#facebook algorithm woes

[lumine-no-hikari]

Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #112

Yesterday's letter was flagged as spam on Facebook, and taken down.

Facebook is a place on the internet where people post up their various thoughts, writings, images, and whatnot so that others can see it. It's another means of screaming into the void and hoping that kindness will return to you. I generally write my letters on a place called Tumblr, and then scooch a slightly modified version of it over to Facebook, since the formatting for these places is slightly different. The goal is to make it so that my words are more likely to reach you and more likely to reach others who need them.

…I'm not really sure how it happened. Supposedly the box of maple-flavored tea that I showed you yesterday was offensive, though I'm not sure how. What's worse is that I'm not sure if it was the algorithm or what. It's complicated to explain. I'm not going to bother you with the details.

Either way, suppose I'll be posting only in this place until that gets all figured out. Suppose what I'll do on Facebook is post up that my next letter is out and give anyone the link who asks me for it.

I did some more work today, listing and describing items. I also did some dishes. I also finally got around to putting the third layer of epoxy on the amethyst tree sphere. Hopefully by the time it's cured, the inconsistencies in its shape will be mostly gone and it'll be ready to be sanded. The set of extremely fine-grit sandpaper arrived today, and I'm eager to put it to good use. I hope it turns out well. Suppose we'll see what happens.

Today it's warm enough outside to leave all the windows of the house open, so we opened all the windows. The breeze flowing in smells like grass and fresh soil; it's a good smell. I wish you were here to enjoy it.

At some point, I took a walk. Some of the plants around where I live are starting to sprout leaves again. I know that you like pictures of nature, so I took a few pictures for you; maybe you'll like them:

I also found a feather on the ground later in the day:

...Maybe I'll imagine that it means you'll be safe somehow.

…I feel kind of lost and empty today for reasons I don't fully understand. I think maybe I just need more water and food. I haven't been eating or hydrating well for the last several days. I drank a rehydration solution today (Pedialyte), but I've only eaten minimally; not much of an appetite. I haven't been sleeping well, either, for various reasons. Suppose if I wanna feel better, I'm gonna hafta do a better job of the whole self-care thing for at least the next week or so. Bleh.

Are you taking care of yourself? Are you safe and warm? Do you have plenty of food to eat and things to drink? Soft plushies to hug? I know you can't answer me, but I'll ask anyway. I'll ask because you deserve to have people check in on you. I'll ask because I wish you could answer. Nobody here knows, of course. And I suppose the uncertainty of it all is very difficult to deal with. But I'll keep doing my best. I'll keep my eyes and ears open for any news.

Br is visiting, and that feels good. Upon realizing that I've not eaten much today, she cut some fruit for us to share. I have a bowl of Asian pear slices and chunks of dragonfruit. I wonder if you've ever had these. I wonder if you'd like them:

We were going to watch Junk Man, but folks were hungry, and so we went to the grocery store to get a pizza. Br can't have gluten, so we got this pizza that was made with tapioca flour. And we also got toppings to add to it, since it was just a cheese pizza. We put on roasted garlic, portobello mushrooms, and pepperoni (we checked the ingredients to make sure there was no gluten, don't worry)! I was delighted to find out that the crust tastes and feels like Brazilian cheese bread! And if you don't know what that is, it's basically this bread thing that is wonderfully chewy and cheesy and amazing. The pizza was absolutely delectable!!

…It probably doesn't surprise you to know that I feel a lot better since eating. Bodies and minds get weird when the blood sugar gets low. I'll have to try to be more mindful of making sure I eat even when I don't have much of an appetite, I guess.

Br had to leave by 9 though, so there wasn't enough time for a movie. But we watched Steven Universe instead! J and I have already seen it through several times, but Br still hasn't seen most of it. Today we got to the part where we meet Lapis Lazuli.

…I think maybe you might relate to her, at least a little. She was enslaved in a mirror and used as a tool for years before Steven set her free. She was understandably very angry at the other gems for knowingly keeping her trapped in the mirror. She responded by attacking them, and then stealing the ocean, but then Steven talked to her and fixed it. It's a long and complicated story, but it's wholesome.

…I wish you could come here and watch Steven Universe with us, because actually, I think there's a lot in it that you would be able to relate to. I wish you could watch it with us and eat the yummy pizza with us. I wish you could see the whole thing. And I wish I could give you all kinds of tasty snacks to enjoy while we watch it. Alas… alas…

Well. I'm maybe rambling a little. So I suppose I'll end today's letter here. Don't forget that there are people out here wishing well on you, okay?

I love you. I'll write again in a little while. Please stay safe.

Your friend, Lumine

[psshaw]

The more time I spend on Spotify, the more it pushes me away from the outer edges of the platform and toward the mushy middle. This is where everyone is serviced the same songs simply because that is what’s popular. In 2018, while the app’s algorithmic autoplay feature was on, I was served the Pavement song “Harness Your Hopes", a wordy and melodic—and by all accounts obscure—B-side from the beloved indie band. The song has over 100 million streams, more than twice as much as their actual college rock hit from the ’90s, “Cut Your Hair", the one Pavement song your average Gen X’er might actually recognize. How did this happen? In 2020, Stereogum investigated the mystery but came up empty-handed from a technological perspective, though the answer seems obvious to me: Whereas many Pavement songs are oblique, rangy, and noisy, “Harness Your Hopes” is among the most pleasant and inoffensive songs in the band’s catalog. It is now, in the altered reality of Spotify, the quintessential Pavement song. When frontman Stephen Malkmus was asked about this anomaly, he sounded blithely defeated: “At this point we take what we can get, even in a debased form. Because what’s left?” The whole “Harness Your Hopes” situation is in part a result of what’s called “cumulative advantage.” It’s the idea that if something—a song, a person, an idea—happens to be slightly more popular than something else at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. (On the other hand, something that does not catch on will usually recede in popularity, regardless of quality.) This is the metric of how most social recommendation algorithms work—on Facebook, the more “likes” an article has, the better odds a user will read it. But when this is applied to what songs are sent to which people, Spotify can engineer its own market of popularity as well as what song defines a band. Popular songs on Spotify are popular within the app because they are what most people are listening to. So from both a behavioral psychology and business perspective, it makes sense for Spotify to assume that you want to listen to what other people are listening to. The chances of the average listener staying on the app longer are much higher if Spotify curates songs that have had a similar effect on people whose taste matches theirs.

[allison555]

Precision Parking: Smart Solutions for Stress-Free Urban Parking

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#PrecisionParking #SmartParking #UrbanMobility #ParkingAssist #SmartTech #Innovation #SafetyFirst #HassleFreeParking

[sanguineshade]

I don't even know if I should write this but it's something that's annoying me and I have no outlet to release it so here goes. I hate being on the "global" internet. I hate having to read Palestine news on this stupid site where it always have to end with "pressure your government to condemn it" when my government already condemns it. When my president already called for a ceasefire and called it a genocide. When the only time we didn't side with Palestine was when we had an USA bootlicker for a president that won because of facebook and youtube algorithms promoting conservative topics.

