#ai will lead to automation and people shouldn’t have to work so that’s good!!!

[bepoprotectionsquad]

Getting real tired of people I know in real life trying to spin the AI art theft shit as not only *not a bad thing*, but somehow A GOOD THING

[nethunt-blog1]

20 Biggest Sales Trends in 2019

The world sees new brands appear every day, which only makes it more difficult for striving commercial players to successfully sell their stuff. To help you out and direct your business in the most profitable way, we compiled this list of the most popular, yet accessible trends impacting the sales profession right now. Some of them have been basking in wide popularity since 2018, while others have only shown the efficiency in the niche recently.

Sales Trends in 2019: Our Choice

Without further ado, here are the top twenty trends in the sales industry to get your sales and income rates up to a new level in 2019.

Use CRM as a true enablement tool

The implementation of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) stays among the biggest trends right now in any digitalized business niche. This tendency is so significant it gradually turns into a ‘must’. Such systems help to automate stages of interaction between clients and a company – from the initial call-up to the product shipment. CRM is a type of software solution that stores all the data on clients, their orders, and each sales funnel stage in one centralized database.  

By integrating such a system, you may increase the number of clients that can be serviced simultaneously without the need to expand the staff of sales managers, as well as boost the quality of service in general. All you have to do is add a bit of personalization and exclude the risks of workflow errors.

Be closer with marketing

One of the main issues business owners with a solid experience face is the conservatism and tunnel thinking when it comes to the promotion of their goods or services. Such tendencies don’t go well with the demands of modern consumers, whose wishlists are replenished with more and more innovative, peculiar products.

In order for a brand to keep up with the demand, you must stay up to date, pay attention to all the B2C and B2B sales trends and never neglect a qualified help of expert marketers (you may go for outsourcing if you need to save as much as possible). Keeping a steady hand on all the promotion aspects, you will definitely be able to stay afloat on the market and even go for the leading positions on the arena.

Embed sales automation

Sales automation doesn’t only mean the integration of CRM. Everything related to the sales process optimization with the software and/or hardware means falls under this category. In particular, world-renowned Amazon has been using drones for the goods delivery and other specialized solutions based on the IoT to properly adjust the transportation conditions.

You can also try to realize something similar or at least go for the special software that would help you optimize business sales chains at the command of your in-house logistics specialists.  

Focus on selling to Millennials

Millennials – people that were born after 1995 – are the representatives of a ‘new and advanced’ generation that is, mostly, literally obsessed with new trends in IT. You can and should use this knowledge when developing a unique marketing strategy.

Perhaps, you can expand your selection of goods with hi-tech innovations. Or present the existing items in an updated, trendy format (like IKEA did some time ago by launching a separate dedicated augmented reality app).

Find the growth in micromarkets

Micromarkets are a type of retail arenas that are based on self-service. These include vending machines or manual service touchpad panels in stores and fast food restaurants.

This is the most comfortable way to make purchases for the majority of people out there. It is care-free and available at any time. Micromarkets help to eliminate resellers, too, which makes the realization of items cheaper and easier overall.

Try to understand social selling

Social selling is a new approach to sales processes that allows staying in tune with clients over extended periods. For instance, this can be a set of marketing techniques that don’t target nonrecurring purchases motivated by the demand creating efforts (e.g., calls to action like ‘click here’ and ‘buy now’). In the essence of this solution, lies a long-term plan that focuses the establishment of reliable connections. With such an approach, the relationships between you and your loyal clients can go beyond the mere ‘buy-sell’ routine. They are built upon the principles of trust and understanding.  

Social selling can be mainly covered by SMM – Social Media Marketing – brand promotion through social media channels. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t neglect opportunities. Use other points of contact with your TA as well; for instance, you can distribute some free samples, organize polling, etc.

Use a strategic approach to sales enablement

Try to work out a certain sales-attracting plan. It can some common marketing strategy customized according to the specialty of your business or something more individual, developed strictly for your niche.

Any strategy would consist of several stages that cover a certain time period. Remember that the results cannot be immediate. With a substantial approach to doing things, you minimize the risks of financial losses and improper product/service positioning in the eyes of your TA.  

Use machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies

In addition, we’d like to point out the importance of collecting and evaluating analytical data. Considering how utterly simple this procedure has become in our times (due to AI- and ML-based solutions), it would be only reasonable to use it for the development of a highly-efficient marketing strategy.

On top of everything, forecasts formed with the help of an AI-powered software already boast enhanced precision, which may protect you from the risks of coming out of demand on the market.

Try to implement omnichannel sales

People use many various channels to purchase goods and order services nowadays: Online stores, marketplaces like eBay or Amazon, social media like Facebook and Instagram, as well as offline sales outlets. A buyer isn’t attached anymore to only one or several channels. You can choose whichever way to shop you want.  

What does this mean to you as a vendor? It means that you should offer your goods through as many channels as possible. Otherwise, you risk losing a good chunk of buyers. Several sales channels interconnected between each other allow a customer to make an order and receive the purchase in the way they find the most convenient. A vendor, in turn, can monitor the centralized statistics and manage all the channels simultaneously in one place. This is what the omnichannel sales mean.

Build customer experience and personalization

Deep personalization and impeccable user experience – these are the key aspects of one’s digital business to lead any player to the top. Even with somewhat higher prices and heavy competitiveness in the niche.

A vivid example of success reached by using these essential sales industry trends is of the Invictawebsite. Their watches are much more expensive than the ones on Amazon, for example (you can compare prices for the same model on both the official website and the marketplace yourself). Impeccable visual design and personal approach to each client, however, make the vast majority of the brand’s fans buy watches at a higher price from the official representative.  

Make effective sales conversations

Despite the fact that the total demand for the sales manager position gradually becomes obsolete (due to online and self-servicing shopping opportunities), live client conversations will still remain a huge, necessary part of any retail business, keeping up with all the major B2C sales trends.

Particularly, defining the demands, pain points, and ultimate goals of your clients; allowing them to speak their mind, and taking the position of an active listener, you can also vividly describe how exactly your product or service can change their business. What advantages they get and how their life will improve in the long run. The real physical excitement caused by real words is a very powerful way to get that deal.

Remember that buyers have more power than sellers

The current market is literally overloaded with goods and services of all shapes and sizes. This means that you need to thoroughly build professional relationships with each of your clients and put a good deal of effort into attracting leads.  

In terms of the relationship establishment, personalization and fast high-quality service can serve as your main techniques. As for lead attraction, look for and cooperate with opinion leaders and create contextual advertising.

Build quality relationships and trust with the client

Good relationships with clients equal your service reliability in their eyes. The main trick here is to convince them initially that your product or service is among the best ones on the market and it definitely deserves their attention.  

Once they realize your actual status on the arena or the factual advantage of your offer, they are likely to start sharing their major pain points which they would like to eliminate. This is the beginning of real quality relationships.  

Create a mobile-friendly website, use mobile apps

The mobile is yet another major aspect of the hottest sales trends of 2019. People simply become busier and unable to spend hours using a PC for a quick search or a particular purchase.

Letting people reach your retail solution through their mobile devices, you provide a 100% all-around access for your TA and every other user.

Share your achievements

Let your target audience know about your successes. About you selling a batch of goods that could be sold over the month at once, about the fact that Mr. N prefers your products, or about you expanding the staff of employees due to the growth of sales.  

In such a way, your potential clients can also see how successful and striving you are, which will help you ultimately increase the product or service demand.

Be closer to customers

Being closer to your customers today means being interested in their problems and issues, goals and desires.

You can create brief polling, for example, where your potential customers can share their preferences as to your products. This is a simple, yet efficient approach to establishing trustful relationships, therefore, increasing sales.  

Hire knowledgeable and skilled sales representatives

Never neglect the level of qualification of employees representing your brand. Sometimes, inexperienced staff may spoil your business reputation, which might be pretty difficult to restore later on. Be thorough with your sales manager recruitment or, what’s better, let dedicated experts handle that.

Create real-time sales teams

The faster you sell, the faster your business and income will grow. Special real-time sales teams can be created to implement such rapid sales. This is one of the online sales trends which implies that sellers work via interactive forms on online shop pages.

‘If you have any questions as to this or that product, contact us right now so that our software advisor can explain everything to you’ – provide your customers with an ability to contact your sales expert at once, via such a form.

Make sales playbooks

One of the most vivid trends in sales in 2019 is the creation of a sales playbook. It is an in-house document where all the crucial sales moments are indicated: customer segment portrait, acceptable behavior scenarios and requirements for sales managers, FAQ templates, and the similar data. Such information allows defining a strategically proper sequence of actions based on the intuitive behavior and experience of managers.    

As a result of implementing playbooks, you can minimize the risks of any unpredictable behavior that can put off potential clients.

Automated sales prospecting emerges

The finishing number of our top latest trends in sales is the automated sales processing and optimization. Many software vendors are launching CRM solutions that automatically collect data from external sources (e.g., social networks) and offer new potential clients based on particular characteristics.

Such a CRM system may boost the performance of your sales experts dramatically.

Sales Trends 2019: Conclusion

Summarizing our review of the main sales technology trends and business leading tendencies, we cannot say that every point we highlighted is fresh. With some moments traveling to this top from the last years’ one, we still recommend going for these sales enablement trends. The efficient adoption of some will help you ultimately stand out among the competitors on the market.

If you wish to get a multipurpose tool for the solid implementation of all the above-mentioned trends, you can use our own NetHunt CRM – an advanced automation tool successfully integrated with business processes of hundreds of companies all over the globe

Original source: https://nethunt.com/blog/20-biggest-sales-trends-in-2019/

[kaibab-the-grumpy-dragon]

Kat Murata’s about page

//This is set for mobile user to see it, but if you can like this post after reading it would be great! 

General

Full name: Kathleen Murata

Nicknames: Kat, Katy, KitKat, Kiiro no ryū (Yellow Dragon), Boss, Sunflower(only Jou)

Age: 24 by default. Depending on the verse but 3 years older than Jounouchi

Birthday: 30 May ( Gemini )

Birthplace: Domino City

Current residence: Domino City

Nationality: Japanese

Ethnicity: Japanese/Russian/Swedish

Gender: female

Sexuality: Heterosexual. Sort of Demi-romantic

Marital status: Single

Religion: Atheist

Occupation: Student - 3nd years of Business economic / Leader of the gang, Kiiro no Ryū (The Yellow Dragons)

Appearance

Face: a mix between Asian and Swedish feature. Round, full lips, button nose with a scar on the edge. Freckles when she tans.

Preferred Hand: Right

Hair: Wavy bob haircut, golden blonde

Eyes: Blue

Body type: Muscular, shaped by dance, workouts, and yoga.

Skin Tone:  medium skin tones with neutral olive undertones

Cup size: A-B cup

Height: 1m83 (6′0”)

Weight: 72 kg (158lb)

Health: rarely get sick, mostly little colds. She seems to generally heal a little faster than others.

Energy: Because of her being possessed by a monster, her body needs and uses a lot of energy. To preserve her muscular mass, she needs to eat a lot of calories. Even more when Xeras takes control and uses his powers.

Scars: An inverted V one on the nose, razor ones on her left wrist, circular ones on her upper back (from the summoning circle), a line on her abs, several smaller scars on the arms, body and legs, and cigarette burns on the right arms.

Clothing style: flashy clothes, mostly crop top, hoodies, shorts, street-wear.

Makeup style: No makeup

Posture: Depends on her mood. Most of the time confident, imitating men behavior when with her gang, more feline and gracious when she flirts.

Tattoos: 3 dragon tattoos: one around her left wrist, one big on her upper back with his tail that ends under her left breast, and one small on her right inner thigh.

Scent: her cheap shampoo that smell candy for the hair, lemon for the body.

Personality

Mental/Emotional disorder(s):  Borderline personality disorder(false diagnostic: symptoms mostly due to Xeras’ possession), PTSD

Phobias: Musophobia(rodents), Nyctophobia (darkness), loss of limbs or paralysis.

Addictions: Risky gambles (involving her own security), coca cola, coffee, jelly coffee, sex.

Likes:

- Dance (hip hop, New Age ) She’s good at it.

- Drawing.

- 80’s songs and punk rock. But only people close to her know it.  

- Giving food related nicknames

- Roller skating

- Omelet

- Pizza

- Banana-chocolate ice-cream

- Mostly all food

- Coffee

- Dragons

- Playing Duel Monsters

- Even more Dragons

- Being the Yellow Dragons’ boss

- Bowling

- Tease People

- Flirting with people

- Space

- Horror / Monster/Kaiju Movies

- Star Wars

- Sitting on anything

- Dominant men in the bedroom

Doesn’t like:

- Bullies

- Doctors

- University

- Authority in general

- Serial killer movies

- Rodents

- Being in the Dark

- Be told that she’s crazy  

Hobbies:

- Roller skating

- Dancing

- Dueling

- Drawing

- Video games

- Combat sports

- Yoga

- Vogue fem

Fears: Rodents, abandonment, darkness

Habits: Turn things into competitions, stealing your food, entering where she shouldn’t.

Negative traits: Don’t know when to back down sometimes, can be pushy and loud, heavy eater, hot-tempered, don’t know how to lie for trivial things.

Positive traits: Seems to always smile, try until she succeeds, loyal, curious.

Abilities: combat and dancing skills. The monster inside her gives her some slight regeneration. Could learn to use shadows magics.

Equipment: A knife in her boots or under her clothes, another one in her backpack that she always has. Her deck and her duel disk, battle city version.

Trinkets: Her old phone. She always has in her backpack, a USB key that was from her dad.

Transportation: a pair of boots that can turn into rollers, with an electric motor, produced by KaibaCorp (offered by the close members of her gang)

Collections: Several ones. Knives, guns, duel monster cards.

History:

- Sharing the same passion for robotics, Kat’s parents met at an IEEE International Conference on R&A (Robotics and Automation) in Atlanta. Her dad, Hideyoshi, a young AI genius with a fragile health that had left him lame, was from an old Japanese family with some Russian ancestry, the Murata’s, who were not really into honest business. But his talent and original organic approach to programming led him to another path: Founding his own robotics company.

Her mother, Erika, a strong Swedish woman, that gave Kat almost all of her genetics, left her country and family to study and work in America. She had always loved to tinker but the creation of prosthetics and robots fascinated her.

Their meeting was a surprise, but they quickly became attached to one another and when he asked her to follow him to Japan, at Domino city, to accomplish his project, she accepted. With each of their specialties, they created Murata Robotics with the help of an American friend, Stuart Evans. After some time they had two children, Kathleen and Hiro.  

