dimanche 6 avril 2014

TwitterToolsReviews

TwitterToolsReviews


Target The Right Audience With LinkedIn Showcase Pages

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 07:47 PM PDT

Kate Dunham

Social media moves fast—and we're not just talking about the sheer volume of conversations. Social platforms are constantly making changes, which can make a marketer's head spin. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn each made multiple changes in 2013 that will help vastly improve your social media marketing. Over the past week, we have featured important updates from each social network and detailed how you can use them to your advantage this year and beyond. We've also provided real-world examples of how brands are utilizing these new features for inspiration on how you can too.

LinkedIn Showcase Pages: The Details

  • Allow companies with multiple brands or services to create separate pages for each entity, enabling them to target messages to separate audiences.
  • Analytics available on engagement, trends and the demographics of your followers.
  • You can create up to 10 Showcase Pages to branch off your company page.

How Brands are Using Showcase Pages:

Hewlett-Packard has Showcase Pages for each of its services such as HP Big Data, HP Cloud and HP Software (highlighted in the image below). Rather than updating all channels with the same information, Hewlett-Packard filters relevant news to each page, announcing product updates and sharing industry and company news that is relevant to that service.

Target The Right Audience With LinkedIn Showcase Pages image HP Showcase Pages1

How You Can Use Showcase Pages in 2014:

  • Determine if you really need them. Showcase Pages are beneficial if your company has multiple products or services that each have very distinct target audiences. If you have one or two products with pretty similar features and target audiences, it may not be worth adding a Showcase Page. Really think about your marketing messages and whether or not they need to be separated out.
  • Target the right audience. Showcase Pages allow your community to follow the pages that are of the most interest to them—don't bombard them with all of your content. Instead of blasting out every company update on every channel, only share what will be relevant to each audience.
  • If your company produces content specifically for current customers, create a customer Showcase Page, invite your customers to join and promote engagement to really create a community. A page devoted to customers is the perfect place to share product updates, how-to blog posts and other content that will help people use your product or service effectively.

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Colin Kroll, Vine Co-Founder Is Stepping Down

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 07:25 PM PDT

Ian DeMartino

Colin Kroll, Vine Co Founder Is Stepping Down image Vine

Colin Kroll, one of the co-founders of Vine, the six and a half second long video sharing service, has announced that he is stepping down from his current position.

Kroll founded Vine back in June 2012, by October Twitter had acquired the social site for $30 million. Kroll remained with the company, but his tenure there is now coming to an end.

Kroll did stress that he wouldn't be leaving the company he created completely, he says he will remain nearby as a consultant, but won't be working with the company any longer in the day to day operations of the business.

Kroll gave no further details. Vine had just released a private messaging system less than 24 hours before Kroll's announcement, there are no indications that the two events are related.

This makes the second Vine co-founder to leave the company this year. Dom Hoffman left Vine in January. Like Kroll, Hoffman also promised to stay on for a consulting role while he worked on a still unnamed project. Is it possible that Kroll decided to join him? When asked "what's next" for him on Twitter, Kroll stated that he had no details to share at this time.

With Colin Kroll and Dom Hoffman stepping down from active roles in the company, that leaves Rus Yusupov as the sole Vine founder still with the company on a full time basis.

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Fans Share Final Four Pictures From AT&T Stadium

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 07:24 PM PDT

Scott Croker

Fans Share Final Four Pictures From AT&T Stadium image large 4430217947

As UConn took on Florida during the Final Four at AT&T Stadium, fans lucky enough to be there shared their pictures with some humorous results.

You see, AT&T Stadium is home of the Dallas Cowboys of the National Football League. The massive 100,000 seat palace was transformed into a basketball arena for the annual March Madness tournament, leaving some fans pretty far away from the action.

Or as one fan described it:

Even the the event crew knew how ridiculous the situation was.

Now, the stadium shouldn't be the focus of the Final Four, but in this case it is. Basketball was not designed to be watched by 100,000 fans in a stadium. The court is too small and the action is too quick.

The good news is even if fans are too far away from the action, they can watch the jumbotron hanging over the entire court.

In reality the situation isn't that bad. Most fans are just happy to be there. The Final Four is a special event and and all joking is in good fun. Most fans probably feel like this:

In the end, maybe the Final Four does deserve to be on such a grand stage. Not many sporting events hold as much interest for fans or glory for players. Why shouldn't our best college athletes fight for glory on the biggest stage possible?

