Category Archives: News

PriceAlert a new sheriff in town!

If you ever tried to use a tool for price comparison between two or more products of different online shops you definitely came in contact with the limitations that were imposed by such platforms. Usually this kind of apps work by periodically crawling a number of sites and periodically updating a certain product/price table. This is not very useful for users who want to choose products from various shops  in different geographical areas or from smaller sites that haven’t been crawled by that certain app.

Now, maybe it’s a bit early to talk about the capabilities of this next product but it’s rounding up nice and can be a real help for finite consumers around the world and even for  market analysts, and the best part is that it’s completely free, and with no commercials either. PriceAlert wants to be a new solution for measuring prices from various sites. Until now there’s nothing amazing but the technology behind allows users to compare prices on any ecommerce platform all over the world, because unlike other similar platforms limited to a number of well defined shops it uses an algorithm that automatically extracts data like specifications of that certain product or of course price and availability.

For now, only a beta version is available but new features are programmed to come up starting very soon. Useful proprieties like an email alert when a certain price has changed or statistics over the change in price for a period of time will be available, not to mention the capability of exporting the data gathered into various useful formats like excel or CSV.

So we think there’s no reason for you not to check out this interesting new toy and maybe leave a review in case that you feel so. You can find it here at the address //thewebminer.com/pricealert/ and we hope that together we can bring one more interesting tool to the use of people who need it.

Business Manager from Facebook

5Now that the holiday is over we can get back to business with high stamina and low desire to stop. And so the big news this week is that Facebook presented its new Business Manager for entrepreneurs and marketers meant to ease up the work on different ad campaigns and even multiple pages from one account, a well received feature. Another feature of it, is that allows tasks for different users on the same project by adding or revoking permissions.

In order to use Business Manager  you have to first set up your account, which makes you a so called ‘a business ad man’ – a position in which you can modify all aspects of the business. Another new feature is that you can assign tasks even to people who are not your Facebook friends and you don’t know anymore that a work email.

Even though it seems like a very well intended tool TechCrunch tends to point out that it is a bit of a reachout for Facebook. Even considering this, the ability for small business owners, who don’t have big budgets, to be successful on Facebook will directly correlate to their ability to quickly manage their pages, content, and ads to drive engagement.
We can only hope that Facebook continues releasing tools that make it easy for small businesses (not just fortune 500 brands) to have success on the platform.

Twitter’s redesigned pages 101

If you’ve been active on twitter lately you may have noticed the major changes that happened on the micro-blogging platform. Since it has been founded, in 2006 twitter has distinguished itself from other platforms by revolutionized the way people communicate on the internet. It imposed that people should only deliver the essential of their message by setting up a 140 character limit and so it reinvented the wheel.

Now in the last few days twitter has implemented a new design for user’s profiles and it’s nothing of what we are used to. Instead of the regular plain customizable profile we we have a facebook-like page with the main picture and bio scaled to the left and significantly more real estate dedicated to the header photo. The new look has a greater focus on photos and content cards.

Also this change in looks brought a new category with it, called “out on the profile” , where you can view who you are following, followers, favorites and lists.

Major brands had not skipped the opportunity to promote along with this changes and had almost immediately responded by redesigning  their pages (in the photos:Samsung and Kia)

 

If the new profile hasn’t reached you yet it’s not to worry about because the changes will be slowly implemented to users in random manner so your turn will come up, only with more followers we hope.

TheWebMiner in French

Good day everyone, or should i say better bonjour, because along this week we have launched the french version of TheWebMiner.com.

It is a certitude that the need for data increases every day in every possible direction and we want to keep up with this trend. Although English is the language of the internet we want to reach also to other users from smaller environments that might need our services, and because French is the official language in 29 countries it seemed as an obvious choice.

So, from now on along with the English version and the Romanian, which is the base country of our company a third version is available to choose in the language menu from the upper right corner of  our site.

french

We hope you will enjoy your experience and will provide a good feedback on our expansion.

 

Why emotions are important in marketing

I don’t know about you but i haven’t given very much thought of how do i feel the instance that i press the “share” button. I recently found out that i was ignoring a much more important part of online marketing than it seems, and i corrected myself, all because of emotions.

When it comes to what we feel, everything can be expressed as a sum of four basic emotions: happy, sad, afraid and angry, that combine themselves and form a variety of other feelings about which we may or we may not be aware. For better understanding of this we may look at Robert Plutchik’s famous “wheel of emotions” that shows just some of the well known emotional layers.

 

Studies have also revealed that the emotional state that “gets” the most of the likes is happiness, which is normal if we consider that  our first emotional action in life is to respond to our mother’s smile with a smile of our own. Obviously, joy and happiness are hard-wired into all of us, as discovered by the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. And because happiness almost never comes as a self sustainable feeling we can see that the top 10 emotions that people have when sharing something are made of positive ones, as studied by Fractl.

top 10

 

More than this Jonah Berger, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, conducted a study from which  he found that an article was more likely to become viral the more positive it was.

