Google: Popups Will be Penalized

If you value SEO, remove popups from your website.

Google doesn't love them anymore.

This January, its bots began to penalize sites that include them.

“Pages that show intrusive interstitials provide a poorer experience to users than other pages where content is immediately accessible,” Google's engineers proclaim.

Your site is toast if it displays a popup that covers content after the user lands on a page, or that appears while he's viewing it. 

You get doubly burned if the user has to kill the popup to view the content.

The only allowances Google makes are for helpful popups, like those seeking age verification or informing visitors about cookies.

5 Big Tips for Better Mobile Marketing

Sophorn Chhay contributed today's post. He is the inbound marketer at Trumpia, a mobile content delivery service that lets users customize their one-to-one marketing.

Sure, you might have a mobile marketing plan. But is it innovative?

In 2016, run-of-the-mill approaches won't take you very far; and, although most mobile marketers follow year-long plans, the fact is effective mobile marketing requires constant innovation.

If you want to stay ahead, check out the following tips, guaranteed to boost your results.

Tip One: Get Tight with Video Ads

Today, 80 percent of Internet users carry smartphones, and buyers are responding to video ads at alarming rates. You can benefit massively from video advertising.

Tip Two: Get Automated with SMS

Did you know you can automate your own SMS campaigns? Better yet, you can segment your audience and shoot out customized text messages. To get automated with SMS, contact a trustworthy provider. Textpedite, among others, streamlines the process.

Tip Three: Distribute an App

Americans currently spend more time using mobile apps than they do watching television. By incorporating an app into your plans, you'll give your brand greater meaning. Marketers are already reworking their entire strategies around apps (airlines, for example, are offering “nearby eatery” apps to frequent flyers). But make your app count, if you want to see it used.

Tip Four: Gain Data from SMS Surveys

Feedback means a lot to customers, and it's easy to conduct business when you know your customers' wants, needs and buying habits. SMS surveys procure a wealth of data and can garner otherwise unobtainable feedback.

Tip Five: Create a Social Campaign

In today’s mobile world, antisocial companies drop like flies, while companies like Starbucks win big. The brand’s “Race Together” and “Create Jobs for the USA” campaigns proved that promoting altruistic causes works. Sure, goodwill is a byproduct of powerful business practices; but it’s also a byproduct of social outreach.

The Experience Stack

A race is on to deliver "the experience stack," says Mike Wadhera in TechCrunch.

Mobility has fundamentally changed computing, he says.

While desktop computing was all about your timeline-based profile (think Facebook), mobile computing is about in-the-moment self-expression (think Snapchat).

With the onrush of mobility, "You are not a profile. You are simply you."

We've all become, in effect, amateur auteurs. 

"The stories we tell each other now begin and end visually, making the narrative more literal than ever," Wadhera says.

Providers are racing to monopolize mobility by building a pile of immersive toys he calls the experience stack (pictured here).

"The full stack is in service of capturing and communicating real-world moments," Wadhera says. "Reality is its foundation. As you move up, the layers transition from physical to logical. At the top is the application layer made up of products like Snapchat Live and Periscope."

Tomorrow’s toys will boggle our storyteller's brains, Wadhera says.

"Our online and offline identities are converging, the stories we tell each other now start and end visually and investments at every layer of a new stack are accelerating the development of experience-driven products. Taken together, these trends have cracked open the door for a new golden age of technology."

Containers of the Past

For nearly 200 years, Americans used stoneware to keep perishable food. It was, in fact, the predominant houseware of the 19th century.

The ceramic containers were heavy and expensive to ship, so stoneware potteries cropped up everywhere to serve local markets.

But after 1913, when refrigerators were introduced, the once-ubiquitous potteries sputtered and failed.

You could say, refrigerators had a chilling effect on the stoneware business.

Today's refrigerator is, of course, the smartphone, as this week's Mobile World Congress makes clear.

And, as the event makes clear, the business without a mobile strategy today is the stoneware pottery of tomorrow.

As ad agency exec Rishad Tobaccowala says, "The future doe not fit in the containers of the past."

