Johnny Slack

Johnny Slack is a 3d programming artist working in WebGL and is also 1/2 of Cartelle
by via Awwwards - Sites of the day

Virality Isn’t Limited To Big Brands – Your Content Just Needs To Strike The Right Emotional Chords

A viral hit is the holy grail for marketers these days: Not only does it generate a ton of awareness, but it also repositions a brand as an industry leader thanks to endorsements in the form of shares and retweets.

Consider GoldieBlox’s highly successful “Princess Machine,” which helped the retailer make their mark in the toy industry. This playful video follows a trio of girls as they test their latest engineering endeavor, and although the campaign ran into a bit of snag regarding music licensing, there’s no denying it was successful: Not only did it generate more eight million views in a week, but it helped the company earn a 30-second Super Bowl ad.

So what is it about this campaign and other viral hits that make people click ‘share?’

New research points to key emotional drivers, so to get a better understanding of what these influential triggers look like, my team at Fractl used the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance (PAD) model to analyze the emotional responses to some of the top images from Reddit’s r/pics community. Our results revealed that there are three ideal emotional combinations for viral content.

Here I’ll walk you through our findings and provide examples of what successful campaigns look like for different combinations.

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

How to Measure Social Media Using Google Analytics Reports

Do you want to see how social media impacts your business? Want to learn how Google Analytics can help? In this article you’ll discover four ways you can use Google Analytics to measure the impact of your social media marketing. #1: Verify Social as a Traffic Driver Google Analytics will provide a look at the [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

by Kevan Lee via

How to Master the Habit of Forming Good Habits

As human beings, 40% of everything that we do is habitual — from brushing our teeth in the morning to checking our emails as soon as we arrive at the office. According to The European Journal of Social Psychology it takes, on average, 66 days to form a new habit.

Although it only takes a tiny fragment of our lives to break a bad habit and reach better life goals, we often find it very difficult to do so. But why, when the benefits of letting go of bad habits are so obvious?

Succumbing to bad habits can make us feel weak and lack the confidence to try harder, which is why many of us get stuck repeating the same bad habits time and time again. Change can be extremely stressful when you’re used to doing things in a certain way, but changing habits for the better has a lasting positive effect on our lives.

Let’s take a look at some ways that we can forget bad habits and adopt new, better ones.

Why Do We Form Habits?

Neuroscientists have discovered that when certain behaviors become subconsciously automatic, our brain doesn’t have to work as hard. Basically, we form habits so that our brain can slack off for a while! What does this mean? It means that doing something spontaneously out of the ordinary exercises our brain!

(and, of course, breaks the habit momentarily).

Curing Bad Habits by Premeditating Them

Bad habits are usually a result of a decision that we made earlier, like deciding to eat lunch at an establishment that doesn’t cater healthy options. The mistake might not occur to you until the “oh crap” moment when you’re sitting down and reading the menu (“Damn it, I’ve ended up here again, oh well I’ll take the double cheeseburger and fries”). Premeditation is the key, because more often than not bad habits lead to other bad habits ⏤ for example: "Since I've been eating so unhealthily today, I may as well have that full sugar Coca Cola and forget about the Coke Zero." No, no, no.

Noting down bad habits and coming up with viable alternatives will not only help you to dodge them, but will also make it easier to come up with solutions that don’t feel like a form of self-punishment.

Getting in the Habit of Writing Down Bad Habits

In this case, the note might say “Eat something healthy for lunch”. “Don’t eat something unhealthy for lunch” has negative connotations and may induce underlying feelings of shame for your past habits — it really does make a difference to your approach. Positive vibes equal more motivation. If you still find this difficult at first (which is understandable, it's not supposed to be easy), start off small with a simple “Have water or a sugar-free drink at lunch”, and work your way up to bigger goals.

Noting your habits digitally in a list or to-do app will allow you to take your notes everywhere and set reminders for them.