[Photo Credit: David Jones]

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UConn Upsets Florida In Final Four To Advance To National Title Game

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 07:22 PM PDT

Scott Croker

UConn Upsets Florida In Final Four To Advance To National Title Game image origin 6313246733

UConn upset Florida 63-53 Saturday in the Final Four and will advance to the National Title game. The victory showed just how underrated UConn was coming into March Madness.

Entering the annual NCAA tournament UConn was ranked number seven. Florida was the number one overall seed and looked like the team to beat all March.

If Florida was the team to beat, UConn was the team that just wouldn't be beat. An underdog nearly the entire tournament, the school is now one game away from accomplishing the impossible.

UConn lost its final game of the regular season by more than 30 points. If they win the National Title, they would be the first team do so after such a loss.

Fans took to Twitter to share their feelings on the upset, some obviously happy and others not so much.

If Kentucky wins tomorrow, it will be the first time in tournament history a seven seed has played an eight seed for the title.

With the heavy favorite that was Florida knocked out, a lot of brackets just ended too. That is if there were many left to begin with.

UConn advancing to the National Title is just one of a number of March Madness upsets that destroyed brackets this year. Of course, that's good news for UConn.

[Photo Credit: MattBritt00]

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Social Strategy: How to Build a Sustainable Social Media Marketing Plan

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 07:14 PM PDT

Michael Stelzner

Do you have a social media plan?

Are you wondering how to build a social media strategy for your business?

To learn about the importance of a social media strategy, I interview Neal Schaffer for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.

More About This Show

Social Media Marketing Podcast w/ Michael Stelzner

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview Neal Schaffer, author of Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing. He's a social media consultant and coach. His newest book is Maximize Your Social: A One-Stop Guide to Building a Social Media Strategy for Marketing and Business Success.

Neal shares the unique insights he gained while working overseas with companies that had to build their sales organizations from scratch.

You'll learn the core elements your social strategy needs to be successful and sustainable.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!

Listen Now

You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, Stitcher or Blackberry.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:

Social Media Marketing Plan

Many marketers are solely focused on the 'how' rather than the 'why' of social media

Neal states that you should operate with a plan. The most precious resource for a marketer is time. Social media can drain your time, especially with the emergence of new platforms.

You need to have a plan—and more importantly, an objective—and be able to measure what you are doing. For a small business it's one thing, but if you are doing it on behalf of a client or a brand/company, they want to know what they will get out of their social media budget.

plan istock 16596422

First of all, you need to have a plan when it comes to social media marketing. Image source: iStockphoto

As social media becomes a mass skill, Neal thinks we'll see a lot more corporate oversight into what people do in social media.

If you concentrate on the tactics alone, then the value of a Facebook like is meaningless. It might be a secondary metric, but at the end of the day, you need to know how it affects your business objectives. If you just look at the tactics, you completely miss the whole business picture.

As a small business owner, it's easy to get caught up in the numbers. There is more focus on the 'how,' because you can be too concerned about trying to keep up with everyone else.

You'll hear Neal give an example of a hotel client's Facebook strategy and how it's not all about the number of likes you have compared to your competitors.

maximize social business on facebook

Facebook likes aren’t what you should use to compare yourself against your competition.

Likes are important to companies that want to get brand recognition in the marketplace—although it's not a business objective, it's more brand awareness.

Listen to the show to find out why the number of likes is only one indicator in comparing yourself to your competition.

How working abroad helped Neal in the new world of social media

After graduating from college, Neal moved to Japan, where he helped three companies in the high-tech industry. Neal says it provided him with a lot of extremely holistic business experience.

He had to launch their sales organizations from scratch and had to figure out how to get brand recognition across different countries in markets where they weren't known.

These jobs included sales and marketing, attending conferences, hiring people, dealing with legal issues and offering customer support. All of these roles led Neal to a very holistic view of social media in terms of not just using it for marketing but throughout the enterprise.

You'll hear why storytelling helped strengthen these Chinese brands and Japanese technology.

Neal gained unique insights while working with these companies and it has given him a way to look at things in a practical, rational and actionable way.

Listen to the show to find out about the analogy of thinking about a social network like a country.

Trends marketers need to understand 

One of the trends that Neal brings up in his book, Maximize Your Social, is the convergence of information and communication.

maximize your social book

Neal’s book, Maximize Your Social.

