#specifically clicks gimmick twitter

[brightgoat]

Another day at the pink addison meeting

[chlorinesyrup]

hey did you ever post explanations for the ihnmaims iceberg? im so curious about some entries haha

(Oh beans! I kept forgetting about posting them! Might as well do it here.)

These are explanations for each tier of the no mouth iceberg!

SKY:

I have no mouth and I must scream- The book itself doesn’t really get talked about in the mainstream all that much.

Harlan Ellison- The author, his books have a niche cult following nowadays.

THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG:

AMs hate speech- An iconic part of the franchise, that even people who know nothing about I have no mouth and I must scream may recognise.

Ihnmaims game adaptation- On the 31st of October 1995, a point and click game adaptation of I have no mouth and I must scream was released, developed by cyberdreams and the dreamers guild, the game follows the same set up as the original but presumably proceeds the events of the book in which no one died.

Great soft jelly thing- Referring to not only the disturbing ending of the original book but also the bad ending of the game which includes the first visual depiction of what the great soft jelly thing looks like.

Russian and Chinese master computers- AMs “brethren” who were created around the same time he was, they’re only mentioned in the book but gain a pivotal role in the game, assisting the humans in AMs destruction.

Game remaster- On August 10th, a Twitter account uploaded what appeared to be a teaser for a possible remaster for the game, these were confirmed to be legitimate and were sold as a limited time offer, they also included a few extra items along with the game such as a face covering, a great soft jelly thing model and pin and hate pillar USB drive.

UNDER THE WATER:

Moonwalking- A common glitch within the no mouth game in which character sprites won’t turn in direction and will instead walk backwards.

Three armed benny- in the ending of Bennys psychodrama, he will sprout a third arm, this was thought to be a glitch but is actually intentional.

The official I have no mouth and I must scream audio book- Wonderfully voiced by Harlan Ellison, split up into five sections with loud technical noises, it can be easily found on YouTube.

psychodramas- In the ihnmaims game, each human is sent into their own personalised “psychodrama”, it is unclear whether these worlds they are sent to are real or just fabrications.

Pocket Edna- referring to how gorrister can fit a whole human inside his inventory.

Gorristers double storage spaces- In Gorristers psychodrama, he has two rows of inventory spaces while the other four humans only have one.

Spiritual beromiter- A gimmick used to measure the ethical choices you’ve made throughout each characters playthrough, if you’ve completed a perfect run, the spiritual beromiter will be completely white.

Good ending- By maxing the spiritual beromiter of each character and following specific steps throughout the ending, it’s possible to shut AM down and awake 200 humans in space who escaped before AM nuked the earth who are in cryogenic sleep.

Ihnmaims radio drama- A brilliant reenactment dramatized by Mike Walker and aired on Radio 4 on Thursday at 11 PM a good few years ago.

It follows the same plot as the book with a few extra scenes added, it’s considered the third version of ihnmaims along with the book and the game, while not as well known as the other two it’s held in high regards for its wonderful voice acting provided by Harlan Ellison as AM, David Soul as Ted, Abi Eniola as Ellen, Ewan Bailey as Nimdok, David Timson as Gorrister and Jason O’Mar as Benny, with music by Wilfredo Acosta and directed by Ned Chaillet.

Much like the official audio book it can be found on YouTube.

AM and Teds scene in the radio drama- Ted and AM are given a long scene together in which AM taunts and rants to Ted, Presumably while he strangles him.

Allied master computer, adaptive manipulator, aggressive menace- Used by Gorrister in the radio drama to describe AM, while AM is referred to as allied mastercomputer lots throughout the series, he has never been called adaptive manipulator or aggressive menace anywhere else.

THE BASE OF THE ICEBERG:

I have no mouth and I’m obscene- A two part YouTube poop created with Harlan Ellison’s official audio book reading.

Nimdoks removal- In the German version of the game, nimdok was removed due to his relations to natzis, this makes the game impossible to get a good ending on in Germany.

iOS/android app- A port of the ihnmaims game is available on the iOS App Store for about £2.99.

The milk of human kindness- Taken from Macbeth and briefly introduced in the game adaptation, it’s a substance nimdok developed during his time as a scientist, it’s what AM used to keep the five humans basically immortal.

Transform liquid- Another substance Nimdok developed, it’s said to be what was used to turn benny into a half human half ape creature.

Ihnmaims creation- As quoted by harlan Ellison, he showed about a dozen pages of ihnmaims to Frederik Pohl who paid in advance to finish it. Then, Ellison spent an entire night finishing the book with “white steamy passion” and published it without making ANY changes from the original draft that was shown to Frederik Pohl.

Harlan’s original plan for the game adaptation- Harlan originally wanted the game to be unwinable but begrudgingly agreed to add a good ending to the game when he was told that’s not how video games work.

I have no butt I must pound by Chuck tingle- a story created by famous smut writer chuckle tingle, that used elements of ihnmaims in its sci-fi erotic story.

AI fandom multiverse- An alternative universe created by fans of fictional AI’s where the universes are connected, AM is often included in these.

LOWER END OF THE ICEBERG:

Ihnmaims comic- In the 1990’s a comic was created for ihnmaims by John Byrne, it follows the same plot as the original book.

AM singing- In Gorristers psychodrama, when using the jukebox, select the last option and you will get a sort clip of AM humming and singing, careful because this also lowers the spiritual beromiter.

Game booklet- When the ihnmaims game got a physical release, it came with a manual and game booklet that revealed far more information about the charecters and world, It can still be found online.

AM fuckers- A group of people in the no mouth fandom who are sexually attracted to AM, nuff’ said.

Benny the baby eater- In Benny’s psychodrama, he was originally able to eat a living baby, this was removed before release but footage of it still remains.

Deleted/unused scenes- Benny eating a baby, a short scene involving the caged dog in Gorristers psychodrama and some dead bodies being removed from the meat cellar, also in Gorristers psychodrama.

AMs logo replacing a facist symbol in nimdoks psychodrama- during nimdoks psychodrama, AMs logo is plastered across the concentration camp, this is obviously a replacement for the natzi symbol.

Reference to the original story in the game- In Teds psychodrama, he briefly mentions the plot of the book, lending credence to the theory that the events of the book have taken place in the game but Ted wasn’t able to kill the other four humans.

Fanon AM forms- Alternative fan-created versions of AM such as AMos, PM and FM.

Worm AM- A common theme amounsgt AM designs is for him to be depicted as a worm/snake-like robot.

THE END OF THE ICEBERG:

Likely unlicensed merchandise- it is possible to buy shirts with ihnmaims imagery and quotes on them on places like redbubble.

Uncommon/unused audio- AM humming, and some harder to trigger voice lines in the game such as:

Horny AM- In both the game, book and radio drama, it’s clear AM is so enraged because he cannot feel, move or do anything that humans can, as quoted in the radio drama; “never for me to make love” this became a small injoke within the fandom because AM is just a sexually repressed edgelord.

Weird AM noises- In all forms of AM voice acting, one common theme is all the weird noises he makes, this includes cackling, wheezing, humming, tsking and stuff I don’t even know how to properly describe.

