Saturday, October 29, 2016

Free Stock Photo Sites for your Social Media Images

Image result for Free Stock Photo Sites for your Social Media ImagesAny social media manager or content marketer knows that one of the toughest parts of the job is finding the perfect image to accompany a post. We all know that images are one of the most important components for engagement, but unless you’re willing to pay significant costs for access to a database, trying to find great free social media imagescan be incredibly time-consuming.

To help you get rid of this headache, we’ve put together a list of 20 free stock photo sites that you can bookmark for easy reference whenever you’re having trouble getting the right picture.

Creative Commons Zero

Before sharing the list, it’s important to recognize what is meant with the different licensing and copyrights of images available. It can be hard to know if you are legally allowed to use or modify an image you find online for your personal or commercial uses, so the Creative Commons Zero license is especially valuable.
According to the Creative Commons website, the CC0 license “enables scientists, educators, artists and other creators and owners of copyright- or database-protected content to waive those interests in their works and thereby place them as completely as possible in the public domain, so that others may freely build upon, enhance and reuse the works for any purposes without restriction under copyright or database law.”
In other words, you are free to use that great sunset shot you found under the CC0 license for any purpose, including your next Instagram campaign. Here are the best free stock photo sites we found whose images fall under CC0.
Bonus: Download a free cheat sheet to quickly find the best image sizes for every social network and learn how you can use Hootsuite to easily add them to any post.

20 Free Sites for Awesome Social Media Images

Gratisography is one of the most interesting of the free stock photo sites due to the quirky style of photographer Ryan McGuire. All of the photos are high-resolution and royalty-free, ready for your use wherever you please. Sorted into the categories of animals, nature, objects, people, urban, and whimsical, there are new photos added weekly, which are also shared through McGuire’s Twitter and Facebook.
2. IM Free
IM Free offers not only free social media images, but is a “curated collection of free web design resources, all for commercial use.” The royalty free collections include templates, icons, button makers, along with classic free stock images organized by themes such as technology, education, nature, and many more.
3. Pixabay
Pixabay offers over 490,000 free images for both your personal and commercial use. These are great to use as social media images, because Pixabay’s collection includes not only photos, but illustrations and vector images. As all images on the site are royalty free and covered under Creative Commons CC0, they may be modified and used commercially and in printed format.
With over 2,479,693 downloads since its 2013 launch, Picjumbo is a popular free resource for your social media images. Users can either click through the different categories of over 600 high resolution photos for free, or download a pack that includes all images as well as three Photoshop mockups, in exchange for a donation of $10 or more.
Unsplash offers ten new photos every ten days via an email subscription as well as simply on their website. All photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, “which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.” You can navigate the site by viewing the photos in their larger versions, but when browsing I usually find it easier to switch to the grid format.
The Morguefile was created in 1996, and offers photographs available free for the use in creative projects. The website does ask that photographers or artists are credited when using their free stock images as they aren’t in the public domain. As they emphasize altering their images when using them, this is a great resource for free social media images that can be used as backgrounds for text-based images such as quotes, store hours, etc. that you want to post to Instagram or Facebook.
Stockvault hosts over 35,000 royalty-free images, graphics, and designs from photographers, designers, and students around the world. As long as you stay on the “Free Stock Photos” rather than the “Premium Stock Photos” tab, you have access to a huge library of photos to use for your content and social media purposes.
Negative Space adds new free stock images every week, and all are listed under the Creative Commons Zero license. These free images are sortable by category, copy space, position, and color. You can also follow them on FacebookTwitter, and Instagram, for updates on new image additions.
Lock and Stock Photos was started by AJ Montpetit who firmly believes in a “sharing is caring” model and after benefiting for a long time from other free stock images sites, decided to become a producer himself. All of his beautiful photos are released under the Creative Commons Zero license, so no attribution is required (but is of course always appreciated).
KaboomPics offers a ton of great quality royalty free stock images that are available for use by personal users as well as commercial purposes. The thousands of free images are searchable by keyword, category, tags, or can be browsed.
FancyCrave’s easy to navigate website releases two new images from professional photographers everyday. When looking for free social media images, the extra colorful and vibrant nature of FancyCrave’s photographs are especially eye-catching for sharing and engagement purposes.
12. StockSnap
When researching resources for free social media images, I was told by more than one socially-savvy person that StockSnap was their favorite site. The free images can be sorted by date added, trending, number of views, number of downloads, as well as through keyword searches.
Startup Stock Photos has a concept that is pretty self-explanatory, with free stock images for “startups, bloggers, publishers, websites, designers, developers, creators, and everyone else.” The photos are especially great as free social media images when you are sharing links to content such as a professional blog post, where the most fitting visual is of someone on a computer or in a casual business setting.
Web designer Daniel Nanescu created Splitshire to offer a collection of stunning, easy to browse, free stock images. The images are sorted into helpful categories such as “Abstract,” “Still Life,” and “Technology,” which allows for a pleasant browsing experience. Nanescu’s photos which previously lived “on a hard drive gathering dust” are now, for good reason, being used on websites like The Huffington Post, CNN, as well as numerous books and magazine covers.
Life of Pix is a collection of free high-resolution stock images donated to the public domain by the Leeroy Advertising Agency in Montreal. With no copyright restrictions, the beautiful photos are free for personal and commercial use. If you need free social media images of the moving variety, their sister site Life of Vids offers royalty-free videos, clips, and loops for you to use to your heart’s content.
16. Pexels
The free stock images on Pexels are curated from sites such as Gratisography, Unsplash, and Little Visuals, in the attempt to simplify the image searching process. All of the photos on the site are licensed under the Creative Commons Zero, making it easy to know that you can use any of the photos for personal or commercial use. The collection currently includes over 3,800 high-resolution free stock photos, with at least 70 new ones added each and every week.
Jay Mantri’s photographs are nothing short of breathtaking, and the fact that he offers them as free stock photos is extremely generous. While beautiful to scroll through in their large form, if you are needing to quickly find an image for your content or social media posting, I suggest changing to the archive view for a condensed appearance.
ISO Republic is a fairly new site, run by English designer and photographer Tom Eversley. The site’s mission is “to provide high-quality images to be used by designers, developers, bloggers, marketers and social media teams.” The categories these free social media images are sorted into, include architecture, nature, people, textures, urban, and everyone’s favorite, “various”.
New Old Stock provide the ultimate “Throwback Thursday” content with their hundreds of vintage photos from the public archives. The photos are fascinating and would be a compelling addition to any social media campaign. Offering hundreds of royalty free stock photos, New Old Stock’s collection showcases a wide variety of situations and subjects, perfect for a number of social media posting opportunities.
20. Free Refe
We have used a number of the free stock photos from Free Refe for our purposes, due to their clarity, quality, and diverse subject matter. Although there is an emphasis on photos showing “real life,” the images are anything but mundane. As their website states, “using great imagery helps portray emotions, increase sales, and conversions,” the free photos here are a must-bookmark resource.
The quest for perfect free social media images can seem daunting at first, but with these free resources hopefully the task has been made as painless as possible. Share your favorite sites for free stock photos with us, and let us know if we’ve missed any!