I hate that just by virtue of being on the "global" internet I have to hear everything filtered through an USA understanding of the world. That I have to see USA local news and read USA local woes and they're somehow "global" because the USA empire won the cold war. Do you think I want to know the amount of English I do? I'm a computer science undergrad, the one time I saw terms that weren't in English was on the topic of semaphores, where the operation's original names are Dutch and guess what, we still use English terms for them.

People who grow up in USA, Canada, UK and Australia don't understand how much is catered to them. They can't understand. It's not the same level as having one niche international interest. The internet is everywhere, it's in everything, and it is in English. I have to be bilingual to earn a nugget of the things that are available to any uneducated-but-literate person in these countries. The discrepancy is driving me up the walls. I had to learn so much just to participate in this special club that is the "global" internet, and what I get for it is just. The terrifying knowledge that the average English opinion is even shittier than the average Brazillian opinion, that the average English education is just as bad if not worse than the average Brazillian one. And yet this is the empire that influences the entire world. The empire of people who have a fabricated choice between centrism and nationalism and they think they don't even have to vote since "these both suck anyway", because they don't realize that the moment the USA becomes an dictatorship, every other country is going to follow the fad. And it's infuriating that I have to know that, that I had to learn how their voting system works, when the only thing I came on the internet for was to find people to chat with about a silly anime game.

So, um. If you're reading this and you're from the USA. I'm not sorry to break it to you, but you have many invisible responsibilities with other countries. Educate yourself. Please always vote. Do demand things of your goverment on local and global issues, it is one of the goverments whose voice matters most in the world right now.

If you're reading this and you're from an English-speaking country or you're European: you're privileged. That's a neutral fact. Use your privilege to help on global issues when you can.

And for the rest of us. Great work, friends. Remember to always be kind and helpful to the ones who aren't able to learn this blasted language and participate in the "global" internet (especially our elderly).

[areyoumissingpieces]

Oh the Advertising Woes

I don’t think it is possible for me to grow organically. I feel like you have to be lucky with the algorithm of all the sites, an overnight social media star, or know enough influential people to talk about your business in order to make it successful organically.

I have had over one thousand sales and a total of three of those were on my own website.  The rest of these were from ebay, tcgplayer, at shows, and through my wholesale account. I know the product I’m selling is good.  It moves on third party sites and at the store where my wholesale account is.  The product I sell is in a pretty saturated market online, but I am comforted by the fact that it is successful in some locations.  Naturally I want more sales going through my website where I have way fewer fees than at shows, on other websites, or at a wholesale rate. I just need some well placed advertising and I think I will be on my way. 

I have been trying to promote myself on tiktok, instagram, and facebook. Most of my followers are friends and family. I love that they support me but I’m not reaching buyers.  

I also have a fairly decent presence on Pinterest.  I can see on my analytics that people do go to my website from there.  My first sale on my website was thanks to a pin. That only happened once in 2018. It is now 2023. 

Now I am on tumblr as yet another attempt to promote myself for free.  Truth be told, I’m also on tumblr because it is nice to get all these thoughts out of my head and onto a page. I hope it will help me think clearer and maybe give me a few customers.

I use business cards to help promote myself.  They have some basic information and a QR code to make it easy for people to access my website.  I throw a business card in every sale I make on ebay, tcgplayer, or at shows. I always keep a few in my phone case in case I bump into someone who asks if I have a website. If I am at a coffee shop or someplace that has a local bulletin board where people can put business cards I will put one of mine up. When I go to physical shows I also have my business cards available for people to grab. Some of my wonderful family and friends have received a little handful to disperse if they desire.  I think there have been a few visits to my site from all of these different approaches but no sales. 

 I would love for my business to grow organically through any of my existing channels but I don’t think that is likely. At least in the last five years of me attempting organic growth it really hasn’t happened. 

The problem is I am a little bit spooked by advertising. I hate having to give a company money to force ads in front of people. I don’t particularly like ads most of the time.  Sometimes I see a product I like and look at the website but know I’m not going to get anything. I worry that will be the mindset of most people.  “Oh look!” They’d think, “That stuff is amazing! I love that! I can’t afford luxuries right now. I could make that.” I don’t want to spend money on so many maybes.  

I’ve also worked for a few online companies that have gone down the advertising path.  I’m a little bit scared by their experiences. One company did mail out fliers.  I have no idea how much they spent, but they got two customers out of the deal.  The same company also paid to have a couple page blurb in a business magazine. That, as far as I can tell, did not drum up any business.  Another company hired a professional marketing  team.  This did result in a huge bump in business.  It also resulted in way more work while only breaking even. They were never able to profit out of it and have some regrets about how much they spent.  These stories do make me worry about the validity of marketing campaigns. I know everyone has their own advertising stories, and just because the people in my life haven’t had a very good result with advertising doesn’t mean I won’t.

 I was worried for a long time that I don’t have enough merchandise available online and was embarrassed at the idea of promoting it. After my last show, in May, I realized that I do have enough merchandise posted.  I have mailed so many orders now I am confident in my systems I have in place.  I AM ready for business.  I need to put on my boss lady kick ass pants and get my first advertising campaign rolling! Let’s aim for the beginning of October. Please hold me accountable for this statement. Stay tuned for updates!

[gerdfeed]

In this fast-moving keynote at Estoril Conferences see https://ift.tt/L0BRVrc I speak about why I believe that - despite the current woes of global warming, wars and inflation - the future is better than we think. As Kevin Kelly says 'we should be optimistic not because we have less challenges but because we have a lot more capacity to deal with them". Yet technology alone will not save us - we will need purpose and telos (wisdom). Algorithms know the logic of everything but the feeling of nothing. Too much of a good thing (technology) can be a very bad thing (#facebook aka Meta really makes the best example). In this talk, I also present my 3 tickets to the future: #digitization #decarbonization and reformation #theddr *more at https://ift.tt/peCamK8 The Good Future is entirely feasible - we just have to make the right decisions, today. And what I call People Planet Purpose and Prosperity is where it all starts. Business as usual is dead or dying, and capitalism as we know it is unfit for the future. Original version, including the pabel discussion, is at https://youtu.be/47fUUrOUuQA Be sure to have a look at my new short film: The Good Future https://ift.tt/Oy3Mb2S and https://ift.tt/mtV8KsG https://ift.tt/eLcfp94 https://ift.tt/8wbSsxC Read: https://ift.tt/rOB2Kh9 Most of my videos can also be downloaded via my vimeo channel i.e. https://ift.tt/vcpzZIM #thegoodfuture #techvshuman #futurist Please subscribe to this channel to never miss a thing, and be sure to share my videos if you like them. And hit that notification bell:)) Sign up for my 'Best Reads & Finds' curated futurist newsletter at https://ift.tt/YsLjSMA Audio-only versions of most of my videos are available via SoundCloud https://ift.tt/9r2uKfg, and Spotify see https://gerd.fm/spotify If you enjoy my videos and talks, please take a look at my best-selling book “Technology vs Humanity” https://ift.tt/2bo6HNu - it's now available in 14 languages! Gerd Leonhard Futurist, Author and Keynote Speaker Zürich / Switzerland https://ift.tt/K51mBVE ****For all booking inquiries please go here https://ift.tt/ay8UDEf Twitter: @gleonhard by Gerd Leonhard

[fenzodigital]

Why is Automation the Least Favourite Part of SEM?

