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#Tags as part of the experience of storytelling language online
divinekangaroo · 11 months
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Random things I learned today: the way the etymology and definition of felching has changed significantly! very significantly! over time.
Yet there is no current alternative single-word term I can find which seems suitable, and do not speak to me of creampie eating because that is just soooooo stylistically jarring even as a tag
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enterprisewired · 7 months
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How to Elevate Your Brand Identity with SEO?
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The modern digital landscape is dynamic and always evolving. One of the vital parts to survive in this space is establishing a robust online presence. It is not just advantageous; it’s imperative for businesses striving to thrive. At the forefront of this digital transformation is the profound impact of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on shaping and fortifying brand identity.
In this article, we will delve deeper into the intricacies of how to leverage SEO strategies to elevate your brand’s identity, ensuring a harmonious blend of visibility and credibility.
Understanding the Essence of Brand Identity
Before delving into the world of SEO, it is crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of brand identity. Beyond logos and color schemes, a brand’s identity encapsulates a unique amalgamation of visual, verbal, and emotional elements that define your business in the eyes of your audience. It represents the values, personality, and promises that your brand conveys, creating a distinct and memorable impression.
In the intricate tapestry of business, brand identity is the vital thread that brings together the aspirations, values, and promises of an enterprise. It transcends the tangible aspects of logos and color palettes, delving into the intangible realm of emotions and perceptions. Imagine your brand’s identity as the soul of your business, the invisible force that shapes how your audience perceives and connects with your offerings. 
Do you know why a certain logo evokes trust or why specific colors resonate with your target demographic? It’s because of the brand identity. Through meticulous identity development, businesses can carve a distinct space in the minds of consumers, creating not just customers but advocates who align with the ethos and narrative that the brand represents. 
In essence, any brand’s identity is the compass that guides your business through the vast and dynamic landscape of the market, ensuring that every interaction, visual element, and communication reflects the authentic core of your brand.
The Role of SEO in Brand Identity Enhancement:
1. Keyword Optimization: Crafting the Language of Search Engines
At the heart of SEO lies the strategic use of keywords. These are not just phrases but the language that connects your brand with your audience through search engines. Incorporating these keywords naturally and strategically within your website content, meta tags, and headers is crucial for boosting your visibility in search engine results. For example, if your brand is centered around sustainable fashion, optimizing for keywords like “ethical clothing” or “sustainable fashion brands” will align your content with what your audience is searching for.
2. Content is King: The Brand Narrative
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High-quality, relevant content is the linchpin of effective SEO. Every piece of content on your website contributes to shaping your brand narrative. Whether it’s informative blog posts, captivating product descriptions, or compelling landing pages, each piece should reflect and reinforce your brand identity. Consider incorporating storytelling elements into your content to create a more personal connection with your audience. Share success stories, showcase your brand’s journey, and emphasize the values that set your business apart.
3. Optimized Website Structure: The Foundation of User Experience
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4. Link Building Strategies: Building Trust and Authority
Building a network of high-quality backlinks is instrumental in establishing your brand’s authority in the digital space. Seek opportunities for guest posts, collaborations, and partnerships within your industry. Each backlink serves as a vote of confidence in your brand, signaling to search engines that your content is valuable and trustworthy. For example, if your brand specializes in tech solutions, collaborating with reputable tech blogs for guest posts or features can significantly enhance your brand’s authority in the eyes of both search engines and your target audience.
5. Social Media Integration: Amplifying Your Brand Message
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Consistent branding across social media channels reinforces your brand identity and fosters a sense of familiarity among your audience. Consider creating shareable content that not only resonates with your audience but also encourages them to become brand advocates.
Conclusion
A well-executed SEO strategy is a powerful tool for enhancing your brand identity in the digital space. By incorporating strategic keywords, producing high-quality content, optimizing your website structure, building a robust backlink profile, and integrating social media, you can create a cohesive online presence that resonates with your target audience.
Remember, the key is not just to rank higher on search engines but to deliver a consistent and authentic brand experience. As you embark on this SEO journey, stay true to your brand’s values and personality. Watch as your brand’s identity takes center stage in the competitive digital landscape, forging lasting connections with your audience and propelling your business to new heights.
Also read: SEO vs. SEM: Navigating the Digital Marketing Maze for Business Triumph
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ubaid214 · 9 months
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Web Design Trends: Staying Ahead in a Rapidly Changing Digital World
Effective calls-to-action prompt visitors to take desired actions, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or contacting the business. Encouraging users through well-placed buttons and persuasive language is crucial to engagement.
Mobile Responsiveness:
In the mobile-driven landscape, mobile responsiveness is non-negotiable. Ensuring a consistent experience for all users requires a website that adapts to various screen sizes.
Accessibility:
Designing with accessibility in mind ensures that all users, including those with disabilities, can access and navigate the website easily. This includes providing alternative text for images, clear headings, and keyboard navigation options.
Navigating the SEO Landscape in Website Design:
A beautifully designed website is of little use if it remains hidden from search engine results. Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial to increase organic traffic and improve visibility.
Keyword Research:
Thorough keyword research helps identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords that users are searching for. These keywords can then be strategically integrated into the website's content. Webdesigner Berlin
Meta Tags and Descriptions:
Meta tags and meta descriptions provide concise summaries of a web page's content. Optimizing these elements helps search engines understand the page's context and rank it appropriately.
Quality Content:
Creating valuable and engaging content is an integral part of SEO. High-quality content attracts backlinks and signals to search engines that the website is a reputable source of information.
The Evolving Landscape:
Website design is an ever-changing field, influenced by technological advancements, user preferences, and industry trends. Designers must adapt to stay relevant and deliver cutting-edge experiences as new technologies emerge and user behavior evolves.
Immersive Technologies:
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are poised to transform website design, offering interactive and immersive experiences that transport users to new dimensions.
Voice User Interface (VUI):
The rise of voice-activated devices is shaping the future of website design. VUI enables users to interact with websites using voice commands, creating new challenges and opportunities for designers.
Microinteractions:
Microinteractions are subtle animations and interactions that add a touch of delight to the user experience. These small details contribute to the overall user satisfaction and engagement.
Final Thoughts:
Website design is a captivating fusion of artistry and functionality, where every element works in harmony to create a seamless and engaging user experience. Whether you're a seasoned designer or a business owner embarking on your first website, understanding the principles of website design empowers you to craft an online masterpiece that captivates and connects with your audience. From the visual storytelling to responsive design and SEO optimization, every aspect plays a vital role in elevating a brand's online presence. As technology advances and user expectations evolve, designers must continue to embrace innovation and creativity to deliver experiences that leave a lasting impression on visitors.
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tatum34w · 2 years
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PDF Kate: Inside the Rainbow PDF BY John Carder Bush
Kate: Inside the Rainbow - John Carder Bush
READ & DOWNLOAD John Carder Bush book Kate: Inside the Rainbow in PDF, EPub, Mobi, Kindle online. Free book, AudioBook, Reender Book Kate: Inside the Rainbow by John Carder Bush full book,full ebook full Download.
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 Read / Download Kate: Inside the Rainbow
DESCRIPTION BOOK : Kate is a collection of beautiful images from throughout Kate Bush's career. It includes outtakes from classic album shoots and never-before-seen photographs from The Dreaming and Hounds of Love sessions, and rare candid studio shots and behind-the-scenes stills from video sets, including "Army Dreamers" and "Running Up that Hill." These stunning images will be accompanied by two new essays by John Carder Bush: Inside the Rainbow, describing in vibrant detail their shared childhood and the early, whirlwind days of Kate's career, and My Sister, My Sitter, which vividly evokes John's experience of photographing his sister. John Carder Bush: "For me, each of these images forms part of a golden thread that shoots through the visual tapestry of Kate's remarkable career. Storytelling has always been the heartbeat of Kate's body of work, and it has been a privilege to capture these photographic illustrations that accompany those magical tales."
 DETAIL BOOK :
Author : John Carder Bush
Pages : 288 pages
Publisher : Sphere
Language : eng
ISBN-10 : 0751559903
ISBN-13 : 9780751559903
 Supporting format: PDF, EPUB, Kindle, Audio, MOBI, HTML, RTF, TXT, etc.
Supporting : PC, Android, Apple, Ipad, Iphone, etc.
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naimee · 3 years
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4.3.21/Day 25-31 of zoomester studyblr challenge. 
[Okay, I know the month of March is over, but I promised myself I would finish this challenge so here are the last few days.]
25- Tag someone who has great text posts
@blacklinguist once again lol
26- What has been your best zoomester experience so far?
I’ve really enjoyed setting up my work space. Like, it’s been a great time. I’ve purchased so many beautiful prints to hang up and I’m in love with my desk. It continues to motivate me to do what I need to do, and while it’s still been difficult not to procrastinate, there’s been progress. So much progress. 
27- If you’re about to graduate, what’s something that you’ll miss from school? If you aren’t about to graduate, tell us something you really love about school.
I graduate this year!! Ummm, I’ll definitely miss my college campus. I have a friend who is also graduating this year, and we always talk about how janky the school is on the regular, but at some point, we tend to talk about the small things we’ll miss about the campus. The iced chai tea lattes. Coming to class like an hour early and having the room to yourself. Sitting in the halls. The ten minute naps in the student lounge. And so much more. 
28- Spill the tea about the things that you’ve done during the zoomester (Online shopping, courses taken, any hobby)
I’ve bought so much stationery, lol. Language learning books, paper clips, bookmarks, folders, stickers, post cards, etc etc. I’m like obsessed now.
I’m taking a Black Aesthetics course that had been amazing so far. Also, a Fiction 2 course that is reshaping how I understand storytelling. I’m learning a lot about sequencing, and what I remain loyal to in my writing style.
29- Quick! Name your own aesthetic! or alternatively, what’s an aesthetic you’d like to try out?
I’m a combination of aesthetics, lol. I really want to channel the afrofuturism part of me though. I want to show through my clothing style more.
30- What’s the best advice someone has given you?
Earlier this year someone told me not to solely rely on academia to study or to learn new things. I didn’t realize I’d been doing it for so long until those words came out of their mouth.
31- Send three people some uplifting messages!
@progressaesthetics Thanks for this challenge. You’ve made March pretty fruitful and fun. Hopefully, it’s been a great one for you and April will have the same outcome!
@urbannoir I’m in love with your blog! Whatever you’re working on right now, keep adding to it. Even if it’s just life in general, I’m wishing you nothing but love and progress. 
@notchainedtotrauma Again, tysm for the work you do. Keep going. Your supporters love and listen to you. You’re so needed. 
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illegiblewords · 3 years
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Fic Writer Meme
Swiped this because it looked like fun!
Name
Fandoms
Most popular oneshot
Most popular multichapter
Actual worst part of writing
How you choose your titles
Do you outline
Ideas I probably won’t get around to, but wouldn’t it be nice?
Callouts @ Me
Best writing traits
Spicy Tangential Opinion
Tagging: @nilim, @azwoodbomb, @wouldyouliketoseemymask, @parvus-pica, @peregrineroad, @spiral-seeker, @frostmantle, @autumnslance, @strangefellows, @redbud-tree, @maccaroni-eh, @entropytea, @prettyparadoxes, @ivalane, @kunstpause, @fogfens
Name: Illegible or Illegiblewords lately. I’ve switched it in the past a few times.
Fandoms: I’ve been in Final Fantasy XIV for the past couple of years now. Passively I might be in Pathologic fandom and Dragon Age fandom? Maybe others too on and off. I was in comic fandoms for a long time but honestly that spiraled into a hot mess of epic proportions so I’ve mostly peaced out of there. Still love stories, characters, and buddies from there though.
Most Popular Oneshot: Ironically it’s Ideation for Bladerunner 2049 haha. I did exactly one fic there right after seeing the movie and didn’t go back, but I thought it was very good and I had a specific story I wanted to tell. It’s one of my most popular fics, and given it’s gen too I’m actually kind of happy about that.
Most Popular Multichapter: The Immortal Wound for FFXIV fandom! I had only just started writing for the fandom, and the series leading up to this fic was my first time writing NPC shipping in FFXIV. I was seriously, SERIOUSLY nervous at first! I wrote the first fic, Posturing, as a personal challenge to do an ambiguous protagonist/NPC since I saw other people doing that and wanted to see if I could pull it off. Posted it at around 4 in the morning then deleted within a few minutes out of anxiety lol. A week went by before I read it again, realized I still liked it, and put it back up for good. That being well-received helped encourage me to keep trying, and by The Immortal Wound it was getting solid attention. The experience really meant a lot to me!
Actual Worst Part of Writing: Probably chapter maps within the outlining process for me. It’s needed for how I approach things, but shit is anxiety-inducing and stressful af lol. I basically plan each event out in high detail before actually writing the fic, so when the time comes for me to legit write I’m more or less following a plan I can trust. Making that plan is the tough part.