 

Of course we shouldn’t neglect that there are also other feelings that may interact with our online behavior.  For instance sadness helps us connect and empathize by producing cortisol, known as the “stress hormone”; and oxytocin, a hormone that promotes connection and empathy. Further research revealed that when we are angry the hypothalamus makes us more stubborn and fear only makes us more desperate to find something or someone to cling on.

Considering all this information is easy to understand the high significance of emotions in marketing, especially when considering that an analysis of the IPA dataBANK, which contains 1,400 case studies of successful advertising campaigns where, campaigns with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (31% vs. 16%) as those with only rational content.

And this is why we can’t underestimate the importance of understanding the science of emotion in marketing!

 

How to use regex in Vim?

We often need to process big text files (larger than 100 mb) and we discovered that best text editor for this is Vim and gVim (windows version). Also a powerful mode to process text automatically is to use regular expressions (also called RegEx).

Using RegEx in Vim

Vim doesn’t support standard RegEx, but we built a tool that converts standard regex to Vim regex. This tool it’s available here: RegEx to Vim.

We hope that is useful for you.

What are the most exciting opportunities for companies this year?

Hello everybody. Today I want to share with you a new research conducted by Adobe that we got our hands on these days. It’s actually a perspective view over the digital world and a briefing of what to expect from this field in 2014.If last year was about recognizing the importance of customer experience, this one is about actually doing something. For an optimal customer experience, various business functions and customer-facing touch points need to be working in harmony, from customer service and advertising to online user experience, content management and email messaging. For the question of which one area is the single most exciting opportunity for your organization (or for your client) in 2014 the responses were diverse but following a well defined pattern.

the webWe know the number of company respondents (980) and the one of Agency respondents (1202) and from this we conclude that organizations need to ensure they have the right data, technology and culture to act as the foundation for a great customer experience, with a focus on multichannel marketing and campaign management also required to underpin a successful approach.

The mobile part, the second most exciting opportunity in the eyes of client-side respondents and first on the list for supply-side participants has a well earned position. About this we’ve already written in another post few weeks ago and is no surprise at all.  Despite the importance of mobile and prominence of smartphones and tablets in our lives, many companies are still trying to work out how they optimize their websites for mobile, for example, whether they should go down the ‘responsive’ route or not.

A second figure that i’d like to discuss is not so much about the big picture and more about specific disciplines. The question is which three digital-related areas are the top priorities for your organization (or for your clients) in 2014?

miner

It seems that marketers and digital professionals are clear on what the priorities are, and this has not changed markedly in the last year, knowing that the top five options are in exactly the same order as for last year’s survey, respectively content marketing, social media engagement, targeting and personalization, conversion rate optimization and mobile optimization.

 

 

 

Data Grants from Twitter

There is a lot of fuss these days because of the newest announcement made by Twitter on February 5. They encourage research institutions to apply until March 15 in what seem to be a scientific lottery, for a chance to the access of twitter’s data sets. Around 500 million Tweets are sent out each day and if they were to be scientifically quantified, studies like where the flu may hit,  health-related information or events like ringing in the new year could be analyzed from a statistical point of view and outcomes could be predicted.

Twitter acknowledges the difficulties that researchers have to face when they have to collect data from the platform and therefore it named this project the Twitter Data Grants, aiming for a better connection between research institutions or academics and the data they need. Also, along with the data itself, the company will offer for the selected institutions the possibility of collaboration with their own engineers and researchers, all this, with the help of Gnip one of the most important Twitter’s certified data reseller partner.

The New Mobile Optimized Web Miner!

We all have to accept the fact that society is changing, and that we have to change too if we want to stay on top of any situation. Nowadays each one of us has a cellphone and many own a smartphone.

Because of the rush that we live in, we always have to be up to date with latest news and to be able to search, browse, compare and analyze websites right on the spot. But what do you do when a site fails to load on a mobile device, or has a very unfriendly look because of the desktop version unable to fit on a mobile screen. Well, i know for sure that lots of you will simply exit that website and search for an alternative mobile friendly solution.

It’s strange to see that companies fail to adapt to society and have their websites optimized for a better experience of the users. As facts, in 2013 the number of mobile devices connected to the internet exceeded the ones of the classic computers, and also, at any instance 30 percent of all internet traffic is generated from a smartphone or a tablet, and this numbers are only going to grow in 2014.

It’s easy to see the pros and cons of a mobile browsing experience and mostly the cons relate to the websites that don’t give useful information in the best way so that it can be received well. A bad mobile experience can even lead to damaging a company’s brand, not mentioning all the loses in the e-commerce branch that can survey for a retailer.

Starting a month ago TheWebMiner has implemented a mobile aware of the site for a better experience of the visitors and hopefully of the future partners. We hope that you will enjoy reading the latest posts of our blog on the go and that it will be much easier for you to find web scraping information for your company!

How website look on tablet

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How website look on smartphone

TheWebMiner is a cloud data mining company - Google Chrome_2014-01-12_18-45-43