- Kat was a cheerful little girl, with curly blonde hair, always smiling and curious, even if she was a little too much naive. At 8 she was already interested in her dad’s work. He dedicated his secret project to her: creating a fully functional animal AI, based on what a dragon could be.

- Their lives turned upside down the day where Kat met a strange man in a convenience store. He talked with the 8-years-old girl a few minutes but disappeared before Erika had seen him. The night after, Kat woke up, upon hearing the sounds of a struggle. Before she could react the same man entered her room and captured her. She doesn’t remember everything from this night but some details are still clear today. Her family sitting in front of her. Her father telling her to look into his eyes as her mother’s blood spilled on the floor. Her brother’s cries. Their slit throats.

After that everything went quickly. He took her with him, locked her up in a cave, left her screaming in the dark, with only rats for company. When she finally fell silent and he was sure that she was broken and weak, he brought her into a room decorated with dozens of candles. It didn’t take her long to lose consciousness when he started engraving the summoning circles on her back with a ritual knife.

What was supposed to be a sacrificial ritual to bring a monster into this world, Xeras, the dragons slaver, trapped him in the body of this little girl. And it was furious. Using Kat’s physical and emotional pain, it merged their soul, releasing their wrath on the man who did all that. When the police arrived, they found her unconscious with the dead body of her kidnapper. They decided to close the case.

- After a stay in the hospital to take care of her wounds, which left her with scars, they took her to an orphanage, waiting for the family of her dad to come to get her. But under the influence of the monster inside her, she quickly became violent, hurting herself and the other kids. Her family, that only wanted the control of Murata robotics, put her in the Institute, a psychiatric hospital for children, for ‘her own good’. She was soon diagnosticated as having a borderline personality disorder and PTSD and was placed in isolation, under medication. The monster finally calmed down, too weak to take control anymore.

- Two years later a psychiatrist finally decided to give more effort toward her recovery. After some work, he declared her well enough to go, but not without supervision. Her family was powerful and didn’t want her to take back her inheritance one day. They made efforts to bribe for a ruling of ineptitude, claiming she was not able to care for herself, even into adulthood.

Of course, they never took custody of her, and she was placed in an orphanage, and then in a foster family until her 18th birthday.

- Being mostly free to go outside, she quickly mixed with the wrong crowd. Understanding that she was on her own and nobody would help her, she came closer to the only kind of people that would accept her, other outcasts, delinquents, gangs.

At 17, she fell for a 24 years old gang leader, Esteban. She tried to join his group, but he laughed at her. Why would he take her? She knew how to fight in the schoolyard but she was weak. He threatened her to take her as a prostitute, but he finally let her go. He liked her gaze.  

- Strangely, dance had been her salvation. She met a dance teacher that taught her to have control of her body and to be confident. She began to workout as well, she built up a fair amount of muscles for a girl of her age. When she went back to Esteban, he finally accepted. He saw potential in her but he also wanted her. Even if she was still young, she was crazy about him. Her relationship with him defined all the ones she had after. If anybody tried to say that she was only a prostitute, they would feel her wrath.

But she didn’t totally agree with how Esteban was leading his gang. And by that time, her ambition was more important than the feelings she had.

- At 20, she began to search for supporters within the gang and when she had enough support on her side, she led an attack on Esteban and the rest of the gang. After a knife fight that she won with difficulties (winning a scar on her abdomen), she had to choose what she would do with Esteban. He was already condemned. She could let him live with the shame that he lost his power against a woman, or she could kill him. But she knew him. He was psycho, a killer. But strangely enough, he loved her. In his own way. So she offered him to be her second in command. He accepted. After all, it was his only way to stay with her and keep some power.

- She changed the name of the gang, calling them Kiiro no Ryū, the yellow dragons but also changed their activities. Her goal was now to protect the people of the districts they controlled. Their main incomes were the attacks of other gangs, everything linked to the underground Duel Monster traffic (rare cards, illegal tournaments,…), but also drugs traffic and prostitution. Most of the gang’s members are loyal and receive a share of the profits. Kat mostly refuses to use that money, even if it could have given her a good life.

- During this time, Kat continued her scholar life without interest, being at Rintama High School and had to repeat a year. But she saw something that motivated her. She remembered that kid she saw on TV when she was at the Institut, that was adopted by the richest man in Domino. And now she was seeing him on TV again, CEO of his company. It impressed her. It made her realize that she could do it too. That even with a bad start she doesn’t have to stay in the underground. And maybe take back her parent’s company. After that, she began to studies seriously to graduate from high school with a scholarship for the American University of Domino City. She chose to study Business Economics, making Kaiba Corp her main subject.

- Being good at dueling she decided too to start a more official career, as the Dragon Warrior. So far she managed to win her duel disk, and participate in some tournaments, with some good results.

- But when everybody seemed to go better, the worst happened. Strong of years of wait, Xeras took advantage of a moment of weakness to take full control of Kat’s body. She only managed to be back in control thank to her friend Isabel, after a long and harsh combat. The discovery of her possession was a shock, it meant that all those bad things that happened to her, the Institute, all the violent events that she couldn’t remember, all this was because of him. It took her time to accept that, but after all, he was stuck in her body and they can’t do anything about it.

This part is valid for the default verse with @upbeatsunshine. If your muse is Jou, Kat doesn’t know him. If you still want to use this headcanons, send me  an IM/ask :) :

- She met him when she was 13 and him 10, and he became her first and best friend. They tried to learn together how to survive in their neighborhood.

- Once Jou was 18 he went to live in the same apartment than her, using one of the bedrooms.

Facts:

- She has great difficulties making friends, she’s very awkward socially speaking. She still doesn’t know how she made ones.

- She tends to be impulsive and vulgar. But in the presence of people she likes, she’s very energetic and radiant, always ready to laugh.

- She sings very badly and she is unable to play well to a game other than Duel Monster (include video games. Except from Otomes games. She good at it.).

Home: A converted brick building in the old industrial district. The first floor is big garages and her apartment is the half of the second floor. A big living room/kitchen, a bathroom and three rooms.

Family: Hideyoshi Murata (father/deceased), Erika Magnusson (mother/deceased), Hiro Murata (brother/deceased), Adam Sjögren (cousin), her father’s mother and brother (CEO of Murata Robotics)

Friends: Jounouchi Katsuya (@upbeatsunshine), Isabel Corazón, Imnah Hiwatari

Followers: Esteban, her gang members, her dancers.

Pets/Familiars: Doggo, a male golden retriever with a scar on his side and limping a little

[dailynewswebsite]

Refugees are at risk from dystopian ‘smart border’ technology

Refugee holding a cell phone at a refugee lodging centre in in Berlin, Germany, 2016 EPA/Kay Nietfield

New applied sciences deployed on borders for migration administration and border safety beneath the umbrella of sensible border options are ignoring the basic human rights of migrants.

Unmanned aerial automobiles (drones, for instance) are sometimes deployed within the surveillance of refugees within the US and the EU; massive information analytics are getting used to observe migrants approaching the border. Although strategies of border safety and administration fluctuate, a terrific deal are more and more used to stop migratory actions.

Synthetic intelligence (AI) is a vital part of migration administration. For example, the EU, the US and Canada spend money on AI algorithms to automate choices on asylum and visa functions and refugee resettlement. In the meantime, the real-time information collected from migrants by varied sensible border and digital wall options similar to satellites, drones and sensors are assessed by AI algorithms on the border.

On the US-Mexico border, for instance,the US Customs and Border Safety (CBP) company is utilizing synthetic intelligence, navy drones with facial recognition applied sciences, thermal imaging and faux cellphone towers to observe migrants earlier than they even attain the border. They’ll take heed to conversations between migrants, attempt to determine them from their faces, try their social media accounts and find individuals attempting to cross borders.

A brand new UN report has warned in regards to the dangers of so-called “sensible” border expertise on refugees particularly. These applied sciences are serving to border companies to cease and management the motion of migrants, securitise migration governance by treating migrants as criminals and ignore the basic rights of individuals to hunt asylum. Moreover, they acquire all information with out taking the consent of migrants – components that in different circumstances would doubtless be legal if deployed in opposition to residents.

As researcher Roxana Akhmetova has written: “the automated decision-making processes can exacerbate pre-existing vulnerabilities by including on dangers similar to bias, error, system failure and theft of information. All of which can lead to larger hurt to migrants and their households. A rejected declare fashioned on an faulty foundation can result in persecution.”

This can be a good instance of how algorithmic expertise extra typically will be influenced by the biases of its creators to discriminate in opposition to the decrease courses of society and serve the privileged ones. Within the case of refugees, individuals who have needed to flee their properties due to conflict are actually being subjected to experiments with superior expertise that can enhance the dangers carried by this already weak inhabitants.

Knowledge and consent

One other challenge at stake right here is the knowledgeable consent of refugees. This refers to the concept refugees ought to perceive the methods they’re subjected to and will have the possibility to decide out of them. Whereas voluntary knowledgeable consent is a authorized requirement, many teachers and humanitarian NGOs concentrate on “significant knowledgeable consent” which is greater than signing a paper and serving to refugees to totally perceive what they’re topic to. Secret surveillance offers them no such probability. And the applied sciences concerned are so complicated that even the workers working them have been mentioned to lack the experience to evaluate the moral and sensible implications.

Learn extra: Tech can empower refugee communities – in the event that they’re allowed to design the way it works

Recognition of the precise of ‘beneficiaries’ to reject these applied sciences will not be real looking, neither is it sensible. EPA

Regardless of the current UN report warning on the sensible border options, many governments and varied UN companies coping with refugees more and more desire to make use of tech-based options, for instance to evaluate individuals’s claims for support, money switch and identification. However what occurs to people who find themselves not prepared to share their information, for any cause, be it political, spiritual or private?

Use of those applied sciences requires public-private partnerships and technical preparations for an extended time frame earlier than refugees encounter them on the bottom. And on the finish of all of the processes to determine, fund and develop algorithms, recognition of the precise of “beneficiaries” to reject these applied sciences will not be real looking, neither is it sensible. Subsequently, most of those tech-based investments categorically undermine refugees’ knowledgeable consent as a result of the character of the work of these behind these choices is to disclaim their rights.

Refugees can profit from the growing use of digital expertise, as smartphones and social media will help them join with humanitarian organisations and keep in contact with households again dwelling. However ignoring the facility imbalance created by their lack of rights on account of utilizing such expertise results in the romanticisation of the connection between refugees and their smartphones.

It’s not too late to alter this course of technological growth. However refugees shouldn’t have the identical political company as home residents to organise and oppose authorities actions. If you wish to see what a dystopian tech-dominated future wherein individuals lose their political autonomy appears to be like like, the day by day experiences of refugees will present ample clues.

Emre Eren Korkmaz doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or group that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.

from Growth News https://growthnews.in/refugees-are-at-risk-from-dystopian-smart-border-technology/ via https://growthnews.in

[floridaprelaw-blog]

Mostly Negative News: Employment Obstacles For Florida Attorneys

By Henry Jacobson, Florida State University Class of 2020

July 22, 2020

Before any prospective lawyer commits themselves to a law school consisting of two to three years of rigorous course work and a possible five- or six-figure student tuition debt they should know what the job market in Florida looks like for lawyers. Factors that could affect one’s ability to become employed in the state of Florida include which law school one attends, the amount of competition for their desired position, and various other circumstances. The last thing that a student wants to think about is the possibility of being unemployed while costly student loans accrue interest. While many believe that all attorneys can afford whatever luxuries they desire, the truth is that not all BAR certified attorneys are able to find employment. This unfortunate reality is not absent in the state of Florida

So, what is the number one issue that lawyers in Florida encounter when searching for jobs? Other lawyers. The Tampa Bay Times reports that “almost half of the lawyers who responded to a Florida Bar survey last year cited "too many attorneys'' as the most serious problem facing the legal profession today” [1]. The lawyers that do have jobs have had to adjust their fees to compete with new lawyers that are undercutting prices for business, “Fees in some drug trafficking cases have dropped from $15,000 to as low as $1,500” [2]. Many people that earn bachelor’s degrees feel that it may not be enough to secure them a viable career, and so they go into law trusting that the added qualification will open more doors. The problem in Florida, and more or less nation-wide, is that many people are doing this. This leads to an increase in the supply of lawyers, but not in the demand for lawyers. As bleak as this information may seem, it is not a guarantee that new lawyers will be penniless vagabonds. Nationwide, jobs are still growing in the legal profession at a rate of 6 percent according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [3]. And in Florida, “Excess Attorneys”, licensed attorneys that are not directly practicing law, “Excess Attorneys’ may be judges, politicians, business people whose careers advanced due to their law degrees; or, they may be people who were unable to find careers as lawyers, are working in fields that don’t require law degrees, are choosing not to work, or are unemployed yet still maintaining active licenses”, are only 20.5 percent of Florida’s lawyers. Compared to New York’s 51.9 percentage, Florida seems to make good use of most of its legal professionals [4]. However, the obstacle of too much competition still stands and nobody that just spent thousands of dollars on a legal degree wants to feel like they are rolling the dice when it comes to being employed.

Furthermore, if one wants to take their Florida BAR certification and practice law in another state that may be offering more jobs, they might be devastated to learn that Florida has no direct reciprocity with other states. Many other states have reciprocity agreements to honor another state’s BAR examination, which allows lawyers to practice law in different states than the one where they took the BAR. However, Florida has not made any agreements with other states and therefore, if a Florida attorney wishes to practice law in any other state, they may have to take a modified exam to be licensed or, in some cases, a whole other BAR exam [5]. This further limits the ease at which a Florida attorney may find employment. Florida, as covered in the previous section, has no lack of lawyers. So, it does not need or desire lawyers from other states. However, many states only grant reciprocity to other states that grant reciprocity, therefore, Florida is left out of all agreements. Just compare the number of states where the Florida BAR is recognized as valid (zero), to the number of states where the Illinois BAR is recognized (32) [5].

To ease at least one of the possible worries that may plague would-be lawyers, The New York Times reports that AI will not be replacing lawyers in the near future. Among worries of competing for jobs with other humans, I have heard of speculations of AI removing a large portion of the job market for lawyers. Speculators would cite the ability of robots to do mundane things like handle traffic tickets for clients. However, while automation has aided lawyers in some of their tasks, it still can’t replace a human being. “An artificial intelligence technique called natural language processing has proved useful in scanning and predicting what documents will be relevant to a case, for example. Yet other lawyers’ tasks, like advising clients, writing legal briefs, negotiating and appearing in court, seem beyond the reach of computerization, for a while” [6]. AI is streamlining many arduous processes for lawyers,but it shouldn’t be confused as a doomsday prediction for human lawyers. Even the most advanced AI’s need an experienced professional to guide and review its processes. So, while prospective and current lawyers still need to worry about finding employment, AI being the cause of such shortages is a non-factor.

