As influencer marketing continues to become more and more popular, more and more brands are expected to give it a shot. To get an idea of how influencer marketing works, it can be helpful to take a look at a few influencers who’ve had great success working with brands or even launching their own brands as a way to capitalize on their popularity. Take a peek at the top brand influencers across social media today.

Joy Cho

On Pinterest, Joy Cho slays. The top brand influencer has more than 12 million followers, hundreds of boards, and thousands of pins. Her creativity and popularity have led to collabs with Target, Incipio, and Band-Aid. She also has 387,000 Instagram followers.

Reichel Broussard

Reichel Broussard’s blog, Copy Cat Chic, is all about getting a luxe home decor look for less. As one of the top brand influencers, she has 54,500 Instagram followers, and has worked with brands such as Delta Faucet.

Emily Henderson

Emily Henderson is a blogger, stylist, author, top brand influencer and TV host with 666,000 followers on Instagram. Although she’s mainly into home design and decor, she’s partnered with a variety of brands, including Land’s End and the subscription box service FabFitFun.

Bri Emery

Bri Emery is the graphic designer and blogger behind the blog Design Love Fest. As one of the top brand influencers, she has 797,000 followers on Instagram. She regularly shares posts created in partnerships with brands. Some of the brands she’s worked with recently include Behr Paints and Artifact Uprising.

Just released, Final Cut Pro X (Version 10.4) now offers editors 360-degree VR video editing capabilities, advanced color grading tools, and support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) video. The software has been optimized to work well with the new iMac Pro—which started shipping this week. Users will also be excited to know they can now edit full 8K video on a Mac. The updated software also includes powerful tools for color grading such as color curves, which allow for ultra-fine color adjustments, and custom lookup tables (LUTS) from color-grading apps like DaVinci Resolve. 

Some additional features in Final Cut Pro 10.4:

Final Cut Pro 10.4 is $300 for new users and available as a free update for existing users on the Mac App Store.
 

PRESS RELEASE

Regulators say such financial rewards—even those given to influencers without explicit demands in return—can run afoul of longstanding rules against deceptive marketing if they aren't disclosed. Authorities in the U.S., the U.K., France and elsewhere are policing social media to ferret out potential offenders.

The Federal Trade Commission in September sent warning letters to 21 social-media influencers asking them to disclose any financial arrangements with brands mentioned in recent posts on Instagram.

Supermodel Naomi Campbell and “Pretty Little Liars” actresses Shay Mitchell and Lucy Hale, as well as bloggers and reality-TV personalities, were among those contacted by the FTC.

In what experts are calling a watershed moment, hackers have infiltrated the critical safety systems for industrial control units used in nuclear, oil and gas plants, halting operations at at least one facility.

The attackers, who are believed to be state-sponsored, targeted the Triconex industrial safety technology made by Schneider Electric SE, according to security firm FireEye and Schneider, who disclosed the incident on Thursday.

A security alert was sent to users of Triconex, but neither firm would reveal the nature or location of the plant, which some have suggested may be in the Middle East, possibly Saudi Arabia. Experts said the attack marks the first reported breach of a safety system at an industrial plant by hackers.

Galina Antova, co-founder of cybersecurity firm Claroty, said safety systems “could be fooled to indicate that everything is OK” even as hackers damage a plant.

The hackers used sophisticated malware, dubbed “Triton”, to take remote control of a safety control workstation, according to a FireEye investigation. Some controllers entered a failsafe mode as the hackers attempted to reprogram them, causing related processes to shut down and allowing the plant to spot the attack.

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a warning against the hazards of cellphone radiation this week. Yes, the thing we are all addicted to and can’t seem to put down is leaking electromagnetic radiation and now California has some guidance to safeguard the public.

The CDPH asks people to decrease their use of these devices and suggests keeping your distance when possible.

“Although the science is still evolving, there are concerns among some public health professionals and members of the public regarding long-term, high use exposure to the energy emitted by cell phones,” said CDPH director Dr. Karen Smith.

The warning comes after findings were offered up this week from a 2009 department document, which was published after an order from the Sacramento Superior Court.

A year ago, UC Berkeley professor Joel Moskowitz initiated a lawsuit to get the department to release the findings after he started looking into whether mobile phone use increased the risk of tumors.

In this video, Entrepreneur Network partner Jeff Rose explains 13 ways you can make money online, from podcasting to sponsored content. The internet provides a massive opportunity for entrepreneurs, and getting ahead of your competitors with some of these strategies could make a massive difference. It could allow you to have more cash to invest in yourself or your business, which in turn could be the difference between succeeding and failing. 

So, if you have an interest in learning how to make more money online, click play to learn which of Rose's 13 strategies might fit you best.

Related: How to Invest When You Only Have $100 to Spend

Entrepreneur Network is a premium video network providing entertainment, education and inspiration from successful entrepreneurs and thought leaders. We provide expertise and opportunities to accelerate brand growth and effectively monetize video and audio content distributed across all digital platforms for the business genre.