How Do You Choose Your Titles: Often titles are the last things I figure out before starting the fic itself. I know I like punchy stuff if I can manage. Sometimes it’ll be one word, sometimes it’ll be a quote or song lyric, sometimes it’ll be a saying, sometimes it’ll be a phrase that feels fitting. I go fast and loose usually, and tbh I’ve tried to tell myself not to overthink it too hard. I do try title related works in ways that have some thematic link when I can.
Do You Outline: HahahahahaHAHAHAHAhaha yeah. Straight up my outlines are eldritch terrors for their detail, length, and complexity. I don’t mean that as a brag at all, seriously--I tend to get frozen a bit if I don’t have an outline by and large because it’s hard for me to keep track of what’s in my head and plan accordingly. Just end up with too many moving parts + revision and pacing get wonky otherwise.
Depending on the project I might have sections tied to setting, characters, magic systems, religions, etc. at the top. Fanfic this is less likely but does crop up sometimes.
To give an example of the first bullet of the first chapter of an ongoing fic:
Post-Shinryu, the Warrior of Light lingers in the Royal Menagerie alone at his own insistence to search for the Eye of Nidhogg. In the process he remembers the fight against Zenos and Shinryu. Note he was overcome by an almost feral rage at Zenos’ assumption that he was the target of anything resembling lust. Those attentions (“bite down upon my jugular”) belong to another, but note similarities of two pale-eyed, long-haired blondes. Seeing Shinryu, the Warrior had no idea whether Lahabrea survived within. The fusion was horrifying to see and as he fought he didn’t hold back because besides obvious dangers, he was also ready to mercy kill if needed. Also note Warrior wanted to intervene against Thordan for Lahabrea but wasn’t fast enough, questions a little privately how far he’d have gone against him. It might not have mattered even if he’d managed since he knows Lahabrea was going crazy and unable to listen. Locating and examining the Eye, he recognizes how drained it is. Certainly not enough to threaten him when dealing with post-battle exhaustion. So he reaches inside with his own aether, relentless in pushing aside every foreign element—Nidhogg, Thordan, the corrupted Rhalgr, the places Zenos caged them all under his own will. Zodiark’s tempering is what helps him ultimately find Lahabrea, who is barely alive. Zodiark’s tempering has preserved what it could but has a much more tenuous grip in consequence. When the Warrior finds him Lahabrea isn’t even aware, functionally unconscious. The tempering flares against him defensively and this time the Warrior focuses on it. This is all that has allowed Lahabrea to stay alive. He could force himself closer but there is no vessel. Besides, the process of separating a fragile soul so deficient in aether is too great a risk. So he keeps the Eye.
It’s not the only bullet of comparable size for that chapter. The overall piece has at least 40 total chapters, but probably more.
Ideas I Probably Won’t Get Around To, But Wouldn’t It Be Nice: Tbh probably some of the earlier WIPs I have that aren’t finished already. Not just FFXIV (Dead Language, With Good Intentions) but other fandoms. I could end up circling back in the future one day but who knows.
Callouts @ Me: “NO MORE WIPS HOLY SHIT YOU HAVE OVER 20″, “RELEARN HOW TO DO DRABBLES”, “GET UR PRESENTS DONE”, “REVIEW OTHERS MORE THE STAGE FRIGHT IS RIDICULOUS”.
Best Writing Traits: I try to write any character as the hero of their own story/with the capacity to be someone’s favorite. I do my research and prioritize telling a good story first and foremost. I can change my writing style according to need and am good at capturing the cadence and word choices of different characters.
Spicy Tangential Opinion: If no transaction has been made (esp. monetary), no one owes you shit online. Not reviews, not hits, not praise, not agreement, not content of any sort. It sucks to feel like you’re creating to a void. It sucks to be passionately in love with a rarepair when other ships are drowning in art and stories.
People still don’t owe you.
If you don’t like someone else’s content, create something exploring what you do like... or even why you don’t like that content. Tell a story. Create art. Make photosets and playlists and analyses. If it is not a literal crime (as opposed to portraying fictional crime), don’t discourage other creators no matter how awful you might find their stuff. Lend your own voice to an alternative as convincingly as you can. And if that doesn’t persuade others, you need to keep honing your own skills.
If you want more of something to exist, spread inspiration. Again this can be in storytelling, art, photosets, playlists, analysis, you name it. Give form to your passion. And if others disagree or don’t respond, keep working at it. This is a skill too, and it takes practice.
I’ve found it shows when work is created out of a sense of guilt, fear, or obligation. The quality is much lower and no one latches on to keep building in-turn. And IMO it is essential to build up rather than tearing down.
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reading-while-queer · 4 years
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This month on Reading While Queer, I’m doing something a little different! In order to try to direct more attention toward indie web fiction and short stories, I’ll be doing a series of Indie Spotlights like this one.  This month’s review covers two short stories, both queer retellings of folktales, both free to read online.  The first is “With Roses in Their Hair” by Ennis Bashe, a retelling of Tam Lin.  The second is “Tristan” by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, a retelling of Tristan and Isolde.
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Rating: Great Read Genre: Short Story, Fantasy, Science Fiction Representation: -Lesbian protagonist & love interest Trigger warnings: Violence, injury, body horror, parental abuse metaphor, colonialism metaphor Note: Just on the edge of being YA-appropriate, but on the sexual side.
“With Roses in Their Hair” is an f/f retelling of Tam Lin, the Scottish folktale about a woman who rescues her love from the Queen of the Fairies.  Bashe’s spin on the original tale takes place in an apocalyptic world which has been reorganized by the Visitors - aliens with a striking similarity to fae, both in nomenclature (even calling themselves changelings, etc) and in the fae-like laws they rule themselves by.  The Visitors control how many humans can enter a public place, issue identical clothing and rations to all, and are only opposed by the small resistance living underground in the subways.
I found this premise delightful, if confusing at first.  Reconciling the many names the Visitors have for themselves (Visitors, changelings, fairies) with the fact that humans can also have fairy wings (though mechanical), and differentiating clearly between the two factions, took some time.  I liked that Bashe didn’t hold the reader’s hand, which would have been more unpleasant than taking the time to untangle the threads of worldbuilding myself. 
The Visitors are one of the best visualizations of aliens that I have read - the fae interpretation is ingenious, and really drives home their fundamental difference, making the Visitors much more frightening. These aliens are so strange that they aren’t even governed by the same physical and chemical laws as humans are - rather, their version of the laws of physics are the laws of deal-keeping.  Shape-shifting and light-bending they can do, breaking a bargain they cannot. The magic-science of this world is accomplished beautifully, reminding me a little of Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, but ultimately, all its own.
Sometimes Bashe’s worldbuilding, beautiful as it is, does not quite support its own weight - it is a very rich sci-fi world built on fragile stilts.  As much as I love how sparing the stilts are, the richer the world, the more stilts you need, or else the reader ends up having a decidedly Fantasia-like experience.  I was delighted by the style of the story, the on-the-page description of the Visitors, of Jennet, the human resistance fighter, and of Tamburlaine, the changeling she falls in love with.  The old subway car that Jennett calls home, the horses made from light-constructs - I could go on.  But we were missing a few stilts, and so I was never really sure of the rules, or why what I was reading was happening.  Part of this is a problem of adaptation.  Bashe sometimes leans on the reader’s prior familiarity with the Tam Lin folktale in order to patch issues of character motivation.  “Why does the Queen of the Fairies do x?” is not so much addressed by the story itself as by the context of being a retelling.  The Queen of the Fairies acts as she does because that’s what the Queen of the Fairies does in the original story.
Despite scattered motivation and worldbuilding issues, what makes the original Tam Lin a compelling and timeless story shines through in this retelling as well.  I wasn’t sure about the hard sci-fi pivot to an alien invasion story, but I came to really appreciate that angle and what it brings to the table.  Rather than humans and fae being two separate, parallel worlds which find themselves at odds over Tamburlaine, the alien invasion adds a colonial aspect to the story.  Fae-aliens with seemingly nonsensical laws, violations of which are punished swiftly and ruthlessly, make a brilliant allegory for settler colonialism.  A culturally strange group of invaders may as well be aliens - or the fae! Or both! The allegory is there if you choose to see it, but nothing more than a gentle undertone, which was accomplished well.  
The romance between Jennet and Tam is well-developed, with a natural-feeling progression that is difficult to accomplish in short form.  However, in a short story with so much ground to cover, it’s no surprise that it has taken me until the end of the review to even consider the romance.  There is so much to sink your teeth into, that “With Roses in Their Hair” hardly needs to be a romance at all.  In fact, my favorite parts of the story had nothing to do with Jennett and Tamburlaine’s growing feelings for each other.  The value in this story is multi-faceted: between the romance, the parental abuse metaphor of the relationship between the changelings and the Visitors, the colonialism metaphor of the alien invasion, and the retelling of Tam Lin, one could even say “With Roses in Their Hair” is a shape-shifter itself.
“With Roses in Their Hair” is free to read on Xanwest, here.
For more from Ennis Bashe, visit their website here. 
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Rating: Great Read Genre: Short Story, Literary Fiction Representation: -Bisexual leading characters Trigger warnings: Ableism & ableist slurs, drug abuse Note: Contains overt sexuality, not YA
“Tristan” is a short story billed as “Tristan and Isolde but make it queer” - that tagline is what got me to click the link to Electric Lit where the story is hosted.  However, “Tristan” is a lot more than a retelling.  Rather than a straightforward retelling of the medieval romance between the knight Tristan and the princess Isolde, “Tristan” takes a left turn into “She’s All That” territory.
Hughes-Hallett sets the tale in the modern day with quippy dialogue that brings to mind British romantic comedy of the early 00s.  This literary style makes an amount of sense, considering the 00s were well and truly laden with rom-com retellings of English literature, from George Bernard Shaw to Shakespeare.  “Tristan” slips easily into a “pop” style of storytelling without sacrificing any of its poetry, making for a very interesting read. The trimmings of the modern retelling - from Tristan doing a tab of acid in the park to his boss-slash-boyfriend Cornwall running a private museum of antiquities - were fun, and they provide a sharp complement to the meat of the story, which is more pensive study on the nature of love than rom-com.
As much as I liked “Tristan,” I had a bad first impression.  The story opens with an extended scene of expository dialogue between Tristan and Cornwall as they arrange for Tristan to pick up Cornwall’s wife-to-be, Isolde, from the airport.  Dialogue is “Tristan”’s Achilles heel, an obvious and fatal weakness that almost made me write off the whole story. There is an invasion of poetic (convoluted?) language in the dialogue that breaks suspension of disbelief, and between the poetry and the lack of any dialogue tags to offer tone cues, one is led to read the dialogue as stiffly-acted soliloquy.  What are the characters doing? How are they speaking? Do they exist in the world, or are they standing center stage? The real crème de la crème of my initial dislike of “Tristan” was not the style of dialogue, however, but the content.  Within the first page, Tristan questions why Isolde needs to be picked up from the airport - is she [insert ableist slur]? How about [other ableist slur]?  Some aspects of the quippy, sarcastic 00s I could do without.
I continued to be underwhelmed by Hughes-Hallett’s dialogue throughout “Tristan,” but this was almost entirely made up for by the remarkable writing of every other part of the story.  First, the premise itself defied my expectations for a queer retelling of Tristan and Isolde.  The passionate romance between Tristan and Isolde is not gender-bent to make it between two WLW or MLM; rather, Tristan himself is bisexual, and Cornwall’s casual lover before Isolde enters the picture.  Where our story begins, Cornwall doesn’t like how attached Tristan is getting to him, and is ready to settle down with Isolde, his email pen-pal who he’s never met.  I was genuinely delighted by this creative choice as an interpretation of the “how to queer medieval literature” exercise.  It doesn’t take the easy way out, and recognizes that the value of a bisexual character doesn’t lie only in stories of same-gender romance.
I also liked that “Tristan” wasn’t a romance, not really.  Despite the similarities one can draw to the 00s rom-com (for good and ill), the meat of the story is not feel-good fluff at all, but a discussion of passion versus love: a prolonged meditation on loving someone who ostensibly loves you back, but whose feelings do not compare.  This discussion peeks through Hughes-Hallett’s beautifully detailed work; from intriguing descriptions of the antiquities in Cornwall’s gallery, to the otherworldly presence of Isolde, to the skillful weave of one sentence to the next, “Tristan” is scattered with gems.  One must only sift through the sand.
As a retelling, “Tristan” more than accomplishes its goal of “Tristan and Isolde but make it queer” - it also asks the reader to think about the very genre of romance.  Tristan and Isolde being a 12th century romance that is so culturally ubiquitous as to have mothered the Arthurian tradition and captivated the imagination for centuries since, it was the perfect groundwork for the story about the nature of love that Hughes-Hallett wanted to tell, (with characters that just happened to be queer.)
“Tristan” is free to read on Electric Lit, here.
For more from Lucy Hughes-Hallett, visit her website here.
