I’m a big fan of social calls-to-action. Previously, I’ve found evidence that they work on Facebook and Twitter. So I wanted to expand my research and see if I could find more words and phrases that were good at spurring people to social action.Using a huge data set of more than 2.7-million tweets provided to me by the awesome folks at Buffer, I analysed the use of calls-to-action (like “please retweet”) and their relationship to retweets. To control for number ...

Microsoft has sold more than 100-million installs for Windows 8 since it became generally available and claims to have over 250-million users on its cloud-based storage service SkyDrive.In an official blog post, the Redmond-based giant's chief marketing officer and chief financial officer Tami Reller confirmed that the OS had reached the 100-million mark, up from 60-million licenses sold by January.Those 40-million extra licenses, she explains, come largely from the PC market, with the "vast majority" shipping on new ...

Grand Theft Auto V is a fat, full-bodied game, overflowing with things to see and do. But above all else, it wants to be one thing very badly: a good heist game.A new screenshot says it all. Michael stands in the foreground wearing a mask worthy of Hannibal Lector. He’s flanked by a monkey (Trevor) and a skull (Franklin). These are your protagonists, and they’re dressed for business.Crime has always been central to Grand Theft Auto’s DNA, yet now the ...

At first glance you might not think there is much in common between the film industry and tech startups. I'm here to tell you differently. Both industries have their own set of challenges, whether you're starting out, or refining your craft/company down the line. I'm not here to tell you that one is tougher than the other, but rather that startups can learn from the parallels between them.Each member must know their 'craft'In the film industry you have ...

Israeli authorities have lodged a request urging Google to reconsider its decision to list Palestine among its selection of localised search pages. By listing the territory, says Israel, Google is implicitly recognising Palestine as a state.Since 1 May the company's Google.ps listing has read "Palestine", whereas previously it read "Palestinian Territories". At the time, the Israeli foreign ministry said expressed concerns at Google's intent. Now however, the country's foreign minister Ze’ev Elkin has taken things a step further, suggesting ...

Social media marketing is journey, not a race. When most people start with marketing on the social web, it's hard not to behave a like a kid with lots of toys. There are hundreds of social media channels that you want to join and you are looking for ways to start a new conversation at every turn. You share, post, tweet, and follow everyone you come across. While this might work in the beginning, it's definitely not that easy to ...

More and more users are reaching for the mobile devices way before they even switch on their desktops and laptops. Mobile users are looking for everything from restaurant reviews to the fastest route home, banking solutions and nearby exclusive offers and promotions.In turn this means that those mobile searches, mobile apps and mobile websites are all getting that much more traffic. In a really interesting study conducted between April and December 2012 by comScore, mobile users were asked to ...

Apple has been out-Appled. The HTC One is a triumph of design and functionality and if you want your next phone to make you happy for a while yet, this is the one you should get. Scrap that, it's the phone everyone should get.It's funny that, at a phase when it's in financial dire straits, HTC has managed to cook up something so astonishing. The Taiwanese giant is supposed to be dead and buried, one of the more significant casualties ...

The "White Men wearing Google Glass" is a killer meme, a potential product killer.A friend who is a prominent geek, always a bit of a rebel and very comfortable with self-promotion, is very concerned about posting a picture of himself wearing Google Glass.He just got them and was super excited to finally have them, and he told all his social networks about it days in advance. When they finally arrived he told his friends he couldn't post a photo of ...

It seems that all those pre-roll and pop up ads just weren't enough. If Google has its way you could soon be paying to watch videos on YouTube.According to a report by The Financial Times, the company is just days away from launching a paid-for subscription service, which would require users to pay between US$1 and US$5 a month to watch the videos posted by some specialist channels. It said that YouTube invited a small number of users to ...