Why cheese is made in Wisconsin- a shitpost made on tumblr that used audio of Harlan Ellison explaining why cheese was made in Wisconsin with the hate pillar instead of the usual hate speech.

Weird amount of mlp ihnmaims crossover art-

THE DEPTHS:

Nimdok x Dr.Mengele- In the game booklet, it suggest that Nimdok and Dr.Mengele were in a homosexual relationship.

(DO NOT RESEARCH) “Ellen’s run”-An incredibly upsetting and disturbing fanfiction made on fan fiction.net detailing scat, medical waste, humiliation and other upsetting things involving Ellen.

“A very particular kind of hatred”- An AM x listener audio released on Soundgasm, this is the first of its kind and was only discovered recently.

[badly-drawn-bbu]

Hii! Clicked on the link from robin's twitter- uh one question Most blogs have like a DNI or rules, yall got any of that? Just wanna know so i dont accidentally mess smth up cuz i wanna respecc yall ^^ (aside from nsfw dni n stuff like that)

HELLO ROBIN AKA ADMIN MAAH HERE! Welcome welcome!! :DD We don't have like, anything super indepth, but here's a basic list we put together! ~~~

DNI: - Basic DNI critera ofc, NSFW + Pr0ship - If you erase BBU characters' canon identities whilst knowing about them

RULES + BOUNDARIES: - No NSFW/suggestive topics! We intend to keep this blog a sfw space :) - We don't take post submissions! Feel free to send us a little doodle or something based off our posts, but generally this is a two-goat gimmick account and we plan to keep it that way, thank you! - Keep asks on topic to the blog, please! - No personal questions towards the admins please! This blog isn't about us, it's about our dumb BBU art LMAO. If you wanna see more of us as individuals we both have personal blogs you can check out! (Admin Maah @robinfollies , and Admin Buck @star-scrambled !) - Also on that note, please don't be weird towards the admins + our ocs. Buck + Emmaah may only show up periodically, but they are our sonas! Don't make weird jokes/comments/etc about them, or us. - Don't be rude in our askbox, this encapsulates stuff along the lines of being hateful towards specific characters, ships, or headcanons. We intend to keep this a positive space and we love and appreciate a lot of different characters/ships/hcs (within reason obviously LOL) - Please don't get pushy with the admins for being inactive, or not responding to an ask/request/etc. We both have personal lives and may get busy at points! - Generally just be kind + respectful and we should be good!! Yippee!! ~~~

I think we covered everything for now! I also wanna say a huge thank you from both myself and admin Buck for asking this, it's super appreciated!!! So very sweet of you 🥺💖

- Maah! <3

[phantomrose96]

I've seen a lot of people saying stuff like "tumblr wants us to trust them with our credit cards when they can't even deal with [porn bot/staff bot] problem???" And there's a million other good reasons to not trust tumblr with credit cards, but that, SPECIFICALLY, is a luke-warm take from a cyber security standpoint. The existence of bots vs. the security of a website don't have the cause-and-effect yall are jumping for.

Twitter and Instagram have bot problems SIGNIFICANTLY WORSE than Tumblr. And honestly I'm not sure Twitter even views it as a problem. The APIs for integrating a Twitter bot are super public. Making Twitter bots is fair game for anyone. So much of Twitter is just bots spam-posting articles as an SEO-gimmick. Tons of Instagram accounts are click-farm bots. This tells me nothing about Twitter or Instagram's security, because the existence of bots breaches nothing.

Bots are just automated processes taking advantage of very open, very public, very intentionally accessible user interfaces to... sign up and make an account. Of course a bot can sign up and make a tumblr account. Anyone can. Anything can. That doesn't say anything about bots being able to access secure information from other users. And if they CAN access secure information, that's a different security breach not related to The Ability For Many Bots to Exist. Don't distract yourself from actual security issues because you're hung up on bots. The Sunglasses virus should make you SIGNIFICANTLY more concerned than the existence of porn bots.

The rampant bot population DOES suggest Tumblr is understaffed, which is a fair enough metric to extrapolate and wonder if they have the staffing to actually handle data security. And the bot population typically does try to trick YOU into revealing secure information, but that's social engineering, and not directly related to Tumblr's own internal security.

But at the end of the day, saying "the bot problem means there's a security problem" is like walking up to the counter to pay for your food at a restaurant and saying to the cashier "I saw a ton of seedy patrons in this restaurant. I don't trust giving you my credit card." What you SHOULD be judging is whether the cashier seems secure.

If the register is made of glass, card numbers are kept in a hand-written list behind the register, and the cashier is wearing a shirt that says "I am both easily tricked and give into demands quickly when threatened", then YES, ABSOLUTELY, YOU'VE GOT EVERY REASON TO THINK ONE OF THOSE SEEDY PATRONS IS GONNA SEE THE EASY ACCESS POINT AND STEAL YOUR INFO. But getting hung up on the seedy patrons INSTEAD of the cashier is where you're failing to understand the important picture.

Don't focus on the bots. Focus on Tumblr security instead.

[lauralot89]

I’m actually really pissed off now and entirely against my better judgement I’m going to rant about it here because Discord is down and if I don’t get my rage out somewhere then it’s just going to build so here we fucking go

do not reblog this, I’m not in the mood for when it is inevitably passed on to someone who gets mad at me for it

I’m gonna be talking about weight loss/dieting/calorie counting/etc below the cut, if it triggers you, don’t read it, if you think any form of caloric restriction is disordered eating and any form of dieting is dangerous or wrong then DON’T READ IT

So there I am, minding my own business on Twitter reading a tweet from a YouTuber I follow revealing that she and every other influencer out there have recently received an email offering them money to shill NFTs, which is why you’ve probably seen some YouTuber/streamer recently just bring up NFTs out of nowhere

and then I see Noom is trending and against all my instincts I click and I guess Buzzfeed News did an article about how Noom is a diet program (no fucking shit)* and everyone and their mother is losing it on Twitter about how Noom pushes you to hate yourself and develop an eating disorder and how dare you ever want to lose weight, examine your internalized fatphobia and on and on and oh my fucking head

[*’But Laura they say in their ads that they’re not a diet and it’s misleading!’ Look I’m not gonna defend their advertising which I don’t think that highly of but what they clearly mean when they say that, even if they didn’t articulate it well, is that it’s not based on some gimmick like juice cleanses or no carbs or protein only, they mean that they don’t restrict any specific foods, you can eat whatever the fuck you want even if it’s nutritional sawdust so long as it fits in a caloric deficit]

I’ll put all my cards on the table here.  I used Noom.  I lost forty pounds on Noom.  I’ve kept off forty pounds even after I stopped using Noom, and I only stopped not because it wasn’t working but because I learned how to do it on my own and so why pay for something when you can do it for free.  I very specifically sought out and chose Noom because it was basically Weight Watchers but with colors instead of numbers, and I suck at math.

Why did I want WW?  Because it’s the commercial diet program that has the best results for long term success.  That’s because it doesn’t restrict any foods, it just teaches you what portions look like and recommends foods that have a higher water content, so you feel full without eating as much.  And Noom did the same thing and didn’t require me to potentially attend meetings while a plague was happening or do math, so I went with Noom.