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unofferable-fic · 5 years
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Submission from literalapologyblog + some thoughts re: GOT/Marvel/writing
“(too long for askbox, so sending as submission)
Hey, I left a dickish comment on a post you made (via defunct blog, “beewinged”), and I’m sorry. I just literally created a whole new account and painstakingly tracked down your url again to say that, because it was bugging me that much.
I was really into fandom and tumblr for a few years, and pulled out of it completely when one particular fandom went sour with drama and hatefulness. Hate directed at showrunners, between fans– a lot of it using the guise of progressive language.
I removed myself from fandom and social media entirely and pretty successfully, because I hate communicating with people in soundbites and hate how communities like tumblr (for all their upsides) make it easy for users to “curate” a personality and set of opinions with the click of a button.
And it took all of a few days scrolling the Endgame tag for me to go right back to a place of casual, de-personalizing interactions (two comments, the other one being, “this take bums me out”– but still two comments too many).
I saw about fifty posts that compared Endgame to GoT S8; yours wasn’t that unusual. Tags on tumblr, by design, highly concentrate extreme emotion and stimulus. Social media doesn’t care what it’s doing to compassionate discourse. Rationally, I know this! – but seeing post after post talking about writers and creatives, human people with families, as if they had committed war crimes– seeing “fuck the Russos”, “these writers are basically the same people as these writers”, treating “the Russos” like some kind of malicious entity or, worse, seeing anti-colonialist director of color Taika Waititi referred to as “a bag of racid dicks” (in the name of protecting the integrity of a made-up person) made it all too easy for me to perceive individual posts as a part of a vicious hivemind obsessed with its fandom reality-bubble.
I think there are some good criticisms of Endgame. I also felt and still feel that the writing in Endgame (flawed but thematically consistent, focuses on Tony’s arc to the exclusion of others, because his– for better or for worse– is the strongest) doesn’t bear comparison with the hasty and thoughtless writing of GoT’s last few episodes.
That opinion is not what I expressed in my comment on your post. I wasn’t starting a conversation in good faith (something I’ve tried very hard to hold myself to, in real life and when I do make posts online). I essentially expressed, “*you*, a part of a hivemind, are mad because the thing you wanted didn’t happened, and *you* are fronting like that’s ‘bad writing’”.
That’s a very personal accusation, and a really incendiary and unfair thing to say to someone on the basis of one post, ever if it reflects a generalized feeling I have about online fandom. I let my momentary irritation get the better of me, and focused it on you. It wasn’t the most unkind thing I’ve ever said, but that doesn’t rankle any less.
So: I’m sure you do have strong feelings about stories and opinions about storytelling, and I’m sure they are worth listening to, that you have people in your life who enjoy hearing your thoughts, and that the best and most complex of your thoughts can’t be gleaned from just scrolling through your tumblr.
You might have a thicker skin than I do, and maybe didn’t give my comment a second thought– but I’m sorry if, for even a second, it made you feel dismissed or hurt or misunderstood. You could be any number of people who, in “real” life, I’d never speak to so dismissively. I hope you continue to write, enjoy and engage with stories.”
First off, I want to apologise for taking a few days to post this. I saw this in my submission box and wanted to thoroughly think over it before I replied. I’ve since seen that the blog has been deactivated, but I wanted to post this in the hopes you might stumble across my response, because I do appreciate you going to the effort to find me again… It’s a serious effort! And rarely do people apologise for ‘dickish’ comments haha
First off, I understand anyone who wishes to take time away from fandoms, especially when things get toxic and experiences get ruined by it. For me personally, I have a tendency to just avoid those blogs/tags. There was certain things I don’t go near, and certain posts that I might read, internally disagree with, and move on. I’ve spent a lot less time on Twitter and Instagram lately, and I’m feeling better for it too.
In short, do I think that there are rightful comparisons to make between the writers at Marvel and GOT? Yes. Do I think that makes it okay for us to talk excessive smack about the Russos/TW? No. While my criticisms for the Russos and TW run deep, I never condone death threats or unnecessary insults. On one post in particular, I’ve ‘gone off’ on some comment the Russos made regarding fan reactions to Loki’s death. Nothing other than calling them ‘fucking eejits’, but cursing is used more casually here in Ireland, so maybe that’s why I use it as such. But yeah, other than that, I don’t agree with the notion of wishing death or serious harm on these people, and I think most people would agree with that. Criticise them all day, if it’s valid, but anything else is a bit… excessive. I certainly do think that there are far more valid criticisms floating about instead of death threats, but the harsh stuff is always going to jump out the most.
I agree with a lot of what you say - while there are definitely valid criticisms to be made about Endgame, it’s not an awful or bad film, and there are definitely more examples of poor and lazy writing in the last season of GOT. As someone who was in love with that show for a good five seasons, it was sad to see it go the way it did. I did, however, jump ship after some very telling and dramatic writing choices they made in season five. By my logic at the time, “if they will do x now, they’ll most definitely do y and z later”, and it’s never fun when that realisation comes to fruition. That being said, I still strongly believe that Marvel dropped the ball with some of my favourite characters in Endgame (Loki, Steve, Tony, Bucky, Thor). I think they did great by some characters, and terrible by others. But that’s probably a discussion for another post - most of my feelings have been far better explained in posts by other blogs!
“I essentially expressed, “*you*, a part of a hivemind, are mad because the thing you wanted didn’t happened, and *you* are fronting like that’s ‘bad writing’”.” If I’m being honest, this is absolutely nothing new to me haha. As a Loki fan and someone quite critical of the last season of GOT, I’m well used to people telling me “you’re just mad because your fave died!” and “you just don’t like it because it’s not the ending you wanted!” I think any Loki fan can attest to that too. It sucks, but if someone replies to me in that way, I don’t even bother continuing the conversation. You’ve already reached a wall before the conversation can start. I recently had a chat with a friend who I falsely assumed would cut me off in a similar manner, and it was amazingly refreshing to have my opinion heard and not automatically shut off because I’m a “Loki fangirl”. For me, Endgame just proved that my favourite character’s ending in IW was badly written, badly executed, pointless other than being motivation for Thor, and just overall illogical and out of character. Much like most Dany fans don’t mind her character becoming a mad queen, I don’t mind if Loki dies. My issue is how we get there and how badly executed it was in terms of writing. The actors themselves obviously put their hearts into what I would consider a weak story point. It seemed careless, much like Dany’s characterisation... “How do we get there exactly? Ah, who cares, just do it and get it over with. People will watch it and we’ll make money anyway.”. Can you imagine if they had screwed up Iron Man’s arc in the same manner? The backlash would’ve been insane!
I do of course apologise if I’ve ever some across as someone who just shits on Marvel, because that’s not who I am. I grew up being a massive Spider Man fan as a kid, and these heroes and films will always have a place in my heart, but I’m still going to critique something even if I love it. If anything, I think it’s even more important to acknowledge flaws in your favourite things. I’m certainly not right in ever instance, and I don’t think I know everything there is to know about writing!
My main hope from all of this is just that future writers learn from these mistakes and become better writers because of it. 
I genuinely appreciate the fact you went to the trouble to find my blog again apologise, because it’s something that I see rarely. I hadn’t paid much attention to your original comment, but your apology is valued and appreciated. It’s honestly something I don’t usually receive amidst a sea of “yOu’rE JUst mAD bEcAUse yOuR faVE DieD!!”
Likewise I hope that you continue to express your own thoughts and opinions on writing in an articulate manner, and hopefully you see less of those posts that proper do your head in! Thank you for explaining your point of view to me, and thick skin or not, apologies and calm conversations always go a long way.
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axekerose54 · 3 years
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Download [PDF] A Time to Kill: A Jake Brigance Novel PDF
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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The master of the legal thriller probes the savage depths of racial violence in this searing courtroom drama featuring the beloved Jake Brigance. “John Grisham may well be the best American storyteller writing today.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer The life of a ten-year-old black girl is shattered by two drunken and remorseless white men. The mostly white town of Clanton in Ford County, Mississippi, reacts with shock and horror at the inhuman crime—until the girl’s father acquires an assault rifle and takes justice into his own hands. For ten days, as burning crosses and the crack of sniper fire spread through the streets of Clanton, the nation sits spellbound as defense attorney Jake Brigance struggles to save his client’s life—and then his own. Don’t miss any of John Grisham’s gripping Jake Brigance novels: A TIME TO KILL • SYCAMORE ROW • A TIME FOR MERCY (Coming Soon)
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Let's be real: 2020 has been a nightmare. Between the political unrest and novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, it's difficult to look back on the year and find something, anything, that was a potential bright spot in an otherwise turbulent trip around the sun. Luckily, there were a few bright spots: namely, some of the excellent works of military history and analysis, fiction and non-fiction, novels and graphic novels that we've absorbed over the last year. 
Here's a brief list of some of the best books we read here at Task & Purpose in the last year. Have a recommendation of your own? Send an email to [email protected] and we'll include it in a future story.
Missionaries by Phil Klay
I loved Phil Klay’s first book, Redeployment (which won the National Book Award), so Missionaries was high on my list of must-reads when it came out in October. It took Klay six years to research and write the book, which follows four characters in Colombia who come together in the shadow of our post-9/11 wars. As Klay’s prophetic novel shows, the machinery of technology, drones, and targeted killings that was built on the Middle East battlefield will continue to grow in far-flung lands that rarely garner headlines. [Buy]
 - Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief
Battle Born: Lapis Lazuli by Max Uriarte
Written by 'Terminal Lance' creator Maximilian Uriarte, this full-length graphic novel follows a Marine infantry squad on a bloody odyssey through the mountain reaches of northern Afghanistan. The full-color comic is basically 'Conan the Barbarian' in MARPAT. [Buy]
 - James Clark, senior reporter
The Liberator by Alex Kershaw
Now a gritty and grim animated World War II miniseries from Netflix, The Liberator follows the 157th Infantry Battalion of the 45th Division from the beaches of Sicily to the mountains of Italy and the Battle of Anzio, then on to France and later still to Bavaria for some of the bloodiest urban battles of the conflict before culminating in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. It's a harrowing tale, but one worth reading before enjoying the acclaimed Netflix series. [Buy]
 - Jared Keller, deputy editor
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garrett Graff
If you haven’t gotten this must-read account of the September 11th attacks, you need to put The Only Plane In the Sky at the top of your Christmas list. Graff expertly explains the timeline of that day through the re-telling of those who lived it, including the loved ones of those who were lost, the persistently brave first responders who were on the ground in New York, and the service members working in the Pentagon. My only suggestion is to not read it in public — if you’re anything like me, you’ll be consistently left in tears. [Buy]
- Haley Britzky, Army reporter
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World by Elaine Scarry
Why do we even fight wars? Wouldn’t a massive tennis tournament be a nicer way for nations to settle their differences? This is one of the many questions Harvard professor Elaine Scarry attempts to answer, along with why nuclear war is akin to torture, why the language surrounding war is sterilized in public discourse, and why both war and torture unmake human worlds by destroying access to language. It’s a big lift of a read, but even if you just read chapter two (like I did), you’ll come away thinking about war in new and refreshing ways. [Buy]
 - David Roza, Air Force reporter
Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege: 1942-1943 by Antony Beevor
Stalingrad takes readers all the way from the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union to the collapse of the 6th Army at Stalingrad in February 1943. It gives you the perspective of German and Soviet soldiers during the most apocalyptic battle of the 20th century. [Buy]
- Jeff Schogol, Pentagon correspondent 
America's War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich
I picked up America's War for the Greater Middle East earlier this year and couldn’t put it down. Published in 2016 by Andrew Bacevich, a historian and retired Army officer who served in Vietnam, the book unravels the long and winding history of how America got so entangled in the Middle East and shows that we’ve been fighting one long war since the 1980s — with errors in judgment from political leaders on both sides of the aisle to blame. “From the end of World War II until 1980, virtually no American soldiers were killed in action while serving in the Greater Middle East. Since 1990, virtually no American soldiers have been killed in action anywhere else. What caused this shift?” the book jacket asks. As Bacevich details in this definitive history, the mission creep of our Vietnam experience has been played out again and again over the past 30 years, with disastrous results. [Buy]
 - Paul Szoldra, editor-in-chief
Burn In: A Novel of the Real Robotic Revolution by P.W. Singer and August Cole
In Burn In, Singer and Cole take readers on a journey at an unknown date in the future, in which an FBI agent searches for a high-tech terrorist in Washington, D.C. Set after what the authors called the "real robotic revolution," Agent Lara Keegan is teamed up with a robot that is less Terminator and far more of a useful, and highly intelligent, law enforcement tool. Perhaps the most interesting part: Just about everything that happens in the story can be traced back to technologies that are being researched today. You can read Task & Purpose's interview with the authors here. [Buy]
 - James Clark, senior reporter
SAS: Rogue Heroes by Ben MacIntyre
Like WWII? Like a band of eccentric daredevils wreaking havoc on fascists? Then you'll love SAS: Rogue Heroes, which re-tells some truly insane heists performed by one of the first modern special forces units. Best of all, Ben MacIntyre grounds his history in a compassionate, balanced tone that displays both the best and worst of the SAS men, who are, like anyone else, only human after all. [Buy]
 - David Roza, Air Force reporter
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
The Alice Network is a gripping novel which follows two courageous women through different time periods — one living in the aftermath of World War II, determined to find out what has happened to someone she loves, and the other working in a secret network of spies behind enemy lines during World War I. This gripping historical fiction is based on the true story of a network that infiltrated German lines in France during The Great War and weaves a tale so packed full of drama, suspense, and tragedy that you won’t be able to put it down. [Buy]
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Katherine Rondina, Anchor Books
“Because I published a new book this year, I've been answering questions about my inspirations. This means I've been thinking about and so thankful for The Girl in the Flammable Skirt by Aimee Bender. I can't credit it with making me want to be a writer — that desire was already there — but it inspired me to write stories where the fantastical complicates the ordinary, and the impossible becomes possible. A girl in a nice dress with no one to appreciate it. An unremarkable boy with a remarkable knack for finding things. The stories in this book taught me that the everydayness of my world could become magical and strange, and in that strangeness I could find a new kind of truth.”
