Facebook Pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook stated that the activity “violate[s] our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Facebook has declined to attribute the new findings to the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), but an IRA account was found to be a co-admin on one of the newly outed fake events “for only seven minutes.”

Facebook has been in contact with Congress and law enforcement about the discovery, which suggests that social platforms should expect to again detect the kind of coordinated disinformation campaigns that targeted the 2016 election around U.S. midterm elections this November. The company stated that more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the Pages it identified. The Pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and most recently in May of 2018.

The most popular Pages displaying this kind of behavior were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being” and “Resisters.” The other Pages had less than 10 followers each and the Instagram account did not have any followers. That does not necessarily discount other kinds of potential activity, like commenting and messaging.

Like the fake Russia-linked ads and Pages formerly released through the House and Senate, the new content specifically amplifies American tensions around race. The examples released by Facebook appear to mostly target the US political left. Some examples contain explicitly anti-Trump content, but most offer appeals to racial identity targeting black and Mexican-American Facebook users.

According to Facebook, “They ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars” between April 2017 and June of this year. The Pages also made around 30 Facebook events.

As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts are operating more cautiously than the infamous Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election:

For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.

Still, the newly discovered wave of activity pushing polarizing political content on Facebook strongly echoes previous content linked to the IRA. The evidence is sufficient for Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a prominent figure in the investigation into tech’s culpability in disseminating of Russian disinformation, to make the connection.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity,” Warner said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Facebook really doesn’t want users to go to a fake Unite the Right counter-protest next week

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/facebook-midterms-political-influence-campaigns/

source https://derekpackard.com/facebook-finds-evidence-of-russia-linked-influence-campaigns-targeting-us-midterms-2/

Facebook finds evidence of Russia-linked influence campaigns targeting US midterms

In a newsroom post Tuesday, Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” designed to influence U.S. politics on its platform.

According to Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity, Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. So far, the activity encompasses eight Facebook Pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook stated that the activity “violate[s] our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior.”

Facebook has declined to attribute the new findings to the Russian government-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), but an IRA account was found to be a co-admin on one of the newly outed fake events “for only seven minutes.”

Facebook has been in contact with Congress and law enforcement about the discovery, which suggests that social platforms should expect to again detect the kind of coordinated disinformation campaigns that targeted the 2016 election around U.S. midterm elections this November. The company stated that more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the Pages it identified. The Pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and most recently in May of 2018.

The most popular Pages displaying this kind of behavior were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being” and “Resisters.” The other Pages had less than 10 followers each and the Instagram account did not have any followers. That does not necessarily discount other kinds of potential activity, like commenting and messaging.

Like the fake Russia-linked ads and Pages formerly released through the House and Senate, the new content specifically amplifies American tensions around race. The examples released by Facebook appear to mostly target the US political left. Some examples contain explicitly anti-Trump content, but most offer appeals to racial identity targeting black and Mexican-American Facebook users.

According to Facebook, “They ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars” between April 2017 and June of this year. The Pages also made around 30 Facebook events.

As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts are operating more cautiously than the infamous Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election:

For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.

Still, the newly discovered wave of activity pushing polarizing political content on Facebook strongly echoes previous content linked to the IRA. The evidence is sufficient for Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, a prominent figure in the investigation into tech’s culpability in disseminating of Russian disinformation, to make the connection.

“Today’s disclosure is further evidence that the Kremlin continues to exploit platforms like Facebook to sow division and spread disinformation, and I am glad that Facebook is taking some steps to pinpoint and address this activity,” Warner said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

Facebook really doesn’t want users to go to a fake Unite the Right counter-protest next week

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/facebook-midterms-political-influence-campaigns/

source https://derekpackard.com/facebook-finds-evidence-of-russia-linked-influence-campaigns-targeting-us-midterms/

Facebook has found evidence of influence campaigns targeting US midterms

In a newsroom post Tuesday, Facebook revealed that it has detected evidence of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” designed to influence U.S. politics on its platform.

According to Facebook’s head of Cybersecurity, Policy Nathaniel Gleicher, the company first identified the activity two weeks ago. So far, the activity encompasses eight Facebook Pages, 17 profiles and seven accounts on Instagram. Facebook stated that the activity “violate[s] our ban on coordinated inauthentic behavior,” though so far is unable to attribute the activity to Russia or any other entity with an interest in influencing U.S. politics.