There are people all over Twitter claiming things like “I was a breastfeeding mother and it told me to eat 1200 calories a day!  I’m a 6′8″ man and it told me to eat 1200 calories a day!  It’s marketing an eating disorder!  It tells you what foods you can and can’t eat!  It makes you weigh yourself every day!”

okay so

If you get the app and you get some completely absurd number for your recommended daily calorie intake, then you have done something wrong.  You have either mis-entered information or you have set it for the most unrealistic goals possible, probably so you could post on social media about how awful and insidious it is.  I say this as a 5′5″ woman who told the app I wanted to lose fifty pounds as fast as I possibly could and the lowest number it ever gave me was 1600 per day.  Which isn’t even a locked-in number: you record your physical activity, and any activity you do increases the calorie allotment.

And just so you know, daily weigh-ins on Noom are not a permanent fixture, it switches to weekly after you’ve done it for a while, it’s just there to get you used to doing it so you don’t forget the whole thing and then give up like three days in

Yes, counting calories CAN be disordered eating.  Being vegan can be disordered eating.  Exercise can be part of disordered eating.  Hell, intuitive eating can be part of disordered eating.  It’s entirely possible for someone to excuse a binge as what they intuitively wanted at the time.  It’s happened before.

Can programs like Noom and WW be used by someone to unhealthily restrict themselves?  Yes.  But in those cases, the person likely either already had disordered eating habits or they would have formed disordered eating habits out of any diet or exercise plan they tried.  People don’t develop an eating disorder just because an app tells them “hey, grapes make you feel fuller than raisins” (I read this roughly eleven thousand times on Noom). We develop eating disorders because of a huge complex number of influences and stressors both internal and external.  Does the diet industry play into that?  Absolutely.  One hundred percent.  Can we blame the existence of eating disorders on diet programs?  Absolutely not.

(also why do people bring up that diet programs just want to make money off you as if that’s some insidious thing specific only to them and not any other capitalist venture?  do you think nabisco and taco bell actually care about you?  you’re a wallet to corporations no matter what you’re buying from them)

Look, I dieted because I wanted to.  I continue to count calories and eat at a deficit because I’m not at my goal yet, and I want to get there.  I don’t think that just because a program worked for me, that it will work for everyone, or that just because I used it in a healthy way, everyone would.  But just because you don’t want to lose weight, or you can’t handle foods being ranked or calorie deficits without falling into disorder patterns, does not make it inherently bad for others to create and sell a program that uses those things.

If you are happy with your body, that is awesome.  I mean that truly.  I don’t think anyone should hate themselves for their weight or anything else about their appearance.  I think that people can make healthy choices and perform healthy actions no matter what their size.  But there’s a Very Online contingent of the body positivity movement that just seems to want to tear down everyone who doesn’t feel exactly as they do or doesn’t look exactly as they look, and they’re fine smearing everything as evil and/or ineffective in order to do that.

Like how many times have you heard that it’s impossible to lose weight because your body will enter starvation mode and hold onto any calorie you’ll give it and then you actually gain weight?  Yeah, starvation mode is a real thing.  It was experienced by people imprisoned in concentration camps.  But this is what those people ate in a day.  And their bodies didn’t enter starvation mode until all of their fat reserves had been depleted.  And they never gained weight; at best, they maintained weight.

But what about the study that proved ninety-five percent of diets fail?  Yeah, about that.  That was a single study conducted with just 100 people in 1959.  1959, when we did not have nutrition labels or serving sizes on food packages, when there was no easy way to know the caloric value of food unless you already happened to study nutrition.  The participants in the study were being treated at a nutrition clinic, and once they left the nutrition clinic, it’s not surprising that most of them regained weight.  Even one of the doctors conducting the study later said it wasn’t relevant in the modern world: “I've been sort of surprised that people keep citing it; I know we do better these days.”

Losing weight isn’t easy.  So much of our culture and social interactions are built around food, and so much of our food is calorie-dense without filling our stomachs.  It isn’t easy, but it is simple.  You eat at a caloric deficit and, barring some kind of medical complication, you lose weight.  Likewise, if you eat at a surplus, you gain weight.  Our world makes it much easier to gain weight than to lose it, but it’s not impossible and it shouldn’t be discouraged if someone isn’t doing it unhealthily.

Obesity is linked to a myriad of health conditions.  With most of those conditions, we can’t say that obesity causes them given that there’s no ethical way to test that, but we can definitively say that your chances of developing these conditions go way up if you’re obese.  Fat people have value.  They deserve the same respect and dignity as everyone else.  But obesity is not humanity’s natural state and it’s not unavoidable, and it’s not wrong or inherently unhealthy to want to change your body.

I’m just tired.

[binaryic]

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT E-COMMERCE MARKETING

E-Commerce Marketing is a world in itself with countless nuances. In simple terms, boosting your sales electronically using social media platforms, search engines and email campaigns comprises e-commerce marketing. Staying in touch with the latest trends, marketing gimmicks and innovations could potentially make or break a business.

 Ecommerce advertising encompasses any kind of advertising, online or offline, that drives traffic to an online store. The most common examples include Google AdWords, display ads, and social media advertising like Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. Price bidding between marketers and the ad space owner determine the cost and placement of each ad.

 An e-commerce marketing essentially comprises of:

 Social Media Marketing: With social media couture, firmly ingrained in today’s society, companies are cashing in on social media handles by bridging the gap between consumers and the platform. The use of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to boost a campaign or drive traffic is on a constant rise. Facebook provides a Facebook Business Page tool to mange and market your brand efficiently, so does Instagram.

Search Engine Marketing: People often confuse Search Engine Marketing(SEM) with Search Engine Optimization(SEO). SEM solely refers to pay per click campaigns where users are redirected or shown the brands ad on searching the relevant term. SEO is optimizing content using Google’s ranking algorithm. Almost all ecommerce companies are registered with Google AdWords to promote their brands and offers.

Content Marketing: Engaging a wide range of target audience with diverse, interactive and appealing content is content marketing. Exploring more rather than being focused on your product could get new followers. SEO could come in extremely handy for Content Marketing.

Email Marketing: Email intimations of campaigns and offer to potential and existing customer has been one of the oldest ways in e-commerce marketing.

There are a number of deciding factors which determine the success or failure of e-commerce marketing:

 Search engine results page (SERP): The cumulative results from users executing a search engine query, comprising organic and paid listings. Having results on the first page of SERPs helps massively in getting new customers.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO): In e-commerce marketing, conversion rate optimization is a system for converting more visitors into customers, or to take a specific action on a webpage. CROs are essential to study the growth of any brand as it helps analysing the success rate.

Conversion funnels: A conversion funnel refers to the journey a prospect takes to become a customer, beginning with the awareness stage and ending in a purchase. For higher-priced items, a longer sales cycle is common, while low-cost items convert in a much shorter time frame. Conversion Funnel is a patient process with high-yielding results because people often tend to stick to their choice of online marketplace.