Diane Cook is the author of the novel The New Wilderness, which was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize, and the story collection Man V. Nature, which was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the Believer Book Award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the Los Angeles Times Award for First Fiction. Read an excerpt from The New Wilderness.
Bill Johnston, University of California Press
“I’ve revisited a lot of old favorites in this grim year of fear and isolation, and have been most thankful of all for The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Witty, reflexive, intimate, queer, disarmingly occasional and monumentally serious all at once, they’ve been a constant balm and inspiration. ‘The only thing to do is simply continue,’ he wrote, in 'Adieu to Norman, Bon Jour to Joan and Jean-Paul'; ‘is that simple/yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do/can you do it/yes, you can because it is the only thing to do.’”
Helen Macdonald is a nature essayist with a semiregular column in the New York Times Magazine. Her latest novel, Vesper Flights, is a collection of her best-loved essays, and her debut book, H Is for Hawk, won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction and the Costa Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.
Andrea Scher, Scholastic Press
“This year, I’m so grateful for You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson. Reading — like everything else — has been a struggle for me in 2020. It’s been tough to let go of all of my anxieties about the state of the world and our country and get swept away by a story. But You Should See Me in a Crown pulled me in right away; for the blissful time that I was reading it, it made me think about a world outside of 2020 and it made me smile from ear to ear. Joy has been hard to come by this year, and I’m so thankful for this book for the joy it brought me.”
Jasmine Guillory is the New York Times bestselling author of five romance novels, including this year’s Party of Two. Her work has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Real Simple, and Time.
Nelson Fitch, Random House
“Last year, stuck in a prolonged reading rut that left me wondering if I even liked books anymore, I stumbled across Tenth of December by George Saunders, a collection of stories Saunders wrote between 1995 and 2012 that are at turns funny, moving, startling, weird, profound, and often all of those things at the same time. As a writer, what I crave most from books is to find one so excellent it makes me feel like I'd be better off quitting — and so wonderful that it reminds me what it is to be purely a reader again, encountering new worlds and revelations every time I turn a page. Tenth of December is that, and I'm so grateful that it fell off a high shelf and into my life.”
Veronica Roth is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Divergent series and the Carve the Mark duology. Her latest novel, Chosen Ones, is her first novel for adults. Read an excerpt from Chosen Ones.
Ian Byers-Gamber, Blazevox Books
“Waking up today to the prospect of some hours spent reading away part of another day of this disastrous, delirious pandemic year, I’m most grateful for the book in my hands, one itself full of gratitude for a life spent reading: Gloria Frym’s How Proust Ruined My Life. Frym’s essays — on Marcel Proust, yes, and Walt Whitman, and Lucia Berlin, but also peppermint-stick candy and Allen Ginsburg’s knees, among other Proustian memory-prompts — restore me to my sense of my eerie luck at a life spent rushing to the next book, the next page, the next word.”
Jonathan Lethem is the author of a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Fortress of Solitude and the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Motherless Brooklyn. His latest novel, The Arrest, is a postapocalyptic tale about two siblings, the man that came between them, and a nuclear-powered super car.
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Riverhead
“I’m incredibly grateful for the magnificent The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer. This book — a mélange of history, memoir, and reportage — is the reconceptualization of Native life that’s been urgently needed since the last great indigenous history, Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. It’s at once a counternarrative and a replacement for Brown’s book, and it rejects the standard tale of Native victimization, conquest, and defeat. Even though I teach Native American studies to college students, I found new insights and revelations in almost every chapter. Not only a great read, the book is a tremendous contribution to Native American — and American — intellectual and cultural history.”
David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is author of the novel Winter Counts, which is BuzzFeed Book Club’s November pick. He is also the author of the children’s book Spotted Tail, which won the 2020 Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. Read an excerpt from Winter Counts.
Valerie Mosley, Tordotcom
“In 2020, I've been lucky to finish a single book within 30 days, but I burned through this 507-page brick in the span of a weekend. Harrow the Ninth reminded me that even when absolutely everything is terrible, it's still possible to feel deep, gratifying, brain-buzzing admiration for brilliant art. Thank you, Harrow, for being one of the brightest spots in a dark year and for keeping the home fires burning.”
Casey McQuiston is the New York Times bestselling author of Red, White & Royal Blue, and her next book, One Last Stop, comes out in 2021.
"I'm grateful for V.S. Naipaul's troubling masterpiece, A Bend in the River — which not only made me see the world anew, but made me see what literature could do. It's a book that's lucid enough to reveal the brutality of the forces shaping our world and its politics; yet soulful enough to penetrate the most recondite secrets of human interiority. A book of great beauty without a moment of mercy. A marriage of opposites that continues to shape my own deeper sense of just how much a writer can actually accomplish."
Ayad Akhtar is a novelist and playwright, and his latest novel, Homeland Elegies, is about an American son and his immigrant father searching for belonging in a post-9/11 country. He is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Vanessa German, Feminist Press
“I'm most thankful for Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether. It's a YA book set in 1930s Harlem, and it was the first Black-girl-coming-of-age book I ever read, the first time I ever saw myself in a book. I appreciate how it expanded my world and my understanding that books can speak to you right where you are and take you on a journey, at the same time.”
Deesha Philyaw’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. She is also the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Philyaw’s writing on race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, McSweeney’s, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. Read a story from The Secret Lives of Church Ladies.
Philippa Gedge, W. W. Norton & Company
“As both a writer and a reader I am hugely grateful for Patricia Highsmith’s plotting and writing suspense fiction. As a writer I’m thankful for Highsmith’s generosity with her wisdom and experience: She talks us through how to tease out the narrative strands and develop character, how to know when things are going awry, even how to decide to give things up as a bad job. She’s unabashed about sharing her own ‘failures,’ and in my experience, there’s nothing more encouraging for a writer than learning that our literary gods are mortal! As a reader, it provides a fascinating insight into the genesis of one of my favorite novels of all time — The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as the rest of her brilliant oeuvre. And because it’s Highsmith, it’s so much more than just a how-to guide: It’s hugely engaging and, while accessible, also provides a glimpse into the mind of a genius. I’ve read it twice — while working on each of my thrillers, The Hunting Party and The Guest List — and I know I’ll be returning to the well-thumbed copy on my shelf again soon!”
Lucy Foley is the New York Times bestselling author of the thrillers The Guest List and The Hunting Party. She has also written two historical fiction novels and previously worked in the publishing industry as a fiction editor.
“The books I'm most thankful for this year are a three-book series titled Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend. Walking a fine line between comedy and horror (which is much harder than people think), the books follow Jack, an employee at a gas station in a nameless town where all manner of horrifyingly fantastical things happen. And while the monsters are scary and more than a little ridiculous, it's Jack's bone-dry narration, along with his best friend/emotional support human, Jerry, that elevates the books into something that are as lovely as they are absurd.”
T.J. Klune is a Lambda Literary Award–winning author and an ex-claims examiner for an insurance company. His novels include The House in the Cerulean Sea and The Extraordinaries.
Sylvernus Darku (Team Black Image Studio), Ayebia Clarke Publishing
"Nervous Conditions is a book that I have read several times over the years, including this year. The novel covers the themes of gender and race and has at its heart Tambu, a young girl in 1960s Rhodesia determined to get an education and to create a better life for herself. Dangarembga’s prose is evocative and witty, and the story is thought-provoking. I’ve been inspired anew by Tambu each time I’ve read this book."
Peace Adzo Medie is Senior Lecturer in Gender and International Politics at the University of Bristol. She is the author of Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2020). His Only Wife is her debut novel.
Jenna Maurice, HarperCollins
“The book I'm most thankful for? Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. My mother and father would read me poems from it before bed — I'm convinced it infused me not only with a sense of poetic cadence, but also a wry sense of humor.”
Victoria “V.E.” Schwab is the bestselling author of more than a dozen books, including Vicious, the Shades of Magic series, and This Savage Song. Her latest novel, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, is BuzzFeed Book Club’s December pick. Read an excerpt from The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Meg Vázquez, Square Fish
“My childhood best friend gave me Troubling a Star by Madeleine L'Engle for Hanukkah when I was 11 years old, and it's still my favorite book of all time. I love the way it defies genre (it's a political thriller/YA romance that includes a lot of scientific research and also poetry??), and the way it values smartness, gutsiness, vulnerability, kindness, and a sense of adventure. The book follows 16-year-old Vicky Austin's life-altering trip to Antarctica; her trip changed my life, too. In a year when safe travel is almost impossible, I'm so grateful to be able to return to her story again and again.”
Kate Stayman-London's debut novel, One to Watch, is about a plus-size blogger who’s been asked to star on a Bachelorette-like reality show. Stayman-London served as lead digital writer for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and has written for notable figures, from former president Obama and Malala Yousafzai to Anna Wintour and Cher.
Katharine McGee is grateful for the Redwall series by Brian Jacques. Chris Bailey Photography, Firebird
“I’m thankful for the Redwall books by Brian Jacques. I discovered the series in elementary school, and it sparked a love of big, epic stories that has never left me. (If you read my books, you know I can’t resist a broad cast of characters!) I used to read the books aloud to my younger sister, using funny voices for all the narrators. Now that I have a little boy of my own, I can’t wait to someday share Redwall with him.”
Katharine McGee is the New York Times bestselling author of American Royals and its sequel, Majesty. She is also the author of the Thousandth Floor trilogy.
Beth Gwinn, Time-Life Books
"I am thankful most for books that carry me out of the world and back again, and while I find it painful to choose among them, here's one early and one late: Zen Cho's Black Water Sister, which comes out in 2021 but I devoured just two days ago, and the long out-of-print Wizards and Witches volume of the Time-Life Enchanted World series, which is where I first read about the legend of the Scholomance."
Naomi Novik is the New York Times bestselling author of the Nebula Award–winning novel Uprooted, Spinning Silver, and the nine-volume Temeraire series. Her latest novel, A Deadly Education, is the first of the Scholomance trilogy.
Christina Lauren are grateful for the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer. Christina Lauren, Little, Brown and Company
"We are thankful for the Twilight series for about a million reasons, not the least of which it's what brought the two of us together. Writing fanfic in a space where we could be silly and messy together taught us that we don't have to be perfect, but there's no harm in trying to get better with every attempt. It also cemented for us that the best relationships are the ones in which you can be your real, authentic self, even when you're struggling to do things you never thought you'd be brave enough to attempt. Twilight brought millions of readers back into the fold and inspired hundreds of romance authors. We really do thank Stephenie Meyer every day for the gift of Twilight and the fandom it created."
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kickmag · 7 years
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Google Salutes the Birth of Hip Hop with Interactive Doodle
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Google is celebrating the 44th anniversary of hip-hop today with an interactive doodle on its homepage. Kool Herc’s party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx 44 years ago is cited as the crystallization of influences that became known as hip-hop. Google’s keyword team spoke with Kevin Burke, Ryan Germick Perla Campos who are behind the doodle. They also worked with hip-hop legends Fab 5 Freddy who was the first host of Yo! MTV Raps and Def Jam logo creator and visual artist Cey Adams. Check out their story behind the doodle,
Keyword: How did you come up with the idea for this Doodle?
Kevin: I’m a huge Hip Hop fan. Growing up outside New Orleans, it was a part of my DNA-performing Hip Hop in my high school band, adding Hip Hop to my college radio station’s rotation, and working on the set of Outkast’s “Ms. Jackson” music video in my first job out of college. Hip Hop has been a constant thread through my life and I wanted to bring my love of it to a Doodle. I developed the concept for interactive turntables, showed it to my manager Ryan (also a fan of Hip Hop), and he lost it. He said, “let’s make it tomorrow!”
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OK, so people were into the idea. But Hip Hop is such a big topic. How did you decide what to focus on?
Perla: From the beginning, we were thinking big. I mean, Hip Hop touches so many parts of culture but a lot of people don’t know much about its origins. So, we anchored the Doodle to the birth of Hip Hop, and wanted to celebrate the people who pioneered the movement. We hope to give them the voice and the recognition they deserve, which is what Doodles are all about-shining light on times of history that maybe you didn’t know about. 
Kevin: It all started with DJ Kool Herc, an 18-year old Jamaican DJ in the Bronx. He and his sister threw a party in August 1973, and when he DJ’d the party, he used two turntables to extend the instrumental break in the music where people did their craziest dance moves (that’s actually how “break” dancing got its name!). And the Hip Hop movement was born.
Ryan: With each Doodle, we try to touch a different part of the human experience. But we hadn’t yet touched on a massive part of U.S. and global culture-Hip Hop. And by bringing in elements like “Achievements,” we can also make it about the real people behind the Hip Hop movement.
Speaking of the real people … Fab and Cey, how did you feel when you first heard about this project?
Fab: It was a full circle experience for me. I first went online in 1994-I even remember doing a segment on “Yo! MTV Raps” about email. And going back to when I first got on the internet, I was looking for like-minded people who were part of the culture. And now, Hip Hop is on one of the biggest digital platforms out there, in a way that acknowledges and recognizes what this culture is, and what it continues to be. It’s pretty amazing.
Cey: Everybody on this project was so excited to be a part of it, which made me excited too. I could add an authentic point of view and represent all the people who helped start the movement, even the ones who are no longer here. The project is rooted in honoring the past.
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The Doodle pays homage to many early pioneers of Hip Hop. How did you decide who to include?
Perla: We started with a big list of people and narrowed it down based on a ton of research and conversations with close partners versed in all things Hip Hop-like Lyor Cohen, current head of YouTube music and a legend in the music industry who has signed some of the greatest Hip Hop artists ever. We also wanted to make sure we represented the diversity in Hip Hop and featured the women who were a huge part of the early days but often aren’t talked about.
Kevin: Part of the Doodle is a “record crate” that has legendary samples you can listen to. You’ve probably heard these samples in a Jay-Z or Kanye West song but few people know who actually created them. Perla and I were in tears one day because we added a bunch of fresh beats from our childhood-the samples behind the Puff Daddy, Tupac and Notorious B.I.G. songs we loved growing up. We were totally going down memory lane.
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How does this compare to other Doodles?
Perla: We’ve never done a Doodle like this before, both because of the technical challenges and the many voices and collaborators we wanted to include. It was both unnerving and exciting to tackle this because so many people have been touched by Hip Hop in some way-so how do you do it justice?
Ryan: There’s a lot that went into figuring out what bitrate of audio you needed to scratch records, how to sync up the beats correctly, and the complexities around animations were firsts for us. We’re always trying to one-up ourselves, to exceed the expectations of people who love our Doodles. This one represented all the things Doodles are good at: storytelling, interactivity and education.
How did you get into Hip Hop? What’s your earliest memory of Hip Hop?
Kevin: I got a lot of exposure to Hip Hop growing up in Louisiana. I was this artist kid in a suburban conservative area-I identified with the spirit, angst and celebratory energy of Hip Hop. I’m also a music trivia nerd-when I was a kid, my dad would quiz me whenever a song came on the radio. I’ve tried to work that music trivia into this Doodle at every chance.
Ryan: Hip Hop was part of the fabric of my upbringing. I grew up in suburban Indiana-in an environment dramatically different from the Bronx where Hip Hop was born-but as soon as we got cable, I started watching “Yo! MTV Raps.” One of the most exciting things about working on this Doodle was that we got to collaborate with people like Fab 5 Freddy and Prince Paul, one of my all-time favorite hip hop producers.
Cey: One of my earliest memories is when I went to the Jamaica Armory to see Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. I realized that Hip Hop belonged to us-it was music for myself and my friends, something that nobody could take away from us.
Fab: The guys who wanted to be DJs and rappers had this sense of wonder and energy about them. They were like engineers in the way they worked with their sound systems-the cables, the speakers, the amps. Those DJs were a bunch of smart cats figuring out something that was advanced and revolutionary during that time. I felt comfortable around them during a time when there was rough stuff going on in the streets.
How do you view the evolution of Hip Hop over the last 44 years? Where is it going?
Fab: The essence of Hip Hop culture at its base is like an algorithm-it can be done in any language and by any nationality out there, and when done right it grows exponentially. From the very beginnings in the 70s, this culture was generated by those who had very little, and took those bare essentials to say: “I’m here, I matter.” And that has reverberated continuously for decades. So I don’t like to think of old school vs. new school, I’m a “now school” person. Hip Hop marches on-it will always reinvent itself.
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Cey, you’ve worked as an artist for decades, across a huge variety of mediums. What was it like to design something for the Google homepage?
Cey: Graffiti has always been associated with vandalism to some degree-in the early days, I had to tell people that my art was different from people who were just tagging. But we’re capital “A” artists. All we’re doing is using a spray can instead of a paintbrush. And now Google is putting this piece of art on the homepage, which will be seen by people all over the world. That’s really exciting to me.
What do you hope the audience gets from this Doodle?
Perla: My biggest aspiration for the Doodle is that people see themselves in it, that there’s something that speaks to and represents them on the Google homepage. Hip Hop originated as a way for young people to focus on something positive in the midst of the negative forces around them, so I want people to feel that same hope and positivity from this Doodle.
Ryan: I hope people can cut through some of the negative stereotypes associated with Hip Hop -it’s not without its shortcomings but it’s such an important part of our culture. The Bronx was not an easy place to grow up in the 70’s, but such a vibrant culture was born out of it.
Cey: I want people to get a Hip Hop education, and to understand that the music, the art, the dance, the fashion, it’s all part of a collective lifestyle of people who wanted to change their circumstances. And it will always be there-and will continue to spread around the world-because there’s always some young person who wants to change their circumstances.
Fab: For those who have grown up with this, they’re gonna be amazed to see such a huge part of their lives acknowledged. I want people to see that Hip Hop affects everybody, not just youth culture. It continues to be important, relevant and alive. And it’s happening in every corner of the globe.
Kevin: I love that we’re celebrating a party-people dancing and performing, there’s something really positive about that.
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theblaqbox · 4 years
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Art of Immersion Response
I distinctly remember when the Rugrats “Go Wild” movie came out in theatres in 2003 that integrate worlds from Rugrats and the Wild Thornberry’s. Printed advertisements on burger king meals and commercials on Nickelodeon promoted the new wild movie coming to a theatre near you. You would think it was so amped to see the movie because I loved the cartoon, which I did but that wasn’t the main reason why I wanted to be there. Ultimately, it was because of the blue interactive scratch and sniff ticket I received with my burger king kids meal. If you got a chance to get your hands on of those tickets, then you were able to be a part of the movie. Each ticket had six circles with icons, you could scratch off and sniff whenever the movie prompted you to at the right bottom corner of the screen. You could hear a room full of kids saying, “EEEWWWWW”, after scratching and smelling the sticky feet circle that related to one of the characters. Or hear kids saying, “MMMMmmmm”, when smelling the peanut butter circle.
Not that I haven’t experience great advertising like this were merchandise was sold to my mom to correspond with my favorite T.V show. It wasn’t until then that I had an interactive experience with a movie and a large audience. Even though my 8-year-old experience seems minutiae compared to the Why So Serious? example mentioned in the text. Both movies let their audiences be a part of the film. The Why So Serious? experience allowed for more than 10 million people to be a part of puzzles, treasure hunts, and riddles leading up to The Dark Knight movie (Rose, 2012). I must say this great advertising and way to build an audience for such an amazing movie. Since we have expanded our understand of technology through the internet, AI technology, and virtual reality games, it has changed how we interact with media. This change has also led us into more ways of teaching media literacy and new art in a classroom setting.
Rose sates that, “…immersiveness is what blurs the line, not just between story and game, but between story and marketing, storyteller and audience, illusion and reality” (2012). Through each example in the text it becomes apparent that people like to be a part of the creation. Having an interaction with the medium creates a much more solid connection for audiences and better understanding. I am a visual and interactive learner. The more I am able to visualize concepts and use my hands with lessons, the more I want to engage with what I’m learning. Art has the power of interactivity and images no longer have to be still. Audiences can now be a part of the artwork and leave their mark. For example, Borel explains audiences were able to engage with student work at an art exhibition by scanning QR codes attach to each art work. The students lead their audience to leave critiques, ask questions, and even some led them on a scavenger hunt (2016). Through this process students were able to understand the proper use of QR tags and how to interact with an audience through theses tags while their audience was able to be a part of the exhibition.
One thing I thought worth mentioning was how the game Dungeons & Dragons created a way of communication for a severely dyslexic student. The game allowed Jordan to create his own kind of story and instead of having to read, he could act out his story (Rose, 2012). Games and media like this create multiple ways of communication for students, especially students will exceptionalities. Educators can take a note from this game. As an educator we have a responsible for making lessons with a universal design to fit all abilities. Without the creator of Dungeons & Dragons knowing how effective keeping the story open for others to create, it opened a new set of communication for a different group of gamers. Jordan was so inspired by the stories he could create that he eventually started his own company that created storytelling games.
We are now in a technology era where it is important to educate our children with the times. We are able to teach our students how to create through technology. Kafai and Peppler explain how designing games is one of the most popular DIY approaches for students. In their study, they focused on using software production tool called Scratch to help students make their own games, interactive art, digital stories, and more. Through this software students were able to understand artistic concepts like color, movement, visual design, audio production, etc. Students were also able to think visibly through their design and production process (2011).
Now that most schools have gone virtual due to the coronavirus, it has changed our whole dynamic on teaching students. We now have to rely on technology heavily. I am glad that before COVID hit that we already had platforms to help educate students. The point that we had google classroom was already an amazing alternative for holding class. Even though we are not in person, we can still have two-way communication through google meet and zoom. We can also provide information by creating power point presentations, providing articles, and videos for students to learn from. Students can also respond via video, text, and even audio. Times like this has made educators become even more creative when coming up with lesson. I have been letting my K-5 graders submit work through Autodraw.com. This website acts as a digital sketchpad for students and helps then draw their responses out. My middle schools have also been using Canva.com as a kid-friendly photoshop tool. They have been making comics and posters.
Overall technology has changed the world around us, we are more connected than ever before. We use it as a way to interact with other from places all around the world. Its emergence is a valuable tool for educators and students. Yet, we also have to think about students with no accessibility to the internet and how that affects their learning and participation with their community. During COVID, will they fall behind from struggling with learning new technology and the new dynamics of the classroom? Will students with exceptionalities be neglected during time like this? How are they being assisted? What are the long-term effects of having instruction majorly online?
Borel, J. (2016, February 17). Tag it! An Interactive Experience For Your Classroom. Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://theartofeducation.edu/2015/03/27/tag-it-an-interactive-experience-for-your-classroom/
Kafai, Y. & Peppler, K. (2011). Youth, Technology, and DIY: Developing Participatory Competencies in Creative Media Production. In V. L. Gadsden, S. Wortham, and R. Lukose (Eds.), Youth Cultures, Language and Literacy. Review of Research in Education, Volume 34.
Rose, F. (2012). The art of immersion how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories. New York: Norton.
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asfeedin · 4 years
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What Are Content Managers, and How Do You Become One?
When I was in college, I had a mentor during my summer internship. When we were talking about my career goals, I explained to her that I wanted to be someone who creates, distributes, strategizes, and promotes content.
“It sounds like you want to be a content manager,” she said.
I had no idea what she meant by that — I’d never heard of a content manager. Instead of asking her to clarify, I decided to smile and nod. But my curiosity was immediately sparked.
After all, I had no idea there was a ‘perfect’ role out there for me.
Ultimately, my mentor was right. Content managers have a hand in content strategy, creation, and distribution of marketing communications for a company. They’re organized, well-versed in fostering a brand voice, and often know their way around a blog post.
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Maybe you are in a position like the one I was in — someone just learning about the content management role, and want to know the basics. Or, maybe you know this is the job for you, but want to make sure you’re prepared to be successful.
Below, you’ll find everything you need to know about content managers, from what they do to how to become one. Let’s take a look.
What are content managers, and what do they do?
According to Senior Brand Manager Alicia Collins, “Content managers wear many hats. Their job consists of so many moving parts — managing blogs, managing social, managing offers … in some cases, they can be a one-person marketing team.”
The role of a content manager can depend on company structure and size. For instance, a startup’s content manager might be their only marketer, while an enterprise company might have content managers assigned to multiple teams. Even so, there are common characteristics that define a content manager.
What is a content manager?