Singapore is a leading business hub, with cutting-edge technologies and disruptive innovations dominating its entrepreneurial landscape. Digital transformation has altered business practices in the island state by introducing advancements like automation. Businesses have increased their focus on digital marketing in Singapore and introduced new mechanisms for catering to their online audience. 90% of Singaporeans own smartphones and about 10% learn about new products due to online ads. These trends suggest an overwhelming need to curate industry-leading marketing strategies that can meet the needs of this online audience. As a result of this growing pressure on digital marketers, many businesses fall back on automation to simplify their campaigns. But is automation the best answer for all the woes of a digital marketer? Not always! Let’s assess why automation is often the least favourite part of SEM.

Automation in SEM: Decoding the Basics

Search engine marketing (SEM) involves the use of digital marketing tactics to improve brand visibility, lead generation, and sales via search engine platforms. Search engines like Google are the go-to tools for prospective customers as they search for various products. SEM includes paid ads and other optimisation tools for improving your chances of meeting business goals on the SERPs. Search engine results pages (SERPs) display relevant results and ads to people when they search for a product or service. Businesses strive to gain better visibility on these pages in their bid to get more customers.

Now, let’s analyse what automation looks like in the context of SEM today. Google, the top search engine in Singapore (95.69% market share), has introduced automation in many levels of paid ad generation. Google applies machine learning to manage bids, create ads, match keywords, and more.

Here are some examples of automation in the SEM process:

Dynamic     Search Ads (DSAs):     DSAs are automated ads that pick-up content from a business website to     generate relevant ads for customers.

Responsive     Search Ads (RSAs): RSAs combine different     variations of headlines and descriptions to run top-performing ad     elements.

Dynamic     Keyword Insertion (DKI): DKI     inserts new keywords into your ad if they are present in a potential     customer’s search query.

Automated     Bidding: This feature lets Google     dynamically change your ad bids by identifying keywords with greater     chances of conversions or clicks.

If you are new to the world of digital marketing, you might be thinking that such automation is a dream come true. While these features can help many businesses simplify their SEM process, they also come with a catch. Automation has some pitfalls that can cause troubles in your marketing paradise. Let’s understand why automation is not a digital marketer’s dream feature!

Challenges of Automation in SEM

Today’s digital marketers have many complaints about automation in SEM. Here are their top concerns:

·         Lack of Nuance: A business enterprise is a lot like a human being. Every one of them is different from the other, needing nuanced approaches for optimising growth. While machine learning algorithms are advanced, they often adopt a cookie-cutter approach. Their broad strokes and generic decisions can have a negative impact on your firm and its business model. Automation seeks to achieve quicker customisation. However, the quest for time-saving can lead to oversimplification. If you work with an SEM agency in Singapore, their team of experts can generate tailormade insights that an automated service can never match.

·         Loss of Control: An overdose of automation can rob you of control over your marketing campaign. Search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook often push users to adopt automated options. While novice digital marketers may find that exciting, experienced ones know how it can turn into a trap. Overdependence on automation can provide broader insights, making it harder to assess micro-level KPIs.

·         Unsuitability for Many Business Models: Many search marketers complain that the force-fed model of search ad automation is unsuitable for their clients. The dynamic and responsive ad generation models can be helpful for high-volume e-commerce accounts. These online stores often target broad audiences and want impression volumes to build brand awareness. However, this approach may not work for every business. For example, if you cater to a niche audience with low conversion rates, you will need a different strategy. In that case, an SEM service in Singapore can help you deliver thought leadership and build customer relations to fuel your growth plans.

·         Lack of Selective Targeting: The current automated solutions do not offer adequate flexibility to businesses and search marketers. For example, it is not possible to use automated bidding while turning off specific targeting components. This inflexibility prevents marketers from effectively tracking insights for data-driven decisions.

·         Inadequate Reports: Google dashboards often provide reports with overarching data without highlighting the micro-level KPIs. This limitation stops marketers from identifying low-performing elements and creating better advertising copies.

·         Pushy Representatives: Many search marketers complain that the search engine representatives pressurise them to adopt automation. This pressure, added to the rising prices, compounds the frustrations of users in the world of SEM. The pressure from search engine representatives can often confuse business users who do not know better. They fail to get the right advice and fall into the trap of automation.

Considering these issues, can we say that automation is bad for SEM? Not necessarily. However, the use of automation will be successful only when it finds a complement in human considerations. Professional experts from successful SEM agencies can help businesses craft tailormade strategies for growth and sales. If you want suitable guidance for your SEM needs, reach out to the Fenzo Digital team today! They can help you navigate the thorny path of automation and succeed in style.

Sources: https://fenzodigital.com/why-is-automation-the-least-favourite-part-of-sem/

[explojohn-blog]

To Homophily or Not to Homophily, That is Your Connection!

Like Connects with Like

Homophily is a singularity that happens frequently in social groups where like minds interact constantly and this notion is methodically regarded in social sciences (Kazi et al., 2020). Moreover, the author states that Homophily is a social theory where people in these networks communicate with those who are like them more so than those who are dissimilar and the motive for starting these groups is for the purpose of likeminded associations and social influence. Further, the author expresses that studies in homophily usually reveal that subjects have a tendency to make friends or connect with others who are similar in race, culture, and gender. Homophily regarding personality serves as a function to reduce cognitive load as when we are familiar and connected with others whose activities and behaviors correspond similarly to ours, less mental exertion is spent in predicting their responses (Laakasuoet et al., 2020). Further from the author relays that Psychological research has revealed that the breadth of homophily is linked to the magnitude of the network as when groups become too all-encompassing from expansion, homophily ceases, and this signifies that positive relations with a trait is not the only factor that cause homophily; but also a perception of superiority that makes the group distinctive from others. 

Algorithms at Work

      Algorithms used in Social media can strengthen homophily and these groups begin to create bias that influence their view of the world which can lead to isolation or divisiveness (Dandekar et al., 2013).  This raises potential risks on social media when these online groups, such as a fitness group I was a part of but no longer, where I saw fitness being objectified by people with well-toned bodies and obese individuals in the group being bullied and scorned.  The extreme opinion that I saw in this social media group was the polarization between lean muscular people and those who were obese where the lean muscular people received all the likes and encouragement for their photos and the obese people received harsh comments and laughing or other than supportive emoji’s for their comments and images. This was a private group so the moderators of the group through their failure to correct this behavior and social media algorithms suggesting this groups to users, therefore promote this negative aspect of homophily and are liable for users feeling isolated.