Google constantly keeps refining its search algorithm and it’s critical to monitor developments regularly to meet high expectations. Online marketing trends often change overnight and being out of touch could lead to losses. Search engines and advertising platforms are constantly altering their requirements, rules, and algorithms that determine results — so it’s essential to stay mindful of any major updates.

 Being aware about the industry, latest trends and knowing about everything new that’s happening in the community could yield massive growth for e-commerce companies both in the short and long run.

To know more: https://binaryic.com/knowledge-center/everything-you-need-to-know-about-e-commerce-marketing/

[tapatapreview]

Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Headphones Review, Buy at Rs. 28,490

Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Headphones review : The WH-1000XM4 is the newest in Sony’s famous line of flagship wireless headphones. Premium wireless headphones have been launched in India just over a month after the global launch, and are available for purchase at Amazon, Sony retail stores, big multi-brand electronics shops, and Sony’s online shopping site shopatsc.com. With the 1000XM4, Sony decided not to reinvent the wheel again, but to put slight changes around the board and further refine what was already a successful product.

Priced at Rs. 28,490 in India, Sony WH-1000XM4 is the latest flagship in the wireless headphone line of the Japanese business. The successor to the WH-1000XM3 looks pretty much the same at first sight, but there are some changes both on the top and under the hood that make this a stronger pair of headphones.

Sony’s 360 Reality audio style, which offers surreal space audio experience, is among the most over-the-top functionality. LDAC support for 990 kbps bitrate transfer for your higher-quality titles is also available. Mind you, aptX support is gone so the Hi-Res audio playback performance will take a dive.

Sony WH-1000XM4 Design

Visually, the 1000XM4s are the same as their counterparts. They even come in the same two colours, but there’s no way to tell them apart when you see someone wearing them. The only distinction is the interior of the left earcup, which is where the optical wear recognition sensor is mounted.

Nothing especially incorrect with that, as the architecture of the 1000XM3 was already very refined, with equal parts of minimalism and versatility, allowing it to fit into most scenarios. The choice of fabrics is also top notch here, with high-quality polycarbonate on the exterior and supple faux leather on the inside.

Sony decided to maintain the core concept of the 1000X series through its several iterations. Versions 3 and 4 differ somewhat from 1 and 2, but they both share the same unmistakable appearance.

Also See : Redmi 9i price in India, Full Specifications, Detail Review

It’s not a bad thing to me. An aesthetically appealing style with a polished, elegant look that is discreet enough to be worn outside without attracting attention to it.

The headbands are flexible with a satisfactory sliding mechanism. One problem with the moving, though, is that it needs to be done while the headphones are off the ears. That’s because if you wear it, the headbands get bent, stopping the ear cups from falling easily onto the metal bars.

On the exterior of the headphones, you’ll find two circular power / pair control buttons and a 3.5 mm aux button that switches between noise cancellation and ambient sound. The outer portion of the right earcup serves as a touch-capable control panel that can be used to trigger, pause or skip music and increase or lower the volume.

Sony WH-1000XM4 Features

The Sony WH-1000XM3 was feature-rich upon publication, full of creative control schemes and clever implementations of its noise cancellation technology. Everything that was wonderful about the WH-1000XM3 headphones was turned over to the latest WH-1000XM4 predecessors, along with some new tricks, too. They ‘re not all gimmicks, though — they ‘re practical features that really function as advertised.

The 1000X series has always had these touch movements, and I’ve never been a fan of them. It’s a fun idea to demo your clients in a shop or show off to your friends, but it’s not the most realistic and user-friendly way to control it. First of all, the movements are only accessible on the right ear cup, but whether you’re left-handed, even if you’re right-handed, you’ll find them very awkward

The adjustable button also returns to the Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Headphones, and you can adjust its function using the Sony Headphones Connection app. I tended to use it to monitor active noise cancellation and hearing modes, but you can also set it up to easily call Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. You may also invoke the default voice assistant on your mobile by clicking it once and leaving it up.

The only piece of bad news is about the codecs. WH-1000XM4 supports SBC, AAC, and LDAC, but multi-device pairing does not work for LDAC, because based on what is provided by each of your paired systems, you will be taken to AAC on both or SBC on both. Right now, this is the premium you pay for multi-device matching, that you’re going to lose some audio quality for the sake of convenience.

Sony WH-1000XM4 Audio Performance

Sony uses the same 40 mm drivers in the Sony WH-1000XM4 Wireless Headphones as in the WH-1000XM3, but there is no sound and blend between the WH-1000XM4 and the WH-1000XM3 headphones that followed them. It’s a warm and balanced sound that does well to deliver a wide variety of sounds as needed and specifics that can be penetrated by a strong bass output.

WH-1000XM4 supports SBC, AAC, and LDAC codecs for transfer over enhanced Bluetooth 5.1 connexions. There is no support for aptX and aptX HD codecs, since Sony has now moved to MediaTek processors on its headphones, which lack native support for these codecs. While LDAC is fine and has fairly broad support for Android these days, it’s not as reliable as aptX codecs because of its ability to slip back to lower bitrates when the relation is less than ideal. I’m going to explore this further in the networking section.

The mid-range also profits from cleaning up the bass area. The bloated bassline of the WH-1000XM3 blew into the lower mid-range, producing extra warmth in male voices and making the sound a boom. The mid-range WH-1000XM4 is even more stable in contrast. It’s not ahead, but it doesn’t go to the back of the mix, and basically, there’s a strong sense of balance all over the board.

Also See : 15 hot tech skills to get a job — Without Certification

Active noise cancellation on the headphones is excellent; standard home noises such as ceiling fans and air conditioners have been virtually blocked out, and the headset has also had a significant effect outdoors. The level of silence stopped short of being exaggerated and unsettling; rather than feeling like sitting in a vacuum, it felt more real and realistic. Importantly, this made a major change to my desire to immerse myself in and interact in music, with less distractions and less background noise. This, of course, even improved when viewing Reality shows and movies.

Sony WH-1000XM4 Battery Performance

Although the Sony WH-1000XM4 didn’t get a boost in battery life relative to their predecessors, they still delivered a significant 30-hour noise cancellation switched on and about 38-hour noise cancellation switched off.

30 hours would be enough for quite a few videos, several flights or days of regular use while at work. In addition, this time, there’s still fast charging. You will get around five hours of charge from a 10-minute top-up, according to Sony. It takes about three hours for a complete fee. Luckily, all this is going to happen via USB Type-C.

Also See : FAUG Game : Can it make space in our heart similar to PUBG?

When used in this worst-case scenario mode, the 25-hour battery life is not bad, but definitely not the 30-hours claimed and far more spectacular. Luckily, the headphones have a fast charging option that offers a 10-minute charging of around five hours of use. This feature works as expected, and I got about six hours of use in the same worst-case test situation as the 25-hour test figure from before, so thumbs up for that.

Conclusion

The last complaint is about the life of the cell. While not bad by any stretch, Sony ‘s goal fails a tremendous margin. Battery life is something that Sony’s headphones are usually excellent at, and I anticipated to see more in this respect. Not only do these headsets assert the same number as the previous generation edition, they also fall short of that goal.