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Get Clicks Without Resorting to Clickbait: Easy Tactics

Image result for Get Clicks Without Resorting to Clickbait: Easy Tactics
In this zany internet age, we’ve become more selective about how we spend our time on the world wide web. With zillions of internet articles to read on everything from politics to polar bears and limited time to devote to said reading, many people have become less willing to waste time searching for substance.

While a catchy headline like, “Read this article to discover the true meaning of life,” might grab your audience’s attention (who hasn’t longed for an internet article to tell them the true meaning of life?), if a few lines of reading doesn’t fulfill the promise of the headline, the reader will feel duped and be less keen to return to your website again.

And that, dear content marketer, is why you should avoid using clickbait headlines on your website and social media posts.

Many platforms have caught onto the fallacy of clickbait and developed systems to demote that kind of content. To better serve their users, Facebook now uses a system that detects clickbait headlines and reduces distribution of posts from Pages and web domains that consistently use them.

So how do you entice your audience to read your content without making false promises? Here are a few tips to help you get clicks without resorting to clickbait.
5 tips for writing clickable headlines that aren’t clickbait
1. Set realistic expectations

These days people don’t want to be strung along. The first few times your audience falls for the clickbait trap are exciting, but eventually you lose their trust and they stop clicking. Your desperate attempts to inspire curiosity and wonder will wear off if you continuously fail to meet expectations.

When the reader clicks on “These 45 Stunning Photos of Pruning Shears Will Make You Cry” and doesn’t shed a single tear, he’s going to feel like a fool.

If you’re going to describe the pruning shears as “stunning” and prepare your audience to cry, those better be some truly fantastic garden tools. Otherwise it’s best to cut the razzle dazzle and just be honest with your audience.

Facebook suggests that instead of relying on misleading headlines to intrigue the reader, share articles with accurate headlines that don’t exaggerate the topic. If your content is about boring, but incredibly functional pruning shears, then own it. Your audience of pruning shear consumers will thank you for giving them the straight facts.

That way when the reader clicks on “The 12 Greatest Garden Pruners for Small Hands” and your content lives up to the headline, she’ll know you’re a brand with integrity.
2. Make a list

When your audience is scrolling through an endless stream of headlines, what can you do to make your content stand out without manipulating them emotionally or withholding information? Organize your content into a list.

Research has shown that human brains love lists. Lists help create an easier reading and thinking experience. Lists help quantify the length of the story while preparing your audience for how much attention they’ll need to pay to the reading. In a world of infinite choices, list-style headlines can be a relief from the burden of decision. Numbered lists help us organize information spatially and enjoy a feeling of accomplishment when we successfully finish reading the article.