Refuse or Renounce Negative Social Media Connections

A Facebook friend said to a friend of mine, “your ex-girlfriend is doing well without you, she is taking trips and looking good.” This really didn’t affect him too much because he understood that his ex was wealthy in social currency in the economy of attention. According to Parnell (2017), the individual on social media can become the product and in turn others attribute value to you in likes, shares, and comments. Therefore, her personal self-worth was tied into the amount of likes, shares, and comments she received to which value is attributed. As a result, she only showed her highlight reels, or the great moments and mountaintop experience of her life (Parnell, 2017), that is why the comment didn’t have to much of an effect on him because he knew of her low and mundane points which she would never share on social media. On the other hand, there are friends of mine on Social Media that post all of their woes and get tons of social currency in the form of sympathy likes, shares, and comments. These stress related behaviors being performed over an extended period of time have lasting effects on an individual and have the potential to become full blown mental issues as we quantify our self-worth based on others opinion of what we post (Parnell, 2017). The author of this lecture goes on to say that if we are experiencing symptoms related to substance abuse particular to Social Media such as anxiousness when we don’t have access, compulsively obsessing over how many likes we have amassed, fear of missing out (f.o.m.o.), depression when our lives don’t line up with others’ highlight reel, distracted from our life’s essentials to check notifications, etc. The solution is to practice safe social media in order to maintain social media wellness by recognizing if we have a problem and are experiencing the previously described symptoms. Further from the author suggests that we audit our social media diet, especially on days when we are not feeling too good about ourselves, seeing others living their perceived best lives will only add to our self-worth attrition. Therefore, create a better online experience and audit the people and groups we connected to that make us feel bad or worthless, and purge from the things, brands, or images that you feel are harmful and too engrossed in your self-worthiness (Parnell, 2017). Additionally, the author cautions us to remember that the dark side of Social Media is not necessarily evil innately derivative of being connected to Social Media itself, as Social Media is content driven and the dark, harassing, and bullying content or insecure feelings, stems from being connected and exposed to the darker sides of us people.

John

Dandekar, P., Goel, A., & Lee, D. T. (2013). Biased assimilation, homophily, and the dynamics of polarization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110(15), 5791–5796. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1217220110

Kazi, Z. K., Srivastava, G., & Mago, V. (2020). The homophily principle in social network analysis. Cornell University Library, arXiv.org.

Laakasuo, M., Rotkirch, A., van Duijn, M., Berg, V., Jokela, M., David-Barrett, T., Miettinen, A., Pearce, E., & Dunbar, R. (2020). Homophily in Personality Enhances Group Success Among Real-Life Friends. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 710. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00710

Parnell, B. (2017, June 22). Is social media hurting your mental health? [Video]. YouTube. | Transcript. https://youtu.be/Czg_9C7gw0o

[businessweekme]

Twitter Plunges Most in Four Years

Twitter Inc. shares plunged the most in four years after the social media company said monthly users dropped by 1 million in the second quarter from the first and predicted further declines as it continues to fight against spam, fake accounts and malicious rhetoric.

Monthly active users were 335 million, San Francisco-based Twitter said Friday in a statement. Though that measure was up 2.8 percent from a year earlier, the company expects monthly visitors to fall again in the current period. Twitter blamed the projected drop on intensified efforts to clean up the platform, stricter privacy rules in Europe and changes to the way its service is used through SMS messaging.

“We are confident that this is in the best long-term interest of the platform and will enable long-term growth as we improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter” and reallocate resources, including those used to prepare for the data privacy changes in Europe, Twitter said in a note to shareholders accompanying the earnings release.

The market appeared unwilling to wait and see. The shares plummeted 21 percent to $34.12, the biggest single-day decline since February 2014.

Twitter reported net income for the third consecutive quarter, which has helped drive the shares 79 percent higher this year to $42.94 at Thursday’s close. But the company gave a forecast for third-quarter earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of as much as $235 million, falling short of analysts’ average estimate of $268 million.

Twitter’s user woes are similar to those of Facebook Inc., which also has been plagued by manipulation, robot accounts and unrest about the growing influence of social media in the culture. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey has said his priority is to reduce abusive conversations on the platform and the company said its machine-learning algorithms are identifying more than 9 million potential spam or automated accounts a week.

The huge number of deletions have raised concerns among investors that Twitter — the favorite communications tool of U.S. President Donald Trump — can’t attract a more general audience to supplement the politicians, entertainers and journalists who are among its prime users. The company, however, said the vast majority of malicious accounts are inactive or caught before they become counted among active users.

Some analysts saw the purge as a good sign.

“They’re cleaning up a lot of MAUs that are not good or real,” said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG, referring to monthly active users. Twitter is “improving the health of the system while there’s still dramatic DAU growth to come.”

Executives said on the earnings call that investments in cleaning up the platform won’t impact revenue.

“Efforts by the company to eliminate inauthentic accounts – even large numbers – should be viewed positively because these efforts improve Twitter’s position with regulators and with advertisers, who see the user base as higher quality when purges occur,” said Brian Wieser, an analyst at Pivotal Research, in a note to investors.

While monthly visitors declined, Twitter highlighted daily active users as the best measure of success. The company said those daily participants on the site increased 11 percent from a year earlier, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit year-over-year increases. The company doesn’t disclose the total number of daily users. Bloomberg LP produces TicToc, a global breaking news service for Twitter’s site.

“Despite Trump being perhaps the most high-profile user possible, usage has not dramatically improved over the past couple of years,” Benjamin Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, wrote in a note to investors before the earnings announcement. “We simply don’t see the product improvements having a dramatic impact on Twitter’s ability to attract new users.”

The service’s plethora of product updates and push into live video streaming have made Twitter less cumbersome to use, driving advertising revenue and profit in the second quarter.

Revenue increased 24 percent to $710 million in the period, topping the analyst average estimate of $697 million. Net income was $100 million, or 13 cents a share, compared with a loss of $117 million, or 16 cents. Adjusted earnings were 17 cents a share. Analysts projected 16 cents.

Advertising sales have been bolstered by Twitter’s positioning as a destination for a wider range of live video content and as a place to find out “what’s happening now.” The company has tried to improve the site to personalize it more for users, including overhauling the “Explore” section of the mobile app to show curated content for breaking news stories and major events such as the recent World Cup soccer tournament, which brought in $30 million in extra revenue in the second quarter.

International revenue grew 44 percent in the quarter from a year earlier while sales in the U.S., the company’s largest market, increased 10 percent. Japan remains Twitter’s second-largest market, growing 65 percent and generating $122 million.

The post Twitter Plunges Most in Four Years appeared first on Bloomberg Businessweek Middle East.

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[fulcrum-resources]

How to target audience?

Audience Targeting is the method of separating consumers into segments based on interests or demographic data. Marketing Agency in Pune use audience targeting to compose campaigns that will align directly with their consumers' lifestyles.