To conclude, there seems to be no shortage of bad news in the world. Mostly because bad things make for good ratings and because good things take time to become good things. Prospective lawyers should heed the advice and thoughts of current legal practitioners, however, and not write off what they say as mere scare stories. “A 2018 Gallup poll found that less than one-in-four people who graduated from law school between 2000 and 2015 said obtaining a law degree was worth the cost” [7]. Prospective lawyers may want to do some soul searching, and some career searching, to discover if a law degree would be truly beneficial to their long-term plans. This is not to say that if one knows for sure that they want to become a lawyer, they shouldn’t follow that dream. But I think it fair to say that no one should half-heartedly stumble into a law school.

________________________________________________________________

[1]. https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/floridas-swollen-ranks-of-lawyers-scrap-for-piece-of-a-shrinking-legal-pie/2190047/

[2].https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/the_most_serious_problem_facing_lawyers_too_many_colleagues_about_half_of_f

[3]. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/legal/lawyers.htm#:~:text=in%20May%202019.-,Job%20Outlook,than%20there%20are%20jobs%20available.

[4]. https://lawschooltuitionbubble.wordpress.com/original-research-updated/lawyers-per-capita-by-state/

[5]. https://attorneys.uslegal.com/licensing-of-attorneys/reciprocity/

[6].https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/technology/lawyers-artificial-intelligence.html

[7].https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/082416/going-law-school-worth-it-anymore.asp#:~:text=The%20majority%20of%20law%20school,salary%20comes%20in%20much%20less.

Photo Credit: Bruin79

[adrianodiprato]

+ “I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is.” Greta Thunberg | Environmental Activist

My Hope

In 2021 I will once again be an active participant at s p a c e in Byron Bay. In the lead up to this event I was asked by the organisers to ponder this question – Is our education system preparing our kids to be more ambitious Australians? My response can be viewed via their faces of s p a c e blog. Below I have expanded on my thoughts.

We can no longer ignore that fact that today’s prescribed one-size-fits all schooling structure in Australia has past it’s used by date. The truth is, if the Australian schooling system remains largely the same as it is today, young people will be prepared for a world that no longer exists and risk entering into a world with a set of skills, knowledge and attributes that could be rendered obsolete by the time they reach adulthood.

By 2030, we know that two-thirds of jobs in Australia will be soft skill-intensive, and that the skill deficit is going to hit about 29 million. So, there are some critical structural changes that need to occur in our education systems to double down on the development of human skills.

Therefore, we need to re-examine the purpose of schooling for our times and ensure that it is based on the facts and best predictions about the impact of this constant change.

How can our schooling system remain relevant when the only constant today’s students face is change? It is clear from what science has being telling us that in this century we will also face existential threats in the form of climate change, population growth, growing inequality, ageing populations and so much more (think covid19).

With the advances we are seeing in technology (especially AI and automation), our children are going to be entering into a very different work environment, with a large percentage — estimated as high as 65% in some studies — of current primary learners starting their careers with jobs that don’t even exist yet. The ability to self-direct learning throughout one’s life is going to be essential in a fast-changing environment that demands adaptability.

Alvin Toffler, an influential American writer and futurist wrote in his 1970 book, Future Shock, “By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.” So, this begs the question about the role our Australian education system is performing today. For example, are students learning how to learn, unlearn and relearn or are they learning how to pass standardised tests?

Standardised education systems are creating the biggest dead-end for our future generations. In 10 years, everything that can be standardised will be automated by machines. What will be the purpose for a standardised humanity? The great American educational historian and professor Diane Ravitch said this, “Sometimes, the most brilliant and intelligent minds do not shine in standardised tests because they do no not have standardised minds.”

In contrast to standardisation has been the growing movement of personalised learning in many schools, of which I have been a strong supporter as illustrated in a previous blog post, The Future Is Now. Therefore, a tension lies between the competing forces of personalisation and standardisation where personalisation is designing for an individual’s changing needs, unique talents and interests, while for mine, standardisation is the engine for rapid growth, lower costs and greater profits. Teaching and learning, the relationship between a teacher and learner, is uniquely personal and responsive to the many different ways young people can become their best selves. I want high standards for all the students in our care. But standardisation is not the same as high standards. Having high standards doesn’t mean that we all reach them in the same way.

Valerie Hannon in her book Thrive argues that the traditional pillars of education; that it is about prosperity and growth measured by GDP, and that it is good for individuals in that it will provide them with competitive access to better jobs, are no longer true. Hannon says that the purpose of education is about learning how to learn and how to thrive in a transforming world. Hannon also argues that, given the real challenges we face in the world today, it is essential we ask what job we want schools to do.

World-class education nations don't do what seems to be our main strategy in Australia: Insist schools compete against one another via league tables, use toxic accountability measures to control and measure what schools do, and hold teachers as scapegoats for “plummeting” global education rankings.

We have the potential to do so using online platforms to assist with more personalised learning experiences. A new learning paradigm would not and cannot exist without technology. Automation along with the other affordances of the fourth industrial revolution have the potential to disrupt the status quo of the live to work society opening up new possibilities for what people can do with their time. If machines performed the bulk of humanity’s work, perhaps then we could spend more time on volunteering, entrepreneurship, family, civic engagement, and creative endeavours.

More than ever, we are going to have to develop our most human qualities. Creativity, adaptability, original thinking and collaboration are all going to be key concepts in the workplace as well as in learning environments (schools!). With emotional competency becoming the new knowledge base.

If we cannot pinpoint how students will apply, now or in the near future, what we want to teach them (that is, have their thinking or behaviour change in another context—transferability), then maybe the material is not worth teaching in the first place. We always need to introduce students to material, but there has to be a purpose. This purpose is real ownership, application and transferability. We need to shift away from purely lecture-based learning where students are just consumers of information toward a more meaningful learning approach. Prolific educational author and fifth grade teacher Pernille Ripp believes, “With [student] ownership comes a deeper engagement because the learning environment is more theirs. Students should not feel like visitors in our rooms, it should feel like a safe environment that they can create, experiment, and perhaps even fail in.”

Much like the climate “crisis” our environment finds itself in, youth activist Greta Thunberg has stated “I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is”, education urgently needs (classic) blue sky thinking and leadership, because if we don’t act now, our young people will be in their own learning and formation crisis. Today’s educational sector calls for adaptive leadership. It is a collaborative change movement that emerges in a non-linear manner from interactive exchanges. School leaders and educational sectors need to wake to the fact that control, order and certainty are fallacies and that agile and adaptive leaders read the patterns of life effectively, moulding themselves to the needs of the moment, the sign of our times. School leaders need to re-examine the purpose of education for today’s world and ensure that it is based on the facts and emerging predictions about the impact of the exponential change we are currently witnessing. It is our collective responsibility to expose young people to new experiences and possibilities, but if we want them to take charge of their learning, these experiences have to be worthwhile and applicable in the students’ lives… really applicable, not because traditional dogma says they have to know it.

We have structured our schooling system to be focused on single-metric measurements of achievement, that are often isolated to educational environments (think ATAR), rather than on the post-school success of our students. The future for Australia may or may not be the ATAR — or the ATAR as it is now — but it will be a future in which secondary students also graduate with many micro-credentials representing a range of knowledge, skills and competencies, all of which will be necessary to allow young people to flourish in a new world environment. Instead of measuring the wrong end of the student and focusing on the minutes that students sit in seats, or how they can take a test, we can ask—for each student—are they mastering meaningful competencies? These competencies can range from academic ones around what students know and can do, to those focused on human habits of success like agency, adaptability and executive function—and even what it means to simply be a good citizen, like when it’s prudent to #stayhome. By exposing students to a range of experiences to engage locally, nationally and with the world, my hope is to give them a sense of how they can play a role in solving the problems that we’re collectively facing. The latest report from Year13 and YouthSense titled After The ATAR III, believes that schools should provide opportunities for all young people to “acquire knowledge that takes them beyond their experience” and which enables them to lead rich, fulfilling and productive lives. Only a more holistic approach to schooling can achieve this success. With the ultimate goal – a generation of happier, healthier young people, that can thrive in this new tomorrow.

My hope is that Australians we can break free from binary thinking and adversarial approach to so many issues we are currently facing. My hope is that our leaders start to look for common ground rather than focusing on difference. My hope for our country is that we become much more intellectually curious and collaborative. You shouldn’t be in the education sector if you don’t have hope. And my hope is to instil in each of the young people we educate, a great optimism and sense of possibility to learn, live, lead and work for their future.

[scifigeneration]

Robots won't steal our jobs if we put workers at center of AI revolution

by Thomas Kochan and Lee Dyer

The technologies driving artificial intelligence are expanding exponentially, leading many technology experts and futurists to predict machines will soon be doing many of the jobs that humans do today. Some even predict humans could lose control over their future.

While we agree about the seismic changes afoot, we don’t believe this is the right way to think about it. Approaching the challenge this way assumes society has to be passive about how tomorrow’s technologies are designed and implemented. The truth is there is no absolute law that determines the shape and consequences of innovation. We can all influence where it takes us.

Thus, the question society should be asking is: “How can we direct the development of future technologies so that robots complement rather than replace us?”

The Japanese have an apt phrase for this: “giving wisdom to the machines.” And the wisdom comes from workers and an integrated approach to technology design, as our research shows.

Lessons from history

There is no question coming technologies like AI will eliminate some jobs, as did those of the past.

The invention of the steam engine was supposed to reduce the number of manufacturing workers. Instead, their ranks soared. Lewis Hine

More than half of the American workforce was involved in farming in the 1890s, back when it was a physically demanding, labor-intensive industry. Today, thanks to mechanization and the use of sophisticated data analytics to handle the operation of crops and cattle, fewer than 2 percent are in agriculture, yet their output is significantly higher.

But new technologies will also create new jobs. After steam engines replaced water wheels as the source of power in manufacturing in the 1800s, the sector expanded sevenfold, from 1.2 million jobs in 1830 to 8.3 million by 1910. Similarly, many feared that the ATM’s emergence in the early 1970s would replace bank tellers. Yet even though the machines are now ubiquitous, there are actually more tellers today doing a wider variety of customer service tasks.

So trying to predict whether a new wave of technologies will create more jobs than it will destroy is not worth the effort, and even the experts are split 50-50.

It’s particularly pointless given that perhaps fewer than 5 percent of current occupations are likely to disappear entirely in the next decade, according to a detailed study by McKinsey.

Instead, let’s focus on the changes they’ll make to how people work.

It’s about tasks, not jobs

To understand why, it’s helpful to think of a job as made up of a collection of tasks that can be carried out in different ways when supported by new technologies.

And in turn, the tasks performed by different workers – colleagues, managers and many others – can also be rearranged in ways that make the best use of technologies to get the work accomplished. Job design specialists call these “work systems.”

One of the McKinsey study’s key findings was that about a third of the tasks performed in 60 percent of today’s jobs are likely to be eliminated or altered significantly by coming technologies. In other words, the vast majority of our jobs will still be there, but what we do on a daily basis will change drastically.

To date, robotics and other digital technologies have had their biggest effects on mostly routine tasks like spell-checking and those that are dangerous, dirty or hard, such as lifting heavy tires onto a wheel on an assembly line. Advances in AI and machine learning will significantly expand the array of tasks and occupations affected.

Creating an integrated strategy

We have been exploring these issues for years as part of our ongoing discussions on how to remake labor for the 21st century. In our recently published book, “Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Change and a New Social Contract,” we describe why society needs an integrated strategy to gain control over how future technologies will affect work.

And that strategy starts with helping define the problems humans want new technologies to solve. We shouldn’t be leaving this solely to their inventors.

Fortunately, some engineers and AI experts are recognizing that the end users of a new technology must have a central role in guiding its design to specify which problems they’re trying to solve.

The second step is ensuring that these technologies are designed alongside the work systems with which they will be paired. A so-called simultaneous design process produces better results for both the companies and their workers compared with a sequential strategy – typical today – which involves designing a technology and only later considering the impact on a workforce.

An excellent illustration of simultaneous design is how Toyota handled the introduction of robotics onto its assembly lines in the 1980s. Unlike rivals such as General Motors that followed a sequential strategy, the Japanese automaker redesigned its work systems at the same time, which allowed it to get the most out of the new technologies and its employees. Importantly, Toyota solicited ideas for improving operations directly from workers.

In doing so, Toyota achieved higher productivity and quality in its plants than competitors like GM that invested heavily in stand-alone automation before they began to alter work systems.

Similarly, businesses that tweaked their work systems in concert with investing in IT in the 1990s outperformed those that didn’t. And health care companies like Kaiser Permanente and others learned the same lesson as they introduced electronic medical records over the past decade.

Each example demonstrates that the introduction of a new technology does more than just eliminate jobs. If managed well, it can change how work is done in ways that can both increase productivity and the level of service by augmenting the tasks humans do.

Worker wisdom

But the process doesn’t end there. Companies need to invest in continuous training so their workers are ready to help influence, use and adapt to technological changes. That’s the third step in getting the most out of new technologies.

And it needs to begin before they are introduced. The important part of this is that workers need to learn what some are calling “hybrid” skills: a combination of technical knowledge of the new technology with aptitudes for communications and problem-solving.

Companies whose workers have these skills will have the best chance of getting the biggest return on their technology investments. It is not surprising that these hybrid skills are now in high and growing demand and command good salaries.

None of this is to deny that some jobs will be eliminated and some workers will be displaced. So the final element of an integrated strategy must be to help those displaced find new jobs and compensate those unable to do so for the losses endured. Ford and the United Auto Workers, for example, offered generous early retirement benefits and cash severance payments in addition to retraining assistance when the company downsized from 2007 to 2010.

Examples like this will need to become the norm in the years ahead. Failure to treat displaced workers equitably will only widen the gaps between winners and losers in the future economy that are now already all too apparent.

In sum, companies that engage their workforce when they design and implement new technologies will be best-positioned to manage the coming AI revolution. By respecting the fact that today’s workers, like those before them, understand their jobs better than anyone and the many tasks they entail, they will be better able to “give wisdom to the machines.”

Thomas Kochan is Professor of Management at MIT Sloan School of Management. Lee Dyer is Professor Emeritus of Human Resource Studies and Research Fellow, Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies (CAHRS) at Cornell University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. 