If you set out to learn about the “7 Most Important Moments in Icelandic History” and by the end of the article you know all seven, that’s a good feeling and you’re likely to click numbered list-style articles again. Especially odd numbered lists.
3. Evoke emotion

Creating an emotional connection with your audience is essential. Again, that doesn’t mean promising extreme sentimental feelings in exchange for making contact with your content. It just means identifying the emotions that matter most to your audience and using them in your language. Rage may not work so well for someone trying to sell fleece pajamas, but may work great for a marketer promoting an energy drink.

What works isn’t always so obvious. For example, one study on emotional marketingfound that consumers in the finance and insurance sector respond better to intimacy than to safety and to anxiety over exclusivity. Consumers in the retail market had the opposite response. They were more likely to engage with safety over intimacy and exclusivity over anxiety. What works best for your company and audience may take a little trial and error to figure out, but once you tap into what makes them tick, you’ll be well on your way.


Bonus: Download a free guide that reveals how to increase social media engagement with better audience research, sharper customer targeting, and Hootsuite’s easy-to-use social media software.
4. Be authentic

Remember when you asked your mom how to make friends in school and she told you to just be yourself? Well, she was right. When your creative team taps into their own genuine interests, magical things can happen. Once you strip away the business lingo, you can relate to your audience through shared experience and connect with them as you would a friend.

That’s why it’s essential to have a vibrant, engaged creative team with a multitude of interests. For example, Hootsuite’s creative team loves the HBO series, Game of Thrones. By tapping into this authentic interest, the team was able to create a wildly successful bit of media content by reimagining the Game of Thrones title sequence with social networks as the houses.

The video has been viewed over 900,000 times and was featured in Time, AdAge, Fast Company, and Mashable. If you want to get clicks without resorting to clickbait, foster a supportive workplace environment that encourages creativity, individuality, and taking risks.

When your team can freely express ideas from a place of authenticity, shareable content will follow.
5. Revise, revise, revise

Just because a headline seems casually clever, doesn’t mean it was arrived at by quick wit. Great editors often painstakingly revise headlines down to a science. A muddle of keywords transforms into an effective high-converting marketing beast machine when attacked by a thoughtful copywriter.

You may be on a deadline, but that little bit of extra care you take to craft a headlinecan pay off big time if inspiration strikes and you come up with a great one.

Your headline is your first point of connection with your audience, so you better make it a good one. If you need a little help getting started on your headline, you can take a spin on this nifty headline generator tool.

Remember, you don’t need to stoop to clickbait to get clicks. Slow and steady wins the race.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Crazy ways Social Media is changing your Brain





Social Media sites being used by 1/3rd of the entire world, they’ve clearly had a major influence on society. But what about our Mind?


Here are 5 crazy ways that social media and the internet are affecting your mind right now

1. Can’t log off? Surprisingly 5 to 10 % of net user are actually unable to control how much time they spend online.

Though it’s a psychological addiction as appeared to substance addiction, brains scan these people actually show a similar impairment of regions that those dependencies have.

Specifically, these are a clear degradation matter of regions that control emotional processing, attention, and decision-making. Because Social Media provide immediate rewards with very little effort required, your brain begins to change itself, making your desire this stimulation.





2. We also see a shift when looking at multitasking. You might that those who use social media are constantly switching between work and website are better at multitasking, But studies have originated that when comparing heavy media user to others, they perform much worse during the task-switching test.

Increased Multitasking online reduces your brain’s ability to filter out interference, and can’t even make it harder for your brain to commit information to memory.





3. Like your phone buzzes in the middle of productive work. Or wait did it even buzz? A phantom Vibration syndrome is a relatively new psychological phenomenon where you think you get your phone go off, but it didn’t. Studies show sometimes itching is a vibration from your brain.

In one study, 89% of test subjects said they experienced this at least once a week. It perceives an itch as an actual vibration from our phone.




As crazy as it seems, technology has begun to rewrite our nervous system and our brains are being triggered in a way that never have been before in history.

4. Using MRI scans, scientist found that the rewards middle in people’s brain is much more active when they are talking about their own views as opposed to listening to others. Not so surprisingly, we all love talking about ourselves right?

But it turns out that while 30 to 40% of face to face conversation involve communicating our own experiences, around 80% of social media communication is self-involved.




5. But it’s not all self-involved, In fact, studies on relationship have found that partners tend to like each other more if they meet for the first time online rather than with face to face interaction. Whether it's because people's are more anonymous or perhaps more clear about their future goals, there is a statistical increase in a successful partnership that started online.





So while The Internet has changed our verbal communication with increased physical separation, perhaps the ones that matter end up even closer.