Age, average income, interests, location, gender are the demographics which are consider while targeting audience. Other considerations that can be helpful are psychographics — values and motivations that impact a consumer's buyer's journey.

With audience targeting, you will be more likely to reach consumers who are interested in your products or services with relevant messaging. It will also decreases the odds that you’ll waste ad spend on uninterested eyeballs and help move potential customers down the funnel.

Data management is key to when it comes to audience targeting.  Data Management platforms gather data by tracking the consumer behavior online with cookies. Based on the consumers online behavior these aggregators can with extreme accuracy decipher the demographics, interests and preferences of an individual. Facebook and Google use this data which pinpoints an exact audience for their marketing clients.

But when it comes to cross-platform/channel strategies, there is a need to keep in mind that it can yield disappointing results as targeting by definition must be individual-centric, not channel- or product-centric. Instead, one needs to start with the individual target, including demographics, online behavior, purchase history, repeat purchases and loyalty.

The following strategies are derived by the experts –

1.       Prioritize SEO

Organic SEO is the best audience targeting that exists because there is nothing else better than simply being in front of the customer when they search for exactly what you are able to offer. If your brand ranks high in relevant terms, it is targeting everyone who is actively searching for your products and services. Search is often a signal of buying intent whereas targeting ads to demographic data and tastes is always hoping you may get them at the right time.

2.       Expand reach with Google’s In-Market Audiences

When targeting an audience that hasn’t heard of his business before, display campaigns in Google Ads play a vital role. Google’s in-market audiences feature lets you target consumers who are researching your products or services. We use a not-so-well-known report from our Google Analytics reports to find the highest performing Affinity Categories and In-Market Segments. Once we have our insights, we can then build different ad groups around each of the audiences and create messaging that resonates with them. This works because you are making decisions that are backed by data. We're finding out who the best customers are and then going out to try and find more of them.

The in-market audiences are the ones that are already out there searching, reading, comparing or even planning to buy a product or service, just not engaged with your brand directly or indirectly. With past searches, keyword activity and browsing behavior of the user, machine learning can predict what a user is interested in and when would he be ready, to convert effectively.  Ideally, in-market targeting aims at widening your reach with high buying intent and offers a practical customer acquisition strategy.

3.       Remarket with Google Ads

In Google Ads Editor, one can view, download and assign existing audiences. Depending on campaign type, one can target remarketing lists, custom combination lists, life events and interest categories. Google Ads allows doing lots of A/B testing and setting up 'ad clusters' to compare which campaigns are most effective.  Remarketing as a way to connect with people who previously interacted with your website or mobile app. Creating remarketing lists is effective for targeting an audience who once expressed interest in your product or service.

4.       Try LinkedIn for keyword research

Social media platforms often offer the best and most expansive audience targeting capabilities, which the search engines lack. The most effective audience targeting strategy is translating job title targeting to keyword research. Going through the profiles of different professionals with job titles to target on LinkedIn and scraped the content on their LinkedIn profiles to come up with keyword lists that have been used to make our search campaigns and audiences much more robust. It is similar to looking at reviews on an ecomm website. LinkedIn has great options for testing messaging, getting campaigns off the ground and reaching specific targets quickly and extremely cost-efficiently.

5.       Using Facebook custom audiences and retargeting

Despite the data privacy woes of Facebook, it still remain the social platform with the widest selection of formats to target, reach and engage potential customers because it is “a personalized data platform”. Facebook's core feature is giving businesses the capability to target users on the platform based on their interests. It provides the users with relevant ads based on their preferences. It doesn't bombard them with irrelevant stuff. In this way we are able to build content and ads that our users really value.

Facebook users have short attention spans, so clients have found short videos to be the most effective format. And once the user engages with the ad, it is easy to retarget that consumer with another ad to draw them further down the tunnel. Advertisers can make use of Facebook’s back-end ad platform to set up demographic and psychographic parameters to make sure ads reach the right audience and track their performance.

6.       Add chatbots to your plan

Visitors interact with a chatbot the brand created internally using open source machine learning framework which can determine if visitors are in its target audience. One of the most important lessons to learn is that a team marketing analyst must be frequently controlling the decisions that the algorithm is taking. The algorithm can be refined and educated more quickly based on the knowledge the company had in the past.

7.       Initialize tracking

Adding event tracking to website shows you how visitors are interacting with your site and can help build a more effective online presence. Marketing Agency in Pune can capture phone IDs and serve ads based on geography—including location up to six months ago—with just latitude, longitude and date.  With the help of tracking, it can be used to effectively leverage B2C technologies like geo-targeting and geo-fencing to reach B2B prospects based on physical location.

8.       Explore more options

These are some of audience targeting strategies that marketers are use to find and reach their ideal customers. But rapid technological change, it’s important to keep looking forward to find new strategies.

For example, making use of voice search to target audiences.

Final Thought -

Audience targeting is going to new heights with these new technologies. This can be new and a amazing way of targeting our audiences. New and revolutionary ways can be found out to target our audiences which could drastically change our ways as marketers.

While targeting audience, remember to keep the buyer persona in mind. They should be at the heart of targeted ads and content, so marketing materials can drive a high ROI for your business.

[silverpush]

Brand Safety Is Indispensable for Video Advertising

The placement of ads against video content has emerged as one of the most effective marketing strategies for brands. Placing ads on user-generated videos on platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and more provides brands a much wider reach than provided by TV and print media. Despite their vast reach, these social media platforms have their own pitfalls. One of them that is really damaging for the brands is the difficulty in ensuring brand safety.  

The term “Brand Safety” has been used to describe the controls that companies in the digital advertising supply chain employ to protect brands against negative impacts on the brand’s consumer reputation associated with specific types of content, criminal activity, and/or related loss of return on investment.

It takes years and significant resources for a brand to build a reputation in the minds of consumers. Even a single less than desired association can heavily tarnish the brand reputation and the consumer’s trust.

Most advertisers today are facing ad placement against unsuitable and potentially harmful content in the following categories that the global digital advertising industry refers to as the “Dirty Dozen” categories to avoid - Military conflict, Obscenity, Drugs, Tobacco, Adult, Arms, Crime, Death/injury, Online piracy, Hate speech, Terrorism, and Spam/harmful sites.

Data shows that 1 in 10 ad placements are against harmful content. According to a survey, about 80% of consumers will stop or reduce buying products advertised against extreme or violent content and 70% believe the advertiser and the agency are most responsible for a brand’s ad placements.

About 10% of all content on YouTube is brand unsafe. Top unsafe categories in YouTube are violence, adult, extremist, and smoking. In March 2017, YouTube faced massive brand pull for ad placements against extreme content. In January 2018, YouTube partnered with third-party tools for brand protection, but in April in the same year, YouTube brand safety woes resurfaced affecting 300 brands. Google’s estimated loss owing to safety issues affecting brands reached $1 billion in October 2018. Other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok have also faced similar issues in recent years.