[recootyats]

The Top 20 Best Applicant Tracking Systems in 2019

“Never hire someone who knows less than you do about what he’s hired to do.” – Malcolm Forbes, Forbes\

When it comes to recruiting, it probably is the most challenging and disconcerting process for the HRs or recruiting team of any company. Within the whole hiring process and amidst all the different stages, posting jobs, managing and streamlining applications is popularly considered the most hectic task in the hiring industry. Ideally, a company’s hiring process should be as effective and efficient as possible and for this, it becomes highly imperative to accept only qualified and best-suited performers to save both finances and time. Seems like a daunting process, doesn’t it? Well, it doesn’t have to be!

Over the last decade, recruiters have effectively entrusted the hiring process to modern day technology or speaking more technically, Applicant Tracking Systems. An Applicant Tracking System is software whose basic function is to electronically automate the filtering, organizing and streamlining the job applications according to the preferences and criteria mentioned in the job opening.

There are a number of ATSs developing over the recent years as the trend set in and digitization took over the recruitment scenario. With so many options available, it becomes extremely difficult to decide which ATS to consider and which to overlook. Which ATS is the most appropriate and can prove to be effective for your HR team? Don’t worry, we got your back. To solve this dilemma of recruiters, we have shortlisted and compiled this article of top 20 best Applicant Tracking Systems which recruiters shouldn’t miss considering.

1. Oracle Taleo Cloud Service

Oracle Taleo Cloud Service effectively helps recruiters and hiring managers to attract & retain top talents. They are one of the best and leading solutions for talent management and social job sharing.

Unique Features- The service of Oracle Taleo depends heavily on social media platforms sourcing tools. Recruiting candidates through social media makes the job application available and accessible through smartphones which leads to increased employee referrals.

2. Greenhouse

Greenhouse is an efficient recruiting tool which is much more than just an ATS. It effectively enables and helps companies to build a winning hiring culture. It enables companies to stay ahead in the competition for talent

Unique Feature- Greenhouse is an ultimate and complete HR administration system. Recruiters are able to manage current, as well as prospective customers effectively at the same time. Recruiters can benefit from this to analyze the performance and efficiency of candidates and also compare them.

3. Recooty

Recooty is the world’s easiest Applicant Tracking System. It’s an all in one recruiting software which optimizes recruiting right from the initial stage of application tracking and streamlining to the very end of the hiring process, interview scheduling and onboarding candidates. Apart from these main features, it also provides a wide range of other features which enables hiring managers to get the best recruitment experience.

Unique Feature- The most unique feature of Recooty is it’s unbelievably affordable pricing. The basic version is free, paid versions start from just 10$ per month which is pretty much less than any other ATS. The best part is, even though the prices are very affordable, there is no compromise in the features.

4. BambooHR

BambooHR is a cloud-based and easy to use HR software for business which and small as well as medium-sized. The HR information system provides various tools and features that help HR executives to effectively manage and monitor every step of the employment process.

Unique Feature- BambooHR basically flourishes because of its reporting capabilities. Not only Equal Employment Opportunity reports, but also benefit reports can be pulled out using BambooHR ATS. And this feature of BambooHR is also supported on mobiles.

5. Zoho Recruit

Applicant Tracking is the specialty of Zoho Recruit and its functionalities are utterly dedicated to HR teams and staffing agencies. It helps recruiters to easily manage and streamlining tonnes of applications.

Unique Feature- Zoho Recruit provides recruiters and job seekers with a list of active job openings, displays them in chronological order with open fields so that applicants can submit their applications immediately. It also lets recruiters select criteria for their applicants to respond to and Zoho automatically rejects the applicants who do not fulfill the criteria.

6. BreezyHR

BreezyHR is an end-to-end recruiting software that modernizes the recruiting process by helping recruiters attract and hire great employees with minimal efforts. It is amazing recruiting software which enables recruiters to get a bird’s-eye view of their candidate’s profiles.

Unique Feature- BreezyHR simply provides a clear and precise vision of the applicants and in what stage they are. The drag and drop manage system allows recruiters to have absolute control over candidates.

7. JobVite

JobVite is not only an ATS, but it’s also a software that enables social recruiting, mobile-optimized career sites, onboarding, and any other desirable recruiting features.

Unique Feature- Recruiters can efficiently create customizable and branded career websites that feature their brand, applications, forms and more.

8. Google Hire

Google Hire is a recruiting app by Google that uses AI to make the hiring process faster and simpler.

Unique Feature- With Gmail, Google Calendar and other G Suite integrations, Hire streamlines administrative tasks so that your team can hire people, faster.

9. iCIMS Talent

iCIMS Talent Acquisition Software Suite efficiently supports the businesses of all sizes and in all industries. They have been in existence for more than 10 years, trying to get recruitment right. It’s easy to use and separated into three modules: recruit, connect and onboard.

Unique Feature- iCims is a globally leading brand for talent acquisition with over 3000 businesses and organization as happy and satisfied clients.

10. Jazz HR

JazzHR is a simply customizable ATS and recruitment software. It enables recruiters to post jobs on a number of multiple job boards and various social media platforms at the same time screen and monitor applications with particular and desirable filters. Different hiring stages can be set according to the requirements of the job type.

Unique Feature- It effectively allows users to access the hiring in various platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and more, all at the same time and same platform.

11. Ulti Pro

With the experience of more than 25 years, UltiPro focuses on changing the HR systems and take the recruitment scenario to a next level. Various factors like HR, payroll, talent, employee information, and many more, all combined together in one place which helps recruiters to manage and analyze employees easily.

Unique Feature- UltiPro’s unique feature is it’s Succession Management feature that enables recruiters to create and implement proactive plans for professional and career growth of employees.

12. Workable

Workable is an ATS and an all-in-one recruitment tool that helps businesses of all sizes to flourish in the field of recruiting. It helps recruiters to optimize the whole recruiting process from the very beginning to the absolute end.

Unique Feature- Workable doesn’t charge a single penny for installation or setup which allows recruiters to get started just within 10 minutes. It’s platform also allows teams to collaborate and work together on various hiring decisions.

13. Lever

Lever’s Talent Acquisition focuses on making hiring more efficient and more human. It is one of a kind system which is a combination of an ATS and customer relationship management software. With Lever, recruiters can also create career websites and profiles.

Unique Feature-  Lever gives all of the recruitment data through its analytic tools and recruitment metrics, which makes it very easy for recruiters to draft their progress report.

14. Clear Company

ClearCompany is an absolute talent management system that provides recruiters everything needed to engage, hire and retain talented individuals. It utilizes the company’s vision and mission to find top talents.

Unique Feature- The unique feature of ClearCompany is that it provides automated checks and verification of candidates. In this way, recruiters know exactly what kind of candidates they’re hiring.

15. IBM Kenexa

IBM Kenexa Talent Acquisition Suite is a bag full of various recruitment solutions that help recruiters to find, hire and finally on board worthy candidates. It encapsulates behavior marketing tool that proactively attracts talents and motivates job seekers.

Unique Feature- Its assessment features and capabilities are all powered by IBM Watson analytics because of which the process of identification of best fit is pretty quick.

16. Newton

Newton is a mobile ready, user-friendly and a compact fully featured Applicant Tracking System for employers of small and medium-sized businesses. It manages the applications effectively and efficiently without much hassle.

Unique Feature- Newton is basically designed and programmed to give recruiters and their team unparalleled visibility into their recruitment process from the initial stage.

17. Comeet

Comeet is a unique hiring software that supports and encourages team-centric recruitment. It combines the function of an ATS with communication, collaboration, workflow and every other factor which enhances the quality of the present working team.

Unique Feature- With Comeet, recruiters can involve multiple HR professionals and candidates into the hiring process. This helps in the filling of the vacancy quickly.

18. Fresh Team

Fresh Team is an Applicant Tracking System which has successfully build the perfect bridge between good recruiters and great candidates. It is a multitasking recruitment tool that helps a number of companies to achieve their goals.

Unique Feature- It effectively automated and takes care of all the recruitment tasks and chores by managing job postings, sourcing candidates and more.

19. Bullhorn

Bullhorn mainly focused on automating the entire recruitment process and increase recruiter productivity, improve candidate’s experience and make better hiring decisions.

Unique Feature- Bullhorn stands out as a combination of both, an ATS and a CRM software for recruiting firms and staffing. It’s extremely easy to use and gives fast results. If anything goes wrong, the system effectively notified the recruiter to avoid major problems.

20. ApplicantStack

With the trust of many customers over 9 years, ApplicantStack is a fully loaded and features ATS. It is used by many SMEs, and small and mid-sized businesses.

Unique Feature- The team of ApplicantStack comprises former recruiters and HR executives. So they exactly know the core of all recruiting issues and problems and how to solve them.

Hope this list have helped you in decision making. We tried to collect data from different sources to help you find the best applicant tracking system, still, the data can vary according to date, time & other factors.

[brianobrienny]

11 Digital Marketing Trends You Need to Know for 2020

As we’re rapidly approaching the end of the year, it’s a great time to look ahead at where we’re going and the marketing trends we’re likely to see more of in 2020. I’ve already touched on how we can expect marketing to evolve on a strategic level, and in this article, I’ll be looking in more detail at some of the specific trends to look out for.

Technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, so of course, some of these trends are focused around technology. However, there’s also a pushback against the increased digitization and automation of interactions between brands and consumers, and a desire to make marketing more human again.

While technologies such as AI and data-driven marketing will certainly be big trends for 2020, the overarching focus will be on people, not technology.

Quick Takeaways:

The marketing trends that will dominate in the next 12 months will include Customer Experience, Employee Engagement, and Content Visualization.

The definition of what we consider as “marketing” is constantly changing and becoming broader.

Marketing has moved beyond branding and advertising; marketers must work together with other departments to focus on building great customer experiences and engaging them for long-term relationships.

1. World Class Customer Experience

Every year is the year of the customer. We’re seeing a massive shift in beliefs about what marketing actually is. It’s no longer about trying to convince people to buy from or work with your company. Instead, the priority has moved towards providing fantastic customer experiences that will keep people coming back for more. In a sense, when you focus on building a positive business culture and providing great service, the marketing almost takes care of itself.

Not only are customers impatient, but they also want those fish tacos delivered on a silver platter.

Not literally, but they do expect a seamless experience from the first spark of interest to customer service after the sale. From personalized messaging that helps them solve problems to make a buying decision to a customer-focused culture throughout their customer journey, an experience that delivers quality across all channels is more likely to earn their business.

In addition to personalized marketing messages, find ways to listen and respond to their questions. Coordinate your digital marketing team with your sales and customer service teams to deliver quality throughout their experience.

The growth of online content has given consumers more power. They are no longer a passive party when it comes to learning about products. They’re not waiting for you to tell you how great your products are. Instead, they’re going out and doing their own research.

So you have to offer them something more than information. 73% of people say that customer experience is an important factor in their buying decisions, but currently only 49% of US consumers say that today’s companies provide a good experience.

What exactly makes a great CX? Efficiency, convenience, knowledgeable and friendly service, and easy payment options are what people value most in their customer experience. But aspects more traditionally considered as marketing’s domain are cited too: up-to-date technology, personalization, an easy mobile experience, brand image, and design all add up to the overall customer experience.

Source: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/pwc-consumer-intelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf

Building the kinds of relationships with customers that drive loyalty is worth every penny you spend. As the management experts at Bain and Company point out, a mere 5 percent boost in customer retention increases profit by 25 percent.

Can you imagine how your profits would soar if you went the extra mile to deliver the kinds of experiences that build not only loyalty, but qualified referrals as well? When you coordinate your digital marketing strategy with all your teams to deliver those kinds of experiences, you’ll grow your bottom line well beyond even your highest expectations.

In other words, you need to consider CX in every aspect of your marketing strategy. This is how you can provide a great experience in order to keep your customers and attract new ones.

In fact, as you go through this list, you’ll see that every trend is really just one factor of the overall customer experience.

2. Employee Activation: A Giant Leap Beyond Engagement

If efficient and friendly service is the cornerstone of great customer experience, how do you ensure you’re providing this? The answer, of course, is in your employees. The previously mentioned research also found that 46% of consumers will abandon a brand if its employees are not knowledgeable, and bad employee attitude is the number one factor that stops individuals from doing business with a company.

Source: https://www.pwc.com/us/en/advisory-services/publications/consumer-intelligence-series/pwc-consumer-intelligence-series-customer-experience.pdf

Your employees are the human face of your brand, so concentrating on interactions between your employees and your customers should be a key part of your marketing strategy. When you’re turning the responsibility of creating a great customer service over to your employees, you need to make sure that they want your business to succeed as much as you do.

The key to this is building a solid foundation of employee engagement and taking steps to ensure every employee understands and is aligned with your brand mission and values.

You can’t expect your employees to care about your customers if they’re not happy at work and don’t really believe in what you’re doing as a business. So achieving a high level of employee engagement is the first and most important step in improving customer experiences.

Employee engagement requires you to make your workplace such an attractive place to work that your employees’ happiness will spill on over onto the customers. Indeed, a smile and an extra effort to please that comes from the heart is one of the most effective forms of marketing out there. In fact, companies that engage their employees outperform their peers by a factor of two.

However, that one giant leap for humankind �� walking on the moon – is a piece of cake compared to convincing some companies to treat their employees like valuable colleagues instead of glorified house servants. Taking the next step – employee activation – requires you to treat your employees as your most treasured customers.

When you activate your employees, though, it’s marketing magic. Activation includes a wealth of tools to empower your employees to become walking billboards for your company, including:

Training that not only makes them more informed about your products, but also allows them to climb up the corporate ladder – imagine – you gotta love a company that trains you to qualify for a better job

Permission to post content on social media and elsewhere about your company’s culture, products, and services

Involvement in creating blog posts, videos, white papers, and other “official” marketing content, creating a platform on which they can showcase their expertise

Once your employees start sharing the love your company has shared with them, it will pay off. Not only will it pay off in good vibes, but it will also likely make a huge impact on your bottom line.

In fact, leads that your employees generate through social media marketing posts are seven times more likely to convert than leads you generate through other channels, according to Sociabble. In addition, content that they share will enjoy eight times more engagement than content that you share on your official brand channels.

3. Visualization

With the explosion of smart speakers and voice search in recent years, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “readable” content is more important than visuals and design these days.

In fact, this couldn’t be further from the truth. While advancements in voice search are certainly influencing the way that we’ll create content now and in the future, you shouldn’t neglect visual content either.