Social media users join social networks in order to get back in touch with friends on Facebook or colleagues on LinkedIn. When you start to share more information and ask questions, the more you go to these social networks as a source of news, visual inspiration or entertainment.

So what used to be about communication is now about information. Neal believes companies need to be informed and not just talk about themselves, but more about things that their target audience would be interested in.

One of the trends seen very clearly is paid social. With Facebook's recent announcement that you don't need third-party apps to do a promotion anymore, what they are trying to do is to get companies to invest more in Promoted Posts to market the campaigns instead.

In order to keep your engagement level up, you need to do Promoted Posts on a regular basis to keep your page fresh in people's minds. The idea behind paid social is that you need to pay to play, which is becoming more important.

A lot of companies believe that social media is free and that they shouldn't have to pay for it. With paid social, it can really assist your social media marketing. It can accelerate all of the organic things you do. Neal says it's a trend that everyone should acknowledge.

You'll discover how Neal uses StumbleUpon's Paid Discovery to generate website traffic and why he's had extreme success with it.

stumble upon paid discovery

StumbleUpon’s Paid Discovery is a great tool to help generate website traffic.

Most companies make the mistake with paid Stumble of having just a home page. Instead they should have something that's a resource for their target audience.

Neal has found with some campaigns that traffic from StumbleUpon has seen lower bounce rates, more time on site and more page views because you can target the right audience with the right information. It's all about relevance.

Listen to the show to learn what happens when the StumbleUpon crowd sees someone just marketing to them.

Where a business should start with a social media strategy

Neal states that you should start with your objectives. Most companies have multiple objectives, with brand awareness being one of them. Neal worked with a company for which reputation management through social media was their main objective.

The more defined your objectives are, the easier it will be to plan your tactics, metrics and measure ROI.

If you have a lot of different product lines, look at your own corporate strategy. What is your strategy outside of social media? This is where your social media objectives should map into your corporate strategy.

If you're a social media marketer for a company and don't know what the objectives are, then you need to ask your CEO or president, as it's these people who want to see how social media affects the bottom line. Ask yourself what the three strategic things are as an organization that you want to push forward on in the next 3-6 months or 6-12 months. You need to think how social media can help you.

You'll learn about the people you can use in your organization to help you create a more inclusive social media strategy, which will be more comprehensive and help you company-wide.

social media icons

Let staff throughout your organization help build your social media strategy. Image source: iStockphoto

The next part of your strategy is to consider what social media channels you want to establish a strategic presence on. You then have to look at the different functionality of each channel that you can maximize.

As you measure and create your metrics from your objectives, you need to figure out how your activity on these channels contributes to your sales.

Over time, you will then see which platform contributes more to your sales. This gives you the insight into where you should increase and decrease your investment. You have to adjust these levels regularly and take a data-driven approach to be able to fine-tune it.

You'll hear Neal give advice for a new organically grown business whose objective is to drive more traffic to their blog and to get people to sign up for updates.

Listen to the show to hear about what Neal calls content buckets.

The advantages of paid social

Should someone even consider the paid social? Neal says it all comes down to the fact that time is money. There is an opportunity lost for whatever you do.

A lot of small businesses that have grown organically probably spend less than $100 a month on any given tool. You do have the free version of Hootsuite and Google Analytics.

You don't have to use paid social. The best way is to grow organically. This is easy for companies that already have brand awareness, but if you don't, it will take a lot longer. The problem is that it's easier for your competition to gain mindshare.

Neal advises to stop commenting on 100 different blogs and instead spend your time creating better content. For the time you save, you can afford to spend $20-$100 on paid social.

You'll find out the advantages of having an ROI attached to something.

Although paid social is one component, for Neal it's about maximizing potential. Whether you use it or not, it's something to be aware of. It's another tool in your toolkit that you can use.

One way to use paid social is if your goal is to reach 20,000 likes and you are only at 15,000, you could budget to supplement your organic growth rate to help you achieve your target. This can also bring in new blood that might engage with your content in a different way.

facebook sponsored stories

A Sponsored Story is a great way to increase your likes on Facebook.

It's a component you should experiment with. If one hour of your time is worth $20, then spend it and use that time to do something that is more strategic or more valuable.

Neal is not saying that blog commenting and engaging on social media aren't extremely valuable, but you can't be everywhere at once. You have to be careful how you spend your time on social. Use paid to supplement it.

Listen to the show to find out how you can use paid social to get your name out there.