It’s tempting to give the WH-1000XM4 a rough time because of their height. After all, many believe these to be the finest wireless headphones on the market, and they still cost just a penny. Although I would refuse to name them the best without making any comparisons with their rivals, I’m going to say that the WH-1000XM4 is a very, very fine pair of headphones and that you should actually buy them if noise-cancellation, wireless audio and sound quality are your goals in that order.

All of this makes the Sony WH-1000XM4 is the very best pair of wireless headphones you can purchase right now, with a long shot.

For the latest tech news and reviews, Follow TapaTap Review on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Originally published at https://www.tapatapreview.com on September 19, 2020.

[ruchikakamat]

Key Factors That Negatively Impact Employees Morale And Productivity

Employee morale is essentially a build-up of the attitude, satisfaction and overall outlook of employees during their association with an organization or a business. An employee that is satisfied and motivated at the workplace usually tend to have higher morale than their counterparts.

Employee engagement and employee satisfaction play an important role for employees to be happy in their workplace. On the contrary, employees who are not happy in their workplace, who constantly complain about the various attributes in an organization, like employee policies, workplace culture or facilities at work tend to have low employee morale. And this is quite evident in their behavior.

Satisfied employees are productive employees. It is expected from every effective leader or concerned organization to keep them that way. People who are engaged and enthusiastic at work are 21% more productive than those who are not, meaning that poor morale doesn’t just feel bad, it can also really affect the bottom line.

Employee morale and motivation are related but different. Morale reflects an employee’s attitude toward their work, while motivation is an energy that comes from inner space to satisfy the demands of the job. Motivation is drive and morale is a sentiment. Employers should be cognizant of the fact that there exists a synergy between the two. Maintaining this delicate balance is tricky but also important as they share a direct correlation and the absence of one is bound to affect the other.

Review the following factors that can directly impact morale to determine how you can best improve productivity within your organization:

1. GOAL CLARITY

It’s simple logic that people fail to meet productivity goals if they don’t even know what the expectations of them are. Yet only half of the employees say they know what’s expected of them at work. Make expectations for performance clear for every team member by providing specific, measurable markers of productivity, and check-in frequently to make sure employees stay on track. Many times, organizations themselves are unclear about their vision, values and processes. Therefore, they fail to communicate the purpose of the organization to employees.

For example, sometimes some start-ups skyrocket their way to success, because of their product or service and acumen of an able leader. However, they place less importance in drafting and establishing vision and company values as they see it as a time-consuming activity. What they fail to realize is that without value or vision in place it is difficult to draft clear goals for the people working for them. The employees will fail to see a purpose in their actions and feel left out from the bigger picture. Thus will lose the will to work as they are unable to see a link between actions, outcomes and efforts being rendered.

2. TEAM MANAGEMENT:

The level and type of supervision received by an employee have a tremendous influence on his morale. A high rate of employee turnover indicates that leadership is ineffective. On one hand, employees cannot survive in an overly supervised environment and on the other hand there also cannot be complete autonomy. Agreed, if employees are given the freedom to do the job, their morale will be high and nobody likes to be supervised all the time. But organizations must strive to strike a balance here! This is because too much intervention makes disheartens employees making them feel less confident about themselves. At the same time, little to none supervision may make them feel lost and they begin to feel the lack of growth and learning. In both cases, the employee quickly loses morale and loses motivation to perform at work. This increases the employee turnover thus affecting the profitability of the organization.

Also, nearly 1/3 of employees think their current boss is a bad manager, and nearly half have left a job because of a bad boss. That’s a huge problem for companies looking to retain their best employees. Poor leadership warrants low morale and allows unproductive employees to stagnate. At the same time, good employees become discouraged and stop giving good effort to their work. In sum, everyone suffers from poor team management and inefficient leadership. Some traits that are clear indicators of ineffective management are inadequate learning or growth opportunities, the inability of the manager to connect and get along with the team members, existence of polarizing personalities in the team or the inability of the manager to keep a growth mindset. Due to these factors, employee morale drops rapidly and they no longer feel enthusiastic about work. However, poor leadership is reversible. If you train your managers to be better people managers, this will have a positive impact on the performance of those around them. In short, good leaders inspire other good leaders. And that will have a trickle-down effect on employee morale and productivity.

3. EFFORT TO REWARD RATIO:

The effort to reward imbalance and over commitment among employees is prevalent in many organization and is a great contributor towards decreasing morale. Efforts at work is a part of an unsaid agreement between employer and employee. Efforts are supposed to be reciprocated with adequate rewards like compensation and benefits, opportunities, job security or even rewards. Failed reciprocity between efforts and rewards may lead to an imbalance and eventually deter the morale of a working employee.

The worker’s perception of past rewards and future opportunities for rewards affect their morale to a substantial extent. If the workers regard the rewards as fair and satisfactory, their morale will tend to be higher. Moreover, if the rewards and opportunities for the future tend to be bleak. Sometimes, employee efforts are not rewarded appropriately. For example, an employee working hard to earn a promotion might quickly lose morale of not receiving one year after year. Managers need to be sensitive to the efforts and expectations of employees and reward them appropriately. An employee working hard for a promotion cannot be rewarded with a vacation. There will be an expectation mismatch eventually, obliterating his/her morale and eventually affect the bottom-line.

Fortunately, managers can now keep tabs on employee growth and appreciate them regularly using platforms like Buzzz. It is an exceptional employee engagement platform that not only allows managers to reward employees but also records and tracks employee moods daily. This nudges managers to take action the moment they identify a dissatisfaction and address these issues, thus retaining their best talent.

4. PUBLIC IMAGE:

In today’s digital world, this factor affects employee morale even at the peer level – the organization itself. The organization influences the worker’s attitudes to their jobs. For Example, the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, in a paradigm-shifting, Covid-19 inspired move, told his employees that they can continue working from home “perpetually” of course while subjecting it to certain terms and conditions. The point being, a powerful move like that not only speaks volumes about the organization and leadership team but also makes the employees proud to be a part of such an organization. It enhances the public image of the company and makes employees proud of being part of such a culture. The public reputation of an organization may build-up employees attitudes towards the organization, for better or worse.

It may seem like a dramatic consequence of company reputation, but the damage is spread far and wide. When employees don’t agree with a particular action or the overall business conduct of the organization they work with, it affects their morale and the smallest incident could trigger a negative sentiment in them, thus making them actively disengaged. For example, a certain organization indulges in false marketing gimmicks or misrepresentation to sell a product. However, on consumption, the user feedback is a dissatisfied one as they fell for a honey trap. This activity may seem potentially harmless but has the potential to not just dent the company’s public image but also cause social embarrassment to the people working for it. Thus dragging down the morale of the company. It is the responsibility of the organization to maintain a good public reputation to manage this sentiment among employees.

Having a platform like Buzzz helps organizations convert company values into actionable behavious and offers an option for managers and peers to attain social recognition in demonstrating these values. This also makes it easier for employees to ensure that their efforts are aligned to the bigger picture and keeps them actively engaged. Keeping employees engaged is now simple with Buzzz >> click here for a demo!

[stompsite]

Sub-Machine Guns Are Literally The Worst And I Hate Them. Here Is Why.