Monday, October 24, 2016

Social on Your Mind: What Social Media Does to Your Brain




Social on Your Mind: What Social Media Does to Your Brain

Image result for Social on Your Mind: What Social Media Does to Your Brain


You spend all day tweeting, liking, posting, and sharing, but what are these practices doing to your most important tool—your brain? The human brain has had to adapt to many changes throughout history as new technologies were introduced (the printing press, anyone?) and the acceleration of the Internet and social media has shown fascinating effects on the mind.
Neuroplasticity, or “the brain’s ability to alter its behavior based on new experiences,” has been put into overdrive as social media became not just a hobby but a lifestyle and full-time career for many. We’ve all heard that uncle at Thanksgiving who declares that those darn kids on their smartphones are numbing their brain cells thanks to all the “tweetering,” so we decided to take a look at what is actually going on in your head as you experience the world through social.
Spoiler alert: your uncle might need something else to rant about over turkey next year.

Grey matters

While we can talk endlessly about the sociological and cultural effects of social media, the physiological effects on the brain are rarely discussed. This can reasonably be attributed to social media’s relative newness and a lack of research done on the subject. Still, what little research that has been published is definitely worth exploring.
According to a study by The Royal Society, the amount of Facebook friends you have can directly correlate with the amount of grey matter your brain has. Scientists measured the amount of grey matter, the part of the brain responsible for memory, emotions, speech, sensory perception, and muscle control, and “found that the more Facebook friends a person had, the larger the volume of their grey matter in several regions of the brain.” The first author of the study, Dr. Ryota Kanai went on to explain, “We have found some interesting brain regions that seem to link to the number of friends we have—both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time—this will help us answer the question of whether the internet is changing our brains.”
However, with there being no clear reason why this is the case, it remains a kind of chicken and egg situation where it’s not certain whether people who have large amounts of grey matter are naturally programmed to do well on social media, or whether the grey matter builds due to the amount of Facebook friends a person has. Regardless, it’s an intriguing relationship that deserves more attention.

Refresh your memory

With memory being one of the main functions of this grey matter, the effect of social media on our ability to recall events is often questioned. Many whine that because, for example,  we can use social media to talk to someone rather than having to memorize their phone number and contact details, we are damaging our memories. The scientific evidence proves otherwise.
In 2012, researchers Tracy Packiam Alloway and Ross Geoffrey published a paper entitled “The impact of engagement with social networking sites (SNSs) on cognitive skills,” to examine the effects of different social media channels on our working memory, attention skills, and levels of social connectedness. They found that different activities on different platforms positively affected the working memory of participants.
For example, they had one participant check their friends’ Facebook status updates, and the more that this was done, the more positively the working memory levels grew. It makes sense that in taking in more information—more status updates, more images, more interactions—our brains have to work harder to keep up. Like a muscle, the more the brain is exercised, the stronger it can grow.
Checking a status update means that not only does your brain have to see and process the information, but has to remember it and update the “database” of memories all have. If you saw on Facebook that your friend’s sister had a baby, you would want to remember this information and the details to congratulate her the next time you see her. This is a social practice and need that has been around since long before the days of social media, but the idea of “transactive memory”—using others around you to fill in the blanks of your memories —is one that social media has been shown to have affected.
Clive Thompson, author of “Smarter Than You Think,” explains that this kind of memory power “allows us to perform at higher levels, accomplishing acts of reasoning that are impossible for us to do alone.” Where before individuals would rely on their spouses, friends, or people around them to fill in the blanks (i.e. what was your sister’s baby’s name again?) social media is now acting as the storage bank for this info. Furthermore, now that your brain is free from storing all these facts that social media can take care of (birthdays, contact information, etc.), it is open and able to make room for, and concentrate on, more important things (such as the name of that sloth video your best friend needs to watch).
However, it is definitely worth mentioning that these positive effects are diminished when the participant was multitasking on social media. The researchers conducting the study above found that memory and attention span lessened when the participants were using more than one screen or platform at a time, which is how many of us automatically use social media.  In one study, “heavy social media multitaskers” were “found to be more susceptible to interference from environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory,” suggesting the negative effect on memory power when multitasking. The same paper, however, suggests that this could possibly change as younger users grow up and adapt to this way of using the Internet and social media, and thus are able to do so more efficiently. Either way, it will be a compelling phenomenon to witness.

Emotional programming

Aside from the grey matter discussed above, social media has the same power over your brain as many “real life” interactions. Researchers at Tokyo Denki University found that the use of emojis in online communication triggered the same part of the brain engaged by one-on-one emotional contact. Here, the exchange of emojis was found to exercise the parts of the brain areas that affect emotion and social. Author of iBrain, Dr. Gary Small, explained that “when volunteers viewed emoticons during an MRI scan, their right inferior frontal gyrus was activated.”
This idea relates to the concept of “neuroeconomics,” the combination of biology, neuroscience, and psychology which tries to understand the chemical relationship between “what a person is doing at a particular time (especially online), and the specific release of certain chemicals into the brain.” Neuroeconomist Paul Zak ran some experiments and MRI-based tests on participants while they used Twitter and Facebook, and found that the brain understands social media interactions and connections just as it would “real world” interactions through the release of a magical chemical called oxytocin. This is the same chemical released during the bonding between a mother and her baby, when we eat foods that we love, when we earn money, and when we do anything that gives us a sense of satisfaction and pleasure.
You know how great you feel when you get a like or a positive comment on your latest selfie? This is because every time we receive a notification, an area of our brain called the nucleus accumbens lights up to give us this sense of gratification. While this allows social media to be a kind of stress ball for many, the reward cues that those notifications trigger can be addicting for those with addictive personalities.
In a kind of Pavlov’s dog metaphor, the release of dopamine—one of the brain’s chemicals responsible for the reward-motivated behaviours and addiction—is triggered by the buildup of anticipation and rewards. So when you’re waiting for your amazing lakeside photo to blow up on Instagram, what you are essentially trained to wait for are the reward cues in your brain to be released. As these are the same areas in the brain that light up when one takes heroin or other addictive substances, many have sensationally proclaimed social media a type of drug. However, if sticking to the solid “everything in moderation” principle and know your limit, the benefits of social media for the brain are obviously of incredible value.