Despite stringent measures taken by social media platforms such as keywords, blacklists, and whitelisted channels, safety flair-ups affecting different brands have been constant across these platforms. There are certain reasons that have made it difficult to optimally achieve brand safety on social media platforms without affecting reach and monetization.

The first one is that brand safety is not one size fits all. Excluding the ‘Dirty Dozen’ categories is not an absolute rule. Each brand must define its own guidelines for the inappropriate and damaging context in accordance with its specific needs, values and brand image. Measures and tools for ensuring online brand protection should be able to provide required controls to amplify or lower restrictions to allow a highly customized approach. What is unsafe content for one brand, can be the exact context that can help another brand reach its most relevant audience.

The second reason is using the keywords blacklist as the primary solution. This method often fails to understand the complex undertones and various contexts a single word can be used for. For example, keywords such as gun, kill, explosion, etc. may be used in a safe context like in a movie.

Relying on whitelisted channels limits the true potential offered by social media platforms. Through such channels, brand reach gets limited and even may not reach the right audience. Using whitelisted channels is also quite expensive.

Although video advertising majorly uses programmatic advertising, this approach has a flaw that most brands don’t really know where their online advertising is running. Even hiring professionals to screen content to prevent the placement of in-video ads against unsafe content has not proved to be fully effective as a very large amount of video content is loaded hour after hour.  

Conventional brand safety tools fail to identify the right context. Artificial intelligence solutions such as computer vision provide an answer to this problem. Computer vision makes it possible to detect in-video context with great accuracy, offering unparalleled insight for advertisers to place context-relevant in-video ads in a highly structured and safe manner.  

Computer vision enables computers to see, identify and process objects in visual content just like or even better than human vision system. Advanced computer vision algorithms can accurately identify faces, emotions, objects, logos, activities, and scenes, not only in static images but also in streaming videos.

For in-video contextual ads targeting, computer vision enables a high degree of context relevance that surpasses all limitations of traditional keyword and affinity-based targeting. By using frame by frame parsing of video content, computer vision technology accurately blocks ad placements against unwanted, unsuitable, irrelevant and harmful content, even not letting a single damaging ad placement. Moreover, computer vision offers a tailored approach to a brand, i.e. it blocks only that content which is considered unsafe or unwanted by that brand.

Mirrors, by Silverpush, is an innovative contextual online advertising platform that utilizes computer vision for context-relevant in-video ad placement. Mirrors Safe is a computer vision powered brand safety and control platform, developed by Silverpush, that allows a brand to avoid ad placement against inappropriate or unsafe video content.  

Read our latest whitepaper to get a complete view of the current state of brand safety in video advertising and how AI and computer vision is powering the next-gen tech.

[newstfionline]

The fourth industrial revolution is upon us

By Jim Hoagland, Washington Post, November 22, 2017

MARRAKESH, Morocco--Driverless cars and trucks rule the road, while robots “man” the factories. Super-smartphones hail Uber helicopters or even planes to fly their owners across mushrooming urban areas. Machines use algorithms to teach themselves cognitive tasks that once required human intelligence, wiping out millions of managerial, as well as industrial, jobs.

These are visions of a world remade--for the most part, in the next five to 10 years--by technological advances that form a fourth industrial revolution. You catch glimpses of the same visions today not only in Silicon Valley but also in Paris think tanks, Chinese electric-car factories or even here at the edge of the Sahara.

Technological disruption in the 21st century is different. Societies had years to adapt to change driven by the steam engine, electricity and the computer. Today, change is instant and ubiquitous. It arrives digitally across the globe all at once.

Governments at all levels on all continents are suddenly waking up to how social media and other forms of algorithms and artificial intelligence have raced beyond their control or even awareness.

This realization that American lives are on the cusp of technological disruptions even more sweeping than those of the past decade was driven home to me by being part of a research project on technology and governance at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University this year. “Autonomous” (i.e., driverless) cars, the cloud, and swarming drones that deliver goods to your doorstep or transform naval and ground war-fighting strategy are well-known concepts. But the reality that they are breathing down my--and your--neck came as something of a surprise.

So did the startling visions of change outlined in the cozy confines of Silicon Valley that were also on the agenda here on Africa’s Atlantic shoulder when France’s Institute of International Relations held its annual World Policy Conference this month.

The usual suspects--global balance-of-power politics, the European Union’s woes, President Trump’s foreign-policy brutishness, Brexit--shared pride of place with the Internet of Cars (the on-wheels version of the Internet of Things) and the vulnerability of the 5,000 military and civilian satellites now in orbit.

These were not abstract subjects for the conference’s host country. Morocco this month became the first African nation to launch a spy satellite into space. And the kingdom is a key player in U.N.-sponsored efforts to organize a global containment strategy for climate change.

China’s policies toward Taiwan and India were not dwelled upon here. Instead it was noted that China produces more electric-powered automobiles than the rest of the world combined in a determined campaign to reduce pollution. “China is becoming a global laboratory as well as a global factory,” said one speaker, pointing to Beijing’s surging development of artificial intelligence in all civilian and military forms.

The world’s major powers offer sharp contrasts in harnessing technological change to their national interests and histories. The result is a new bipolar world based on technology rather than nuclear arsenals. Today’s superpowers are the United States and China.

The U.S. government has kept out of the way and let market forces develop giant technology companies with global reach. China has chosen to compete head to head, keeping Facebook, Google and others out of its markets while capturing U.S. intellectual property for its national firms. Europe lets U.S. technology companies in and regulates them rather than competing. Russia has weaponized information technology, adding social media to its arsenal of troops, missiles and tanks.

Diplomats and strategists have begun to patrol this expanding intersection of technology and international affairs, hoping to find ways to adapt the Cold War rules of deterrence and arms-control agreements to threats from cyberspace. Some experts shudder at the thought of artificial intelligence being incorporated into national command-and-control systems, further reducing the time humans have to respond to hostile missiles--or laser beams.

There were also calls for governments to begin to grapple with urgent earth-bound problems created by the disruptive impact of technology on domestic labor markets and increasingly fragile political systems.

The jobs that artificial intelligence and automation create while destroying outmoded ones often require constant retraining and multiple career and location changes. U.S. employers report that 6.1 million jobs currently sit vacant largely because applicants lack either the skills or mobility needed.

And there was clear recognition from Palo Alto, Calif., to Marrakesh that the communication revolution embodied in social media has hollowed out the political parties in democracies, enabling demagogues to whip up mobs by remote control.

The world turns, as always. But now it turns on a dime, or rather a computer chip.

[niksethi]

Twitter foments neurosis, Facebook sadness, Google News a sense of foreboding. Instagram turns me covetous. All of them make me want to do it—whatever “it” may be—for the likes, the comments. I can’t help but feel that I am the worst version of myself, being performative on a very short, very depressing timeline. A timeline of seconds.

Craig Mod always finds a way to define the issues of social media in a great way. As someone who not only helped to build the internet but has also found his own way to free himself from it (in small bursts), he provides a more relatable picture than someone like Cal Newport might.