Continue reading %How to Master the Habit of Forming Good Habits%

by Rebeka Bergin via SitePoint

Lightgallery.js – Full Featured Javascript Lightbox Gallery

Lightgallery.js is a full featured javascript lightbox gallery with no dependencies.

by via jQuery-Plugins.net RSS Feed

Quick Tip: How to Make a Game Loop in JavaScript

The "game loop" is a name given to a technique used to render animations and games with changing state over time. At its heart is a function that runs as many times as possible, taking user input, updating the state for the elapsed time, and then drawing the frame.

In this short article you'll learn how this fundamental technique works and you'll be able to start making your own browser based games and animations.

Here's what game loop in JavaScript looks like:

function update(progress) {
  // Update the state of the world for the elapsed time since last render
}

function draw() {
  // Draw the state of the world
}

function loop(timestamp) {
  var progress = timestamp - lastRender

  update(progress)
  draw()

  lastRender = timestamp
  window.requestAnimationFrame(loop)
}
var lastRender = 0
window.requestAnimationFrame(loop)

The requestAnimationFrame method requests that the browser call a specified function as soon as it can before the next repaint occurs. It's an API specifically for rendering animations but you can also use setTimeout with a short timeout for a similar result. requestAnimationFrame is passed a timestamp of when the callback started firing, it contains the number of milliseconds since the window loaded and is equal to performance.now().

The progress value, or time between renders is crucial for creating smooth animations. By using it to adjust the x and y positions in our update function, we ensure our animations move at a consistent speed.

Updating the Position

Our first animation will be super simple. A red square that moves to the right until it reaches the edge of the canvas and loops back around to the start.

We'll need to store the square's position and increment the x position in our update function. When we hit a boundary we can subtract the canvas width to loop back around.

var width = 800
var height = 200

var state = {
  x: width / 2,
  y: height / 2
}

function update(progress) {
  state.x += progress

  if (state.x > width) {
    state.x -= width
  }
}

Drawing the New Frame

This example uses the <canvas> element for rendering the graphics but the game loop can be used with other outputs like HTML or SVG documents too.

The draw function simply renders the current state of the world. On each frame we'll clear the canvas and then draw a 10px red square with its center at the position stored in our state object.

Continue reading %Quick Tip: How to Make a Game Loop in JavaScript%

by Mark Brown via SitePoint

Boosting Engagement with Twitter Dashboard & Analytics

Although relatively young, social media marketing has rapidly grown into a valuable marketing channel. It’s got a huge audience: 65% of American adults use social networking sites (it was just 7% back in 2005) and 75% of all Internet users in the US do the same. Even more importantly, there’s a positive correlation between social media use, education level and household income.

However, in order to make the most of your marketing efforts, you need to be able to measure and track your progress. To make analytics easier for marketers and to encourage businesses to engage more with their followers, Twitter’s launched a new analytics Dashboard to complement its Analytics feature. In this piece we’ll cover the features of Twitter’s new Dashboard, how to get set up and some of the important metrics you should be tracking on its analytics platform.

Glossary of Terms

We’ll start with a glossary of terms used in the new dashboard. If you’re an experienced social media marketer you are probably already familiar with many of these terms, but it’s good to make sure we’re all starting on the same page.

• App install attempts: Number of clicks to install an application from a Tweet Card.
• App opens: Number of clicks to open an application from a Tweet Card.
• Detail expands: Number of users who clicked to expand the more details menu.
• Embedded media clicks: Users who have clicked to view an image or video embedded in a tweet.
• Engagements: Total number of users who have interacted with a tweet by clicking retweet, reply, follow, like, links, cards, hashtags, embedded images or videos, usernames, profile pictures or the more details expansion.
• Engagement rate: Average engagements per tweet.
• Likes: The total number of likes a tweet has received.
• Follows: The total number of followers that can be attributed as a direct result of a tweet.
• Hashtag clicks: Total number of clicks on hashtags in a tweet.
• Impressions: Total number of Twitter users who have seen your tweet.
• Leads submitted: Total number of users who have submitted information via a Lead Generation Card.
• Link clicks: Total number of users who have clicked a URL linked in a tweet.
• Permalink clicks: Total number of users who have clicked on a tweet’s permalink (Note: this is only available to desktop users).
• Replies: Total number of users who have replied to your tweet.
• Retweets: Total number of users who have retweeted your tweet.
• Shared via email: The total number of users who have emailed your tweet.
• Profile clicks: Number of users who have clicked on your @name handle or profile photo of your tweet.

