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Category: iNews

Jollibee Valentine Series: A content that delivers

 

The Philippine social media scene was taken by a storm of reactions as one of the most popular food chains released a series of ads in lieu of Valentine’s Day tomorrow. Jollibee has taken the heart of many once again with their all new Jollibee Valentine Series.

Some liked it, some had their hearts broken, and some even to a lighter “meme” approach to express their sentiments.

With all these mixed emotions and voices that users posted and shared in the past days, one thing is for sure – Jollibee delivered more than what it was supposed to.

This milestone in Philippine advertising proved that content truly delivered when they are done precisely and artistically. The question now is: How can other brands recreate, or maybe even top, Jollibee’s campaign?

The answer to this question varies. Here’s why:

For a brand that has witnessed generations of diners come and go, Jollibee has basically a solid foundation in terms of knowing exactly what its market profile is. The brand has been part of the different phases of a customer’s life such as parties, celebrations, meetups, dates, desperations, and probably even heartaches.

The point here is, Jollibee is few meters ahead in terms of market domination and profiling hence, their ability to pull some stories from their experiences.

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For start-up brands, breakthroughs are very rare especially in terms of marketing virality. You can start by profiling your market step by step. Know them little by little until you get the bigger picture of who they really are. Knowing them well is the initial step in creating the content that they’ll most likely engage with, the one that really appeals to them.

It’s similar to how you try to learn everything about your significant other that getting the “perfect” gift for them becomes second nature to you.

The human emotion is a complex yet beautiful side of humanity. No matter how rational a person is, a dominant emotion – in some cases – overrides the most rational thoughts.

Human emotions are like test tubes of delicate and potentially destructive chemicals in a laboratory. There are vitriols, dopamines, oxytocins, and adrenalines – of which one cannot be mixed with another one without carefully getting the right proportion.

Jollibee has carefully picked the right emotion for each of its Valentine videos. The core emotion served as the binder and reference point of the content. From words, to shot lists, and down to the acting of the cast – all of these speaks to the core emotion of the entire concept of the content.

For start-ups, this process can be achieved by creating content with different emotional inclinations. Releasing it alternately on different channels can give you data where you can draw your conclusion – as to which one works well with your market.

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Admit it or not, we love something that we can fully relate to. Not just on the basis of what we felt when watching but more of the identifying ourselves as part of that content. How did Jollibee achieve that? By tackling social realities.

How many Filipinos have suffered a loss of a family member, a parent, or a spouse perhaps? And not being with the person you love in one of the most celebrated events of the year will definitely bring tears to your eyes.

How about being trapped in a “best friend zone”? How frustrating can it get for someone not to get the one he loves despite being close to her?

Oh wait, did I forget about our crushes? Every one of us has experienced a phase in our lives when we felt that piercing strike of cupid’s arrow.

These realities are what people gravitate towards. It is like speaking in behalf of those who cannot directly express themselves in their most heartbreaking, depressing, and even to the happiest times.

For start-up brands, these can be achieved by stringent observation of your market’s psyche. Frankly, this kind of approach can be achieved when the brand matures, or when the brand has identified its market and their common psyche. Because getting the right social reality to incorporate to your content takes a lot of years to perfect.

Content is, and always be the best marketing asset until this age. The channels may have changed but the market is resilient. The best way to make content viral and successful is to always make your audience/market the center of your communications – not your firm or the people running it.

Do you want to know how to kickstart a good social media marketing? Contact Us at (02) 490-0000 or email us at [email protected].

 

MOBILE FRIENDLINESS IS NOW A THING — It is common knowledge to most marketers that Last April 2015, Google search has expanded its mobile friendliness algorithm known as “Mobilegeddon”. This update from Google has marked the beginning of a shift of focus from desktop to mobile searches and has affected a lot of websites that are not mobile-responsive. Some of the affected may have experienced a decline in their Google SERP ranking or even to the volume of their monthly traffic.

What is Mobile Friendliness?

There are 75.4 million unique mobile users in the Philippines, comprising 74% of the nation’s population. Almost everyone these days considers themselves to be “tech-savvy” with the advent of the internet allowing even the simplest devices to do an amazing amount of tasks.

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Let’s face it, with a market as large as that, you probably want your brand to be etched on the consciousness of these users.  This is exactly why it’s time for your website to go mobile.

Opting for a mobile-responsive website or the mobile friendliness of your website enables it to be sent instantly dynamic as it fits symmetrically on any screen size, minimizing usability issues such as links that are not clickable, images taking forever to appear, scrolling problems and lagging issues.

Simply put – a mobile-responsive website enhances user experience.

Want to know how to make your website friendly? Say hi to one of our account executives, or leave us a message on our contact form.

Mobile version vs Mobile-Responsive

On the off-chance that you live under a rock, you might probably be more familiar with the term “mobile version”.

Mobile version is different from mobile-responsive. The former means developing a version of your website customized for mobile users and uses a separate URL commonly beginning with “m” (such as m.facebook.com). It’s like having two unique websites with one dedicated to desktops and another for mobile devices.

The latter, on the other hand, automatically resizes the content of your website based on user device allowing for optimum user experience.

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Post-Mobilegeddon Updates

Aside from the ‘mobilegeddon’ released on 2015, other updates released were Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), which launched in February 2016, and ‘mobile­first indexing’, which Google has been working on for quite a while now.
The AMP or the Accelerated Mobile Page Project is an open source initiative of Google launched in October 2015. This update works towards increasing the performance of the mobile web, loading web pages instantly, even with rich content or ads.

 

AMP is not a mobile ranking factor, however, its objective is to improve the functions of mobile websites with stripped-down versions of web pages. This enables users to read and scan your content with ease, improving your website’s traffic and in time, improving your SERP ranking. Google AMP lets publishers focus on great content while depending on other components like image carousels and social plug­ins for high performance and great user experience.

 

Another recent update is mobile­first indexing. Google has been adjusting their algorithms to primarily use mobile versions of website content to rank pages, understand its structured data, and show snippets from those pages on their SERPs. Here are some of the recommendations of google about dealing with the mobile­first indexing update:

  • Stay on your responsive site or dynamic serving site on desktop and mobile version;
  • If the two versions of your website’s primary content are different, you should make your structured data uniform, make your mobile website crawlable, and maintain canonical links unchanged;
  • Verify your desktop and mobile website versions against Google Search Console;
  • Launch new mobile sites only when they’re ready, to avoid any unwanted effects on your desktop sites that may arise from faulty mobile ones.

What is for business online?

Businesses that rely heavily on traffic and leads coming from online sources should prepare to change extensively, otherwise, their potential sales will be flushed down the drain. Below are the advantages of making your website mobile-responsive:

Know more about the benefits of a mobile-responsive website or its mobile friendliness by calling our sales executives or by sending us a message through this LINK.

It strengthens your website’s optimization.

With Google recently releasing an algorithm specifically targeting websites that aren’t mobile-responsive yet, now would be the best time to do so. Having a mobile-responsive site brings more traffic to your website which then opens doors to increase sales and revenue. A great search rank on desktop and mobile would be beneficial for your business because that’s brand awareness reaching your market through multiple channels.

It saves you time and money.

With a mobile-responsive website, you can focus your resources instead in building and creating new campaigns and content instead of developing a separate website for mobile devices.

It keeps you ahead of your competition.

There are a lot of businesses who have yet to invest in this new kind of technology because, well, it’s new; and new is a mystery few have the courage to explore.

Going mobile-responsive automatically puts you ahead of the curve because you’re already building your rank up while others are still flirting with the idea.

It provides an optimum user experience for your consumers.

With smartphones and tablets continuously increasing in terms of usage, giving your market the ability to browse through your site with ease is one step to earning their trust. Because everything is organized and made faster, potential clients are more likely to explore your website than leave it the moment they see the home page. Your site will have perfectly scaled images and readable texts so there’s no reason to not give it a chance.

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Sources:

  1. Straightarrow.com.ph
  2. Webmaster.googleblog.com

Gmail Phishing Scam on the Rise!

 

For most of us, email is a way of life. From work to personal communications to smartphone applications downloads, our email is our virtual online address where most of important documents and updates are sent. That being said, email is an indispensable online asset. Modern life isn’t just the same without it. Unfortunately, it’s the one thing that most of us tend to neglect, especially when it comes to security.

In the past weeks, a phishing scam over Gmail has circulated and propagated in the World Wide Web, escaping the scrutiny of both experts and new users of this email platforms.

Wordfence  (security team behind WordPress) revealed how the phishing scam worked using its account to send unsolicited emails that contained that same malicious strings that pretended to be an authentic Gmail log-in page.

After the victim is fooled to logging in at the fake Gmail login page,  the attacker gains access to the victim’s account. This cycle continues as the attacker uses the compromised account to send malicious emails to other people in the email’s contact list.

That’s why this phishing method “gained popularity” among hackers in the past year: as it effectively tricked people into thinking that they’re opening content from a trusted contact. Furthermore, the hackers behind this method makes it much deceitful as they emulated the way the victim user sends his/her emails from the subject down to email body.

How to detect this?

The phishing technique is deceiving even experienced, technical users – the kind who are already aware of attacks designed to extract valuable information through online.

What makes this recent uncovered technique so much more dangerous is that the location bar shows the text string “accounts.google.com” – a legitimate Google page. However, in this phishing attack, there’s a text string (“data:text/html”) preceding “accounts.google.com.”

There’s also another large chunk of text appearing on the far side of the location bar, which is the file that ultimately sends one’s credentials to the attacker.

These hard-to-spot text strings differentiate the phishing log-in page from the legitimate sign-in page. Most will see “accounts.google.com”, believe it’s the real thing and continue with the log-in.

Prevention

Wordfence provided advice on how to avoid being victimized by this phishing attack:

“Make sure there is nothing before the hostname ‘accounts.google.com’ other than ‘https://’ and the lock symbol. You should also be keen about the of the green color and lock symbol that appears on the left. If you can’t verify the protocol and verify the host-name, stop and consider what you just clicked on to get to that sign-in page.”

The use of 2-step authentication is highly advised. This method uses a secondary verification mechanism for users, and to regularly change passwords.

Wordfence also received word from Google regarding the attack. The tech giant acknowledged it and said that they’re strengthening their defenses against it.

“We help protect users from phishing attacks in a variety of ways, including: machine learning based detection of phishing messages, Safe Browsing warnings that notify users of dangerous links in emails and browsers, preventing suspicious account sign-ins, and more,” said one of the Google representative.

Wordfence suggested that Google should incorporate a design that allows users to easily identify the malicious, hidden text strings seen in these attacks which is similar to the way that the Google Chrome browser labels insecure “https” pages in red and secure, trusted ones in green.

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To know more about how to make your website secured and safe for your users, you can check iManila’s hosting page and check how our secured  hosting  packages and safety features such as the SSL certification can help you secure your business online.

 

Source: Wordfence.com

Rappler.com

 

 

Altaba. This six-letter word is yet to be the new name of our childhood-favorite search engine tool, Yahoo. People rendered speechless upon hearing the news as six Yahoo board of directors will soon resign from their positions, including its CEO Marissa Mayer and its founder David Filo. The board’s resignation is “not due to any disagreement with the Company on any matter relating to the Company’s operations, policies or practices,” Yahoo states on its SEC filing on Monday.

These huge changes will be put to effect after the $4.8 billion merger with the telecom company Verizon is finalized. The deal only comprises the procurement of Yahoo’s consumer web business, Yahoo Mail and Sports. Not the entire Yahoo enterprise.

The remaining sectors of the company after the said deal will be named Altaba. Those sectors of Yahoo are still of great significance to other investors since these have shares from the Chinese e-Commerce kingpin Alibaba, hence the new name Altaba.

Big changes are bound to happen with Yahoo this year, with new set of board members, a new CEO, new regularities, new challenges, AND new chances. That is possibly the best part of this realignment – a new line of chances awaits. But at the end of it all, we will definitely miss the old Yahoo.

If you want to know more about what happened, visit Investopedia and click here.

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