“O, Sub Machine Gun, thou vile and treacherous thing. How darest thou darken my arsenal with thy loathesome form! What infidelity to righteousness! Do not tarry here!” ~ some poet, 1529

Look, here’s the fuckin deal: I have posted thousands of rants on twitter dot com, and it never occurred to me that I could just, I don’t know, post them here? Maybe people would enjoy them more as easily linked back-to articles? So here goes.

There’s this weird propensity for game developers, after developing a great game, to make a sequel and add SMGs to it. This is the stupidest thing any game developer has ever done, and I hate SMGs so much that I feel forcibly compelled to explain why that is.

Okay, so, first person shooters. When Doom was birthed, fully formed, from the heads of two guys named John and actually a bunch of other people with names like Adrian and Tom, it set in stone some basic ground rules for how first person shooters ought to be made, apparently. One of the basic ground rules was this: players get pistols, shotguns, some kind of automatic weapon, and a rocket launcher. This is something literally every first person shooter does, even when it shouldn’t. There’s also the BFG-9000 and the Plasma gun, but those are science fiction weapons, so not every shooter has ‘em in.

At some point, some genius ruined shooters by adding sniper rifles. What a horrible person.

Most other weapons have been gimmicks that no one else picked up, even when they were amazing, like Halo’s Needler, Half-Life’s Crossbow, and Turok’s Cerebral bore.

Only the pantheon remains consistent: pistol, shotgun, automatic rifle thing, and rocket launcher. Sometimes the rocket launcher gets swapped out for some other kind of ‘heavy’ weapon, but it’s pretty dang consistent.

So devs make the holy tr--quadrinity? quanity? idfk. Look, the point is, Devs do The Thing and then they make their shooters like it. Doesn’t matter how good or how bad, this is just what people do when making first person shooters. It’s a good thing, too. Pistol is “single shot gun,” shotgun is “inaccurate thing that fires multiple shots,” and rocket launcher is “single, slow-moving projectile that does splash damage.”

Then there’s the automatic weapon. It was a chain gun/gatling gun type deal in Doom, but in other games, it’s often some kind of fully automatic rifle, like an M-16 or AK-47. It is the easy gun, the gun for bad players, the gun where you pull down the trigger and lots of bullets come out and they’re tight enough to hit in the direction you’re pointing at and do damage, but inaccurate enough that someone will yawn “yes, it’s balanced,” and call it a day.

So far, so good. Not a great weapon type, but that’s okay, shotguns are already perfect, so nothing else can be.

(most people get shotguns wrong; I wrote an article about that)

The assault rifle is pretty boring, all things considered. It’s the gun that you use when you’re not in the fight to have an interesting time, just to get through the fight. You aim it, you pull the trigger, things die. It’s the optimum gun--there’s a reason the US Military doesn’t equip everyone with a shotgun/rocket launcher loadout, after all.

So here’s Johnny Game Dev, who’s made a successful first person shooter, and everyone loved it, and everyone’s happy, but now he’s got to make a sequel, and damned if he won’t add some kind of new gun to it. The problem is, he’s exhausted all his options. He’s got the pistol. He’s got the rifle. He’s got the shotgun. He’s got the rocket launcher. Maybe he’s got the sniper rifle too. Heck, maybe he’s even tossed in a grenade launcher and a plasma rifle.

What’s a game designer to do?

Johnny Game Dev invents the sub-machine gun.

Most guns classes are meaningfully differentiated from each other. That means your pistol doesn’t fire rockets like the rocket launcher (there are rocket-propelled bullets, but they obviously aren’t going to work like a regular rocket launcher would), and your automatic rifle isn’t going to fire pellets like a shotgun would. Each gun has a specific, meaningful utility.

You might have a shotgun that fires slug rounds, but it’s still fundamentally a shotgun in that it’s a burst weapon, something that does a lot of high damage at the expense of reduced magazine capacity. Your rocket launcher’s all about projectiles that do massive splash damage, but they move so slowly that enemies can’t dodge them, so you’ve got to be smart about where you place your rockets.

Every gun has utility. The assault rifle’s job is to put a lot of bullets downrange where one of them will probably hit something, but also to be fired in quick bursts when the player wants to be more accurate. It’s a weapon that fills two meaningful roles.

The SMG is dumb.

In real life, SMGs are meant to do the same thing that assault rifles do, but in a more compact form. You don’t want cops carrying big, unwieldy rifles in urban environments; you want something that does the same bullet spray thing, but in a smaller package. This often comes at the expense of accuracy, because the weapons are short and the cartridges carry less propellant (I think that’s the right term?). A longer weapon with faster bullets is going to be more accurate than a shorter weapon with slower bullets.

This isn’t meant to be an in-depth explanation of how guns work, just a primer for explaining SMGs so we can get to the video games part. Anywho, lots of companies like KRISS (Vector) and FN (P90, which is a PDW and may not be considered an SMG, but whatever, it’s 2:28 AM), are working on making more accurate, heavy-hitting, but compact weapons. It’s a whole thing.

In games, the SMG behaves exactly like the assault rifle. Of course, devs realize that there has to be some difference, so they make SMGs inaccurate, kinda like real life. Devs often take liberties with how guns should perform; pistols are REALLY accurate, but Shotguns have almost NO range. Totally not like real life at all, but whatever.

SMGs generally have a simple balance thing: faster fire rate, lower accuracy. Okay, cool, that’s a reasonable thing to do, but that lack of accuracy means they’re often nowhere near as effective as shotguns. They lack that sort of “dual role” of an AR, because you can’t meaningfully burst-fire them for increased accuracy. 

So it’s weird when a game makes an entire class of weapons around what’s basically, functionally, a less-satisfying (unless you’re up close in PVE) subcategory of ARs, and less effective than a shotgun.

Consider Destiny, which had two basic archetypes of auto rifle; there was the super fast bullet hose, which had high ROF and high mag size but low damage, and the slower, heavier AR, which had low ROF and low mag size but high damage. These complemented each other well; you picked what you liked based on how it felt to use.

The SMG doesn’t really fit in. It finds some utility in close range encounters, but in Destiny, most of your encounters are more likely to be mid range, now that shotguns are never useful at all, and melee abilities take like six times as long to recharge. It’s just an auto rifle, but, uh, less good than the auto rifle. The auto rifle is going to resolve almost all fights better than the SMG.

Destiny did the same thing with pistols. Hand cannons were great. Then they added sidearms, which are just weak hand cannons, so they offset that weakness with bigger magazine sizes. The functional role hasn’t changed--sidearms BEHAVE like pistols, and make players BEHAVE the same way, they just make players click more times to perform the same task.

That’s the problem with SMGs and sidearms and other “slight tweaks on a formula” weapons: they don’t change how you play. Ideally, each gun in a shooter should make you behave differently.

In G1, we have very clear, broad archetypes. We have shotguns, which are gonna be these big high-damage burst-fire weapons. We have our handguns, which are high-damage single-shot weapons. On and on it goes. The idea is, each major gun family encourages players to behave in different ways. The grenade launchers and rocket launchers fit within the same class, even if they behave a bit differently (arcing projectile vs accelerated projectile). 