I could use a tool like Instagram to approximate this, but I’d have to fight with its algorithm and avoid looking at the timeline. I am not superhuman. I would look at the notifications, the likes, and comments. Reply to them. Become intoxicated by the chemicals released by the tiny loops. Invariably this process would make me think about that audience and how they would be reacting to the next text and photo. I would have lost the purity of the experience.

This makes me think about how I stopped taking pictures with my camera at some point, since it felt like a drag to carry it around and since I was taking a lot of pictures just for the sake of putting them on instagram. Now, I take pictures with my phone and sometimes feel myself leaving the moment as I open my phone camera.

the disconnection from online chaos and the creating of space to think, to be present, does feel somewhat religious, even if it’s a religion of contemporary woe: to stop being a ding-dong who can’t pull his eyes away from Twitter.

I want to detach from Twitter and reignite my spirituality. Is Craig talking directly to me?

[bordersmash8-blog]

Yelp’s Heyday Is Over

When was the last time you used Yelp? If your attention (and/or ire) has wandered more toward instantly accessible Google reviews or meticulously curated Instagram feeds in recent months, you’re not alone: Yelp revealed during an earnings call last week that the review site is struggling to attract and retain advertisers — the primary way it makes money. That revelation resulted in a 30 percent stock plunge, leading some to wonder if the era of Yelp is coming to an end.

Launched in 2004 by former Paypal employees Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons, Yelp was the first big success story in the early days of user-generated reviews, fueling rapid growth that led it to a 2010 IPO. These days, competition is much stiffer: “It’s not just Google Maps and location-based sites that Yelp has to compete with, but social media channels as well,” says Jenifer Ekstein, a senior consultant at Vivaldi. “If you want to see what the food looks like or who has been eating there, a quick search on Instagram will pull up thousands of pictures and ‘reviews’ in a different form. There is definitely not a shift away from user-generated content or reviews, people are just looking for them in different places as new channels and ways of sharing come about.”

Part of Yelp’s woes seems related to its new no-term deals, meaning advertising clients are not locked into a contract. While that move initially resulted in a jump in new accounts, it also means businesses aren’t obligated to continue to advertise if they’re not impressed with the results of their advertising — and seemingly, more and more business owners are taking their ad dollars elsewhere, especially as diners flock to other platforms. “I opened a new restaurant a few months ago, and for every five Google reviews we get, we get maybe one Yelp review,” says Danny Teran, co-founder of the NYC-based Watson Hospitality Group. “Three or four years ago, that wasn’t the case.”

Teran, who appears in the Yelp-focused documentary Billion Dollar Bully, has accused Yelp of manipulating one of his restaurant’s reviews after he refused to advertise with them. Over the years, the company has been accused of extortion by numerous business owners, who say Yelp threatened to remove positive reviews from their business’s page if they did not pay for advertising, or asked for payment in exchange for hiding or deleting negative reviews. Those complaints resulted in multiple lawsuits that were eventually dismissed after the Federal Trade Commission found Yelp hadn’t committed any wrongdoing. But it’s not hard to see why restaurants would want to shift their ad dollars away from a platform that’s been both plagued by accusations of improper business practices and widely maligned thanks to some entitled users who take great joy in blasting restaurants with negative reviews.

Teran says he’s shifting his advertising dollars toward Instagram and working with influencers, avenues where he says he sees a better and faster return. He cites a recent collaboration with NYC-based Instagrammer @foodbabyny, who has 308,000 followers. Teran says that collaboration netted one of his restaurants 400 new followers and dozens of new customers who said they came in after seeing the influencer’s post.

Dallas-based restaurateur Jay Jerrier, who owns 10 pizzerias across Texas, including Cane Rosso in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, says he and his staff hardly ever look at Yelp anymore: “Maybe every two or three months to see if there are any specific service issues,” he says, “or to spot check food quality from real guest photos.

“For us it seems like we get more [reviews and feedback] activity on Google, Instagram, and Twitter,” Jerrier says. “It gives a much better opportunity to start a dialogue with someone who was happy or disappointed. Yelp seems very reactionary compared to other platforms.” The site has become notorious for retaliatory and spiteful reviews, frequently politically motivated and written by people who have never visited the business in question — such as the flood of bad reviews that were posted for Colorado’s Masterpiece Cakeshop after the bakery’s refusal to bake a cake for a gay wedding was upheld by the Supreme Court. While Yelp does police such things, typically posting an “Active Cleanup Alert” to notify users of the situation while it works to remove fake reviews, it has nonetheless affected perception of Yelp from a legitimate review site to a venue for social protest.

The human behind @foodbabyny, Mike Chau, says his enthusiasm for Yelp has “definitely waned a bit [over the last few years], but that’s more because of growing awareness that ‘Yelper’ is a dirty word in the restaurant industry and mostly everybody in food thinks that people that write reviews on Yelp are morons.”

He believes Yelp’s popularity amongst the average restaurant-goer is still going strong, though: “I don’t ever hear anybody talking about reviews they’ve seen on Google, but Yelp still remains as a common verb people use when they want to check out a new place or find out where to eat lunch,” Chau says. “I often get ideas on where to eat from stuff I see pop up on Instagram, but many people don’t follow food accounts and still need to use the local search features of Yelp to figure out where to go eat.”

Chau’s anecdotal evidence is seemingly supported by Yelp’s user numbers, which it says continue to grow each year, largely thanks to increased engagement on its mobile app. (Traffic from desktop users is down significantly year-over-year, which the company attributes to changes in Google’s search algorithms.)

But users undoubtedly now have many more options for uploading their food photos and reviewing restaurants, and many business owners have soured on the review site. As MarketWatch writes, “The bottom line seems to be that Yelp has a big trust issue, both with consumers and the businesses who advertise.”

Yelp’s also been navigating a long-standing rivalry with Google: In 2014, it accused the search engine company of prioritizing its own search results, even in user searches that included the word “Yelp.” It’s also no secret that Google and Facebook now dominate online advertising, with the two giants now responsible for 25 percent of all ad sales (online or off). Google has made numerous moves to make its restaurant search results increasingly useful to diners in recent years: Googling a specific restaurant now brings up a vast amount of data on the search results page, from address and opening hours to the menu, excerpts from reviews, and data on the business’s busiest times, including how long a diner can expect to wait at peak hours. That makes users searching for information on a restaurant less likely to bother clicking out to Yelp, unless they’re already a habitual user of the site or the app.

“I think their business model definitely has to evolve for them to survive,” says Judge Graham, an entrepreneur with a focus on digital marketing and advertising. “Right now, we’re in what I would a call peer-to-peer affirmation economy, and the ability to get your peers’ data or feedback is in so many more platforms now versus five years ago when Yelp was really popular. The competition has become so fierce for Yelp and there’s so many other [options] to get information and reviews [that] feel more authentic… On Yelp, you may not know the individuals with the reviews and now with social media, you can literally ask about anything on Facebook or Instagram and you’re immediately going to get feedback. You can go to a brand’s page, drop a comment, and get tons of feedback from people you actually know and/or people that you know for sure are real.”