Research has shown that people prefer visual content to plain text. You just have to look at the growth of image-focused platforms Pinterest and Instagram to see the proof of this.

Google, Pinterest, and several other companies are also investing in visual search technology. Images are already returned for 19% of searches on Google, and 62% of millennials say they are more interest in visual search than any other new technology.

Visuals are also easier to remember than written content. Adding data visualizations, infographics, images, and videos to your text not only makes it more interesting and attractive, but it can help your message to be absorbed better too.

4. Personalization: Your Key to Their Heart

When a customer has two relatively equal products in front of her, and she needs to decide which one she’ll buy, my money’s on the brand that won her heart. One of the ways to engage your customers’ hearts as well as their heads is to personalize marketing to meet their needs.

For years, psychologists have taught us that people love to hear their name and see it in print. But today’s technology allows digital marketing teams to dig deep into the data to identify the things that keep customers up at night – and identify what messages will solve those problems and give them a good night’s sleep.

In the 2002 movie Minority Report, the character John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, is bombarded by a series of personalized ads calling him by name as he walks through the city. This was obviously complete science fiction at the time, but not quite two decades later, reality has almost caught up with the marketing future of Stephen Spielberg’s imagination.

Today’s consumers are flooded with marketing messages from multiple channels to the point where they have started to tune them out. Traditional advertising is losing its effectiveness, so what’s the answer? Personalized marketing messages that forge a real connection between the brand and the target market. So, go way beyond the “Hi [Customer Name]” emails, “Don’t you want to make more money?” popups, or “Hey, come back here!” cheesy messages in the browser titles to find what makes your customers tick. Then, give them content that will win their hearts.

Again, a little effort will yield amazing results. In fact, 80% of consumers said that they’d be more likely to do business with a brand that provides a personalized experience, as per a survey by Epsilon.

Improvements in technology such as AI combined with increased data collection and insights from social media and other sources have made it possible and easy to hyper-personalize everything from content to design to product recommendations and everything in-between.

5. Strategic Marketing Transformation

When you’re reading about up-and-coming trends in an article like this, it’s all too easy to think that being successful in marketing can be simplified to following a list of best practices and making sure you’re using the latest techniques and technology.

The business of marketing is becoming increasingly complex. For companies to succeed in 2020, they’ll have to think beyond what they’re doing and link everything back to the why of the business as a whole. Your marketing goals and objectives must align with the overall goals of your business.

Strategic marketing transformation is the term used to describe the process when a business operating without a strategic marketing plan evolves by changing its fundamental business processes and procedures.

Undergoing a marketing transformation can help companies to improve customer service and experience, boost brand awareness and reputation, and ultimately increase revenue and profits.

Businesses achieve these benefits through a combination of data collection, using modern technology, building customer relationships and engaging with customers online, publishing quality content, and improving their online presence. All of these things are part of the underlying strategy that influences every department and employee in the company, not just the marketers.

Your strategic marketing plan defines goals and determines which marketing tactics you will employ to reach your customers including content marketing, SEO, email marketing, social media, advertising, and offline marketing. It then lays out a plan for how every part of the organization will be involved in these tactics.

To put it simply, the marketing strategy is no longer only the responsibility of the chief marketer or CMO. Strategic marketing transformation recognizes this and ensures that the brand, company reputation, customer relationships, and the customer experience as a whole are considered in every business activity.

6. Featured Snippets in Google Search

SEO will continue to be an important aspect of digital marketing as we move into 2020, but we’re now seeing one of the most major shifts in the SEO industry in the last decade.

With the growth of mobile and voice search, people are changing the way they use search engines like Google. Being number one in the search engine result pages or SERPS is no longer necessarily the primary goal your business should be aiming for.

You’ve probably noticed your own search and browsing behavior has changed in the last few years due to Google changes and the fact that you’re looking for the fastest information when you’re on the move.

Featured snippets and other “on SERP” information means that you don’t need to click through to a website to get the information you’re looking for anymore – it’s right there on the Google search results page.

This on-SERP information may appear in various places, but the most sought after position is right at the top of the page, before the organic listings. This position has been dubbed “position zero”. As it’s often the only information that a searcher will view, it’s highly coveted. Over 60% of search results returned by Google are now featured snippets.

Brands are still trying to figure out how to achieve the erstwhile “position zero” as it requires different SEO techniques than those employed for a normal listing in the SERPs. If you can be the first in your industry to get there, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors. So expect to see more SEO companies offering this service over the next year, and pay attention to the latest best practices for optimizing your content.

7. Voice Search

I’ve mentioned voice search a couple of times already, so you knew it was going to be on this list. Voice search shows no sign of slowing down and will continue to be a major influence on how brands create content and market themselves online.

We’re not quite at the commonly cited prediction that 50% of searches will be driven by voice in 2020 (we’re currently sitting at about 20% according to Google), but this statistic is probably not that far in the future. The smart speaker business is booming, with around a quarter of US households now owning a Google Home, Amazon Echo, or another smart speaker.

Consumers are also expecting to use voice search more in the near future – 61% of those aged 25–64 who already use a voice device intend to use it more in the future according to research by PwC.

Voice search brings with it new challenges but also exciting opportunities. “Branded skills” is one example of a smart speaker advertising opportunity that emerged in the last year. Tequila brand Patròn is an example of a company that’s seen huge success from using branded skills. Smart speaker users can ask their digital assistant to “ask Patròn for a cocktail recipe.” This not only helps to increase brand awareness and visibility, but it also enables users to buy the product directly from the recipe results.

Even if your brand isn’t ready for smart speaker advertising, it’s important that your content is optimized for voice search. Voice searchers use search differently. They use longer, more conversational queries, so slanting your content to serve these queries, as well as answering questions directly, can help to make it more visible to voice searches. This has the added bonus of making your content more likely to be picked up as a featured snippet or found on position zero on Google.

8. AI-Based Automation

Will 2020 be the year of the rise of the robots? Maybe (but hopefully not in the Terminator-style of dystopian science fiction movies!)

We’ve already seen huge advancements in AI over the last few years, and a great increase in the number of businesses using AI-powered technology and automation to assist their marketing efforts.

AI is one of the major technologies behind voice search and smart assistants. It’s also made chatbots possible, which are now popping up on more websites than ever before.

AI technology and automation are helping to take some of the grunt work out of marketing so brands can concentrate on strategy and crafting a fantastic customer experience.

Remember, the human aspect of marketing is still important (perhaps more important than ever before), so the idea is to use this technology to enhance your marketing efforts, not replace the real people behind them.

Big data, supported by AI and predictive analytics, is also helping brands to learn more about their audience and customers. It’s enabling hyper-personalization of customer experiences and marketing messages at scale.

9. Focus on Customer Retention, Loyalty and Advocacy

A huge part of providing a great customer experience is making sure that CX is ongoing and focused on keeping your existing customers, rather than just attracting new ones.

Recurring customers are more valuable than new customers. Studies have found that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep a new one, so it’s definitely worth putting in the effort to keep your customers happy.

Loyal customers also help to increase the reputation and awareness of your brand as they’ll talk about your company and products with their friends and family. Happy customers make great (and free!) brand ambassadors and influencers.

Many of the above-mentioned trends and technology can be helpful for increasing customer retention rates. Personalization, for example, is certainly expected from your existing customers if not your new ones, and it gets easier to personalize communications the more interactions someone has with your brand.

10. Live Video

The live video industry is expected to be worth over $70 billion by 2021. Live video is incredibly popular with consumers, and people spend three times longer watching live video than they do watching pre-recorded video.

Video is also the most popular way for consumers to learn about new products.

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/state-of-video-marketing-new-data

When the live element is added, this makes video more engaging as the audience feels they’re a part of it and can influence the content, rather than just passively watching.

Live video is great for grabbing the attention of your social audience on Facebook or Instagram. These types of videos are so attractive to viewers because they tap into “FOMO” or fear of missing out. When you’re not sure if a live video is going to contain a tidbit of information that you can’t get anywhere else, or it will mean you’re the first to find out about some new and exciting news, you’re going to want to watch it.

11. Account-Based Marketing

Although corporations aren’t people, their C-suites certainly are staffed by them. Specifically, by people with widely divergent interests.

The chief financial officer wants to know how the widget you make will save steps in the manufacturing process, saving time. And time, as we all know, is money.

The chief marketing officer wants to know how your widget can help make a better product – and why – so that she can explain it to her customers.

The head of human resources wants to know how much easier your widget will make assembly line workers’ jobs, specifically, how it can help them avoid tendonitis.

And so on.

Account-based marketing personalizes messaging to businesses, targeting each decision-maker with the information they need to solve specific departmental problems. Like personalized messaging directly to customers, account-based marketing yields a higher ROI than other types of marketing. If you sell to other businesses, particularly large corporations, account-based marketing is one of the “already here” digital marketing trends you need to embrace during the coming years.

Get Ready for 2021

Now is the time to start planning your 2020 marketing strategy if you haven’t already. Make sure you start the New Year with a clear plan of your goals and how you’re going to achieve them.

I can’t really call it a trend, but it goes without saying that content marketing will continue to dominate the digital marketing landscape in 2020. Most of these trends rely on content in some way. To have success in them you’ll need to have a solid base of quality content across all your marketing channels.

If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content that’s consistently published, check out our Content Builder Service. Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.

The post 11 Digital Marketing Trends You Need to Know for 2020 appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.

11 Digital Marketing Trends You Need to Know for 2020 published first on http://rssmix.com/u/11592782/rss.xml

[sheminecrafts]

Facebook upgrades its AI to better tackle COVID-19 misinformation and hate speech

Facebook’s AI tools are the only thing standing between its users and the growing onslaught of hate and misinformation the platform is experiencing. The company’s researchers have cooked up a few new capabilities for the systems that keep the adversary at bay, identifying COVID-19-related misinformation and hateful speech disguised as memes.

Detecting and removing misinformation relating to the virus is obviously a priority right now, as Facebook and other social media become breeding grounds not just for ordinary speculation and discussion, but malicious interference by organized campaigns aiming to sow discord and spread pseudoscience.

“We have seen a huge change in behavior across the site because of COVID-19, a huge increase in misinformation that we consider dangerous,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a call with press earlier today.

The company contracts with dozens of fact-checking organizations around the world, but — leaving aside the question of how effective the collaborations really are — misinformation has a way of quickly mutating, making taking down even a single image or link a complex affair.

Take a look at the three example images below, for instance:In some ways they’re nearly identical, with the same background image, colors, typeface, and so on. But the second one is slightly different — it’s the kind of thing you might see when someone takes a screenshot and shares that instead of the original. The third is visually the same but the words have the opposite meaning.

An unsophisticated computer vision algorithm would either rate these as completely different images due to those small changes (they result in different hashes) or all the same due to overwhelming visual similarity. Of course we see the differences right away, but training an algorithm to do that reliably is very difficult. And the way things spread on Facebook, you might end up with thousands of variations rather than a handful.

“What we want to be able to do is detect those things as being identical because they are, to a person, the same thing,” said Schroepfer. “Our previous systems were very accurate, but they were very fragile and brittle to even very small changes. If you change a small number of pixels, we were too nervous that it was different, and so we would mark it as different and not take it down. What we did here over the last two and a half years is build a neural net based similarity detector that allowed us to better catch a wider variety of these variants again at very high accuracy.”

Fortunately analyzing images at those scales is a specialty of Facebook’s. The infrastructure is there for comparing photos and searching for features like faces and less desirable things; It just needed to be taught what to look for. The result — from years of work, it should be said — is SimSearchNet, a system dedicated to finding and analyzing near-duplicates of a given image by close inspection of their most salient features (which may not be at all what you or I would notice).

SimSearchNet is currently inspecting every image uploaded to Instagram and Facebook — billions a day.

The system is also monitoring Facebook Marketplace, where people trying to skirt the rules will upload the same image of an item for sale (say, an N95 face mask) but slightly edited to avoid being flagged by the system as not allowed. With the new system, the similarities between recolored or otherwise edited photos are noted and the sale stopped.

Hateful memes and ambiguous skunks

Another issue Facebook has been dealing with is hate speech — and its more loosely defined sibling hateful speech. One area that has proven especially difficult for automated systems, however, is memes.

The problem is that the meaning of these posts often results from an interplay between the image and the text. Words that would be perfectly appropriate or ambiguous on their own have their meaning clarified by the image on which they appear. Not only that, but there’s an endless number of variations in images or phrasings that can subtly change (or not change) the resulting meaning. See below:

To be clear, these are toned down “mean memes,” not the kind of truly hateful ones often found on Facebook.

Each individual piece of the puzzle is fine in some contexts, insulting in others. How can a machine learning system learn to tell what’s good and what’s bad? This “multimodal hate speech” is a non-trivial problem because of the way AI works. We’ve built systems to understand language, and to classify images, but how those two things relate is not so simple a problem.

The Facebook researchers note that there is “surprisingly little” research on the topic, so theirs is more an exploratory mission than a solution. The technique they arrived at had several steps. First, they had humans annotate a large collection of meme-type images as hateful or not, creating the Hateful Memes dataset. Next, a machine learning system was trained on this data, but with a crucial difference from existing ones.

Almost all such image analysis algorithms, when presented with text and an image at the same time, will classify the one, then the other, then attempt to relate the two together. But that has the aforementioned weakness that, independent of context, the text and images of hateful memes may be totally benign.

Facebook’s system combines the information from text and image earlier in the pipeline, in what it calls “early fusion” to differentiate it from the traditional “late fusion” approach. This is more akin to how people do it — looking at all the components of a piece of media before evaluating its meaning or tone.

Facebook speeds up AI training by culling the weak

Right now the resultant algorithms aren’t ready for deployment at large — at around 65-70 percent overall accuracy, though Schroepfer cautioned that the team uses “the hardest of the hard problems” to evaluate efficacy. Some multimodal hate speech will be trivial to flag as such, while some is difficult even for humans to gauge.

To help advance the art, Facebook is running a “Hateful Memes Challenge” as part of the NeurIPS AI conference later this year; this is commonly done with difficult machine learning tasks, as new problems like this one are like catnip for researchers.

AI’s changing role in Facebook policy

Facebook announced its plans to rely on AI more heavily for moderation in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. In a press call in March, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company expected more “false positives”—instances of content flagged when it shouldn’t be—with the company’s fleet of 15,000 moderation contractors at home with paid leave.

The pandemic is already reshaping tech’s misinformation crisis

YouTube and Twitter also shifted more of their content moderation to AI around the same time, issuing similar warnings about how an increased reliance on automated moderation might lead to content that doesn’t actually break any platform rules being flagged mistakenly.