This Week's Social Media Question

Felipe Bzr asks, "I visited Coca-Cola's Facebook page and most posts were in German. With me living in Vienna, I discovered that they obviously found my location. I was wondering how they find out which language you use? How can I focus on a language if I'm an international company and I want one page for my company internationally and how can I spread the word in different languages without having different pages?"

coca cola facebook page

Coca-Cola is one of the big brands on Facebook that post updates in their fans’ own language.

This is a great question and it doesn't cost anything to do this.

First you need to have a Facebook for Business page. When you go into the Status Update field, there is a little target that appears in the bottom left. You click on it and it will say "Target By" and you can choose from many different options.

For example, you can choose target by location. You will see all of the locations available. For the U.S., you can target by country, region, state or a city. For people outside of the U.S., it might be a little bit different.

You can then target any country you want and it will only show updates to people in that particular country, region or city.

A lot of big brands post updates in their customers', prospects' or fans' language and they will only be seen by the people in those regions. Facebook knows you are in a particular region because of the information you provide when you set up your Facebook personal profile.

You can do more than just target by location. You can target by relationship status, gender, educational status, age and language. Not everyone provides this data in their personal profile.

There are a lot of creative things you can do with targeting. Give it a try and experiment with it.

Call in and leave your social media–related questions for us and we may include them in a future show.

Listen to the show to learn more and let us know how this works for you.

Other Show Mentions

Social Media Success Summit 2013

Social Media Success Summit 2013 is a special online conference designed to help you master social media marketing (brought to you by Social Media Examiner).

Social Media Success Summit 2013.

Forty-five of the world's leading social media pros will show you how. Instructors include Jay Baer (author, Youtility), Chri s Brogan (co-author, Impact Equation), Mari Smith (co-author, Facebook Marketing), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Mark Schaefer (author, Return on Influence), Jesse Stay (author, Google+ for Dummies), Amy Porterfield (co-author, Facebo ok Marketing All-in-One for Dummies) and experts from General Electric, Sony, E! Online, Kelly Services and Discovery Channel–just to mention a few. Fully online. Click here to learn more.

We are only days away from one of the biggest and most popular online events we have ever done. Tons of presenters will present the absolute latest and greatest to you on everything from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to blogging, podcasting and video marketing.

You will find a lot of great stuff here. If you want to take your professional development to an entirely new level, make sure you check it out.

Key takeaways mentioned in this episode:

Ways to subscribe to the Social Media Marketing podcast:

What do you think? What are your thoughts on creating a social strategy? Please leave your comments below.

Images from iStockPhoto.

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5 Hashtag Tracking Tools for Twitter, Facebook and Beyond

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 06:43 PM PDT

Harsh Ajmera

social media toolsAre you using hashtags in your social media campaigns?

Do you want to find tools to help manage your hashtags?

The right tools can help you launch, track and analyze hashtags across social networks.

In this article, you'll discover five tools that make it easy to track hashtags and their related conversations.

Why Use a Hashtag?

Hashtags make it easier for people to find and follow discussions about brands, events and promotions. They also let brands track the performance of promotions across social media.

Hashtags can determine how easily you can target and track a campaign. You've probably seen many businesses use generic hashtags like #food or #chocolate. While these will get your update into a large conversation, using such broad hashtags is wasting your time.

Can you imagine how many posts (tweets or otherwise) contain #chocolate every minute? Managing the hashtag would be a nightmare. You'd spend weeks sorting through every instance of the hashtag to determine which mentions apply to you.

It's worth the effort (and your sanity) to come up with a unique hashtag that fits with your particular campaign.

A good example is Subway's #januANY campaign. Their hashtag has two key components: it's distinctive enough to track easily and it's simple for fans to remember.

subway januany tweet

Subway uses hashtags that are memorable and easy to track.

As you're choosing a hashtag, follow Subway's lead. A good hashtag is memorable, unique and relevant to your campaign.

Following those guidelines, you'll find it's much easier to keep track of how many people are participating in your campaign and spreading the word.

Read on to discover five tools that can effectively track, analyze and report how others are using your hashtag.

#1: RebelMouse: Embed Your Campaign on Your Website

RebelMouse is your best friend if you're running a cross-platform campaign.

Not only does it fetch hashtag conversations happening anywhere on social media, it also offers integrated Google Analytics, social sharing, RSS feeds and content moderation.

Add to that a custom domain feature with customizable designs and CSS capabilities that let you embed RebelMouse on your website, and you have a one-stop shop for your social storytelling.

rebel mouse

RebelMouse is your social media front page.