Yelp has seemingly looked to streamline its business recently, selling delivery service Eat24 to GrubHub, but it still offers users the ability to order delivery through its app and website, as well as the option to make a reservation or add themselves to a restaurant’s waitlist. Stoppelman said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call that use of the reservation and waitlist features has grown 150 percent over the past year.

“With so many different avenues that people can now look to for reviews, Yelp needs to take a step back and evaluate the customer they are trying to reach,” says Ekstein, “and how to best target and engage with them to create a user experience that will differentiate them and allow them to capture some of the market share they have lost.”

“I would be sad to see Yelp die out because I’ve invested a lot of time into it over the years,” says Chau.

But like many restaurateurs, there’s been no love lost between Jerrier and Yelp, and his view of the company’s long-term viability is a bit more fatalistic: “If their stock is diving, I would just like to thank karma, give a hearty LOL, and a cheerful ‘Bye Felicia,’” he says.

Eater.com

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Source: https://www.eater.com/2018/11/16/18094979/yelp-stock-plunge-future-viability-competition-google-instagram-twitter

[contenuwriting]

The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Content Marketing

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is any machine which can mimic cognitive functions associated with the human brain- particularly, ‘learning’ and problem-solving. This technology has come a long way from its conception as a mere theory by Alan Turing in the ‘50s, to defeating chess grandmasters or even writing screenplays from scratch!

Machine-learning algorithms have taken over the realm of marketing- allowing one to sift through an overwhelming amount of data with ease, deliver better customer experience, and generate new content in a flash. AI has been a game changer in the realm of content marketing. In today’s age of content overload, AI is indispensable for streamlining the processes.

With the rules of content marketing changing every year (if not sooner), AI is an indispensable tool for content marketers to keep up with the ever-changing trends. Here are a few notable ways in which AI is changing the landscape of content marketing for the better:

Auto-generated Content

For simple stories like stock updates or sports reports, content marketers are using AI to auto-generate such content pieces.

This technology is being used so regularly and efficiently to write such content, it is almost impossible to detect the hand of an algorithm by the layman.

In fact, this has been going on for years and is hardly a recent phenomenon.

Companies such as Yahoo, Fox, and Associated Press, have been using machines to auto-generate content over the years.

Customised Newsfeed

Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, now use AI to customise news feeds, so their users only see posts of personal interest.

These algorithms analyse hundreds of variables to predict posts that a user will like or comment on, and the ones they would prefer hidden or marked as spam.

In fact, the advertisements that appear on your social media feed are related to your search or browsing history.

Information such as this helps marketers discern which sort of content their visitors find most engaging.

As a result, they can increase their social engagement by creating content of a similar kind.

Analysing the advertisements the target audience is most likely to click also helps content marketers tailor-make their own Facebook Ads.

Predictive Intelligence

The evolution of predictive intelligence has made content marketing so much more efficient.

Companies can now customise their content so it appeals to the individual needs and interests of their customers.

Lead-scoring is a points system that helps figure where your prospects are in the buyer journey.

Using predictive intelligence allows marketers to speed up their sales process by study buyer personas and customer behaviours and market accordingly.

This also helps marketers decide which content pieces are ideal for which a group of customers.

Content marketers can target specific styles of content that the customers suitable for conversion are most likely to engage with.

Better Content Curation

Content curation refers to scouting for, organising, annotating, and sharing, the most relevant and best quality digital content on a topic for your target audience.

It is hardly a cakewalk to regularly curate engaging and relevant content, however, there are a lot of algorithms which you can now use to make your process more efficient.

Right from researching trending topics to improving lead conversion rates – – AI has become a fairy godmother to solve all your content curation woes.

Algorithms allow you to collect a vast amount of data on your target audience- their reading habits, queries, concerns about your business, and so on.

As a result, you can create and curate such content that resonates with your audience and answers their questions- thus boosting engagement and the conversion rate.

Even the best technology isn’t a substitute for a good strategy. However, the evolution of artificial intelligence has made an effective content marketing strategy a plain sailing!

[jacobhinkley]

Can Blockchain Repair the Broken Digital Advertising Space?

Most of us find digital advertising irritating. When online ads first came to platforms like Facebook, it was something of a novelty. For the first time, we were being shown products and services that were actually relevant to us, based on our likes and preferences – and data. That four-letter word has become a precious commodity. Because valuable data is, in fact, worth its weight in gold.

But as with anything in our rapidly evolving lives marked by limited attention spans, we got bored pretty quickly. And Facebook responded by changing its algorithm to prioritize content from family and friends over corporations. Awesome for users (until they found out their data was being leaked anyway), but a real quandary for online advertisers seeking to reach their targets.

The Point of Audience Fatigue

Elsewhere online, where advertising proliferates, some 40 percent of millennials already use adblockers, and that number is on the rise. As for Gen-Z, their tolerance for ads is next to zero, and Gen-Alpha integrates technology into their everyday lives without so much as blinking – even my three-year-old knows how to skip the ads on YouTube in a fragment of a second.

So, how can online advertising exist in such an environment? How can advertisers reach consumers despite growing apathy and government regulation?

Through blockchain technology, of course.

Its decentralized nature can democratize data, releasing ownership of your personal information back to you. Companies like Facebook and other data middlemen are consequently cut out of the system. Here’s how it works:

Monetizing Micro-Fragments of Data

Thanks to blockchain’s ability to register microtransactions, it is creating new value opportunities. Consumers can maintain control over their data and monetize it if they want to. Because everything about them is interesting to someone. While not many people care how many steps you took with your Fitbit today, you can bet there’s at least one advertiser aching for that information.

ICOs like Sooloox are springing up everywhere, allowing consumers to authorize their own data use and trade directly with the companies which want to buy it. Advertisers get the laser-targeted information they crave, and individuals get compensated. No bothersome banner ads involved, and no data middlemen. The platform transforms consumers from “data providers to data authorizers,” and gives them control over its use.

A similar premise is put forward by Social Cash, which intends to use blockchains to “disrupt digital advertising” and help consumers secure their identities. In what they call a new market (the “attention economy”), Social Cash aims to bring trust and transparency back to digital advertising (if those things ever existed). They also plan to resolve the problem of advertising fraud, which cost the industry around $7.2 billion last year.

Another player in this increasingly competitive space is YouGov Direct, making promises of consumer protection, transparency, and efficiency. These companies want data and are willing to pay for it. But now they can deal with consumers directly, helping individuals avoid ad fraud, abuse of data, and a whole host of underhand breaches of privacy as we move into an era of increased consumer data protection.

Final Thoughts

When we’re hearing about the marvels of blockchain technology every day, about how it will transform industries far and wide and change life as we know it, it’s easy to get caught up in the hype. Will blockchain tech resolve the online advertising industry’s woes? Maybe. But it will be interesting to see what happens during the fallout.

Can Blockchain Repair the Broken Digital Advertising Space? published first on https://medium.com/@smartoptions