In spite of its AI efforts, Facebook has been eager to get its human content reviewers back in the office. In mid-April, Zuckerberg gave a timeline for when employees could be expected to get back to the office, noting that content reviewers were high on Facebook’s list of “critical employees” marked for the earliest return.

While Facebook warned that its AI systems might remove content too aggressively, hate speech, violent threats and misinformation continue to proliferate on the platform as the coronavirus crisis stretches on. Facebook most recently came under fire for disseminating a viral video discouraging people from wearing face masks or seeking vaccines once they are available— a clear violation of the platform’s rules against health misinformation.

The video, an excerpt from a forthcoming pseudo-documentary called “Plandemic,” initially took off on YouTube, but researchers found that Facebook’s thriving ecosystem of conspiracist groups shared it far and wide on the platform, injecting it into mainstream online discourse. The 26-minute-long video, peppered with conspiracies, is also a perfect example of the kind of content an algorithm would have a difficult time making sense of.

On Tuesday, Facebook also released a community standards enforcement report detailing its moderation efforts across categories like terrorism, harassment and hate speech. While the results only include one a one month span during the pandemic, we can expect to see more of the impact of Facebook’s shift to AI moderation next time around.

In a call about the company’s moderation efforts, Zuckerberg noted that the pandemic has made “the human review part” of its moderation much harder, as concerns around protecting user privacy and worker mental health make remote work a challenge for reviewers, but one the company is navigating now. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is now allowing a small portion of full-time content reviewers back into the office on a volunteer basis and according to Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen, “the majority” of its contract content reviewers can now work from home. “The humans are going to continue to be a really important part of the equation,” Rosen said.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/2yP6pJK via IFTTT

[technicalsolutions88]

Facebook’s AI tools are the only thing standing between its users and the growing onslaught of hate and misinformation the platform is experiencing. The company’s researchers have cooked up a few new capabilities for the systems that keep the adversary at bay, identifying COVID-19-related misinformation and hateful speech disguised as memes.

Detecting and removing misinformation relating to the virus is obviously a priority right now, as Facebook and other social media become breeding grounds not just for ordinary speculation and discussion, but malicious interference by organized campaigns aiming to sow discord and spread pseudoscience.

“We have seen a huge change in behavior across the site because of COVID-19, a huge increase in misinformation that we consider dangerous,” said Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer in a call with press earlier today.

The company contracts with dozens of fact-checking organizations around the world, but — leaving aside the question of how effective the collaborations really are — misinformation has a way of quickly mutating, making taking down even a single image or link a complex affair.

Take a look at the three example images below, for instance:In some ways they’re nearly identical, with the same background image, colors, typeface, and so on. But the second one is slightly different — it’s the kind of thing you might see when someone takes a screenshot and shares that instead of the original. The third is visually the same but the words have the opposite meaning.

An unsophisticated computer vision algorithm would either rate these as completely different images due to those small changes (they result in different hashes) or all the same due to overwhelming visual similarity. Of course we see the differences right away, but training an algorithm to do that reliably is very difficult. And the way things spread on Facebook, you might end up with thousands of variations rather than a handful.

“What we want to be able to do is detect those things as being identical because they are, to a person, the same thing,” said Schroepfer. “Our previous systems were very accurate, but they were very fragile and brittle to even very small changes. If you change a small number of pixels, we were too nervous that it was different, and so we would mark it as different and not take it down. What we did here over the last two and a half years is build a neural net based similarity detector that allowed us to better catch a wider variety of these variants again at very high accuracy.”

Fortunately analyzing images at those scales is a specialty of Facebook’s. The infrastructure is there for comparing photos and searching for features like faces and less desirable things; It just needed to be taught what to look for. The result — from years of work, it should be said — is SimSearchNet, a system dedicated to finding and analyzing near-duplicates of a given image by close inspection of their most salient features (which may not be at all what you or I would notice).

SimSearchNet is currently inspecting every image uploaded to Instagram and Facebook — billions a day.

The system is also monitoring Facebook Marketplace, where people trying to skirt the rules will upload the same image of an item for sale (say, an N95 face mask) but slightly edited to avoid being flagged by the system as not allowed. With the new system, the similarities between recolored or otherwise edited photos are noted and the sale stopped.

Hateful memes and ambiguous skunks

Another issue Facebook has been dealing with is hate speech — and its more loosely defined sibling hateful speech. One area that has proven especially difficult for automated systems, however, is memes.

The problem is that the meaning of these posts often results from an interplay between the image and the text. Words that would be perfectly appropriate or ambiguous on their own have their meaning clarified by the image on which they appear. Not only that, but there’s an endless number of variations in images or phrasings that can subtly change (or not change) the resulting meaning. See below:

To be clear, these are toned down “mean memes,” not the kind of truly hateful ones often found on Facebook.

Each individual piece of the puzzle is fine in some contexts, insulting in others. How can a machine learning system learn to tell what’s good and what’s bad? This “multimodal hate speech” is a non-trivial problem because of the way AI works. We’ve built systems to understand language, and to classify images, but how those two things relate is not so simple a problem.

The Facebook researchers note that there is “surprisingly little” research on the topic, so theirs is more an exploratory mission than a solution. The technique they arrived at had several steps. First, they had humans annotate a large collection of meme-type images as hateful or not, creating the Hateful Memes dataset. Next, a machine learning system was trained on this data, but with a crucial difference from existing ones.

Almost all such image analysis algorithms, when presented with text and an image at the same time, will classify the one, then the other, then attempt to relate the two together. But that has the aforementioned weakness that, independent of context, the text and images of hateful memes may be totally benign.

Facebook’s system combines the information from text and image earlier in the pipeline, in what it calls “early fusion” to differentiate it from the traditional “late fusion” approach. This is more akin to how people do it — looking at all the components of a piece of media before evaluating its meaning or tone.

Facebook speeds up AI training by culling the weak

Right now the resultant algorithms aren’t ready for deployment at large — at around 65-70 percent overall accuracy, though Schroepfer cautioned that the team uses “the hardest of the hard problems” to evaluate efficacy. Some multimodal hate speech will be trivial to flag as such, while some is difficult even for humans to gauge.

To help advance the art, Facebook is running a “Hateful Memes Challenge” as part of the NeurIPS AI conference later this year; this is commonly done with difficult machine learning tasks, as new problems like this one are like catnip for researchers.

AI’s changing role in Facebook policy

Facebook announced its plans to rely on AI more heavily for moderation in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis. In a press call in March, Mark Zuckerberg said that the company expected more “false positives”—instances of content flagged when it shouldn’t be—with the company’s fleet of 15,000 moderation contractors at home with paid leave.

The pandemic is already reshaping tech’s misinformation crisis

YouTube and Twitter also shifted more of their content moderation to AI around the same time, issuing similar warnings about how an increased reliance on automated moderation might lead to content that doesn’t actually break any platform rules being flagged mistakenly.

In spite of its AI efforts, Facebook has been eager to get its human content reviewers back in the office. In mid-April, Zuckerberg gave a timeline for when employees could be expected to get back to the office, noting that content reviewers were high on Facebook’s list of “critical employees” marked for the earliest return.

While Facebook warned that its AI systems might remove content too aggressively, hate speech, violent threats and misinformation continue to proliferate on the platform as the coronavirus crisis stretches on. Facebook most recently came under fire for disseminating a viral video discouraging people from wearing face masks or seeking vaccines once they are available— a clear violation of the platform’s rules against health misinformation.

The video, an excerpt from a forthcoming pseudo-documentary called “Plandemic,” initially took off on YouTube, but researchers found that Facebook’s thriving ecosystem of conspiracist groups shared it far and wide on the platform, injecting it into mainstream online discourse. The 26-minute-long video, peppered with conspiracies, is also a perfect example of the kind of content an algorithm would have a difficult time making sense of.

On Tuesday, Facebook also released a community standards enforcement report detailing its moderation efforts across categories like terrorism, harassment and hate speech. While the results only include one a one month span during the pandemic, we can expect to see more of the impact of Facebook’s shift to AI moderation next time around.

In a call about the company’s moderation efforts, Zuckerberg noted that the pandemic has made “the human review part” of its moderation much harder, as concerns around protecting user privacy and worker mental health make remote work a challenge for reviewers, but one the company is navigating now. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that the company is now allowing a small portion of full-time content reviewers back into the office on a volunteer basis and according to Facebook Vice President of Integrity Guy Rosen, “the majority” of its contract content reviewers can now work from home. “The humans are going to continue to be a really important part of the equation,” Rosen said.

from Social – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/3cq1cXq Original Content From: https://techcrunch.com

[techfaktory]

13 Ways Businesses Can Use SEO & Marketing to Combat Coronavirus Impact

You should, at this point, be taking the safety precautions recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Many federal governments are stepping up with policies to protect their workers from the certain economic impacts of widespread self-isolation.

In Italy, one of the hardest-hit areas to date, the government negotiated an accord with banks for the suspension of mortgage payments, for example. And in Canada, where I live, the waiting period for unemployment benefits has been eliminated.

There are quite a few reputable resources to help employers and employees prepare for COVID-19, like this WHO guide.

For self-employed individuals and small business owners, help can be harder to find.

How can your business survive the economic impact of a COVID-19 outbreak — or the social distancing required to prevent one?

Keep Calm & Optimize On.

This is not a time for panic.

I’m seeing some alarming accounts from marketing and SEO friends of clients pulling their contracts and shutting down marketing operations until further notice.

This knee-jerk reaction is setting your business up for a long-term, uphill struggle to recover.

Whether you are a landscaping business, a family-owned restaurant, a small retail shop, or some other privately-owned company, you may experience revenue losses in the coming months. Product or service business, ecommerce or brick-and-mortar, we are all bracing for a hit.

There is a lot of uncertainty around the potential economic impacts of COVID-19, and that is certainly scary.

But what is certain is that we will recover.

“Flattening the curve” works as a method of mitigating the damage of a pandemic by not only reducing the volume of cases and therefore the strain on social systems but also spreading the cases out over time, so they can be handled more effectively.

Organic search is a zero-sum game; your gains or losses are exactly balanced by the gains or losses of others in the SERPs.

We understand paid search and social as a live auction but tend not to think of organic this way.

It is very much a living, breathing, competitive space and if you’re not actively moving ahead, you’re falling behind.

Budgeting for Marketing & SEO During Coronavirus Pandemic

If you’re doing anywhere between $1 and $5 million in sales per year you should be spending 7–8% of gross revenue on advertising and marketing, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

I’ve worked with high-growth companies budgeting 10–12%, but for maintenance 7% is a bare minimum.

This means for every $100,000 in gross revenue, you should have at least $7,000 earmarked for advertising and marketing per year.

It is critical that you maintain at least this level of marketing investment throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.

If you cannot afford to grow right now, so be it.

If it makes sense to cut back on some paid advertising for the time being (say, for example, your employees can’t come in to serve customers so there’s no point right now in attracting them to your location), then that’s a logical decision to make.

SEO and inbound marketing are a long game, however.

You’ve invested in building your processes and workflow, ensuring data quality with consistent measurement, building an audience and customer base, and creating quality content that ranks.

What’s more, you can count on the fact that others are going to panic and underestimate the impact of an emotional decision on their 6- to 12-month business horizon.

As their engagement drops, their publishing cadence slows, perhaps their review volume or quality falls off, and they lose traction across channels, you have the opportunity to push ahead and come out on top.

This is the time to stay the course and tackle all of those potentially impactful SEO and marketing tasks you’ve had on your back burner.

Whether you’re working with an agency or handling marketing in-house, these are tasks you can get your team working on while they self-isolate and work remotely.

13 SEO & Marketing Tasks to Do NOW for a Faster Coronavirus Recovery

1. Interview Employees & Customers

Use Zoom or Google Hangouts to host and record video calls.

Interview your employees and customers about their unique experiences with and knowledge of your products, services, and culture.

Use Otter.ai for automated video transcription

In the coming months, these transcripts and videos will be a rich source of insider info for your blog posts, social content, media releases, and more.

2. Do a Mini-Audit of Your Content Assets

A full-blown content audit takes time and expertise, but there is much you can do during this slow period to improve your content performance with a mini-audit.

If you haven’t kept an inventory of your content assets to date, this is a great time to get started.

Create a new Google Sheet or Excel sheet and use one tab for each content type:

· Webpages.

· Emails.

· Blog posts.

· Whitepapers.

· Ebooks.

· Presentations.

· Videos.

· Infographics.

· Articles you’ve published externally.

Etc.

If you get really ambitious, you can track articles others have published about your business, too.

Now evaluate each piece with a critical eye.

· Which high-quality pieces and images can you repurpose for other channels?

· Which pieces got the most social shares? The most backlinks?

· Which ones get the most traffic on-site?

These may all be opportunities for:

· Updating with fresh content.

· Optimizing with new CTAs and keywords.

· Adding internal links to new products/services.

· Repromoting when business picks up again.

3. Plan Webinars

Want to answer frequently asked questions about your approach to small engine repair?

Introduce new team members, products, or features to your customer base?

Inspire seasonal bookings for later this year?

If you’re constantly tied up in the field and now freaking out in an empty office twiddling your thumbs, this is a great time to try out your webinar game.

This is an especially effective marketing tactic in B2B, as 91% of professionals say webinars are their favorite content format for learning.

4. Clean up Your Administrative Messes

“Here are some of the things I’m planning to do:

· Administrative work: clean up files, delete things I don’t need anymore, close open contracts that shouldn’t be open.

· Website: write some posts I’ve been meaning to get to that have evergreen advice, and do a long overdue SEO clean up.

· Webinars and Podcasts: research some that I can pitch to and work on some pitches and ideas for the future.

· Books: read that stack of marketing books I haven’t gotten to!” — Jenny Halasz

5. Take Aim at Different Types of SERPS

If you’re like a lot of small business owners, you haven’t had time to even think about getting any more sophisticated than having a presence in search and maybe trying to balance your organic and PPC efforts for good coverage.

Now that you may have a bit of time and space to dig deeper, you can plot your domination of position zero, video carousels, paragraph snippets, and more.

6. Get Recording Videos

Videos are great SEO fodder on their own, they can help you:

· Target long-tail keywords.

· Trigger featured snippets.

· Appear in relevant YouTube searches.

But they can also be the basis for all types of other content, too.

As mentioned above, Otter.ai is a low-cost way to transcribe video with AI (and if you have employees in need of at-home work, you can get them to watch the video and clean up the transcripts, as the tech isn’t perfect).