Social on Your Mind: What Social Media Does to Your Brain


Social on Your Mind: What Social Media Does to Your Brain

Image result for Social on Your Mind: What Social Media Does to Your Brain


You spend all day tweeting, liking, posting, and sharing, but what are these practices doing to your most important tool—your brain? The human brain has had to adapt to many changes throughout history as new technologies were introduced (the printing press, anyone?) and the acceleration of the Internet and social media has shown fascinating effects on the mind.
Neuroplasticity, or “the brain’s ability to alter its behavior based on new experiences,” has been put into overdrive as social media became not just a hobby but a lifestyle and full-time career for many. We’ve all heard that uncle at Thanksgiving who declares that those darn kids on their smartphones are numbing their brain cells thanks to all the “tweetering,” so we decided to take a look at what is actually going on in your head as you experience the world through social.
Spoiler alert: your uncle might need something else to rant about over turkey next year.

Grey matters

While we can talk endlessly about the sociological and cultural effects of social media, the physiological effects on the brain are rarely discussed. This can reasonably be attributed to social media’s relative newness and a lack of research done on the subject. Still, what little research that has been published is definitely worth exploring.
According to a study by The Royal Society, the amount of Facebook friends you have can directly correlate with the amount of grey matter your brain has. Scientists measured the amount of grey matter, the part of the brain responsible for memory, emotions, speech, sensory perception, and muscle control, and “found that the more Facebook friends a person had, the larger the volume of their grey matter in several regions of the brain.” The first author of the study, Dr. Ryota Kanai went on to explain, “We have found some interesting brain regions that seem to link to the number of friends we have—both ‘real’ and ‘virtual’. The exciting question now is whether these structures change over time—this will help us answer the question of whether the internet is changing our brains.”
However, with there being no clear reason why this is the case, it remains a kind of chicken and egg situation where it’s not certain whether people who have large amounts of grey matter are naturally programmed to do well on social media, or whether the grey matter builds due to the amount of Facebook friends a person has. Regardless, it’s an intriguing relationship that deserves more attention.

Refresh your memory

With memory being one of the main functions of this grey matter, the effect of social media on our ability to recall events is often questioned. Many whine that because, for example,  we can use social media to talk to someone rather than having to memorize their phone number and contact details, we are damaging our memories. The scientific evidence proves otherwise.
In 2012, researchers Tracy Packiam Alloway and Ross Geoffrey published a paper entitled “The impact of engagement with social networking sites (SNSs) on cognitive skills,” to examine the effects of different social media channels on our working memory, attention skills, and levels of social connectedness. They found that different activities on different platforms positively affected the working memory of participants.
For example, they had one participant check their friends’ Facebook status updates, and the more that this was done, the more positively the working memory levels grew. It makes sense that in taking in more information—more status updates, more images, more interactions—our brains have to work harder to keep up. Like a muscle, the more the brain is exercised, the stronger it can grow.
Checking a status update means that not only does your brain have to see and process the information, but has to remember it and update the “database” of memories all have. If you saw on Facebook that your friend’s sister had a baby, you would want to remember this information and the details to congratulate her the next time you see her. This is a social practice and need that has been around since long before the days of social media, but the idea of “transactive memory”—using others around you to fill in the blanks of your memories —is one that social media has been shown to have affected.
Clive Thompson, author of “Smarter Than You Think,” explains that this kind of memory power “allows us to perform at higher levels, accomplishing acts of reasoning that are impossible for us to do alone.” Where before individuals would rely on their spouses, friends, or people around them to fill in the blanks (i.e. what was your sister’s baby’s name again?) social media is now acting as the storage bank for this info. Furthermore, now that your brain is free from storing all these facts that social media can take care of (birthdays, contact information, etc.), it is open and able to make room for, and concentrate on, more important things (such as the name of that sloth video your best friend needs to watch).
However, it is definitely worth mentioning that these positive effects are diminished when the participant was multitasking on social media. The researchers conducting the study above found that memory and attention span lessened when the participants were using more than one screen or platform at a time, which is how many of us automatically use social media.  In one study, “heavy social media multitaskers” were “found to be more susceptible to interference from environmental stimuli and from irrelevant representations in memory,” suggesting the negative effect on memory power when multitasking. The same paper, however, suggests that this could possibly change as younger users grow up and adapt to this way of using the Internet and social media, and thus are able to do so more efficiently. Either way, it will be a compelling phenomenon to witness.