The New Dashboard

Custom Feed

With 310 million active monthly users, Twitter is one of the “Big Three” social networks — along with Facebook and Google+. For marketers, Twitter is a useful channel for reaching target audiences in all stages of the conversion funnel.

To help businesses reach and interact with these audiences, Twitter debuted its Dashboard Analytics Tool. Dashboard collects important engagement data into one place, giving marketers an overhead view of key performance metrics, as well as letting them drill down to evaluate the performance of individual Tweets.

One of the features you can use right away is your custom feed — you’ll set this up when you first access the Dashboard. If you only rely on mentions to track how people are talking about your business online you’re probably missing out on a large part of the conversation. Twitter’s custom feed lets you find any tweet that mentions one of your keywords or phrases, giving you a more complete and accurate view of how people are tweeting about you, your business and/or your products.

When you set up the custom feed, Twitter will automatically include your name and @username as search terms, but will also prompt you to add and/or remove positive and negative search terms. You can include or exclude any words, phrases or hashtags you think are relevant.

You can go back and change your custom feed keywords any time in the About You tab of the Home screen.

Schedule Tweets

Since Twitter is a global platform, it’s got users living in every timezone. Even if you’re a local business with targets in one city or region, finding the right time for a tweet to go live is crucial to getting your message in front of your audience (we’ll talk about dayparting later on). This may not always be during your normal business hours. Twitter Dashboard allows you to create a tweet and schedule it to post at the optimal date and time according to your marketing plan.

To schedule a tweet click the Create tab and write your tweet as you normally would. Click the down arrow and pick Schedule Tweet. Enter the date and time you want to send out your post then click Schedule Tweet to add it to your queue. You can access your queue to edit or delete a pending tweet by clicking Edit on queued tweet.

You can schedule a tweet on the Dashboard iOS app as well by composing the tweet, tapping next and selecting Schedule Tweet.

If you find yourself struggling to come up with ideas for tweets, Dashboard offers up tips and topic suggestions geared to help businesses start conversations with their target audiences.

Twitter Analytics: What Do I Do With All This Information?

Tracking Data with Dashboard

The new Twitter Dashboard offers users a bird’s eye view of their important metrics for up to 60 days: tweets, media tweets, replies, audience growth, new followers, profile visits and tweet impressions. This is useful information for tracking your overall Twitter performance.

You can see the performance of individual posts in the tweets tabs. You can see stats for your most recent tweets or you can get a list of your most recent follower engagements. This is useful information when you’re tracking the reach and audience engagement of your Twitter activity.

This is good stuff to help you when putting together your Twitter marketing plan. Look at your recent tweets to see which type are getting the most total impressions, retweets and likes and which tweets have the highest engagement rates (total engagements per impression). Use recent engagements to spot potential trends, or if certain tweets are driving a certain kind of engagement.

Using Twitter Analytics

For a more detailed look at Twitter data for your business, use Twitter’s Analytics platform. The Tweets tab offers a detailed, granular look at how you’re driving engagement with your Twitter audience. Where Dashboard tells you how many likes, replies and retweets a tweet got, Analytics counts total engagements (but sadly you have to export the data to a CSV to break it out by engagement type). Check out your Top Tweets to see your tweets sorted by total engagements.

Continue reading %Boosting Engagement with Twitter Dashboard & Analytics%

by Maria Lopez via SitePoint