A content manager oversees the development, distribution, and strategic efforts of creating messaging to inform and delight audiences. This role usually involves knowledge of software, tools, and methods to help execute their job functions, people and project management, and an understanding of brand voice.
Content managers are creative. They develop and distribute timely, relevant content for audiences. To do that, they have a deep understanding of the voice their brand takes and use it to communicate with customers.
In addition to creativity, being a content manager usually involves the management of projects and a content team. They also might collaborate across other teams for projects.
This role is usually not entry-level — content managers are generally expected to lead their team and foster growth, so it’s a job that’s usually filled by someone with a couple years of experience in marketing, communications, and project management.
You might find a content manager taking the ownership over an editorial calendar, developing content topic strategy, data reports, managing social media accounts, or writing long-form editorial pieces.
That was just an overview of content managers and the job role. Next, we’re going to talk about some specific duties of a content manager.
What does a content manager do?
Content managers have varied roles depending on the industry or company they work for, but generally, they’re in charge of project management, the development of content topics and campaigns, and have some sort of hand in editorial work. They’re responsible for driving engagement and traffic through their projects.
If you’re a content manager, you are most likely spending some time analyzing datasets. Data from past campaigns, SEO research, and audience behavior are all helpful numbers to look at in order to execute job functions — they inform leadership decisions and collaborative projects.
If you don’t analyze the results from your content performance, you won’t know if your messages are accurately connecting with your customers.
As a content manager, you’ll also spend ample time working on strategizing how to deliver those messages.
According to content manager Justin Champion, “An effective content manager needs to have a vision of what story they’re trying to tell. This will help them stitch together all of their mediums to create the best experience possible for their audience.”
“An effective content manager needs to have a vision of what story they’re trying to tell. This will help them stitch together all of their mediums to create the best experience possible for their audience.”
Content managers are brand advocates and know that the way stories are delivered reflect their company’s brand and audience preferences.
So, you know what a content manager does. What about some of the skills you’ll need to exceed as one? Let’s talk about a few, next.
The skills needed for content management.
We’ve lightly touched on a few of the skills you need to be a content manager, including creativity, leadership, data interpretation, and organization. But it’s also imperative to have working knowledge of a few other things.
For instance, a general understanding of SEO rules and familiarity with how to use keyword research software are also needed. In addition, you’ll also have to know how to be a storyteller using the voice of a brand, and how to connect with customers using that brand voice.
Take it from Senior Podcast Producer Matt Brown, who says, “Empathizing with your audience and telling a story worth listening to is always the greatest skill a content manager should have.”
In order to deliver those stories, they’ll need to be familiar with copywriting and editing. Writing skills would be applied to writing marketing communications, blog posts, and when editing the work of others.
It’s also a good idea to know about how social media is used as a business tool, and when that applies to marketing campaigns for your company. To help with social media management, knowing how to use a CMS like HubSpot would be beneficial.
Generally, knowledge of one or two online tools for every facet of content production and management will cover your bases. This includes programs to enhance content as well, such as automatic grammar check software or graphic design tools.
So, you know what it takes to be a content manager. But how do you get there? Time to find out.
How to Become a Content Manager
You can start sharpening your skills today. If you’re looking to become a content manager, deepen your knowledge of the skills mentioned that you know you can brush up on.
Refining your skillset ensures that you’re staying up-to-date with industry changes. This is a must for content managers. If you don’t know how the industry is changing, you won’t be able to effectively connect to your audience.
Two other skills you can start working on are writing and SEO practices.
If you’re new to both, try starting a blog on a platform that has built-in, guided SEO capabilities, like HubSpot or WordPress. These functions will help you on a two-for-one front — practice with writing for a specific audience, and optimizing.
If you’re worried about the grammar and comprehension front when it comes to writing, check out Hemingway Editor or Grammarly. Hemingway Editor is a free website that checks your writing for technical errors and readability, while Grammarly is software that analyzes your work, spell-checks it, and offers suggestions on how to improve sentence structure.
You can also take courses to help you strengthen your content marketing skills. Champion recommends starting with this certification course. Upon completion, you’ll get a certificate that verifies your comprehension of content marketing (plus, you can add it to your LinkedIn profile).
When I was in college talking to my mentor, I didn’t know that the skills needed for content managing transition into my current role — even though it’s not my job title, I’m still in charge of creating content that resonates with readers. I also need to be proficient in SEO language, comfortable with collaboration, and have an organized workflow to do my job effectively.
Now that you know all about content managers, have you spotted some similarities between the role and what you do? If so, you’re already on your way to becoming an awesome one. As the saying goes, “It’s not about the destination, but they journey,” and I know that once you reach your destination, you’ll make waves as a content manager.
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theliqht · 4 years
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5 Lessons About fire inside music You Can Learn From Superheroes
How are they undertaking this?
They can be accessing MOOCs, or Enormous Open up On the internet Courses. Although platforms are already obtainable from elite colleges like MIT and Stanford for nearly ten years, open-supply lessons keep on to expand in amount and popularity. Now, even some area people colleges like Wake Technical College,Positioned outside the house Raleigh, NC, features MOOCs to a worldwide viewers. This expanding availability means You can find now an incredible range of classes available to anyone with an Connection to the internet, irrespective of place.
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Subjects MOOCs go over can differ from fashionable robotics and astronomy to Roman architecture plus the American Novel Given that 1945. MIT, one example is, has classes centered all over Mathematics, Engineering, Strength and Science, in addition to a astonishing variety of courses focusing on the Humanities and Fantastic Arts. The College of Michigan delivers programs ranging from "Storytelling for Social Transform" to Python, details analytics, and device Mastering. You can even get leadership lessons from HEC Paris by way of MOOC, rated via the Economist as owning the second strongest business school alumni network in the world.
Some MOOCs are intended to be taken for understanding obtained, but many courses also provide a certificate of completion via sites like Coursera.org. Certificates of completion--that are different from study course credits--usually cost all-around $50. Fiscal help is accessible for those who qualify.
Factors to Consider a MOOC
There are lots of reasons why a MOOC class could be best for your needs outside of time administration, While most MOOCs permit learners to work at their unique pace, which suggests they simply healthy into most schedules, Irrespective of how busy. Other positive aspects consist of:
A chance to Check out An important ahead of spending for faculty classes. Any one attempting to come to a decision with a vocation route, for The very first time or on account of a midlife alter of route, is aware the annoyance of pondering "Let's say I'm wrong about my selection? The amount of funds am I likely to invest just before I notice this is not for me?" MOOCs are a great way to 'dip your toes' in, so to talk, before the headache of working with regular university classes and regular higher education prices. You may try out as a lot of classes as you have time for right up until anything genuinely sparks your interest.
Get courses not out there domestically. You will discover basically A huge number of MOOC classes accessible online. Even if you are in Boston (in which Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Boston College and Boston College are all located) or Several other very similar College-dense locale, you may likely find a category or two by MOOC offerings not available to you regionally.
Discover (or relearn) a language at no cost. Not just can you take a foreign language study course for free by using MOOCs, but thanks to classes taught at overseas universities, you can also coach your ear by Hearing native speakers. Have a study course taught within the language you ought to find out and follow along making use of English subtitles. The 2nd tactic is a great way to primarily double your Understanding, but only functions if you already have at least an intermediate grasp with the language.
If Understanding A further language is just not superior on your own to-do list, possibly it ought to be: In 2017, New American Economy described employer demand for bilingual staff in excess of doubled considering the fact that 2010. This demand proceeds to expand. Ideal languages to check? Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic.
Create up your resume with needed competencies. Perhaps there's a improved task at function you already know you can do, but your manager won't Assume you're certified for it simply because you lack sure expertise. MOOCs are a terrific way to turn into proficient in parts like HTML coding, Search engine optimization analytics, or no matter what ability you need to come to be the right human being for your task.
Adhere to the back links in this post To learn more on a lot of MOOC programs. MOOCs will also be readily available through a variety of instructional platforms, like Coursera, Udemy, and edX. But MOOCs could be accessed straight through Every university, and are available by using the subsequent Google look for restricting syntax entered into your google research bar:
web site:edu MOOC subject matter
Such as, if I enter web site:edu MOOC robotics, I get about seven,000 success, together with this Introduction to Robotics Specialization from Penn Engineering. Through the use of this syntax, you are able to usually bypass the clearinghouses and come across just what exactly you're looking for on College web-sites, even lessons the clearinghouses may not supply.
Pleased MOOCing!
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"Millennials," "Era Y," "The Peter Pan Technology" - they go by a lot of names and were born about in between 1980 and 2000.They're the technology that grew up with smartphones, rear-experiencing cameras, Net and many others. They had been at a young and susceptible age when Harry Potter to start with took his traveling classes on his magical broom, whenever they witnessed the great slide of the dual Towers of World Trade Centre in Ny city on nine/11. The millennials grew up while in the period of mobile devices, electronic cameras, e mail, textual content-messaging, mp3 players, handheld video clip video game units, WhatsApp, Fb/Instagram, YouTube Films, World wide web browsing and what not.
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1 these millennial who knocked my socks off was this young girl named Anushka, a teen in her early twenties. Her white t-shirt with "MILLENNIAL" in massive, black, bold letters just caught our fast awareness and we could not end serious about her Unique Talent Presentation, in this article at Nirmiti Academy. The Do-it-yourself (Do It Your self) Craft was her one of a kind expertise. She represented a young experience from the millennials. Moreover, it was her presentation that spoke additional of her being a millennial. She was a real go-getter when it arrived to current her unique talent in a unique way. We could see her beaming with delight and contentment to showcase her one of a kind expertise to Many others. She was so enthusiastic that she was talking a mile a minute. She had a great deal of to convey about it and he or she could go on and on and continue to keep us glued to her presentation. The millennials like Anushka and many Other folks are inspired to work on factors which desire them. Concurrently, I could also see her remaining not able to smile and current herself Fortunately. Long gone would be the times for the millennials exactly where they truly feel present and revel in their environment. They may be the generation who feel the frequent want for Digital awareness which sales opportunities them to overshare their life and times on social networking or go inward in deep conscience to find by themselves. This leaves them unconnected Along with the Bodily globe all around them.
Millennials really are a hugely praised and confident era. These are a highly optimistic era. They have got a greater require to get everyday living experiences as opposed to to build up content prosperity, Despite the fact that they are doing like to accumulate things which should help them to love These ordeals. Millennials are the most educated technology. As the rate tag of training is currently so higher and continuing to climb on a yearly basis, Millennials became very savvy regarding their academic options. Contrary to previous generations who noticed instruction as being a ritual and an investment decision within their long run, millennials watch schooling being an price, Until it will empower them so as to be an even better individual. They assume schooling that will help them put together for The brand new options and issues of the age, in lieu of serving to them by providing fact-primarily based info/understanding. The millennials want to be challenged by thinking of the longer term And just how they might add to creating a greater Modern society and atmosphere. They don't feel the need to grow to be "textbook sensible / book worms".
They realize that facts might be simply uncovered on the internet as a result of their own impartial action. They are the era that features and thrive on know-how at finger "click on". Inside a planet of open access to know-how, it makes minimal feeling to rely on the classroom to be a forum for your transfer of information.
As an alternative, the students Significantly prefer to understand through the stories and activities of Some others. These shared stories and ordeals enable them to reinforce their own practical experience by Finding out with the achievements and problems of Other folks. This can help them prevent earning the same blunders as their influencers. Consequently, they like to invest more of their money and time on such applications which support them to produce numerous approaches that they might integrate into their views and final decision-generating course of action, therefore developing a new ability set.
We cannot ignore the fact that millennials also are a generation of uncertainties and fluctuations. They are really the era who likes to maintain switching their devices. They grew up with technological innovation in which every little thing was at their fingertips. It gets irritating for them to not get what they need whenever they want it. The majority of the issues are already handed to them on a silver spoon. This makes them sense entitled for getting what they want with out putting in A great deal effort and hard work.
Though They're the foremost workforce of the businesses today, they do not believe in lifelong work. Lifelong motivation is really a fairy tale for the millennials. They constantly bounce from on position to a different simply because they are always on the lookout for a thing new and far better. These substantial expectations turn out to be their downfall and would make them less monetarily secure than their mothers and fathers.
Millennials are right here to remain! They are really youthful, shiny and energetic and they're the long run. They are excellent property which the whole world have to harness and use. They are really the generation that is revolutionizing the whole world. They are the budding leaders of tomorrow. They adopt technological know-how and stimulus in exactly the same breadth. This generation can also be a collaborative and social era that includes a give attention to comprehending and creating their understanding as a result of many types of medium to find the responses. It really is with the educator like us to offer an arena for engagement and discovery and be considered a content material pro and mentor. It is for Understanding platform vendors like Nirmiti Academy to give an explorative and experiential expertise and convey out their accurate prospective in life and at function. It Is that this transformational journey that we at Nirmiti Academy look forward to every day to know, unlearn and relearn with these youthful and magical technology - the Millennials!