EN is partnered with hundreds of top YouTube channels in the business vertical. Watch video from our network partners on demand on Amazon Fire, Roku, Apple TV and the Entrepreneur App available on iOS and Android devices.

Do you want to improve your influencer outreach for roundup posts?

Wondering how to come up with a unique topic idea?

In this article, you’ll discover a four-step plan to create effective influencer roundups.

#1: Plan a Timeline for Your Roundup

Timing is everything. If you plan your influencer-driven content in time for the upcoming holidays, you’ll get a number of benefits including:

Starting next year, Facebook will test advertisements at the beginning of some videos. The ads will last six seconds and only show up before videos you seek out in Facebook's Watch section.

That means you won't see these ads in your news feed. You'll only run across a "pre-roll" advertisement when you view something in the dedicated "Watch" section, which Facebook (FB) launched earlier this year. (Facebook says the news feed location doesn't "work well" for these kinds of ads.)

Related: Facebook's new video service is called 'Watch.' But will you?

Watch is Facebook's separate area just for video. It has a dedicated button on the bottom of the mobile app, and a link on the side of the website.

There are some original shows on Watch, like video versions of the popular Humans of New York account. But it's more of a burgeoning YouTube than the next Netflix. The content is mostly short and low budget.

Net neutrality is dead — at least for now. In a 3-2 vote today, the Federal Communications Commission approved a measure to remove the tough net neutrality rules it put in place just two years ago. Those rules prevented internet providers from blocking and throttling traffic and offering paid fast lanes. They also classified internet providers as Title II common carriers in order to give the measure strong legal backing.

Today’s vote undoes all of that. It removes the Title II designation, preventing the FCC from putting tough net neutrality rules in place even if it wanted to. And, it turns out, the Republicans now in charge of the FCC really don’t want to. The new rules largely don’t prevent internet providers from doing anything. They can block, throttle, and prioritize content if they wish to. The only real rule is that they have to publicly state that they’re going to do it.

Opponents of net neutrality argue that the rules were never needed in the first place, because the internet has been doing just fine. “The internet wasn't broken in 2015. We were not living in some digital dystopia,” commission chairman Ajit Pai said today. “The main problem consumers have with the internet is not and has never been that their internet provider is blocking access to content. It's been that they don't have access at all.”

While that may broadly be true, it’s false to say that all of the harms these rules were preventing are imagined: even with the rules in place, we saw companies block their customers from accessing competing apps, and we saw companies implement policies that clearly advantage some internet services over others. Without any rules in place, they’ll have free rein to do that to an even greater extent.

Read the dissenting statements of the Democratic FCC commissioners

Supporters of net neutrality have long argued that, without these rules, internet providers will be able to control traffic in all kinds of anti-competitive ways. Many internet providers now own content companies (see Comcast and NBCUniversal), and they may seek to advantage their own content in order to get more eyes on it, ultimately making it more valuable. Meanwhile, existing behaviors like zero-rating (where certain services don’t count toward your data cap) already encourage usage of some programs over others. If during the early days of Netflix, you were free to stream your phone carrier’s movie service instead, we might not have the transformational TV and movie company it’s turned into today.

How do you get the sales team and marketing team to work together?

There’s a lot of talk about the increasing need to align sales and marketing functions within organizations. Customers are expecting a seamless experience. And it’s getting more difficult to split the different parts of the customer life cycle between the sales team over there, and the marketing team over here.

Instead of keeping the two separate and distinct, it’s clear that the new buyer’s journey requires them to become closer. And at the same time, both marketing and sales professionals are being expected to expand their role. Juggling all of this can be challenging.

The growing number of platforms and channels are pushing marketers to create an increasing amount of content. At the same time, it’s easier than ever to quantify ROI for different marketing initiatives. So marketers are being expected to create more material and being held to higher standards for what they produce.

On the other side of the aisle, there’s increasing pressure on sales people to engage their prospects and customers with relevant insights. Digital communication has become a powerful tool for engaging in long-term value- and relationship- building. That means salespeople need content to share, and unfortunately, most sales people don’t have the training, experience, or desire to create it.

And then, just over a month after she died, Margaret Basco submitted a comment to the Federal Communications Commission about its proposal to overturn net neutrality.

"The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation," the comment read.

Basco's story shows how stolen personal data can be weaponized and used to interfere in the democratic process. Investigators say the identities of more than one million Americans, both dead and alive, may have been used to hijack the FCC's public comment process -- one of the few ways beyond voting that Americans can directly share their opinion with the government.

The current rules on net neutrality, adopted under the Obama administration, bar internet providers, like AT&T and Comcast, from deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic to or from specific websites and apps. (AT&T is in the process of acquiring Time Warner, CNN's parent company.)

On Thursday, the FCC, now Republican-controlled, is expected to repeal the Obama-era rules -- an outcome for which the major telecom companies have lobbied long and hard.

More than 450 HP laptop models have a keylogger hidden away in a driver, forcing HP to issue patches for the affected devices.

The keylogger, found in Synaptics' touchpad software, is disabled by default, but hackers could potentially enable it if they had access to a computer by elevating user privileges, said Michael Myng, the researcher who discovered the flaw.