This lets us work out the basics of how the gun’s primary fire mode is gonna work. We can be as flexible with this as we’d like with the secondary fire. This is fundamentally about a gun’s visuals communicating how it works to the player immediately and sorting them in the inventory. If you get a shotgun, you’ll play it like you would a shotgun, even if, idfk, our secondary fire is a machine gun (tho I’m trying to keep most of ‘em more exotic than that).

That’s my thought process.

Basically, a lot of guns that are very close together so as to be indistinguishable... shouldn’t. Better to have 10 radically different guns than a bunch of archetypes that are only kinda different from each other. Put the SMGs and the auto-rifles all in one class and make ‘em different archetypes. Clearly define their roles so there’s no pointless overlap with other weapon classes. Make ‘em worth using, instead of just being crappier auto rifles that are outclassed by those and assault rifles.

[truemedian]

The Morning After: Are dual-screen laptops a gimmick or the next big thing?

Which is exactly what you wanted, right?Facebook's $149 Portal TV turns your television into a giant smart display

The second time around, Facebook's Portal devices look more like picture frames than smart displays. The 2019 Portal has a 10-inch HD display (1,280 x 800), while the Portal Mini has an 8-inch HD display (also 1,280 x 800). The Portal and Portal Mini are standalone smart displays that retail for $179 and $129, respectively.Take your multiroom audio system outside.Sonos Move review

The Move is the first Sonos with Bluetooth and is ready to work just about anywhere you want to put it. It brings a rugged weather-resistant design, good battery life and good sound quality, but at its $399 price, there are other options that sound even better.The 14-inch ScreenPad Plus acts like a monitor.ZenBook Pro Duo review: ASUS makes a case for dual-screen laptops

It's not for everyone, but if you're a productivity hound used to working across multiple displays on desktops, the ZenBook Pro Duo could be the laptop that satisfies you.Going from game to social network with one new feature.Fortnite's new 'Party Hub' feature gives mobile players a voice

Party Hub is an all-new cross-platform voice-chat app that lets Fortnite players socialize even when they're not playing the game. It's based on technology from Houseparty, the group video chat app that Epic Games acquired in June.The company explains why this electrified car doesn't use a typical battery.Lamborghini's hybrid Sian is a supercar with a supercapacitor

According to Lamborghini CTO Maurizio Reggiani, the Sian's supercapacitor offers three times the power of a battery pack from the same weight and packaging, while also storing and discharging energy much quicker. The spent power can be fully regenerated very quickly during normal braking. Plus, the supercapacitor doesn't have to cool down like a traditional battery, it's just ready to go at all times with 819 horsepower -- which is exactly what Lamborghini owners want.The iPhone 11 Pro comes with the same amount of RAM and a 3,046 mAh battery.The iPhone 11 Pro Max has 23 percent more battery capacity than the Pro

Documents Apple filed with Chinese regulatory agency, TENAA, confirm more details than the company gives up on its own. Specifically, they indicate the iPhone 11 Pro Max comes with a 3,969 mAh battery -- 800 mAh more than last year's iPhone XS Max -- and 4GB of RAM.That explains why Apple claims the Pro Max model can last up to five hours longer than the iPhone XS Max. We'll get final specs when the phone is released and folks like iFixit tear one apart, but these numbers explain the long battery life noted in our iPhone 11 Pro review.The Taptic Engine alone accounts for one-quarter of the rare earth metals used to make an iPhone.Apple will use recycled rare earth metals in the iPhone's Taptic EngineThe Taptic Engine is the tiny actuator that generates the iPhone's haptic feedback -- like the faux home button 'click' in iPhone 7 and subsequent vibrational feedback in the series. According to Reuters, the Taptic Engine accounts for about a quarter of the rare earth metals used in the manufacturing of a single iPhone.The company will source the recycled materials from an outside supplier, but Apple adds that it's also working on a way to use robots to recover rare earth metals. Besides the environmental benefits, the move could help Apple weather a potential supply shortage. China currently mines 80 percent of the world's supply of rare-earth metals, and the country has threatened to limit these exports to the US if the trade war between the two countries continues to escalate. Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, said that it was a happy coincidence where "what was good for the planet is really good for business at the same time."The fuel cell-powered Hyundai Nexo also qualified.Tesla's Model 3 joins Audi's E-Tron in claiming top safety award

The Tesla Model 3 has joined the Audi E-Tron as one of the safest cars on the road, earning a Top Safety Pick+ award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). The organization said that the Model 3 earned "good" ratings across the board for tricky accidents like driver- and passenger-side "small overlap front" crashes (below). It also did well to avoid collisions in the first place during 12 mph and 25 mph track tests.In a statement, chief IIHS research officer David Zuby said that when it comes to EVs and fuel cell vehicles: "There's no need to trade away safety for a lower carbon footprint when choosing a vehicle."But wait, there's more...What we've been watching: 'Another Life' Intrigue at the Nurburgring as Tesla unofficially beats Porsche's fastest lap Amazon rolls out a cash payment option for online orders in the US Fossil's latest hybrid watch is likely powered by Wear OS Xfinity internet-only customers now get the Flex streaming platform for free Oppo's next phone can be fully charged in just 30 minutes Huge leak spoils Huawei's Mate 30 eventThe Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you'll miss if you don't Subscribe.Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note. In this article: av, entertainment, gadgetry, gadgets, gaming, gear, home, internet, mobile, personal computing, personalcomputing, themorningafter, tomorrow, transportation, wearables All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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[martechadvisor-blog]

Transforming ‘Content Marketing’ to ‘Content Experiences’: 3 insights for Marketers

What are the 3 things CMOs need to know to transform their content marketing efforts into a content experience strategy? Randy Frisch: Co-Founder, CMO, and President of Uberflip; and drinker of their own (content-experience) champagne shares insights based on hundreds of conversations with CMOs about ‘the new CX’.

Marketers – aka MTA readers - have been showing a voracious appetite for all content related content…and it’s no surprise either. Some estimates put the budget spent directly or indirectly on content creation/management/ distribution/ analytics at 30% of the marketing budget. And most all players- B2B and B2C – have plans to increase that in 2019. This is because, in the DIY economy, customers – aka ‘all of us’ -   prefer to use publicly-available content to ‘inform themselves’ about proposed purchases before we actually choose the vendors we want to talk to. This choice is based on the credibility, engagement, experience, and excitement they are able to build during the consideration phase, through; most dominantly, content.

There are many ways to get the content right, and yet, most marketers will end up falling into one of these content marketing traps:

Creating content without compelling insight into the audience who will consume it

Not focusing content on the ‘problem the prospect is seeking to solve’ but to say the things they want prospects to hear

Creating content but not making it accessible to touchpoints where customers can access, including Salespeople (especially true in B2B situations)

Creating too much content instead of intelligently amplifying some content

Not basing content strategy on data, not knowing the right performance metrics to focus ons

Not connecting content outcomes to business outcomes… the list goes on.  

It is no surprise that CMOs are frustrated with Content – can’t live without it, don’t know how to elevate it to a more strategic tool – but going to spend more on it anyway.

