Ants Building A Tree House

LeafAntNest

I have seen birds nests in trees by the thousands, never before have I seen a leaf ant nest build up in the leaves. So after photographing returned home to do some research into ants that nest using leaves.

They twist and curl the big leaves into itself as can be seen making a cosy little home, waterproof and off of the ground. Amazing is the ant to cleverly put a tree house up for the rest of the community to thrive.

How powerful they are to hold, anchor and stitch the leaves up, amazing team work! Photo taken with Canon SX160 IS in the iSimangoliso Wetland Park.

News Round-up – Social Media Marketing

Maximum Impact in 2018

Opinion: The role of social media marketers is expanding

With more and more brands trying to connect with audiences across an array of social channels, the attention span of people is on a decline.

Businesses need to quickly figure out what’s best for their audiences in order to generate better engagement and increased brand loyalty.

Here are five crucial social media trends that will have the maximum impact on your social media strategy in 2018 and ahead.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2yt0oxy
Source: http://www.adweek.com

‘Likes Lead to Nothing’ And Other Hard-Learned Lessons Of Social Media Marketing

Seventeen years after the dawn of social media marketing, this medium continues to be an intriguing puzzle—a place where brands are investing more time and money, but are still struggling to determine what works well and where the returns on investment can be found.

Social media spending has increased by 200 percent in the past eight years, rising from 3.5 percent of marketing budgets in 2009 to 10.5 percent in February 2017, according to The CMO Survey 2017. And that upward climb is expected to continue: Marketers say they will expand their social media spending by 90 percent over the next five years, or 18.5 percent of the total by then.

“All brands, big and small, are firmly in social media today,” says Jill J. Avery, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. “Social media has become a mainstream tactic.”

Is this ever-increasing focus on social paying off? Forty-three percent of respondents said in the CMO Survey that they have not been able to show the impact of social media on their businesses. After all, it can be tough to pinpoint a direct connection between a social media chat about a product with the actual purchase of that product.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2yskPL5
Source: Forbes

Digiday Research: Social media dominates distribution for content marketing

In August, we gathered a group of retail and brand executives in Vail, Colorado, for the Digiday Content Marketing Summit. The main topic of discussion: Where does content marketing go from here?

During the summit, we asked speakers and attendees from brands like Reebok, Heineken and Urban Zen about the types of content they’re creating, whether they’re outsourcing work or keeping it in-house and whether or not they can realistically expect content to drive conversions.

Thinking outside the sponsored post: “Content marketing isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a must-have,” said one attendee. But what format works best? While articles don’t take a lot of time or money to write, marketers fear readers have developed blinders when they encounter the word “sponsored” on their favorite sites.

“When you’re selling a product and you’re not editorial, but you’re trying to create content people actually want to read, we fear that people are going to immediately bounce the second they realize they’re reading sponsored content or brand content,” said one marketer at the event.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2yscsPw
Source: https://digiday.com

Only a third of digital marketers are confident their campaigns reach target audience

Only 36% of digital marketers are convinced their campaigns are hitting the right targets, while almost a quarter (23%) are failing even to track of their campaign spend, according to research from Greenlight.

Almost one in five (18%) do not think that their campaigns are reaching their intended audiences and 10% are not sure which channels are most valuable for their campaigns.

The research found that digital marketers are often beguiled by headline-grabbing communications channels. More than a third (35%) of digital marketers spend most of their budget on social despite the stat, from a Google consumer survey of 1000 people, that only 23% of consumers are receptive to marketing on social media.

Social was not the only channel overly-enamoured by marketers, Greenlight found. While 21% of digital marketers spend most of their budget on content marketing, a mere 3% of consumers like reading or viewing this type of content.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2ysS6FR
Source: https://www.campaignlive.co.uk

Original found on Steemit

Sep 22

Interesting Posts On Steemit Curated 4

Would The Father of Economics Invest in Bitcoin?

Considering the current turmoil in the crypto markets, I thought it would be a fun Idea to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the father of modern economics – Adam Smith – and decide if he would be willing to invest in Bitcoin.

Before we start this little adventure, I must inform you that I am not the ghost of Adam Smith, nor am I a reincarnation of him, and I do not possess the means of communicating with his soul, so I would advise you to treat this post for what it is – speculative thinking that I hope has some rationale at its epicenter.