Burger King's #SATISFRIED campaign used RebelMouse to pull hashtagged Instagram photos into their website and show off how fans were being satisfried.

burger king rebel mouse page

RebelMouse embedded on the Burger King website.

Having people share the hashtag provided social proof for friends of friends and helped Burger King reach a wider audience.

#2: Tagboard: Get the Complete Conversation

Tagboard gathers text, video and image posts to give you an overall picture of what's being said around a hashtag.

After grabbing relevant conversations from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Vine, Tagboard puts them in a user-friendly interface where you can interact with the results.

tagboard platform

Tagboard lets you track hashtags across multiple platforms.

Audi used Tagboard to track their Super Bowl ad for #Bravery in 2013. They were able to pull in tweets, Facebook mentions and Instagram mentions.

audi tagboard page

Audi has been using hashtags with their Super Bowl ads since 2011.

#3: Talkwalker: Analyze Hashtag Campaigns

Talkwalker is more than a hashtag tracking tool. Its capabilities go far beyond letting you listen to and engage with conversations around hashtags.

Talkwalker gives you data for gender distribution, geographic distribution and sentiment analysis on your own hashtags, as well as your competitors' hashtags.

talkwalker metrics

Track more than mentions—get key demographics with Talkwalker.

All the data are easily filtered, sorted, analyzed and charted using their tool. The insights can be seamlessly exported into Excel, PowerPoint and Word so you can manage and present results easily.

#4: Bundle Post: Generate Hashtags Automatically

Bundle Post is a very useful content management system that lets you generate, organize, schedule and post content for hashtag campaigns. It also integrates with HootSuite, HubSpot, Buffer and other systems.

bundlepost platform

Bundle Post automatically generates hashtags for you.

This tool has a specialized feature that identifies popular keywords in your content and automatically replaces those words with hashtags. After you type these keywords and phrases into the Bundle Feed feature, it goes out and finds relevant, related content for you!

#5: RiteTag: Find the Perfect Hashtag

RiteTag optimizes updates for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ with the best possible hashtags for your post, then analyzes them to let you create a library of hashtags to use.

To make publishing easier, RiteTag has an extension you can add to your web browser. Use the extension to schedule updates with your optimized hashtags from wherever you are.

Bonus Tools Just for Twitter

Tweet Binder and Twubs are specialized Twitter tools for analytics and filtering conversations, respectively.

Tweet Binder lets you enter a hashtag, then provides an in-depth report of actual conversations, retweets, associated images and links based on your hashtag. Once you get the results, you can categorize your findings by influencers, contributors or other media filters.

tweetbinder platform

Tweet Binder gives you a custom ranking feature for events.

Twubs acts as a live stream for Twitter chats. It has been known to be more real-time than Twitter itself! If a hashtag conversation is moving too quickly for you, just hit the Pause button to catch up.

twubs platform

Use Twubs to track your hashtags in real time.

Over to you

From Google+ and Facebook to Pinterest and LinkedIn, hashtags are everywhere these days.

With the right tools, hashtags make it easier for brands to manage and maintain social media campaigns.

The tools above can help you launch, track and analyze hashtags across social networks. You can see what's working and what's not, how big your reach is and even how you compare to your competition. I'd say that's pretty handy.

What do you think? What do you use to keep track of your hashtags? Have you tried any of these tools? How have they worked for you? Share your experiences and opinions in the comments below.

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get more twitter followers ethically

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 06:07 PM PDT

Creators of ‘Cuban Twitter’ Getting Called To Congress

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 05:51 PM PDT

Ian DeMartino

The officials behind the secret plan to destabilize Cuba with a social media site are being called to Congress.

The United States Agency For International Development (USAID) secretly created a "twitter-like" program called ZunZuneo with the hopes that it would destabilize the communist country. Shortly after the program was revealed by an investigation by the AP, officials defended the program, saying that it was debated in Congress and therefore didn't need Presidential approval. ZunZuneo was created using shell offshore companies that only existed on paper.

Two prominent Democrats, who sit on the Congressional Intelligence Committee and Judiciary Committee say they were never informed of the program, so they are calling in the top official at the USAID, Rajiv Shah to ask him some questions about the program.

ZunZuneo is now defunct, as a social media site created by such forward thinking visionaries like government bureaucrats shockingly failed to take off. The users that did sign up for it, 40,000 at its peak, likely didn't know it was created by a foreign government with the intention of overthrowing their domestic government.