Emotional programming

Aside from the grey matter discussed above, social media has the same power over your brain as many “real life” interactions. Researchers at Tokyo Denki University found that the use of emojis in online communication triggered the same part of the brain engaged by one-on-one emotional contact. Here, the exchange of emojis was found to exercise the parts of the brain areas that affect emotion and social. Author of iBrain, Dr. Gary Small, explained that “when volunteers viewed emoticons during an MRI scan, their right inferior frontal gyrus was activated.”
This idea relates to the concept of “neuroeconomics,” the combination of biology, neuroscience, and psychology which tries to understand the chemical relationship between “what a person is doing at a particular time (especially online), and the specific release of certain chemicals into the brain.” Neuroeconomist Paul Zak ran some experiments and MRI-based tests on participants while they used Twitter and Facebook, and found that the brain understands social media interactions and connections just as it would “real world” interactions through the release of a magical chemical called oxytocin. This is the same chemical released during the bonding between a mother and her baby, when we eat foods that we love, when we earn money, and when we do anything that gives us a sense of satisfaction and pleasure.
You know how great you feel when you get a like or a positive comment on your latest selfie? This is because every time we receive a notification, an area of our brain called the nucleus accumbens lights up to give us this sense of gratification. While this allows social media to be a kind of stress ball for many, the reward cues that those notifications trigger can be addicting for those with addictive personalities.
In a kind of Pavlov’s dog metaphor, the release of dopamine—one of the brain’s chemicals responsible for the reward-motivated behaviours and addiction—is triggered by the buildup of anticipation and rewards. So when you’re waiting for your amazing lakeside photo to blow up on Instagram, what you are essentially trained to wait for are the reward cues in your brain to be released. As these are the same areas in the brain that light up when one takes heroin or other addictive substances, many have sensationally proclaimed social media a type of drug. However, if sticking to the solid “everything in moderation” principle and know your limit, the benefits of social media for the brain are obviously of incredible value.

Trump, Name Now Awash in Controversy, Readies Scion as New Brand




Image result for tRUMP sCION bRAND
By the time the Federal election Commission announces Hillary Clinton as the 45th President of the USA , Donald Trump will have received perhaps up to a billion dollars of paid advertising and up to $3.5  billion of unpaid advertsing.

Enter Scion. The new brand is planned for use at city and resort locations, Trump Hotels said when Scion was announced Sept. 28. The new hotels are intended to appeal “to a new and different type of guest in more locations around the globe,” Trump Hotels said. The first Scion location is scheduled to open in 2017.


The Scion flag won’t replace the Trump brand, according to Trump Hotels. It was announced more than a week before the Washington Post published a 2005 video of Trump bragging about grabbing and kissing women.



“We chose this name as a nod to the Trump family and their tremendous business successes, including Trump Hotels,” Eric Danziger, chief executive officer of Trump Hotels, said in an e-mail. “We want to acknowledge the association with Trump in a genuine way, while allowing the new lifestyle brand to stand on its own.”


Scattered evidence suggests travelers are choosing to check in elsewhere. It’s hard to measure the impact on Trump Hotels of his most inflammatory comments or the allegations of unwelcome sexual advances. The Trump Organization doesn’t disclose occupancy rates.
Bookings Fall


Bookings at Trump hotels through luxury-travel specialist Ovation Vacations tumbled 29 percent in the past six months, said Jack Ezon, president of the firm. While corporate reservations at Trump Hotels through Altour International Inc. fell 10 percent this year through Oct. 15, leisure bookings rose so much they provided a 16 percent lift overall, said Martin Rapp, senior vice president at the corporate and leisure travel agency, which has a large number of entertainment clients. After all, more than 13 million Americans voted for Trump in the primaries.


Trump Hotels is hardly the first lodging company to introduce a new brand aimed at younger customers who may be turned off by older names that can be seen as stodgy. Marriott International Inc. started Moxy, Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. has Canopy, and Starwood, acquired by Marriott last month, added the Aloft brand. The hotel operators are dealing with competition from travel alternatives such as the home-sharing company Airbnb Inc.
Jets, Towers


In fact, competition from new hotels may be a problem for Scion, said Piers Schmidt, founder of London-based consulting firm Luxury Branding. The new brand diffuses the very things that draw customers to Trump: the image of a billionaire full of brashness and bling, he said.


Trump’s “track record is build it tall, build it loud, promote it hard, fill it with people and create this kind of lifestyle -- the jets, the towers, the hotels,” Schmidt said. “There is a litany of new lifestyle brands that are chasing after the millennials.”