Embed the video in a blog post and include the transcript.

Take screenshots and use them as images in social.

Take 5–10 quotes from the video transcript and use them alongside images on Instagram in the coming months.

Reuse those quotes in media releases and upcoming blog posts.

7. Work on Your Online Reviews Strategy

The web is littered with online reviews companies haven’t answered.

You don’t have to go back to the dawn of Yelp time and answer each one, but this is a good time to make sure your more recent reviews have a thoughtful response.

Create a reviews policy and, if you have a good candidate, train an employee now to manage your online reviews going forward.

Write some template responses and go over your brand messaging with them.

Coach them on responding to negative reviews and escalating legit customer service issues to the right person.

Give them the tools they need to monitor reviews and get alerts.

Show them what you expect as far as measuring the value of reviews and monthly reporting.

8. Get Behind Digital in a Big Way

“Get your storefront online so that people can shift from personal shopping to parcel delivery. Get better at video. Loom just halved their rates. I got a 1-year Pro plan today for $48USD/year. It’s a massive tool for sharing information with clients and contacts. Evangelize telecommuting. Share the word about remote tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Docs, etc.” — Shawn DeWolfe

9. Update Your Google My Business Profile for Local Customers

Are you operating on special hours?

Taking special care to avoid the spread of COVID-19?

Google wants local businesses to use the tools available within the GMB dashboard to let customers know what’s changed.

Update your hours and business description, share Google Posts with updates and offers, and make sure your contact information is correct in case people are trying to reach you.

10. Show Your Website Some Love

“Fix your site. You know it’s not perfect, spend some time practicing what you preach and make your site the lead magnet it needs to be!” — Grant Simmons

11. Sniff out Unnatural Links

In her recent column, Anna Crowe shared a couple of pretty compelling stories about the importance of seeking and destroying unnatural backlinks.

In one case, a site had received a manual Google penalty but achieved a top 3 positioning within weeks of removing a disavow file and removing over 1,900 unnatural links.

In another, a site lost 82% of its traffic after building thousands of unnatural links.

There are a lot of different ways unnatural links can happen, and they’re not all intentional.

An unscrupulous SEO here, a shady competitor there and suddenly you can’t figure out why your SEO efforts aren’t paying off.

In How to Find Unnatural Links to Your Site & What to Do About Them, Crowe explains 11 types of unnatural links to watch out for and lays out a step-by-step process for sussing them out.

12. Consider an Outreach Strategy

Whether or not reaching out to your customers during a pandemic is appropriate depends entirely on your type of business, your existing relationship with customers, and the purpose of the communication.

Are customers used to hearing from you regularly by email, SMS messaging or social media?

Don’t let that relationship drop off.

Stay away from tacky disaster-related promotions (looking at you, American Apparel with your Hurricane Sandy Sale).

What you can do is get creative and think of how you can offer reassurance, social connection, or tangible assistance during COVID-19.

“Making the decision to cut your budget at this time is reactionary rather than strategic. SEO and online marketing are avenues to build connection and trust with people and how you do that during challenging times matters just as much as when you’re ready to serve or sell them directly.” — Marketing and SEO strategist Monisha Bajaj

“Making the decision to cut your budget at this time is reactionary rather than strategic,” explains marketing and SEO strategist Monisha Bajaj.

“SEO and online marketing are avenues to build connection and trust with people and how you do that during challenging times matters just as much as when you’re ready to serve or sell them directly.”

· Could you host an online video space once a week for people to check-in, have a light discussion on trends in your industry, and maybe trade tricks or tips relevant to your product or service?

· Can you be a local leader in distributing reputable information to your community about COVID-19 supports? Remember that a lot of places no longer have a local newspaper or radio station. If you have the time to gather information from local government and health agencies and make sure people know where they can get tested for Coronavirus, what steps they should take to report symptoms, etc., why not publish it in a blog or your email newsletter? Include a disclaimer that you are not giving medical advice, and always link back to the original source of the information so people can verify it for themselves.

· Let customers know how your business is changing or adapting to protect them and your employees. Encourage conversation and be forthcoming in answering questions or concerns they may have.

13. Get to Know Customers Better With a Deep Dive Into Your First-Party Data

“Go through your analytics and sales/lead data. What do you know about your customers? What do you know about prospects that didn’t pick you (or about people near your business that don’t shop with you)? What is in the analytics data that you have missed in the past — are they on iPhones, all visit from city X? Compare offline and online trends and determine what could you fix today that you have never had time to do.” — Dave Rohrer

And Remember, Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First…

Supply chain interruptions, the need for social distancing, and impending economic uncertainty are all serious stressors for business owners.

You have responsibilities to employees, customers, and other stakeholders — but you need to take care of yourself so you’re in shape to take care of those others, first.

The WHO has released a document entitled Mental Health Considerations During COVID-19 Outbreak that I recommend as a resource for all of us struggling to come to terms with this fast-evolving threat.

Words matter. Perspective matters.

Focusing on the future and what we can do to prepare for recovery matters.

Do you have plans to tackle certain aspects of your business if you experience a slow-down? Share your tips for others in the comments.

SOURCE: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-marketing-combat-coronavirus-impact/354780/

[terabitweb]

Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett

In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.

How long have you been at AWS, and what do you do in your current role?

I’ve been here for three years. My job is Security Transformation, which is a technical role in AWS Professional Services. It’s a fancy way of saying that I help customers build the confidence and technical capability to run their most sensitive workloads in the AWS Cloud. Much of my work lives at the intersection of DevOps and information security.

Broadly, how does the role of Consultant differ from positions like “Solutions Architect”?

Depth of engagement is one of the main differences. On many customer engagements, I’m involved for three months, or six months, or nine months. I have one customer now that I’ve been working with for more than a year. Consultants are also more integrated—I’m often embedded in the customer’s team, working side-by-side with their employees, which helps me learn about their culture and needs.

What’s your favorite part of your job?

There’s a lot I like about working at Amazon, but a couple of things stand out. First, the people I work with. Amazon culture—and the people who comprise that culture—are amazing. I’m constantly interacting with really smart people who are willing to go out of their way to make good things happen for customers. At companies I’ve worked for in the past, I’ve encountered individuals like this. But being surrounded by so many people who behave like this day in and day out is something special.

The customers that we have the privilege of working with at AWS also represent some very large brands. They serve many, many consumers all over the world. When I help these customers achieve their security and privacy goals, I’m doing something that has an impact on the world at large. I’ve worked in tech my entire career, in roles ranging from executive to coder, but I’ve never had a job that lets me make such a broad impact before. It’s really cool.

What does cloud security mean to you, personally?

I work in Global Financial Services, so my customers are the world’s biggest banks, investment firms, and independent software vendors. These are companies that we all rely on every day, and they put enormous effort into protecting their customers’ data and finances. As I work to support their efforts, I think about it in terms of my wife, kids, parents, siblings—really, my entire extended family. I’m working to protect us, to ensure that the online world we live in is a safer one.

In your opinion, what’s the biggest cloud security challenge facing the Financial Services industry right now?

How to transform the way they do security. It’s not only a technical challenge—it’s a human challenge. For FinServe customers to get the most value out of the cloud, a lot of people need to be willing to change their minds.

Highly regulated customers like financial services firms tend to have sophisticated security organizations already in place. They’ve been doing things effectively in a particular way for quite a while. It takes a lot of evidence to convince them to change their processes—and to convince them that those changes can drive increased value and performance while reducing risk. Security leaders tend to be a skeptical lot, and that has its place, but I think that we should strive to always be the most optimistic people in the room. The cloud lets people experiment with big ideas that may lead to big innovation, and security needs to enable that. If the security leader in the room is always saying no, then who’s going to say yes? That’s the essence of security transformation – developing capabilities that enable your organization to say yes.

What’s a trend you see currently happening in the Financial Services space that you’re excited about?

AWS has been working hard alongside some of our financial services customers for several years. Moving to the cloud is a big transition, and there’s been some FUD—some fear, uncertainty, and doubt—to work through, so not everyone has been able to adopt the cloud as quickly as they might’ve liked. But I feel we’re approaching an inflection point. I’m seeing increasing comfort, increasing awareness, and an increasingly trained workforce among my customers.

These changes, in conjunction with executive recognition that “the cloud” is not only worthwhile, but strategically significant to the business, may signal that we’re close to a breakthrough. These are firms that have the resources to make things happen when they’re ready. I’m optimistic that even the more conservative of our financial services customers will soon be taking advantage of AWS in a big way.

Five years from now, what changes do you think we’ll see across the Financial Services/Cloud Security landscape?

I think cloud adoption will continue to accelerate on the business side. I also expect to see the security orgs within these firms leverage the cloud more for their own workloads – in particular, to integrate AI and machine learning into security operations, and further left in the systems development lifecycle. Security teams still do a lot of manual work to analyze code, policies, logs, and so on. This is critical stuff, but it’s also very time consuming and much of it is ripe for automation. Skilled security practitioners are in high demand. They should be focused on high-value tasks that enable the business. Amazon GuardDuty is just one example of how security teams can use the cloud toward that end.

What’s one thing that people outside of Financial Services can learn from what’s happening in this industry?

As more and more Financial Services customers adopt AWS, I think that it becomes increasingly hard for leaders in other sectors to suggest that the cloud isn’t secure, reliable, or capable enough for any given use case. I love the quote from Capital One’s CIO about why they chose AWS.

You’re leading a re:Inforce session that focuses on “IAM strategy for financial services.” What are some of the unique considerations that the financial services industry faces when it comes to IAM?

Financial services firms and other highly regulated customers tend to invest much more into tools and processes to enforce least privilege and separation of duties, due to regulatory and compliance requirements. Traditional, centralized approaches to implementing those two principles don’t always work well in the cloud, where resources can be ephemeral. If your goal is to enable builders to experiment and fail fast, then it shouldn’t take weeks to get the approvals and access required for a proof-of-concept than can be built in two days.

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) capabilities have changed significantly in the past year. Those changes make it easier and safer than ever to do things like delegate administrative access to developers. But they aren’t the sort of high-profile announcement that you’d hear a keynote speaker talk about at re:Invent. So I think a lot of customers aren’t fully aware of them, or of what you can accomplish by combining them with automation and CI/CD techniques.

My talk will offer a strategy and examples for using those capabilities to provide the same level of security—if not a better level of security—without so many of the human reviews and approvals that often become bottlenecks.

What are you hoping that your audience will do differently as a result of attending your session?

I’d like them to investigate and holistically implement the handful of IAM capabilities that we’ll discuss during the session. I also hope that they’ll start working to delegate IAM responsibilities to developers and automate low-value human reviews of policy code. Finally, I think it’s critical to have CI/CD or other capabilities that enable rapid, reliable delivery of updates to IAM policies across many AWS accounts.

Can you talk about some of the recent enhancements to IAM that you’re excited about?

Permissions boundaries and IAM resource tagging are two features that are really powerful and that I don’t see widely used today. In some cases, customers may not even be aware of them. Another powerful and even more recent development is the introduction of conditional support to the service control policy mechanism provided by AWS Organizations.

You’re an avid photographer: What’s appealing to you about photography? What’s your favorite photo you’ve ever taken?

I’ve always struggled to express myself artistically. I take a very technical, analytical approach to life. I started programming computers when I was six. That’s how I think. Photography is sufficiently technical for me to wrap my brain around, which is how I got started. It took me a long time to begin to get comfortable with the creative aspects. But it fits well with my personality, while enabling expression that I’d never be able to find, say, as a painter.

I won’t claim to be an amazing photographer, but I’ve managed a few really good shots. The photo that comes to mind is one I captured in Bora Bora. There was a guy swimming through a picturesque, sheltered part of the ocean, where a reef stopped the big waves from coming in. This swimmer was towing a surfboard with his dog standing on it, and the sun was going down in the background. The colors were so vibrant it felt like a Disneyland attraction, and from a distance, you could just see a dog on a surfboard. Everything about that moment – where I was, how I was feeling, how surreal it all was, and the fact that I was on a honeymoon with my wife – made for a poignant photo.

The AWS Security team is hiring! Want to find out more? Check out our career page.

Want more AWS Security how-to content, news, and feature announcements? Follow us on Twitter.

Fritz Kunstler

Fritz is a Principal Consultant in AWS Professional Services, specializing in security. His first computer was a Commodore 64, which he learned to program in BASIC from the back of a magazine. Fritz has spent more than 20 years working in tech and has been an AWS customer since 2008. He is an avid photographer and is always one batch away from baking the perfect chocolate chip cookie.

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Go to Source Author: Becca Crockett AWS Security Profiles: Fritz Kunstler, Principal Consultant, Global Financial Services Original Post from Amazon Security Author: Becca Crockett In the weeks leading up to re:Inforce, we’ll share conversations we’ve had with people at AWS who will be presenting at the event so you can learn more about them and some of the interesting work that they’re doing.

[sualkmedeiors]

The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program

In a way, sales reps are like nurses or doctors. They take people’s temperatures to determine how they’re feeling. A “hot” prospect is ready to buy. A “cold” prospect is merely browsing inventory.

Before the internet, this heat check was usually performed in person. Sales reps would get a good sense of how interested someone was in their company’s products or services by spending some time with them.

Qualified leads would ultimately receive more attention—the sales rep might play 18 holes with them to help close the deal. For people looking to buy later, an occasional phone call to nurture the relationship would suffice.

But with the way modern customers conduct online research prior to purchasing, the human interaction aspect of qualifying leads has all but disappeared.

Many companies today have turned to innovative marketing automation software to analyze a prospect’s digital engagement behavior and determine whether they’re qualified enough to move on to the next step in the sales cycle.

But successfully qualifying leads for sales means having three key fundamentals in place:

1. A solid definition of “lead”

First things first. What’s a lead? At Marketo, we define a lead as any “qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behavior.” That could mean when somebody begins following a social media account, subscribes to an email newsletter, or browses a product page on a website.

Of course, every business should have its own definition for what a lead is. Why? Because differentiating a lead from a non-lead will help you determine who’s worth nurturing and who’s not.

If you haven’t yet defined what a lead is for your organization, here’s how to get started:

Schedule a sit-down between sales and marketing. Talk about what your target market looks like, who’s in your database already, and what kind of buyers are currently closing deals. You’ll also want to discuss things like when to start lead nurturing and what makes a bad lead.

Marketing operations usually has access to the tools, systems, and data that tell you everything you need to know.

Once you’ve developed a solid definition, write it down. You’ll what to share what you’ve come up with so everyone’s on the same page.