Bitcoin is a remarkable cryptographic achievement and the ability to create something that is not duplicable in the digital world has enormous value. Eric Schmidt

I believe R. G. Collingwood wrote in An Autobiography that a book is a set of answers that were given based on a set of questions that the author had at the time of writing the book. Since we start our Bitcoin investment analysis from The Wealth of Nations, we should consider that the book was written in a certain historical context, where it had the goal to deal with particular circumstances and conceptual particularities that were present at that time. So we cannot just extrapolate the teachings from The Wealth of Nations to the world of Bitcoin, but we can infer certain attitudes, principles, paradigms, and “decide” if Adam Smith would invest in Bitcoin if he was one of our contemporaries.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2ysl6h5
Source: Steemit

DTube 0.3: This update contains so many new features I could not find a good title for it

Things are starting to settle down here for the DTube project. Many of the networking issues seem to be resolved with the automatic gateway system and viewing videos seems to be comfortable as long as the video bitrate is lower than the connection max speed. Issues are clear now, some are easy to fix, some are harder, but overall the minimum viable product seems to be viable. I believe it’s now about time to introduce some features that will improve the user-experience this time around in 0.3.

I’ve been regularly browsing DTube, and it’s clear that the huge majority of the content is in English. While the USA discovered the Internet before any other nation and got a culture boost out of that, that doesn’t fully explain the super low number of videos in other languages. SteemIt has a lot of Korean or German content and I don’t want to leave some countries/languages out of the loop for the development version of Dtube.

DTube will detect your favorite language from your browser settings, and if the translation exists, it will download it and update all the texts in the UI. In order not to increase the app size, these translations are currently stored inside the STEEM blockchain (example). STEEM is amazing for translations, as SteemIt/ChainBB can be used as a UI to correct mistakes or add new translations.

Maybe hosting these translations on IPFS would be faster to load in most cases, but in the design of DTube I would rather use the blockchain for text, and only IPFS for ‘bigger files’.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2yrVzV2
Source: Steemit

Turn everything you touch into gold!

Hustling brings a dollar for today. Mastering you craft brings wealth for a lifetime. -Unknown

I think that’s a good balance too. Knowing that you need to work really hard in the initial phases of things, but knowing that not only will the work payoff in some ‘instant’ results, but also longer-term benefits.

Have you ever noticed those people who just don’t achieve much? Okay, wait. That’s a bad example. Let’s rather flip the situation around. Have you ever noticed those people who are just able to make anything a success. Anything they try, it just works for them. Well, this is the concept.

It’s about the mentality of taking what you’ve got, and making something great out of it.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2yrVDUM
Source: Steemit

Animal Camouflage – how does it work?

Although we as humans may often feel as if we want to camouflage ourselves and hide in a crowd, animals often have to camouflage themselves from their predators. Camouflage is mostly used for protection purposes, and it is an absolute wonderful sight to see animals blend into their environment.

In the wild it is often a very challenging task to stay alive. If an animal is small and slow, then it is quite possible that it might have difficulty to survive. Their predators are often larger and faster and this is where camouflage comes in. Animal species have evolved so much over time and developed in different ways that with each generation they camouflage themselves better. This is due to natural selection and we all know that is where only the strongest will survive.

Baby animals often have more patterns to camouflage themselves better. The young animals often needs to be left alone while the parents are out hunting for food and the young needs to be able to hide themselves from other predators.

Every season birds change their feathers to make them more adaptable to their environment. Often the color or the pattern on an animals allows them to blend in so perfectly with the environment.
Full story at http://bit.ly/2yrVHUw
Source: Steemit

Joan Stewart –Finding Leads 4 U

Blogging – Social Media – Mobile: Mobile Website, Mobile QR Advertising, Mobile News. Tools, Tips & Tricks Included.

Ants Building A Tree House

I have seen birds nests in trees by the thousands, never before have I seen a leaf ant nest build up in the leaves. So after photographing returned home to do some research into ants that nest using leaves.

They twist and curl the big leaves into itself as can be seen making a cosy little home, waterproof and off of the ground. Amazing is the ant to cleverly put a tree house up for the rest of the community to thrive.

How powerful they are to hold, anchor and stitch the leaves up, amazing team work! Photo taken with Canon SX160 IS in the iSimangoliso Wetland Park.

I have seen birds nests in trees by the thousands, never before have I seen a leaf ant nest build up in the leaves. So after photographing returned home to do some research into ants that nest using leaves.

They twist and curl the big leaves into itself as can be seen making a cosy little home, waterproof and off of the ground. Amazing is the ant to cleverly put a tree house up for the rest of the community to thrive.

How powerful they are to hold, anchor and stitch the leaves up, amazing team work! Photo taken with Canon SX160 IS in the iSimangoliso Wetland Park.

Original found on Steemit

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