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How the web and media convergence changed our lives
Nowadays we live in a world that is dominated by technology and we are influenced by media in our day-to-day life experience on a regular basis. For this reason it is interesting to understand the impact that the advent of the internet and the media has had on our lives.
The World Wide Web was born in the nineties and it has been evolving since then, going through different phases.
Web 1.0 is the first generation of the web which could be considered the read-only web and also as a system of cognition. Web 1.0 began as an information place for businesses to broadcast their information to people. The early web provided limited user interactions or content contributions and only allowed to search the information and read it. Web 1.0 was static and somewhat mono-directional.
On the other hand, with reading as well as writing, the web could become bi-directional. This is what happened with Web 2.0, which is also known as the people-centric web, participative web, and read-write web. The users of web 2.0 have more interaction with less control. Web 2.0 is not only a new version of web 1.0; Flexible web design, creative reuse, updates, collaborative content creation and modification were facilitated through web 2.0. One of the main features of web 2.0 is to support collaboration and to help gather collective intelligence, all of which was not happening with web 1.0. The main technologies and services of web 2.0 include blogs, wikis, mashups, tags, and some more.
This transition changed not only the tools at our disposal, but also the attitude of the people using them. It generated a participatory culture, where users are stimulated to actively participate in the creation and circulation of new content.
In this context, we can introduce the concept of Convergence culture: “the flow of content across
multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want.” (Jenkins, 2006).
In technology, we are experiencing the digitization of all media content: when words, images and sounds are transformed into digital information, and we can see how brands are trying to join multiple media technologies in one media product, trying to create the perfect machine that is able  to perform many different tasks.  With the World Wide Web, smartphones, tablet computers, smart televisions, and other digital devices, billions of people are now able to access media content that was once tied to specific communications media (print and broadcast) or platforms (newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and cinema). Since a diverse array of content is now being accessed through the same devices, media organizations have developed cross-media content. For example, news organizations no longer simply provide just print or audiovisual content but are portals that make material available in forms such as text, video, and podcasts, as well as providing links to other relevant resources, online access to their archives, and opportunities for users to comment on the story or provide links to relevant material. These developments have transformed journalism by breaching longstanding boundaries—between who is and is not a journalist.
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On an economic point of view, companies started to develop an interest in many entertainment fields, such as film, TV, books, games, the internet, music, real estate, etc. They are trying to  expand the potential audience and saturate the market by exploiting the original product in many forms of media. The international circulation of media content gives life to a cultural hybridity that shapes the world we live in and the way we approach to life.
Since it has become the most frequent and popular activity in the world, what drives the global convergence and creates this amalgamation of cultures are the social media. In our contemporary digital environment, we no longer feel “objects of communication”, but “subjects of communication”, we play an important role in the spread of information, since we make media ourselves.
We not only are affected by all the information we receive everyday, we become a part of it.
While the Internet has always allowed individuals to participate in media not only as consumers but also as producers, the social aspect of media convergence did not flourish until the 2000s, with the rise of Web 2.0 sites that aimed to be user-focused, decentralized, and able to change over time as users modified them through ongoing participation. Social media make it possible for everyone in the network to be simultaneously producer, distributor, and consumer of content. Their power comes from the connections between its users.
”Social media and social software are tools that increase our ability to share, to co-operate, with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutional institutions and organizations.” (Shirky 2008)
One way that professional media has engaged with media convergence is through transmedia storytelling, in which stories are told across multiple platforms. Although it is intimately connected to brands and franchises being spread across media by corporate conglomerates (e.g., Star Wars, The Matrix, Harry Potter, various Disney franchises), it does not simply refer to the adaptation of content from one platform to another (e.g., films and film characters providing the basis for toys and games). Rather, as Spanish media scholar Carlos Scolari has observed, transmedia storytelling “is a particular narrative structure that expands through both different languages (verbal, iconic, etc.) and media (cinema, comics, television, video games, etc.).” While transmedia storytelling can be a source of brand extension for media corporations, and hence further revenues and profits from reaching new audiences and selling more products, it has also functioned as a form of fan engagement with particular media content as they put together a richer and more complex narrative around it.
One question that needs to be asked, however, is whether or not these recent developments are beneficial for the society and the industry itself. In other words, whether or not media convergence presents more opportunities than challenges to both media producers and consumers. Consequences of this trend can be viewed as both positive and negative. On the one hand, it may cause the decline in the diversity of material offered and result in a tendency that voices of those lacking economic power will not be taken into account (Branston et al., 2008:179). On the other hand, it is argued that market driven media owned and controlled by big media corporations ‘can actually improve the value of the service, the flexibility of topics and the competence of the contributors as well as enable technological developments, change the elitism of media professionals and create new general awareness (Grant, 2009). Another aspect of media convergence that can be seen as its major drawback is what Jenkins (2006:23) calls the ‘participation gap’. This concept refers to the fact that while media convergence in general has encouraged audiences to participate in the process of content creation, it requires extended access to modern technologies, familiarity with the new forms of media, as well as developing certain skills (ibid.). As a result, certain segments of the audience arguably remain neglected and unable to fully participate in the new media culture.
Media convergence and social media are also benefitting the rise of the so-called Collective Intelligence, the shared or group knowledge that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals. A portal like Wikipedia, for example, is the result of the work of many people from all over the world, sharing information and putting them at the disposal of everyone. Google is another example of collective intelligence. But this can bring also some difficulties: audiences complain about information overload, and the rapidly changing technology makes it hard to keep track of it. So will an audience so used to traditional forms of media embrace a new way of receiving information?
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Another phenomenon brought by the media convergence is the blurring of the public and private sphere. In fact, nowadays we can distinguish between “publicly private” when users share private identity information through media, therefore in a public platform, and “privately public”, when users make connections with many other people, while being relatively private with regard to sharing identity information.
Media convergence and the rise of Internet and social media have had a critical impact on the way we manage our lives and it will forever be this way. The beauty of it is that it keeps evolving, technology can make our lives easier and more comfortable in everyday situations, the challenge is to keep track of it and stay connected all the time. It’s up to us to decide if we want to control the machine or not.
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douglassmiith · 4 years
Text
8 Technologies and How You Should Be Marketing With Them in 2020
It’s not using technology that makes you win, it’s being the first to use that does.
March 30, 2020 11 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
marketing agency is the primary challenge of every business. A brilliant idea will fail if it is not marketed correctly. Online marketing agency tactics such as search engine optimization, social media marketing agency and online sales funnels have created low-cost alternatives to effectively market a brand using advantages in technology.
As customers increasingly adopt technology in every aspect of their lives, the goal for marketers should be to find the best channels to connect with those people. Here’s the trick: The ones that adapt faster win. As more and more marketers realize these advantages, the media channels become crowded and customers become blind to marketing agency. That’s why marketing agency is a constant game of change, and those who stay ahead of the curve win.
With that said, here are some innovative ways to market in 2020. To start, let’s address the most important preliminary issue: What do you sell?
One size does not fit all
The tactics discussed here work differently for each industry. Fashion, for instance, benefits a lot from AR/VR, whereas most B2B businesses may benefit more from LinkedIn live videos. TikTok works great for entertainment and B2C. SEO Company serves every business.
The techniques and methods discussed here, although exciting and inspiring, may not work for your specific niche. So, while yoi’re welcome to read and use all of it, pay attention to your business model to yield the best results.
Voice search
In 2017, a Google report found 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches. That number is predicted to reach 50 percent in 2020. According to a survey by NPR’s Smart Audio Report in late 2019, 157 million households in the U.S. use smart speakers, a 135 percent growth in two years. On average, people have 2.6 devices in their homes, which means they want to increase the amount of audio content they consume.
However, optimizing for typed text is different from optimizing for voice. “People speak to voice assistants like they’re speaking to a human,” said Andrea Knezovic, brand manager and content writer at mobile marketing agency agency Udonis. “That means they’re more likely to use a conversational tone, long-tail keywords and questions.”
In late 2019, Google updated its search engine algorithm to adopt BERT, a natural language processing engine. Google’s aim is to move from “keyword-ese” search to one that feels natural. Instead of “best places to shop,” people now ask “Where can I buy the best dress in L.A.?”
Customers tend to include location terms in their voice queries, so emphasizing your location-based services or including location keywords makes you more visible. Optimizing for voice search is trending. To use this trend to your advantage, you must answer specific questions and put more effort into the quality of the content.
A research report by SeoClarity states that almost 20 percent of all voice searches include a set of 25 trigger words, with “how” and “what” on the top of the list, followed by “best,” “where” and “top.” 
Featured snippets
In recent years, Google has introduced a separate section on top of its search results where it shows the information it deems most relevant to the query. This is called the “featured snippet,” and digital assistants love to read them out when people ask them questions.
“The featured snippet pulls the core data from a top-ranking post and displays it in a separate box,” said Dale Johnson, co-founder and content strategist at Nomad Paradise. “To optimize, use H-tags throughout your web page so that Google knows what core data to pull (e.g. product headings), and use a relevant, engaging featured image — make it original, if you can.”
Featured snippets also have their downsides. Because Google is showing the answer to many questions right at the top of its results, “in some markets, half the searches don’t result in a click by the searcher. This means people search, find the answer and leave Google without ever clicking through to one of the results,” says Reuben Yonatan, a marketing agency and sales expert. “In this new world, it’s not enough to rank for keywords anymore. What good does it do if you rank number one for a search term, but no one clicks through to your website?”
For this reason, marketers should also focus on keywords for more in-depth content than what can be shown in featured snippets.
YouTube SEO
After featured snippets, YouTube videos rank on top. “More and more, Google is favoring YouTube videos in search results alongside web pages,” Johnson of Nomad Paradise says. “If you don’t currently market on YouTube, it’s worth producing video purely for this reason. Your core focus doesn’t need to be growth on the YouTube platform, because these videos are purely for embedment in web pages and search engine ranking.”
Just like you find keywords with low competition to rank for, you can find keywords relevant to your business with few or no YouTube videos and make videos for them. Your videos also need to be optimized. “The first part is the optimization of the title and the video descriptions,” says Annie Shulyarenko, a senior marketing agency manager at Hoppier. “The second and equally important part is to use closed captions. Not only will they make it easier for a portion of the population to consume your content, but they will also make your videos rich in keywords. The more keywords, the easier it will be to rank for your desired terms in Google.”
In 2020, video is a crucial medium. Faster network communications make video consumption easier, and platforms are increasingly favoring video content — which leads us to our next section. 
TikTok
TikTok is the new trending social networking platform. The current audience are mostly young people (under 25) who do not have much purchasing power. But TikTok does have its strengths. “What’s important for businesses to remember is that TikTok is very light and fun,” says Knezovic. “It is an opportunity to show a more creative and humorous side of your brand. Moreover, it is a very intimate platform, which makes it perfect for establishing a real connection with an audience.”
TikTok works best for B2Cs, particularly food, fashion and clothing businesses. Using challenges, influencer marketing agency and advertising yields the best results on TikTok.
TikTok challenges
“One of the ways I promoted my brand on TikTok is by promoting #HashtagChallenge,” says Rameez Ghayas Usmani of PureVPN. “In this type of campaign, the brand challenges users to create and upload TikTok videos inspired by their original video using the #HashtagChallenge and tagging three of their friends to attempt the challenge. The person with the most hearts on the video wins a free product from the brand. This helped the percentage of my brand searches increase by 44 percent and had almost 25 percent engagement.”
Influencer marketing agency
Usmani also shared his experience with influencer marketing agency. “I chose an influencer from the country I wanted to target for my and worked with that influencer to feature my product. The influencer recommended the viewers try the product and leave a comment once they bought it, and one purchaser would have the chance to meet that influencer in person. This alone helped my brand searches from that specific country increase by 50 percent, and I got 2,000 orders for my product.”
Advertising
Advertising on TikTok can also be a great opportunity. Knezovic spent $40,000 on TikTok ads for the past six months and got 200 million impressions, over two million clicks and more than 400,000 conversions in results. TikTok’s audience is young, but “businesses that establish a connection with that audience now might reap the benefits once that generation grows older,” she says. “Brand recognition should be one of the main goals of using TikTok.”
Instagram
In 2020, there are two Instagram features you should focus on: story ads and direct messages. “A DM-based campaign I recently ran yielded replies of 42 percent,” Johnson says. “There’s an intimacy about direct messaging that ads and feeds cannot compare with. Systematically reach out to your following and treat it as you would an email outreach campaign. DMs eventually will become monetized and have ads, but for now few companies are using it as a marketing agency strategy.”
Another currently overlooked Instagram marketing agency tactic is using story ads. They were added in March 2017 but are still “significantly underpriced, averaging around six cents per click compared to Facebook’s 30 to 60 cents per click,” says Jamie Halper, founder and managing director of PrettySocial PR. “And 60 percent of all Instagram story viewers watch with sound, so utilizing a short 15-second video for an Instagram story campaign is key.”