And don’t forget to meet regularly. Your definition of a lead will change as your business grows or your priorities shift.

2. An effective lead scoring system

With a lead scoring system, you can assign values to prospects based on actions they take, behaviors they exhibit, and more. This will help you rank leads to determine which prospects are ripe for nurturing and which are ready to engage with your sales team.

There are four attributes you must identify through your lead scoring system:

Lead fit: Collecting information around your prospects’ demographics (title, role, location), firmographics (industry, company size, name of company) and BANT (budget, authority, need, time) will give you an idea of whether they fit your ideal buyer profile. You can capture a lot of demographic and firmographic information through a registration page form. Gathering BANT data may require getting to know your prospects a little bit better—perhaps through progressive profiling.

Lead interest: Studying your prospects’ online body language by analyzing how they engage with your brand will give you insight into how interested they are in your product or service. The more interest they show, the more likely they are to buy—and the more heavily you should shower them with attention and valuable content. 

Lead behavior: Certain prospect behavior shines a light on where they are in the customer journey. Visiting a website or attending a webinar are the signs of an early-stage prospect. Checking out a pricing page or watching a solution demo reveal buyer intent. You can take advantage of this information by offering early-stage prospects more educational content and passing off leads with high buyer intent to sales. 

Buying stage/timing: Knowing when your lead intends to buy is extremely important. If a prospect is just beginning to research a product, it’s not the time to put the hard sell on them. Instead, send valuable information about how the product can help solve their problems. By closely evaluating a prospect’s behavior, you’ll get a firm sense of where they are in the buying journey.

Developing a lead scoring system is a core component of lead management—and no department is better suited to help your company bring this system into fruition than your marketing operations team.

That’s because marketing operations has access to the data required to establish a lead scoring program—so it doesn’t have to rely on guesswork.

3. A culture built on testing and optimization

Like most things in marketing, your lead nurturing program shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. You’ll want to regularly test what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your processes.

But what exactly should you be testing? In a word: Everything.

The goal of your lead nurturing program is to provide satisfying customer experiences that align with your audiences’ preferences and ultimately drive sales.

So, scrutinize every method you use to engage with your prospects. Measure how people respond to your social media posts, the offers on your websites, and the material in your videos.

Email nurture streams, in particular, provide a plethora of opportunities to test and optimize. You can:

Assess how different variations of a subject line impact open rates

See if click-through rates improve by swapping your content type

Evaluate whether readers respond better to short or long emails

Change the layout to learn what kind of design resonates most with readers

Modify send frequency to get a better idea of how often audiences want to be contacted

By creating a culture of testing and optimization, sales and marketing can collaborate to turn qualified leads into surefire customers.

A new frontier of qualifying leads emerges with AI

The three fundamentals above will go a long way toward helping you successfully qualify leads for sales. But like we’ve seen before with the emergence of the internet, there’s always something new around the corner ready to shake up the status quo.

Today, that’s AI.

Sales reps currently spend a lot of time and attention just determining if a prospect is a qualified lead. Sometimes, it’s all for naught, as a months-long engagement could develop into nothing.

Hiring more sales reps isn’t the answer. But leaning on innovative conversational AI and machine learning could be.

Instead of an employee interacting with a prospect, an AI-driven bot could communicate with them. When a person visits a website, the bot can converse with them, help them, and, most importantly, collect the valuable insight needed to decide if they’re a qualified lead.

This allows human sales reps to limit their focus to building relationships with prospects who are actually worth their time.

A chance to transform lead qualification

With a few key principles and an eye on the future, you can do wonders for your lead qualification program. And it won’t be long until your entire organization feels the effects—experiencing more closed deals and higher revenue.

Download The Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development to learn more.

The post The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/modernb2bmarketing/~3/uWH-1nTaLUo/the-3-essentials-of-a-successful-qualified-leads-program.html

[darkammarketing]

The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program

In a way, sales reps are like nurses or doctors. They take people’s temperatures to determine how they’re feeling. A “hot” prospect is ready to buy. A “cold” prospect is merely browsing inventory.

Before the internet, this heat check was usually performed in person. Sales reps would get a good sense of how interested someone was in their company’s products or services by spending some time with them.

Qualified leads would ultimately receive more attention—the sales rep might play 18 holes with them to help close the deal. For people looking to buy later, an occasional phone call to nurture the relationship would suffice.

But with the way modern customers conduct online research prior to purchasing, the human interaction aspect of qualifying leads has all but disappeared.

Many companies today have turned to innovative marketing automation software to analyze a prospect’s digital engagement behavior and determine whether they’re qualified enough to move on to the next step in the sales cycle.

But successfully qualifying leads for sales means having three key fundamentals in place:

1. A solid definition of “lead”

First things first. What’s a lead? At Marketo, we define a lead as any “qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behavior.” That could mean when somebody begins following a social media account, subscribes to an email newsletter, or browses a product page on a website.

Of course, every business should have its own definition for what a lead is. Why? Because differentiating a lead from a non-lead will help you determine who’s worth nurturing and who’s not.

If you haven’t yet defined what a lead is for your organization, here’s how to get started:

Schedule a sit-down between sales and marketing. Talk about what your target market looks like, who’s in your database already, and what kind of buyers are currently closing deals. You’ll also want to discuss things like when to start lead nurturing and what makes a bad lead.

Marketing operations usually has access to the tools, systems, and data that tell you everything you need to know.

Once you’ve developed a solid definition, write it down. You’ll what to share what you’ve come up with so everyone’s on the same page.

And don’t forget to meet regularly. Your definition of a lead will change as your business grows or your priorities shift.

2. An effective lead scoring system

With a lead scoring system, you can assign values to prospects based on actions they take, behaviors they exhibit, and more. This will help you rank leads to determine which prospects are ripe for nurturing and which are ready to engage with your sales team.

There are four attributes you must identify through your lead scoring system:

Lead fit: Collecting information around your prospects’ demographics (title, role, location), firmographics (industry, company size, name of company) and BANT (budget, authority, need, time) will give you an idea of whether they fit your ideal buyer profile. You can capture a lot of demographic and firmographic information through a registration page form. Gathering BANT data may require getting to know your prospects a little bit better—perhaps through progressive profiling.

Lead interest: Studying your prospects’ online body language by analyzing how they engage with your brand will give you insight into how interested they are in your product or service. The more interest they show, the more likely they are to buy—and the more heavily you should shower them with attention and valuable content. 

Lead behavior: Certain prospect behavior shines a light on where they are in the customer journey. Visiting a website or attending a webinar are the signs of an early-stage prospect. Checking out a pricing page or watching a solution demo reveal buyer intent. You can take advantage of this information by offering early-stage prospects more educational content and passing off leads with high buyer intent to sales. 

Buying stage/timing: Knowing when your lead intends to buy is extremely important. If a prospect is just beginning to research a product, it’s not the time to put the hard sell on them. Instead, send valuable information about how the product can help solve their problems. By closely evaluating a prospect’s behavior, you’ll get a firm sense of where they are in the buying journey.

Developing a lead scoring system is a core component of lead management—and no department is better suited to help your company bring this system into fruition than your marketing operations team.

That’s because marketing operations has access to the data required to establish a lead scoring program—so it doesn’t have to rely on guesswork.

3. A culture built on testing and optimization

Like most things in marketing, your lead nurturing program shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. You’ll want to regularly test what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your processes.

But what exactly should you be testing? In a word: Everything.

The goal of your lead nurturing program is to provide satisfying customer experiences that align with your audiences’ preferences and ultimately drive sales.

So, scrutinize every method you use to engage with your prospects. Measure how people respond to your social media posts, the offers on your websites, and the material in your videos.

Email nurture streams, in particular, provide a plethora of opportunities to test and optimize. You can:

Assess how different variations of a subject line impact open rates

See if click-through rates improve by swapping your content type

Evaluate whether readers respond better to short or long emails

Change the layout to learn what kind of design resonates most with readers

Modify send frequency to get a better idea of how often audiences want to be contacted

By creating a culture of testing and optimization, sales and marketing can collaborate to turn qualified leads into surefire customers.

A new frontier of qualifying leads emerges with AI

The three fundamentals above will go a long way toward helping you successfully qualify leads for sales. But like we’ve seen before with the emergence of the internet, there’s always something new around the corner ready to shake up the status quo.

Today, that’s AI.

Sales reps currently spend a lot of time and attention just determining if a prospect is a qualified lead. Sometimes, it’s all for naught, as a months-long engagement could develop into nothing.

Hiring more sales reps isn’t the answer. But leaning on innovative conversational AI and machine learning could be.

Instead of an employee interacting with a prospect, an AI-driven bot could communicate with them. When a person visits a website, the bot can converse with them, help them, and, most importantly, collect the valuable insight needed to decide if they’re a qualified lead.

This allows human sales reps to limit their focus to building relationships with prospects who are actually worth their time.

A chance to transform lead qualification

With a few key principles and an eye on the future, you can do wonders for your lead qualification program. And it won’t be long until your entire organization feels the effects—experiencing more closed deals and higher revenue.

Download The Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development to learn more.

The post The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program

In a way, sales reps are like nurses or doctors. They take people’s temperatures to determine how they’re feeling. A “hot” prospect is ready to buy. A “cold” prospect is merely browsing inventory.

Before the internet, this heat check was usually performed in person. Sales reps would get a good sense of how interested someone was in their company’s products or services by spending some time with them.

Qualified leads would ultimately receive more attention—the sales rep might play 18 holes with them to help close the deal. For people looking to buy later, an occasional phone call to nurture the relationship would suffice.

But with the way modern customers conduct online research prior to purchasing, the human interaction aspect of qualifying leads has all but disappeared.

Many companies today have turned to innovative marketing automation software to analyze a prospect’s digital engagement behavior and determine whether they’re qualified enough to move on to the next step in the sales cycle.

But successfully qualifying leads for sales means having three key fundamentals in place:

1. A solid definition of “lead”

First things first. What’s a lead? At Marketo, we define a lead as any “qualified prospect that is starting to exhibit buying behavior.” That could mean when somebody begins following a social media account, subscribes to an email newsletter, or browses a product page on a website.

Of course, every business should have its own definition for what a lead is. Why? Because differentiating a lead from a non-lead will help you determine who’s worth nurturing and who’s not.

If you haven’t yet defined what a lead is for your organization, here’s how to get started:

Schedule a sit-down between sales and marketing. Talk about what your target market looks like, who’s in your database already, and what kind of buyers are currently closing deals. You’ll also want to discuss things like when to start lead nurturing and what makes a bad lead.

Marketing operations usually has access to the tools, systems, and data that tell you everything you need to know.

Once you’ve developed a solid definition, write it down. You’ll what to share what you’ve come up with so everyone’s on the same page.

And don’t forget to meet regularly. Your definition of a lead will change as your business grows or your priorities shift.

2. An effective lead scoring system

With a lead scoring system, you can assign values to prospects based on actions they take, behaviors they exhibit, and more. This will help you rank leads to determine which prospects are ripe for nurturing and which are ready to engage with your sales team.

There are four attributes you must identify through your lead scoring system:

Lead fit: Collecting information around your prospects’ demographics (title, role, location), firmographics (industry, company size, name of company) and BANT (budget, authority, need, time) will give you an idea of whether they fit your ideal buyer profile. You can capture a lot of demographic and firmographic information through a registration page form. Gathering BANT data may require getting to know your prospects a little bit better—perhaps through progressive profiling.

Lead interest: Studying your prospects’ online body language by analyzing how they engage with your brand will give you insight into how interested they are in your product or service. The more interest they show, the more likely they are to buy—and the more heavily you should shower them with attention and valuable content. 

Lead behavior: Certain prospect behavior shines a light on where they are in the customer journey. Visiting a website or attending a webinar are the signs of an early-stage prospect. Checking out a pricing page or watching a solution demo reveal buyer intent. You can take advantage of this information by offering early-stage prospects more educational content and passing off leads with high buyer intent to sales. 

Buying stage/timing: Knowing when your lead intends to buy is extremely important. If a prospect is just beginning to research a product, it’s not the time to put the hard sell on them. Instead, send valuable information about how the product can help solve their problems. By closely evaluating a prospect’s behavior, you’ll get a firm sense of where they are in the buying journey.

Developing a lead scoring system is a core component of lead management—and no department is better suited to help your company bring this system into fruition than your marketing operations team.

That’s because marketing operations has access to the data required to establish a lead scoring program—so it doesn’t have to rely on guesswork.

3. A culture built on testing and optimization

Like most things in marketing, your lead nurturing program shouldn’t be a set-it-and-forget-it endeavor. You’ll want to regularly test what’s working and what’s not so you can optimize your processes.

But what exactly should you be testing? In a word: Everything.

The goal of your lead nurturing program is to provide satisfying customer experiences that align with your audiences’ preferences and ultimately drive sales.

So, scrutinize every method you use to engage with your prospects. Measure how people respond to your social media posts, the offers on your websites, and the material in your videos.

Email nurture streams, in particular, provide a plethora of opportunities to test and optimize. You can:

Assess how different variations of a subject line impact open rates

See if click-through rates improve by swapping your content type

Evaluate whether readers respond better to short or long emails

Change the layout to learn what kind of design resonates most with readers

Modify send frequency to get a better idea of how often audiences want to be contacted

By creating a culture of testing and optimization, sales and marketing can collaborate to turn qualified leads into surefire customers.

A new frontier of qualifying leads emerges with AI

The three fundamentals above will go a long way toward helping you successfully qualify leads for sales. But like we’ve seen before with the emergence of the internet, there’s always something new around the corner ready to shake up the status quo.

Today, that’s AI.

Sales reps currently spend a lot of time and attention just determining if a prospect is a qualified lead. Sometimes, it’s all for naught, as a months-long engagement could develop into nothing.

Hiring more sales reps isn’t the answer. But leaning on innovative conversational AI and machine learning could be.

Instead of an employee interacting with a prospect, an AI-driven bot could communicate with them. When a person visits a website, the bot can converse with them, help them, and, most importantly, collect the valuable insight needed to decide if they’re a qualified lead.

This allows human sales reps to limit their focus to building relationships with prospects who are actually worth their time.

A chance to transform lead qualification

With a few key principles and an eye on the future, you can do wonders for your lead qualification program. And it won’t be long until your entire organization feels the effects—experiencing more closed deals and higher revenue.

Download The Definitive Guide to Sales Lead Qualification and Sales Development to learn more.

The post The 3 Essentials of a Successful Qualified Leads Program appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

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