The Trump Organization has eight hotels in the U.S. and seven in other countries. Its U.S. properties include the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. -- housed in the 1899 Romanesque Revival-style Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, five blocks from the White House -- and its foreign properties include the Trump International Hotel & Tower Vancouver, which is under construction. During his run for the White House, Trump gave reporters an April tour of the then-unfinished Washington hotel, held a post-Brexit event at Trump Turnberry in Scotland, and in September returned to the D.C. property to renounce previous claims that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. -- after first boasting about his new hotel.


‘Very Valuable’

Last week in Las Vegas, where Trump went up against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in their third and final debate, Rita Solon, who volunteered for her first Republican campaign in 1980 and came from Washington, D.C., to watch the event and make fundraising calls on Trump’s behalf, said she thinks that his candidacy is hurting his businesses.


“His brand was very valuable,” said Solon, wearing a Trump-Pence pin in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. “The family is making a tremendous sacrifice with his brand. He’s hated and reviled.”

Trump’s new Washington hotel has been hit with graffiti and protests. “All of my friends refuse to come here,” said Peter Gebre, a resident of suburban Maryland who was dining with his wife and son at the hotel’s restaurant to celebrate his 21st wedding anniversary earlier this month. “It does have an impact.”


The Washington hotel also is offering discounts from its pre-opening minimum prices, with rooms advertised for later this month as low as $404, compared with the starting rate of $625 initially set by Trump. October is typically one of the busiest months for Washington hotels.
‘Really Disappointing’


“It’s really disappointing to see they’re charging such low prices for all they said how good they are and how they would come in and crush everybody,” said David Bernand, general manager of the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “You only harvest what you plant.”


Trump Hotels said rates fluctuate for several reasons including market conditions and the $404 rate doesn’t provide an accurate picture of the property’s success since its Sept. 12 soft opening. The opening “has been the most successful in terms of opening bookings, interest from groups and large events” in his 10 years with Trump Hotels, Mickael Damelincourt, managing director of the new Washington hotel, said in a statement.
Beverly Hills


Other hotels have been hurt by politics or their owners’ behavior. The Sultan of Brunei had a similar problem in 2014, when his swank Beverly Hills Hotel was boycotted after the kingdom implemented Islamic criminal laws that call for death by stoning for gay people. Among the events moved from the Sunset Boulevard property was the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Global Women’s Rights Awards, and Richard Branson and Ellen DeGeneres said they wouldn’t stay there.


Then, slowly and rather quietly, the elite began to return -- because they like the place. But the Beverly Hills Hotel is a one-of-a-kind trophy with a decades-long history before the Sultan of Brunei bought it in 1987. The property doesn’t bear the sultan’s name, and the controversy wasn’t followed as closely as Trump has been during his presidential campaign.









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Still, some believe that for Trump, who has been putting his name on everything from steaks to neckties and cologne for more than 30 years, any blow to his business could also be fleeting. The candidate has thrived through multiple bankruptcies, the flop of his Trump Shuttle airline and the demise -- in a swirl of litigation alleging illegal business practices, denied by Trump -- of his eponymous for-profit university.


“Six months after the election, everyone will forget it,” said Jason Awad, a venue planner in suburban Washington. “He’s very resilient.”


Even if the Trump name does suffer long-term, there’s no guarantee that Scion, which means “descendant of a notable family” -- Donald Trump’s children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, are all Trump Hotels executives -- will prove a worthy alternative. After all, it’s not the first time the name’s been used for a youth-oriented brand. With sales falling, Toyota Motor Corp.ended its use of the Scion brand two months ago.

Trump, Name Now Awash in Controversy, Readies Scion as New Brand



Image result for tRUMP sCION bRAND
By the time the Federal election Commission announces Hillary Clinton as the 45th President of the USA , Donald Trump will have received perhaps up to a billion dollars of paid advertising and up to $3.5  billion of unpaid advertsing.

Enter Scion. The new brand is planned for use at city and resort locations, Trump Hotels said when Scion was announced Sept. 28. The new hotels are intended to appeal “to a new and different type of guest in more locations around the globe,” Trump Hotels said. The first Scion location is scheduled to open in 2017.


The Scion flag won’t replace the Trump brand, according to Trump Hotels. It was announced more than a week before the Washington Post published a 2005 video of Trump bragging about grabbing and kissing women.



“We chose this name as a nod to the Trump family and their tremendous business successes, including Trump Hotels,” Eric Danziger, chief executive officer of Trump Hotels, said in an e-mail. “We want to acknowledge the association with Trump in a genuine way, while allowing the new lifestyle brand to stand on its own.”


Scattered evidence suggests travelers are choosing to check in elsewhere. It’s hard to measure the impact on Trump Hotels of his most inflammatory comments or the allegations of unwelcome sexual advances. The Trump Organization doesn’t disclose occupancy rates.
Bookings Fall


Bookings at Trump hotels through luxury-travel specialist Ovation Vacations tumbled 29 percent in the past six months, said Jack Ezon, president of the firm. While corporate reservations at Trump Hotels through Altour International Inc. fell 10 percent this year through Oct. 15, leisure bookings rose so much they provided a 16 percent lift overall, said Martin Rapp, senior vice president at the corporate and leisure travel agency, which has a large number of entertainment clients. After all, more than 13 million Americans voted for Trump in the primaries.