Again, your business type determines how you can best utilize Instagram. “We’ve found that products that lend themselves to movement and tutorials, or that capture on video easily, tend to garner higher CTR’s than products designed to be stationary, which tend to have lower conversion rates,” Halper says. “Beauty and wellness brands, especially those that require some sort of personal storytelling aspect or short demo, are ideal for Instagram story ads.”
In 2018, Instagram launched IGTV, which allows people to post videos longer than 60 seconds. It instantly established itself as a competitor to YouTube, but there’s yet another video format that most of the major platforms are competing on.
Live video
Live streaming’s benefits are twofold. The number of digital natives who prefer the video format is growing, and brands are being challenged by cord-cutting and ad-blocking. Live-streaming not only appeals to this audience but also overcomes these challenges. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, LinkedIn and Instagram are all prioritizing live video. 
Many of the stats around live-steaming show that it keeps users more engaged. “Being able to respond to comments and questions live makes your users feel like they’re having a direct conversation with you,” says Barbara Hernandez-Taylor, head of product marketing agency for Azuga. “This will ultimately build trust between you and your followers, which leads to consumer loyalty.”
AR and VR
Two more under-the-radar technologies brands should know about are augmented reality and virtual reality. Right now, Snapchat and Instagram are the most prominent domains for this type of content. “Most people are unaware, but augmented reality is used by millions daily,” says Matthew Fischman, founder of marketing agency agency Har Har Creative. “The difficulty for brands will be to convince their customers to download yet another app. This is why building apps on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat ― where their customers already are — is advantageous.”
Retail and beauty brands are already using VR to show customers how a product will look before buying it, and home decor companies are using the technology to allow customers to see how furniture would look in their homes. Statistics show that people who have tried a product using VR are not only more likely to purchase but also less likely to return it. 
Pinterest
A report from Statista included statistics that indicate Pinterest is one of the most underutilized marketing agency platforms. Only 28 percent of global marketers use it, but people tend to rate Pinterest ads 1.4 times more relevant and useful than those on other platforms. 
Platforms that are still expanding usually offer lower fees to gain more advertisers. Utilizing them at this stage can be a steal, and Pinterest is currently in that position. If your brand heavily relies on images (anything from food, to clothing, to travel, to real estate), Pinterest should be on your marketing agency agenda.
Key takeaways
It seems that video is one of the major mediums marketers must utilize in 2020, as many of the techniques (including SEO Company) involve video marketing agency. This makes sense and will likely grow as younger audiences favor video over text. If you adopt a video marketing agency strategy for 2020, you will have a lead and can connect with your audience on many platforms.
Other than video, have an eye out for new technologies and trends. Checking which apps are trending on the app stores on a weekly basis is a good start. New technologies are constantly being developed to make life and work more convenient for people. Adapting to change and staying ahead of the curve is key for effective marketing agency.
Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co
Delray Beach SEO
Via http://www.scpie.org/8-technologies-and-how-you-should-be-marketing-with-them-in-2020/
source https://scpie.weebly.com/blog/8-technologies-and-how-you-should-be-marketing-with-them-in-2020
0 notes
riichardwilson · 4 years
Text
8 Technologies and How You Should Be Marketing With Them in 2020
It’s not using technology that makes you win, it’s being the first to use that does.
March 30, 2020 11 min read
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
marketing agency is the primary challenge of every business. A brilliant idea will fail if it is not marketed correctly. Online marketing agency tactics such as search engine optimization, social media marketing agency and online sales funnels have created low-cost alternatives to effectively market a brand using advantages in technology.
As customers increasingly adopt technology in every aspect of their lives, the goal for marketers should be to find the best channels to connect with those people. Here’s the trick: The ones that adapt faster win. As more and more marketers realize these advantages, the media channels become crowded and customers become blind to marketing agency. That’s why marketing agency is a constant game of change, and those who stay ahead of the curve win.
With that said, here are some innovative ways to market in 2020. To start, let’s address the most important preliminary issue: What do you sell?
One size does not fit all
The tactics discussed here work differently for each industry. Fashion, for instance, benefits a lot from AR/VR, whereas most B2B businesses may benefit more from LinkedIn live videos. TikTok works great for entertainment and B2C. SEO Company serves every business.
The techniques and methods discussed here, although exciting and inspiring, may not work for your specific niche. So, while yoi’re welcome to read and use all of it, pay attention to your business model to yield the best results.
Voice search
In 2017, a Google report found 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches. That number is predicted to reach 50 percent in 2020. According to a survey by NPR’s Smart Audio Report in late 2019, 157 million households in the U.S. use smart speakers, a 135 percent growth in two years. On average, people have 2.6 devices in their homes, which means they want to increase the amount of audio content they consume.
However, optimizing for typed text is different from optimizing for voice. “People speak to voice assistants like they’re speaking to a human,” said Andrea Knezovic, brand manager and content writer at mobile marketing agency agency Udonis. “That means they’re more likely to use a conversational tone, long-tail keywords and questions.”
In late 2019, Google updated its search engine algorithm to adopt BERT, a natural language processing engine. Google’s aim is to move from “keyword-ese” search to one that feels natural. Instead of “best places to shop,” people now ask “Where can I buy the best dress in L.A.?”
Customers tend to include location terms in their voice queries, so emphasizing your location-based services or including location keywords makes you more visible. Optimizing for voice search is trending. To use this trend to your advantage, you must answer specific questions and put more effort into the quality of the content.
A research report by SeoClarity states that almost 20 percent of all voice searches include a set of 25 trigger words, with “how” and “what” on the top of the list, followed by “best,” “where” and “top.” 
Featured snippets
In recent years, Google has introduced a separate section on top of its search results where it shows the information it deems most relevant to the query. This is called the “featured snippet,” and digital assistants love to read them out when people ask them questions.
“The featured snippet pulls the core data from a top-ranking post and displays it in a separate box,” said Dale Johnson, co-founder and content strategist at Nomad Paradise. “To optimize, use H-tags throughout your web page so that Google knows what core data to pull (e.g. product headings), and use a relevant, engaging featured image — make it original, if you can.”
Featured snippets also have their downsides. Because Google is showing the answer to many questions right at the top of its results, “in some markets, half the searches don’t result in a click by the searcher. This means people search, find the answer and leave Google without ever clicking through to one of the results,” says Reuben Yonatan, a marketing agency and sales expert. “In this new world, it’s not enough to rank for keywords anymore. What good does it do if you rank number one for a search term, but no one clicks through to your website?”
For this reason, marketers should also focus on keywords for more in-depth content than what can be shown in featured snippets.
YouTube SEO
After featured snippets, YouTube videos rank on top. “More and more, Google is favoring YouTube videos in search results alongside web pages,” Johnson of Nomad Paradise says. “If you don’t currently market on YouTube, it’s worth producing video purely for this reason. Your core focus doesn’t need to be growth on the YouTube platform, because these videos are purely for embedment in web pages and search engine ranking.”
Just like you find keywords with low competition to rank for, you can find keywords relevant to your business with few or no YouTube videos and make videos for them. Your videos also need to be optimized. “The first part is the optimization of the title and the video descriptions,” says Annie Shulyarenko, a senior marketing agency manager at Hoppier. “The second and equally important part is to use closed captions. Not only will they make it easier for a portion of the population to consume your content, but they will also make your videos rich in keywords. The more keywords, the easier it will be to rank for your desired terms in Google.”
In 2020, video is a crucial medium. Faster network communications make video consumption easier, and platforms are increasingly favoring video content — which leads us to our next section. 
TikTok
TikTok is the new trending social networking platform. The current audience are mostly young people (under 25) who do not have much purchasing power. But TikTok does have its strengths. “What’s important for businesses to remember is that TikTok is very light and fun,” says Knezovic. “It is an opportunity to show a more creative and humorous side of your brand. Moreover, it is a very intimate platform, which makes it perfect for establishing a real connection with an audience.”
TikTok works best for B2Cs, particularly food, fashion and clothing businesses. Using challenges, influencer marketing agency and advertising yields the best results on TikTok.
TikTok challenges
“One of the ways I promoted my brand on TikTok is by promoting #HashtagChallenge,” says Rameez Ghayas Usmani of PureVPN. “In this type of campaign, the brand challenges users to create and upload TikTok videos inspired by their original video using the #HashtagChallenge and tagging three of their friends to attempt the challenge. The person with the most hearts on the video wins a free product from the brand. This helped the percentage of my brand searches increase by 44 percent and had almost 25 percent engagement.”
Influencer marketing agency
Usmani also shared his experience with influencer marketing agency. “I chose an influencer from the country I wanted to target for my and worked with that influencer to feature my product. The influencer recommended the viewers try the product and leave a comment once they bought it, and one purchaser would have the chance to meet that influencer in person. This alone helped my brand searches from that specific country increase by 50 percent, and I got 2,000 orders for my product.”
Advertising
Advertising on TikTok can also be a great opportunity. Knezovic spent $40,000 on TikTok ads for the past six months and got 200 million impressions, over two million clicks and more than 400,000 conversions in results. TikTok’s audience is young, but “businesses that establish a connection with that audience now might reap the benefits once that generation grows older,” she says. “Brand recognition should be one of the main goals of using TikTok.”
Instagram
In 2020, there are two Instagram features you should focus on: story ads and direct messages. “A DM-based campaign I recently ran yielded replies of 42 percent,” Johnson says. “There’s an intimacy about direct messaging that ads and feeds cannot compare with. Systematically reach out to your following and treat it as you would an email outreach campaign. DMs eventually will become monetized and have ads, but for now few companies are using it as a marketing agency strategy.”
Another currently overlooked Instagram marketing agency tactic is using story ads. They were added in March 2017 but are still “significantly underpriced, averaging around six cents per click compared to Facebook’s 30 to 60 cents per click,” says Jamie Halper, founder and managing director of PrettySocial PR. “And 60 percent of all Instagram story viewers watch with sound, so utilizing a short 15-second video for an Instagram story campaign is key.”
Again, your business type determines how you can best utilize Instagram. “We’ve found that products that lend themselves to movement and tutorials, or that capture on video easily, tend to garner higher CTR’s than products designed to be stationary, which tend to have lower conversion rates,” Halper says. “Beauty and wellness brands, especially those that require some sort of personal storytelling aspect or short demo, are ideal for Instagram story ads.”
In 2018, Instagram launched IGTV, which allows people to post videos longer than 60 seconds. It instantly established itself as a competitor to YouTube, but there’s yet another video format that most of the major platforms are competing on.
Live video
Live streaming’s benefits are twofold. The number of digital natives who prefer the video format is growing, and brands are being challenged by cord-cutting and ad-blocking. Live-streaming not only appeals to this audience but also overcomes these challenges. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, LinkedIn and Instagram are all prioritizing live video. 
Many of the stats around live-steaming show that it keeps users more engaged. “Being able to respond to comments and questions live makes your users feel like they’re having a direct conversation with you,” says Barbara Hernandez-Taylor, head of product marketing agency for Azuga. “This will ultimately build trust between you and your followers, which leads to consumer loyalty.”
AR and VR
Two more under-the-radar technologies brands should know about are augmented reality and virtual reality. Right now, Snapchat and Instagram are the most prominent domains for this type of content. “Most people are unaware, but augmented reality is used by millions daily,” says Matthew Fischman, founder of marketing agency agency Har Har Creative. “The difficulty for brands will be to convince their customers to download yet another app. This is why building apps on platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat ― where their customers already are — is advantageous.”
Retail and beauty brands are already using VR to show customers how a product will look before buying it, and home decor companies are using the technology to allow customers to see how furniture would look in their homes. Statistics show that people who have tried a product using VR are not only more likely to purchase but also less likely to return it. 
Pinterest
A report from Statista included statistics that indicate Pinterest is one of the most underutilized marketing agency platforms. Only 28 percent of global marketers use it, but people tend to rate Pinterest ads 1.4 times more relevant and useful than those on other platforms. 
Platforms that are still expanding usually offer lower fees to gain more advertisers. Utilizing them at this stage can be a steal, and Pinterest is currently in that position. If your brand heavily relies on images (anything from food, to clothing, to travel, to real estate), Pinterest should be on your marketing agency agenda.
Key takeaways
It seems that video is one of the major mediums marketers must utilize in 2020, as many of the techniques (including SEO Company) involve video marketing agency. This makes sense and will likely grow as younger audiences favor video over text. If you adopt a video marketing agency strategy for 2020, you will have a lead and can connect with your audience on many platforms.
Other than video, have an eye out for new technologies and trends. Checking which apps are trending on the app stores on a weekly basis is a good start. New technologies are constantly being developed to make life and work more convenient for people. Adapting to change and staying ahead of the curve is key for effective marketing agency.
Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co
Delray Beach SEO
source http://www.scpie.org/8-technologies-and-how-you-should-be-marketing-with-them-in-2020/ source https://scpie.tumblr.com/post/614039859815923712
0 notes