The USAID was also playing the long game, gathering information on the users, possibly for future political use later.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont and Representative C.A.Ruppersberger of Maryland are calling Rajiv Shah in to explain the program, because despite being some of the highest ranking elected officials in their respective houses, neither of them had heard about it before.

ZunZuneo ran from 2009 until 2012.

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The Home Of The Cronut, Dominique Ansel Bakery, Shut Down By Health Officials

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 05:49 PM PDT

Megan Charles

A YouTube video posted by an observant customer has been instrumental in getting a New York bakery closed down. The Dominique Ansel Bakery, home of the cronut, has been shut down by health officials due to an infestation of mice.

Even more shocking, this is the second recent report of a New York City bakery being closed down because of vermin and YouTube. Not sure if we should start calling this mouse-gate or rat-gate.

Earlier, the Social News Daily reported how a New York City Dunkin Donuts was shuttered by the health department after several Youtube videos under the username "pjayone" appeared online. They featured a rat as it traversed racks of donuts and croissants intended for customers.

The NYC Dunkin Donuts was shut down and cited for having a rat infestation, not following proper hand washing procedures and not properly protecting food from contamination.

In the case of the Dominique Ansel Bakery, yet another YouTube video post captured a brief cameo of what was most certainly a mouse as is darted from beneath a rack in the kitchen and scurried under a counter during business hours in the Soho-based bakery.

As a result of the amateur short-film, which appeared on several social media outlets, the Dominique Ansel Bakery was closed down by health officials on Friday.

In an October inspection, the health department cited evidence of vermin, but the Dominique Ansel Bakery still received an A rating. It wasn't until the YouTube post that, the LA Times says, four public health inspectors showed up and subsequently shut down the bakery.

The Dominique Ansel Bakery opened in New York City in November 2011; founded by Dominique Ansel, a French pastry chef. Since its opening the eponymous bakery has been awarded Time Out New York's "Best New Bakery of 2012", Metromix's "Best Bakery of 2012", and was Zagat 2013's highest ranked bakery.

The Cronut is Ansel's special trademark doughnut and croissant hybrid; made from laminated dough as it is sugared, filled and glazed. The bakery produces a different flavor of the hyped cronut each month.

Noting back to the aforementioned October inspection, at a live auction during the same month, Dominique Ansel, along with auctioneer Nicholas Lowry and Questlove, auctioned a dozen freshly baked Cronuts for $14,000 in less than twenty minutes. The proceeds benefited City Harvest, a New York City food rescue organization, reports the Gothamist.

Taking the health departments actions personally, Ansel issued a statement of his own, quoted by the NY Daily News, that called the shut-down a reflection of his current stature as the "It" boy of American patisserie. "We often feel like we're being looked at under a tremendous microscope," he said. "No other bakery would've suffered as we did in a similar situation."

And yet, as seen with the New York City Dunkin Donuts, we can see that is not the case.

There is no word yet as to when the eatery will reopen.

[Photo Credit: YVRBCbro]

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Rumored Paid Music Service From YouTube Delayed

Posted: 05 Apr 2014 05:45 PM PDT

Ian DeMartino

Rumored Paid Music Service From YouTube Delayed image YouTube Logo

Google doesn't think the music streaming market is oversaturated. In fact, Google thinks it is so strong that it is launching another Music Streaming service in addition to the one it already offers. The Google owned YouTube is expected to be launching its own premium music streaming service at some point soon, but the expected release date came and left, so what happened?

According to Billboard, the service was due to launch by January, but it has been delayed until sometime during the second quarter of this year as YouTube and Google attempt to make the streaming service capable enough to stand toe-to-toe with its many competitors.

The market is currently controlled by Pandora, Spotify, Rdio, Beats Music and Google's own Play Music program. YouTube, however, remains the most popular place to find and listen to music, even beating out AM/FM radio for users aged between 12 and 24, despite the service not being as capable as the aforementioned streaming services.

While most Google services generally enter a beta phase before release, Google and YouTube reportedly plan to make this service capable enough to draw users away from its competitors the moment it is released to the public.

The service will reportedly include both premium and ad-based version. Google already owns licences for millions of music tracks for its Google Play services, so once the YouTube streaming service has its infrastructure in place, it should be relatively easy for Google to provide a service with an extensive library.

[Photo Credit: Rego Korosi]

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