What's your mobile strategy?

Pandemonium? Blame the Media.

Presidential politics rides a wayward bus.

It's named Media.

Media revolutions drive voters away from party élites, as historian Jill Lepore says in her article about populism in The New Yorker.

Lepore looks back at party upheavals of the early 19th century.

Although slavery was the big issue, the rise of populism was driven by revolutions in media:

• In the 1830s, advances in printing brought down the cost of a newspaper to a penny;

• In the 1840s, newspapers began to get news by telegraph;

• In the 1850s, newspapers began to include illustrations based on photographs.

"For a while, party élites lost control, until the system reached equilibrium in the form of a relatively stable contest between Democrats and a new party, the Republicans," Lepore says.

Then came the 1890s, when occurred another populist revolt, "which took place during another acceleration in the speed of communication, brought about by the telephone, the Linotype, and halftone printing, technologies that allowed daily newspapers and illustrated magazines, in particular, to carry political news faster, and to more readers, than ever before."

In the same decade, color printing appeared, which gave rise a nationwide "poster craze." Campaign posters papered every wall of every building, in every city; and every candidate "ran as an outsider."

Oddly enough, the 20th century was saner. 

Although voters saw the introduction of phonograph records, radio, weekly magazines, movies and TV, media's power to propel populists waned. 

"Despite the upheavals of the Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, and Vietnam, the era of national newsmagazines, newsreels, and network broadcasting was a period of remarkable party stability."

But with the advent of mobile phones and the Internet, populism is again heating up.

"The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it," Lepore says. 

"It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative. But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system. And the national weal had better watch out. 

"It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communications revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution. 

"With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. 

"At some point, does each of us become a party of one?"

I Tweet Dead People

To paraphrase Faulkner, the past isn't dead; in fact, it isn't even offline.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, devoted decades of his life to spiritualism, the art of communing with the dead.

He wrote 20 books on the subject; lectured about spiritualism throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and North America; and was an active member of the Society for Psychical Research for 37 years.

My medium for communing with the dead is Twitter.

Presently, I receive regular Tweets from Sir Arthur, Thomas Jefferson, the Ancient Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius, and the Victorian lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong.

Tweets from the dead entertain and uplift me while I traverse the underworld (on Metro, not a raft) during my commute.

Indeed, communing with the dead is one of the very best uses of Twitter, which is otherwise largely wasteland. 

I recommend it wholeheartedly, and enjoy the fact the dead can Tweet and pay nothing for their mobile phones.

Woody Allen once wrote, “If man were immortal, do you realize what his meat bills would be?”

Elementary

You can hire a hack with an app, so why not a PI?

Washington, DC-based Trustify disrupts the burgeoning market for private eyes by offering an app that, according to the startup's website, "makes it easy for anyone to hire their own private investigator on demand and at an affordable price."

The app eliminates retainers, making gumshoes no longer a luxury of only the rich.

"The customer simply taps a button on their phone or computer, provides a few key details and is then linked up with a private investigator, who gets to work instantly," the company claims.

Coming next: Uber adds a button reading, "Follow that car!"

Big Brother is Watching You. But Not for Long.

Marketers' abuse of mobile data, long before it triggers government regulation, will destroy consumers' trust in many major brands, according to Thomas Husson, an analyst with Forrester.

"Mobility will change the nature of the data marketers can use and act upon," Husson writes. 

"Via sensors on wearables or smartphones, marketers will access data on our bodies and our whereabouts in real-time."

The almighty nature of mobile data, Husson believes, will tempt marketers to break consumers' anonymities—and their trust as well.

Marketers who think of privacy as just some "legal and compliance issue" are riding for a fall.

"Consumers are increasingly aware of the value of their data and expect brands to deliver clear benefits in exchange of the personal data they share," Husson says. 

"Moving forward, we believe consumers will increasingly take control of the brand relationship via mobile trusted agents. Brand trust will be built on mobile experiences. In fact, brands’ survival will depend on their ability to build trust."