Trump Hotels is hardly the first lodging company to introduce a new brand aimed at younger customers who may be turned off by older names that can be seen as stodgy. Marriott International Inc. started Moxy, Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. has Canopy, and Starwood, acquired by Marriott last month, added the Aloft brand. The hotel operators are dealing with competition from travel alternatives such as the home-sharing company Airbnb Inc.
Jets, Towers


In fact, competition from new hotels may be a problem for Scion, said Piers Schmidt, founder of London-based consulting firm Luxury Branding. The new brand diffuses the very things that draw customers to Trump: the image of a billionaire full of brashness and bling, he said.


Trump’s “track record is build it tall, build it loud, promote it hard, fill it with people and create this kind of lifestyle -- the jets, the towers, the hotels,” Schmidt said. “There is a litany of new lifestyle brands that are chasing after the millennials.”


The Trump Organization has eight hotels in the U.S. and seven in other countries. Its U.S. properties include the Trump International Hotel Washington, D.C. -- housed in the 1899 Romanesque Revival-style Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue, five blocks from the White House -- and its foreign properties include the Trump International Hotel & Tower Vancouver, which is under construction. During his run for the White House, Trump gave reporters an April tour of the then-unfinished Washington hotel, held a post-Brexit event at Trump Turnberry in Scotland, and in September returned to the D.C. property to renounce previous claims that President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. -- after first boasting about his new hotel.


‘Very Valuable’

Last week in Las Vegas, where Trump went up against Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in their third and final debate, Rita Solon, who volunteered for her first Republican campaign in 1980 and came from Washington, D.C., to watch the event and make fundraising calls on Trump’s behalf, said she thinks that his candidacy is hurting his businesses.


“His brand was very valuable,” said Solon, wearing a Trump-Pence pin in the lobby of the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas. “The family is making a tremendous sacrifice with his brand. He’s hated and reviled.”

Trump’s new Washington hotel has been hit with graffiti and protests. “All of my friends refuse to come here,” said Peter Gebre, a resident of suburban Maryland who was dining with his wife and son at the hotel’s restaurant to celebrate his 21st wedding anniversary earlier this month. “It does have an impact.”


The Washington hotel also is offering discounts from its pre-opening minimum prices, with rooms advertised for later this month as low as $404, compared with the starting rate of $625 initially set by Trump. October is typically one of the busiest months for Washington hotels.
‘Really Disappointing’


“It’s really disappointing to see they’re charging such low prices for all they said how good they are and how they would come in and crush everybody,” said David Bernand, general manager of the Four Seasons in Georgetown. “You only harvest what you plant.”


Trump Hotels said rates fluctuate for several reasons including market conditions and the $404 rate doesn’t provide an accurate picture of the property’s success since its Sept. 12 soft opening. The opening “has been the most successful in terms of opening bookings, interest from groups and large events” in his 10 years with Trump Hotels, Mickael Damelincourt, managing director of the new Washington hotel, said in a statement.
Beverly Hills


Other hotels have been hurt by politics or their owners’ behavior. The Sultan of Brunei had a similar problem in 2014, when his swank Beverly Hills Hotel was boycotted after the kingdom implemented Islamic criminal laws that call for death by stoning for gay people. Among the events moved from the Sunset Boulevard property was the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Global Women’s Rights Awards, and Richard Branson and Ellen DeGeneres said they wouldn’t stay there.


Then, slowly and rather quietly, the elite began to return -- because they like the place. But the Beverly Hills Hotel is a one-of-a-kind trophy with a decades-long history before the Sultan of Brunei bought it in 1987. The property doesn’t bear the sultan’s name, and the controversy wasn’t followed as closely as Trump has been during his presidential campaign.









Close all those tabs. Open this email.


Get Bloomberg's daily newsletter.


Sign Up




Still, some believe that for Trump, who has been putting his name on everything from steaks to neckties and cologne for more than 30 years, any blow to his business could also be fleeting. The candidate has thrived through multiple bankruptcies, the flop of his Trump Shuttle airline and the demise -- in a swirl of litigation alleging illegal business practices, denied by Trump -- of his eponymous for-profit university.


“Six months after the election, everyone will forget it,” said Jason Awad, a venue planner in suburban Washington. “He’s very resilient.”


Even if the Trump name does suffer long-term, there’s no guarantee that Scion, which means “descendant of a notable family” -- Donald Trump’s children, Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric, are all Trump Hotels executives -- will prove a worthy alternative. After all, it’s not the first time the name’s been used for a youth-oriented brand. With sales falling, Toyota Motor Corp.ended its use of the Scion brand two months ago.