Commercial workstations, consumer laptops and other HP products contain the flaw, including Spectre devices, Pavilion devices, ZBooks and others.

"A potential security vulnerability has been identified with certain versions of Synaptics touchpad drivers that impacts all Synaptics OEM partners," an HP statement on its security bulletin read.

 "A party would need administrative privileges in order to take advantage of the vulnerability. Neither Synaptics nor HP has access to customer data as a result of this issue."

Web fonts helped to breathe life into designs, helping us avoid the system defaults so widely used during the early days of web design. With so many options available today, we as have plenty of tricks up our sleeves in order to serve and style custom fonts. Level 4 of the CSS Fonts Module outlines more intriguing options you will love, including some exciting properties such as font-min/max-size. This article won’t uncover every last crumb of level 4, but will highlight the interesting parts still in their infancy. The adventure starts now!

The Status Quo

Currently we sit between two levels of specs. On one side we have level 3; a spec that has been at “Candidate Recommendation” since October 2013. Looking ahead we have level 4; a spec that has been resting at “Working Draft” since July 2017. If you’re in need of a reminder regarding the order of W3C specification stages, let’s take a moment to review them:

Now that we understand the specification stages let’s dive into the guts of level 4 and bring to light some of the known and documented features new to this module.

Fonts Module Level 4

Parts of level 3 that become standardized will be ported into level 4, but level 4 will also include its own unique additions. Sections such as Font Variations, Font Rendering Controls, Color Font Support, Basic Font Properties and Font Resources will contain brand-new items many developers will find useful.

Basic Font Properties

The particular font face rendered is determined by the font-family and other font properties that apply to a given element, such as font-weight and font-style for example. This structure allows settings to vary independently of each other and what encompasses Basic Font Properties. So what’s planned for this group?

This article was originally seen on Dareboost's blog.

"Reduce the page weight": here is one of the most usual tips in Dareboost reports. According to HTTP Archive trends, images represent 53% of the average pages weight, whether viewed on desktop or mobile devices. When you want to reduce the weight of your web pages, optimizing images should be at the top of your priorities.

For each image its format

It is not always easy to find the most suitable image format. Take our logo, for example. We could save it in PNG, JPEG, WebP or SVG.
The weight of the images would be very different. An empirical test allows us to visualize it:

In this case, the most suitable format seems to be SVG, followed closely by PNG. It is indeed an image whose colors are plain, non-animated, representing geometric shapes. All these factors tend to favor these two formats.

4 reasons why you should get PHP 7

Looking for some alternatives to WordPress? While we might be big fans of the world’s most popular content management system, that doesn’t mean there aren’t other perfectly viable tools for you to use to build a website or blog.

In this post, I’ll dig into 12 of those WordPress alternatives, divided into three separate categories:

Generally, you’ll find more complicated alternatives in the content management systems category and more simple solutions in the hosted website builders and blogging platforms sections.

Let’s dive in!

6 Content Management System Alternatives to WordPress

These six alternatives to WordPress are all standalone content management systems. That means, like self-hosted WordPress, you’ll need to install them on your own hosting to use them for your site.

It’s common to wonder whether your social media strategy is really generating the results you had in mind.

According to Mary Meeker’s 2017 Internet Trends Report, 61% of social media marketers consider measuring their social ROI to be their top challenge.

What makes a social media strategy successful?

Every goal can be measured by different KPIs, but they all have the same starting point. By setting up your goals from the first stage of your social strategy, you are able to measure your performance step-by-step without losing your focus from irrelevant metrics. This helps you track your objectives and analyze your progress toward achieving them.

Your goals should be smart: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. One goal can be to increase Facebook engagement by 25% in the next 3 months, or to double your brand mentions within the next six months.

1. Background Cinemagraphs

Background videos have been all the rage this past year, but there is a new style in town. Cinemagraphs are still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs, forming a video clip. They are published as an animated GIF or in other video formats and can give the illusion that the viewer is watching an animation. Cinemagraphs are created by taking a series of photographs or a video recording, and, using image editing software, compositing the photos or the video frames into a seamless loop of sequential frames.

EXAMPLE: https://codepen.io/jayjoomler/pen/yPxOVo

This feature was previously being tested quietly, but now it is being rolled out to the general user base. You can follow a hashtag the same way you follow a friend: Search for a topic you like or click on a hashtag in an Instagram post. A new page will open with the option to follow the hashtag. You'll see both top posts and recent stories from the hashtag in your feed, and you can unfollow anytime, the same way you would any user.

According to The Verge, Matthew Ogle led the charge for this feature; he was behind the Discover Weekly playlist at Spotify, which relies on both machine learning and a human hand to curate a personalized playlist for each listener every week. Ogle wants to bring the same touch to Instagram's hashtags.

For those concerned about privacy, a note: The hashtags you follow are visible to anyone on Instagram who checks out your profile. It doesn't look like there's a way to turn this off, though if your profile is set to private, then only your followers will be able to see the hashtags you follow.