Facebook has been in contact with Congress and law enforcement about the discovery, which suggests that social platforms should expect to again detect the kind of coordinated disinformation campaigns that targeted the 2016 election around U.S. midterm elections this November. The company stated that more than 290,000 accounts followed one of the Pages it identified. The Pages in question were created starting in March 2017 and most recently in May of 2018.

The most popular Pages displaying this kind of behavior were “Aztlan Warriors,” “Black Elevation,” “Mindful Being” and “Resisters.” The other Pages had less than 10 followers each and the Instagram account did not have any followers. That does not necessarily discount other kinds of potential activity, like commenting and messaging.

According to Facebook, “They ran about 150 ads for approximately $11,000 on Facebook and Instagram, paid for in US and Canadian dollars” between April 2017 and June of this year. The Pages also made around 30 Facebook events.

As Gleicher writes in the post, these accounts are operating more cautiously than the infamous Russian disinformation accounts around the 2016 election:

For example they used VPNs and internet phone services, and paid third parties to run ads on their behalf. As we’ve told law enforcement and Congress, we still don’t have firm evidence to say with certainty who’s behind this effort. Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections. And we’ve found evidence of some connections between these accounts and IRA accounts we disabled last year, which is covered below. But there are differences, too. For example, while IP addresses are easy to spoof, the IRA accounts we disabled last year sometimes used Russian IP addresses. We haven’t seen those here.

See the trippy propaganda images attacking the midterms on Facebook

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/facebook-midterms-political-influence-campaigns/

source https://derekpackard.com/facebook-has-found-evidence-of-influence-campaigns-targeting-us-midterms/

Discord’s Jason Citron to chat it up at Disrupt SF

In September of 2013, Jason Citron hopped on to the Disrupt Startup Battlefield stage to pitch Fates Forever, a multiplayer online battle arena game for the iPad. Now, five years later, Citron is gearing up to join us once again on the Disrupt stage to discuss the stellar growth of Discord.

Though Fates Forever had all the components to be a great mobile game, users simply never took much interest. The company struggled to monetize, and like any good startup, the team began to reassess its own situation.

The conversation turned to communication, where the space contained a few players with lack-luster products.

“Can we make a 10X project?,” said CMO Eros Resmini, relaying the tale of the company’s pivot to TechCrunch. “Low-friction usage, no renting servers, beautiful design we took from mobile.”

That’s how Discord was born. The platform launched in 2016, and has since grown to 90 million registered users, and has raised nearly $80 million in funding.

Coming from the publishing side, the Discord team had a keen awareness of what gamers want and need: a clean, secure communications platform. Since launch, the team has launched features that let game developers integrate Discord chat into their own games, as well as video-chat and screen-sharing.

But the progress has not been without discord. The company shut down several servers associated with the alt-right for violating the terms of service, bringing Discord to the center of the on-going conversation around censorship and political bias.

That said, Discord has seemed to find its stride, forming partnerships with various esports organizations for verified servers.

There is plenty to discuss with Jason Citron at Disrupt SF, and we hope you’ll join us to check out the conversation live.

The full agenda is here. Passes for the show are available at the early-bird rate until August 1 here.

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/discords-jason-citron-to-chat-it-up-at-disrupt-sf/

source https://derekpackard.com/discords-jason-citron-to-chat-it-up-at-disrupt-sf/

The 7 Fundamentals of a Great Content Marketing Program

A great content marketing program can no longer be maintained with good writing alone. 

Content shock has created a glut of content that is outpacing demand. Content marketers have to work harder than ever to keep an edge over the competition, or risk starving while a more savvy competitor eats their lunch. 

To keep competitors at bay, or to surpass the competition, organizations sometimes forgo the fundamentals of a great content marketing program, and instead focus on new best practices and growth hacks. After all, they don’t want to wait for results. They want them now!

While the latest growth hack may sound like the future of content marketing, more often than not it’s a short-term fix to a long-term problem. Organizations latch onto a hack or a shortcut, only to find their content marketing program in disarray a few months later. It’s something we’ve seen over and over.

Here are just a few signs that a content marketing program is in trouble:

• Content marketers struggle to prove the business value of their efforts
• No one understands how new visitors move down the marketing funnel to a conversion
• The executive team is considering reallocating content marketing budgets
• User engagement on content is very poor

All of these signs lead back to a common cause: the fundamentals of the content marketing program are not in place.

Like any activity or profession, understanding the fundamentals is essential to success. If the underlying fundamentals of your content marketing program are not in place, there’s little chance of growth-hacking your way to success.

Here are the seven fundamentals that are essential to any successful content marketing program.

1. Understand Your Business Objectives

You’re not creating a content marketing program for fun. You’re creating it to accomplish a business objective.

The first fundamental of a great content marketing program is to define the business objectives you want your program to accomplish. 

These objectives can include:

• Brand Health
• Marketing Optimization
• Revenue Generation
• Operational Efficiency
• Customer Experience
• Innovation

Once you’ve identified the business objectives of your content marketing efforts, you need to get buy-in from the c-suite to make it a reality.

2. Get Executive Buy-In

Your executives hold the keys to the resources your content marketing program needs. If you can’t get your executive’s buy-in and keep it over the years, your program is toast.

To get executive buy-in, focus on these six points:

1. Why your organization needs content marketing—what is more appealing about it than other means of advertising/communication? 
2. Don’t lead with creatives when talking to executives. Your executives may like to see pretty mock-ups, but those don’t sell a program.
3. Instead of creatives, lead with dollars and cents. This is the language of the c-suite.
4. Tie the program to business objectives. How will the program be better than other programs at achieving specific objectives?
5. Show how you will measure the strategy (this will be discussed in the fifth fundamental.)
6. Lay out the budget and the expected return the c-suite should see as a result of the program. If you can’t demonstrate this, your content marketing budget will quickly get reallocated to projects that can.

3. Understand Your Audience’s Pain Points

The point of your content should be to solve your audience’s problems, not to serve as an ad for your products and services. 

 

To understand your audience’s pain points, you need to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What things keep them up at night? What are they worried about? What content can you provide that would make their lives easier?

Pain points come in all shapes and sizes. A pain point might be an annoyance, like gnats getting through a screen in a window. Or a pain point could be significant, like understanding how to best take care of a parent who needs additional care. Both of these examples can utilize content to give some relief to those pain points—perhaps a homemade gnat trap for the first example, and an article detailing all of the essentials someone should get in order to get their parent the best care possible.

Content intelligence utilizes massive amounts of data to identify the pain points your audience has across your site and the sites of your competitors and industry publications. This approach goes hand-in-hand with qualitative feedback such as customer focus groups, to identify the true pain points your audience has.

Another essential in determining pain points is to understand the user’s intent when they search for a solution.

If someone is searching to know the answer to something, don’t hit them over the head with calls to action to buy something. If they are looking to take an action, like get help, you should be more aggressive in getting them to take the next step with you.

If the user’s pain point is to go somewhere, like a website, or a physical location, make sure your business is easily findable online or in local search. 

4. Create a Documented Content Strategy

If your content strategy is in your head, but not on paper, you may be in a lot of trouble.

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Less than 40% of content marketers have a documented content strategy. As a result, only 35% of content marketers can actually demonstrate the ROI of their content marketing efforts.
Click To Tweet

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Selling your executives is essential to acquiring and maintaining resources for content marketing. If you can’t point to a documented content strategy, and thus prove the ROI of your content marketing efforts, your budget will be quickly reallocated.

It takes time and effort to create a great content marketing strategy. But it’s essential, as your entire content marketing program depends on it to succeed. 

It also gives your entire content team a single source of truth when creating future content marketing campaigns. 

5. Identify the Methods and Metrics for Measurement

To prove your content marketing program’s value, you need to identify the methods and metrics you will use before you create a single piece of content.

These metrics should tie back to the first fundamental of content marketing programs: Understand Your Business Objectives.

The metrics you use should be identified within your content marketing strategy, as well as each content marketing campaign. 

Companies that delay this step until the end of their campaign end up scrambling to show the success of the campaign. Without having a clear method for measurement set up at the beginning, they are left with vanity metrics like total inbound traffic or social shares instead of solid metrics that prove the content campaign drove an actual business outcome. 

This leads to some really awkward conversations with the c-suite.

6. Identify the Most Effective Distribution Channels

How does your audience get content that helps them solve their problems? 

Do they rely solely on search? Then a focus on SEO is probably a place for you to start.

Is your audience mostly on social media? It might be time to create social-friendly articles that will pique their curiosity.

Do they regularly read a certain industry publication? Perhaps utilizing sponsored content on that publication is a good channel.

Do they prefer to have a physical paper? Then it might be time to look at printing and shipping a magazine (yes, they are still around). 

Figure out where your audience is currently getting the solutions to their problems. A lot of the time we see organizations jump into new channels just because they are new. But they never did the research to see if their audience is in that channel. 

It’s easier to get the attention of an audience in their normal channels than trying to get them to join you in a new channel.

7. Create Amazing, User-centric Content

Yep, we’re at fundamental 7 of 7, and we’re just now talking about creating content. That’s because the legwork that leads up to the content is the most important factor in the content’s success at the business level.

Writing amazing, engaging content is essential to any content marketing campaign. That content needs to be user-centric, making your audience the hero of the story. 

You’re not writing creating content to talk about you. You’re creating content to solve the user’s problem. 

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You’re not creating content to talk about you. You’re creating content to solve the user’s problem.
Click To Tweet

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This is one of the biggest mistakes we see from organizations. They think content marketing is simply a way to write long-form advertisements. Check your organization’s ego at the door.

However, that doesn’t mean that you forgo trying to get your audience to take ta next step.

Logical next steps, such as offering a free trial, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading something of even more value in return for an email address, can push audiences further down the marketing funnel organically. 

From there, you can nurture and build trust with them until they’re ready to make the next step with your organization.

Wrapping It Up

Content marketing is hard. There are hacks and shortcuts galore out there, but without having a foundation of the fundamentals, your content marketing program won’t have a solid foundation on which to grow. 

Hopefully, you’re currently practicing all of these fundamentals. But if you aren’t, it’s not too late to start.

The post The 7 Fundamentals of a Great Content Marketing Program appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

source https://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/the-7-fundamentals-of-a-great-content-marketing-program/

source https://derekpackard.com/the-7-fundamentals-of-a-great-content-marketing-program/

Facebook is developing a singing talent show feature

Facebook’s plan to take on Musical.ly may involve more than just its own take on a lip syncing feature. It appears to also be working on something called “Talent Show,” which would allow users to compete by singing popular songs then submitting their audition for review. The feature isn’t live, but was rather uncovered in the Facebook app’s code by researcher Jane Manchun Wong.

Wong has a history of uncovering yet-to-launch features or those still in testing through the use of reverse engineering tactics. She has previously spotted things like Instagram’s first time-well-spent feature, Lyft’s unlaunched bike or scooter program, Instagram’s upgraded two-factor authentication system, new ways of displaying IGTV videos, and more.

In the case of “Talent Show,” Wong has discovered an interface that allow users to pick a song from a list of popular tunes, which is then followed by a way to start recording yourself singing the track in question.

The app’s code also makes references to the feature as “Talent Show” and includes mentions of elements like “audition” and “stage.” The auditions are loaded as videos, Wong notes.

Facebook is working on Talent Show where users can pick a popular song and submit their singing audition for review.

Feels like a cross between Musically and Fifteen Million Merits from Black Mirror

as I previously spotted: https://t.co/jHsYQpEvgo pic.twitter.com/TfC2Og5wlw

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) July 28, 2018

The development would offer Facebook another way to take advantage of its more recently acquired music licensing rights. The company, starting last year, began forging deals with all the record labels – including the majors like Universal, Sony, and Warner, and several others, as well as the indies. The deals mean Facebook won’t have to take down users’ videos with copyrighted music playing in the background, for starters. But the company also said it planned to leverage its rights to develop new “music-based” products going forward.

Facebook Talent Show and Instagram Music Stickers sources the music from the submissions by record labels through the new Rights Manager.

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) July 28, 2018

One of those is Lip Sync Live, an almost direct copy of the popular tween-and-teen lip syncing app Musical.ly, which today has 200+ million registered users and 60 million actives. Like Musical.ly, Lip Sync Live – which is still in testing – a way to broadcast your lip sync recordings to friends.

Talent Show (assuming the code analysis is on point) seems to take a different angle. Instead of lip syncing for fun, people are actually singing and competing. It’s similar to the newly launched app FameGame. However, Wong notes that the feature may be restricted to Facebook Pages, similar to Facebook’s new trivia game show feature. That is, it may be offered to partners who are building out games on their own pages, and are using Facebook’s platform to do so.

Wong also confirms that Talent Show sources the music via the new Rights Manager, used by the record labels to track copyrighted tracks’ usage on Facebook.

Over the years, Facebook has taken aim at any other social app that gathers a following and then reproduces its own version of the app’s key draw – as it did with Stories, Snapchat’s biggest differentiator. It’s no surprise, then, that it now has Musical.ly in its sights, with regard to lip syncing. And with the Talent Show feature, it could be trying to challenge YouTube as the place where new singing talent can be discovered, too.

If Facebook offers a comment, we’ll update this post. 

source https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/facebook-is-developing-a-singing-talent-show-feature/

source https://derekpackard.com/facebook-is-developing-a-singing-talent-show-feature/

Everything You Need to Know About Inserting and Editing Images in WordPress

The post Everything You Need to Know About Inserting and Editing Images in WordPress appeared first on ProBlogger.

Do you feel confident using images in your blog posts?

While there’s no absolute rule that bloggers need to include images, most bloggers will include at least one eye-catching image in each post (normally at or very near the start).

However, it’s easy to make mistakes with images. We’ve already covered how to obtain images legally so you don’t accidentally infringe on someone’s copyright. But in today’s post, I want to go through the process of uploading and inserting images.

Whether you’ve just started blogging or you’ve been blogging for years, I hope you’ll learn something new from today’s post. We’re going to start off with the basics, and move on to some more advanced tips and tricks.

He are the ten things we’re going to cover:

1. How to download an image from the web
2. How to upload an image to your blog
3. How to insert an image into your post
4. How to align your image within your post
5. How to resize your image
6. How to turn your image into a link
7. How to add alt text to your image
8. How to edit your image in WordPress itself
9. How to keep your image file sizes low
10. How to optimise images for retina screens

#1: How to Download an Image from the Web

Brand new bloggers might feel a bit stuck at the first hurdle: downloading their chosen image.

Once you’ve found an image you can legally use, you’ll need to download it to your computer. (While it’s technically possible to insert it in your post using its existing URL on the web, this “hotlinking” is a bad idea. Many sites don’t like it, as it puts extra strain on their servers. And if the image file is removed from its current location, it’ll disappear from your post too.)

To download an image, right-click on it. You should see an option such as “Save image as…”. (It may be worded slightly differently depending on your browser.)

Click on “Save image as…”, and then select the folder on your computer where you want to save it.

On sites that act as a library of images (such as Pixabay and Flickr), you’ll normally be able to choose from different sizes for the image. Here’s how it looks on Pixabay.

The numbers on the left are the dimensions of each image in pixels (width by height). The numbers on the right are the size of each image file in kB/MB. As you can see, larger images equal much larger files.

It’s up to you what size you choose. (We’ll cover this in more detail in sections #9 and #10 on this list.) Note that on Pixabay you need to create a (free) account to download the largest images.

#2: How to Upload an Image to Your Blog

After you’ve selected and downloaded an image, you need to upload it to your blog.

On WordPress, log in to your dashboard, open up your chosen post (or start a new one), and click the “Add Media” button.

Then click the “Upload Files” tab. You can either drag and drop your chosen file to upload it to your blog, or click the “Select Files” button to browse through your computer folders for it.

(Note that whichever you choose, the original file will remain on your computer. Only a copy of it is uploaded.)

If you want to, you can upload several images at once.

#3: How to Insert an Image

First, position your cursor where you want to put the image within your post. (Click at the start or end of a line of text, or click on a blank line.)

Your uploaded images be available in your media library. Click “Add Media” then the “Media Library” tab (if it’s not already selected for you) and you’ll see them.

To insert an image, click on it and you’ll see this panel on the right-hand side of your screen.

You can set the alignment of the image, add a link, and choose the size you want it to be displayed. We’ll be covering all of these later on in this post. (You can edit your image to change any of these details after inserting it.)

Click “Insert into post” to place the image in your post where your cursor is.

#4: How to Align Your Image Within Your Post

If you inserted your image without changing the alignment setting, it may not appear exactly the way you wanted. Perhaps you intended to have it above your text, centred, or at the start of your post. But instead it’s right-aligned alongside the text.

(Dummy text generated by fillerama on “Doctor Who” mode.)

To re-align your image, click on it and then click the “align center” button on the mini-menu that pops up.

(You can also click the little pencil button to edit the image, where you can select the alignment, size and more.)

Your image should now be aligned correctly in your post.

#5: How to Resize Your Image

If your image is too big, you can resize it by clicking on it and then clicking on the edit button in the mini-menu.

You’ll see details about the image. Click the dropdown menu next to “Size” and you’ll see a range of options.

If one of the listed sizes works for you, select it. If not, click “Custom Size” and enter a width or height for your image in pixels. Whichever you choose, the other dimension will be adjusted automatically.

Click the “Update” button at the bottom of the screen, and you’ll be returned to your post with the image updated to your chosen size.

Note that this process doesn’t change the size of your original uploaded image, so the file size will remain the same. (We’ll cover more on this later in this post.)

#6: How to Turn Your Image into a Link

At some point you’ll almost certainly want to create an image that readers can click on to go to a different page.

For instance, you might want to create:

• A “start here” page showing the featured image from several posts, with each image linking to the appropriate post
• A page of book reviews, with the cover image for each book linking to the book on Amazon
• A custom “buy” button for your products, with each one linking to a PayPal or shopping cart page

To add a link to your image, click on the image and then click the little “edit” button that appears to get the Image Details screen.

Click the “Link To” dropdown and select “Custom URL”. You can then enter whatever URL you want the image to link to.

Make sure you click the “Update” button to save your changes to the image.

An even quicker way to add a link to an image is to copy your link, then click on the image and paste the link (press Ctrl+V on a PC or Command+V on a Mac). This will automatically add the link to the image.

#7: How to Add Alt Text to Your Image

Alt (alternative) text is normally used for accessibility. It provides a short description of your image that can be read to people using screen-reading software. (It will also appear on the screen as text if the image fails to load.)

Note that this is different from a caption. If you enter a caption, it w’ll be displayed immediately beneath the image in your post.

You can add alt text to your image when you’re editing it. Simply fill in the Alternative Text field with whatever text you want.

#8: How to Edit Your Image in WordPress Itself

It’s normally best to edit images before you upload them using software such as Photoshop (or, if you want a free alternative, Gimp or Paint.NET).

But sometimes you might want to make adjustments to your original image within WordPress. You can do this by clicking the “Edit Original” button in the Image Details panel.

You’ll then see this screen.

You can then resize the image. (You can only scale down, not up.)

Note: it’s best to do this before making any other edits.

You can also rotate the image, or flip it from top to bottom or left to right, using the buttons immediately above it.

You can crop the image by clicking on it and dragging to select your chosen area. Here’s the original image flipped left to right, with an area selected so it can be cropped.

To crop the image, you then need to click the “crop” button on the top left above the image.

Once you’re happy with your changes to your image, click “Save” beneath it, then “Update” on the next screen. You should now see your new image in the post itself.

If anything goes wrong, you can restore your original image using the “Restore Original Image” option.

#9: How to Keep Your Image File Sizes Low

The larger your image files, the longer they’ll take to load on your web page. And this can potentially affect on your site’s performance. If your site is really slow to load, readers may simply give up and go elsewhere.

There are several ways you can keep file sizes down, including:

• Using .jpg images where possible. They’re compressed, so they aren’t as high quality as other file types. But for images in regular blog posts, they’ll probably look fine. Note that if you have transparent (or partially transparent) images, though, you can’t save them in .jpg format.
• Resizing your image before uploading it to WordPress. If you’ve taken a photo on your camera and it’s 4000px wide, don’t upload it unedited to your blog. Yes, you can scale it down in your post (see #5), but the image will still take a long time to load. Instead, use image editing software to resize the photo before you upload it into your media library.
• Using the WordPress plugin Smush to resize and optimise images you’ve already uploaded in the past. This could make your site significantly faster.
• Using the TinyPNG service and/or Compress JPEG and PNG images plugin to reduce the size of your .png images. (If you have partially transparent images, they’re probably .png files. You should also use .png for any files with graphics in them.)

#10: How to Optimise Images for Retina Screens

The newest Apple products have Retina displays, which have a higher pixel-per-inch density than regular screens.

As SitePoint explains:

Retina has four times more pixels than standard screens. If you have a 400 x 300 image (120,000 pixels), you’d need to use an 800 x 600 alternative (480,000 pixels) to render it well on a high-density display.

This means that if you want a 500px by 330px image for your post, it would be best to upload it as a 1000px by 660px image. That way, it can be displayed crisply on the retina screen.

Your theme might automatically size and display the image correctly for each user (based on their device) if you simply insert it into the post at the larger size. If it doesn’t, you can use the WP Retina 2x plugin (which is explained in detail by Barn2 Media) to create and show the retina images as appropriate.

I know there’s been a lot to take in with this post. Don’t worry: you don’t have to master everything at once.

If you’re new to blogging, you might simply want to get confident with the basics of downloading and uploading images to your blog, then inserting them into your post at the appropriate point.

But if you’ve been blogging for quite a while, you’ve hopefully picked up a new tip or trick today as well. How will you put it into practice this week?

The post Everything You Need to Know About Inserting and Editing Images in WordPress appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

source https://problogger.com/images-in-wordpress/

source https://derekpackard.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-inserting-and-editing-images-in-wordpress/