So when we decided to focus on content experiences as a strategic CMO imperative for 2019, who better to share some key lessons than Randy Frisch: Co-Founder, CMO, and President of Uberflip. A company that has been relentlessly championing the cause of Content Experience; and of course; precisely because of that, a company that needs to put their own content experiences where their mouth is.

Randy confirms our initial understanding: when embarking on content marketing, the first thing marketers do, is go and create a bunch of content. Or they curate a bunch of content. As Randy puts it, “CMOs jumped in hard on the “idea” of content marketing 5–10 years ago. But the “idea” got a bit confused along the way. Many organizations believed if they simply created content, people would come. You know like Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams” …if you (create) it they will (buy). Fast forward to recent years, **CMOs have realized that creating content isn’t the key to winning - it’s aligning content to the needs of an audience at specific stages of the buyer journey**. Randy reminds us of the SiriusDecisions report that found 80 percent of content created goes unused. So, what lies beyond content creation – no matter how great that content may be? “In some ways, marketers are realizing that if content marketing is heavily focused on creation, content experience and content distribution are the real keys to driving engagement.”

Here are 3 Content Experience insights we distilled from our conversation with Randy.

Lesson 1: Content Marketing is not Content Experience

If content experience is distinct from content marketing, what does “content experience” entail?

“We’re all obsessed with better experiences. We cut our cables for Netflix because it delivered a better recommendation experience; we switched from Walmart to Amazon for the experience; and we buy the most tedious furniture to build from Ikea because they display it in an amazing in-store environment. The same reasons that these customer experiences win are the reasons a content experience will help you win or lose. **We are all delivering a content experience—even if we haven’t focused on it. The question is whether we’re delivering one that embraces or turns away our customers**.”

Randy specifies 3 core components of Content experience, that make a strategic distinction from content marketing (which focuses on content creation and distribution aspects):

The environment in which we serve our content

The structure in which we organize it

The way we compel people to engage through elements like personalization  

No marketer wants to wait around passively hoping their content gets discovered or hits the right mark at the right time for the right prospect. **Following the Content Experience approach helps put more control back in the hands of the marketer than the content marketing approach; while also focusing on the Brand experience rather than our own marketing objectives.**

As Randy says, “We need to lead with the stuff that keeps marketers up at night, not the stuff we want to sell. For a while, our team was always trying to sell by leading with content experience. Then one day I told a bad joke: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a noise?” Debatable, right? “Well, if we’re not around, do people talk about content experience?” Again, debatable. We had to lead with the items keeping our audience up at night (for us, topics like demand generation, inbound, ABM and sales enablement) and Trojan horse in our mission (that content experience could help). The same idea applies to all marketers. Make sure the stories you tell speak to the items that people talk about when you’re not around.”  

Storytelling is still the key element of content marketing. Memorable experiences are not about the gimmicks- they are about relevance and context. Randy enriches that by making a distinction between the experience needed to win a considered purchase (whether high-value B2B or even high-involvement B2C verticals like financial, education and automotive) versus content for low-consideration purchases, “where the content is important, but it’s more about building brand loyalty out of the gate, so people continue to buy time and time again—think Coke vs. Pepsi.”

Lesson 2: Content Discovery is not (just) about the first click

Popular wisdom says Search Optimization is a crucial component of successful content discovery. What should marketers know about content discovery that they don’t do enough of today? Randy says it depends on the stage of the journey you are building the experience for. “Google has gotten a lot smarter than you. If you’re looking for best practices, look to experts like Moz or other platforms and agencies that can help you optimize for the top of the funnel. But, even at the top of the funnel, it is worth remembering that discoverability has evolved. “There used to be a funny joke that the best place to hide something was on page two of Google results. Well that’s an old joke because now we speak to a Google Home and instantly trust the first result as authority. Our ability to search and rank content will become more important than ever. Whether on Google search or what people expect when they land on your home page, we have come to expect that you (the brand) know what I (the buyer) want.

But once you’ve captured someone, then what? That’s the big question. Most of us are obsessed with the first click. But to me, true content discovery happens once you’re found.

It’s so easy for people to click back to Google results after the first piece you serve. It’s the same on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. The challenge is to keep someone engaged. On average, it takes seeing seven assets before someone is ready to buy, according to IDC. So, build content journeys that can accelerate sales velocity. That is true discovery!”

Lesson 3: It’s not about the tech, it’s about the 2 P’s: people & processes

This one is not much of a surprise to us, in spite of being a martech-focused publication. Undoubtedly, tech helps drive consistency, accessibility, personalization – at scale. But the correct path, as Randy confirms, in spite of being from a martech platform himself, is people>process>technology.

Buying tech should be the last thing you do. The first is invest in great people—talent trumps all!

Once you have great people, implement sound processes and frameworks for the strategies that will be key to your success. Then, once you see the horizon where those people and the processes won’t scale, introduce tech that takes it to the next level. One of our customers, Snowflake, took this approach when they were delivering streams of hand-picked content to target accounts. Daniel Day, Snowflake’s ABM Director, first built a kickass team, hacking away at a template that worked for the first 12 or so accounts he wanted to target. When Daniel’s concept caught fire, and his execs asked him to deliver the same experience to 300 accounts per quarter, he needed to invest in a content experience platform. That’s when he turned to Uberflip for a framework that could manage content at scale.”

Speaking of scale, AI in content creation and distribution is a hot topic right now. A simplified view of AI, Randy says, is asking how we as marketers can leverage all the data we have (on visitors and campaigns) to deliver a better experience. “When we get into AI, we’re really talking about taking that data when it reaches scale to make split-second decisions and recommendations. But marketers still need to inform those recommendations – a content experience platform should allow a marketer to organize content and inject other ingredients like third-party intent data (at Uberflip we have a partnership with Bombora for this) to deliver the right content at the right time.” 

Involving the right subject matter experts while creating content, and making the content available to the right stakeholders are two additional aspects of internal engagement that will help transform content marketing to content experience. “Great content is all about adding or revealing value. The tricky part is making sure your sales teams can find the right content to serve to your audience”. That is yet another trap marketers’ fall into - investing disproportionately in content being ‘discovered’ by prospects but ignoring how internal stakeholders and other customer touchpoints will find/ use the content they need to serve customers ‘in the moment’. This is even more relevant in the omnichannel environment customers operate in today.

As is the tradition for MarTech Musings - I wrap by asking Randy what trends he was tracking in the space as we head into 2020 and beyond. The themes he is tracking prove just how central to marketing he views content experience. “We’re in a world where we expect a balance of personalization, but also privacy. The trick will be to personalize without being creepy about it. After a year of marketers scrambling to become GDPR-compliant, there’s going to be an ongoing threat to our ability to personalize unless we find ways to show that we can be trusted to turn that data into a relevant experience. Or perhaps I finish with a play on the late Stan Lee’s Spiderman line: “With great data comes great personalization.” 

  More about Randy

Randy has defined and led the content experience movement, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and focus on the experience. He also hosts Conex: The Content Experience Show podcast; was named one of the Top 50 Fearless Marketers in the world by Marketo, and is the author of the upcoming book, F#*k Content Marketing (yeah, he swears sometimes).

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor