Making Shifts Toward Voice Activated Experiences

An article published on Adweek titled Hearst is Launching a 10-Person Team Tasked With Building Voice-Activated Experiences, focuses on voice controlled technology which relates to artificial intelligence. I thought this article was really interesting because it’s something we discussed in class, highlighting how this is becoming an important topic today. This 10-person group called the Native and Emerging Technologies (NET) is specifically looking at voice-activated devices. As technology changes so does content and how consumers interact with the devices and content. “We’re looking at this new wave of natural language interfaces as being a great source of content discovery and content interaction,” said Phil Wiser, Hearst’s chief technology officer. “We find all of that to be increasingly important as a way to engage consumers (Johnson).” As voice controlled technology becomes more and more popular many companies will be heading in the same direction to reach consumers. “The underlying theme in a lot of these areas links back to artificial intelligence, which from a corporate standpoint is an area that we’re doing quite a bit of work right now on machine learning, we’re bringing that to life through some of these applications on these new devices” (Johnson).  Part of changing these technologies also means the content will need to be changed as well, something that consumers can easily use and understand. “As Wiser explained it, the team first aggregates audience data that can then be picked apart to create bits of content as well as personalized ads for new devices. In a lot of cases, that means cutting down Heart’s trove of service-based content down to the bare minimum needed to answer a simple audio question (Johnson).” I deem this article to be important because as technology is progressing, the way companies reach consumers will also change. They will start targeting consumers in other ways, using content that fits the devices. AI has become a major discussion in many industries and it’s fascinating to understand how companies are aware and taking action to keep up with these new innovations.

 
Link to article:

http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/hearst-launching-10-person-team-tasked-building-voice-activated-experiences-174892

Below is a video of the Amazon Echo and how the voice control works.

Marketers Can Easily Track and Tag Social Campaigns

An article published on Adweek titled, Adobe Is Now Letting Marketers Tag and Track Social Campaigns Bring real-time analysis to organic content discusses a new feature where marketers can examine and track content across the internet. What is really interesting about this article is the discussion of how content is changing on social channels. Heidi Besik, group product marketing manager for Adobe Social said, “A lot of it is coming from the fact that we’re seeing through this convergence of social and content marketing happing within marketing as a whole. Where content is becoming key to the social channel and there’s greater demand for high-quality content and figuring out how do you create more engaging content to break through the noise and keep the noise of your brand (Swant).” Adobe has used campaign ID tagging for a while but the new updates allow for a closer look into how content is performing. This is also the next step in automating analytics so tracking this information won’t require as much effort. Brands can create custom metrics across channels to see what works for them in terms of an engagement rates. This feature is important for marketers because they can easily track what’s working on these social channels and what isn’t. It’s another step towards improving technology. As internet users, this is a perk for us when receiving content on social channels. Marketers will be able to target users for efficiently and cut back on clutter.

 

The video below explains how tagging and tacking actually work.

 

Link to article on Adweek: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/adobe-now-letting-marketers-tag-and-track-social-campaigns-174494

Google Map Project 2

Facebook’s Ad Targeting is Under Investigation

An article on AdWeek titled Facebook’s Ad Targeting Is Under Scrutiny About Whether It Allows Discrimination focus on Facebook’s ad targeting preferences and the options that brands can select when targeting ads to specific audiences. I find it extremely interesting because Facebook is used to target so many people based off location and even based off what you search. Facebook has an ad targeting option called “ethnic affinity” where the publication reports advertisers can choose to exclude users with specific races from seeing ads. ProPublica suggested that its illegal is discriminate ads based on ethnicity alone. It’s important to note when brands target ads toward specific audiences it’s not necessarily discriminating because they have a specific audience in mind. Christian Martinez, Facebook’s head of multicultural responded with, “That merchant also many want to exclude other ethnicities for whom their care products are not relevant- this is a process known in the ad industry as “exclusion targeting”. This prevents audiences for the community-specific ads from seeing a generic ad targeted to a large group and helps avoid offensive outcome that traditional advertising can often create for people in the minority (AdWeek Johnson).” For instance, I wouldn’t want to see hair products designed for black women on my news feed. I already get bombarded with ads consistently so if it’s irrelevant to me specifically I would rather the ad not be targeted toward me. This can go for any product of service. The reason I deem this article so important is because social media, specifically Facebook, has become a huge platform for advertising and I think we will be seeing more articles along the lines of this one.

BuzzFeed Aims to Cover Election Night

As election night comes closer and closer I thought it would be appropriate to discuss how the election is changing tech for many companies. An article titled BuzzFeed to Live Stream Election Night Coverage on Twitter discusses Twitter and BuzzFeeds role during the election process and they are working together for ad revenue. Twitter will sell ad packages for the election coverage, offering mid-roll spots, as well as sponsorship opportunities for original news clips produced by BuzzFeed. Twitter and BuzzFeed will share ad revenue. BuzzFeed has recently been making changes to it’s technology by separating news content and entertainment completely and putting more emphasize on news clips. I think this is a great time to start making this transition because the election has high media coverage. “For its part, Twitter has been actively striking deals with media partners to beef up its live content. Its live streams of the presidential debates have surpassed those of its NFL games. Sunday's town-hall brawl between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump averaged 369,000 viewers per minute, up 7% from 344,000 viewers during the first debate, according to Twitter (Poggi).” This is the perfect opportunity for BuzzFeed to compete with traditional TV news and really put emphasize on news content. “This comes as BuzzFeed attempts to step up its game in news video, an area that traditionally hasn't been one of its strengths (Poggi).”

The video below is an example of BuzzFeeds attempt to put emphasize on news content.  

Snapchat Makes it Easy for Millennials to Vote

I'd like to focus this week’s blog post on the 2016 presidential election. However, the focus isn't on the candidates themselves but on the importance of who is voting. An article on Adweek titled Snapchat Wants to Help Register Users to Vote in November focuses on a strategy to get millennials to the polls in November. What I find so interesting about this strategy is the use of a social media app to promote voter registration. This technology update may be a smart way to reach young voters but the content needs to be engaging. "The ads, which feature celebrities including Jared Leto, Ciara, Ryan Seacrest, Jimmy Fallon, and Dwayne Johnson, encourage U.S. adults to vote in their national, state and location elections (Swant)." Snapchat has become a very powerful way to reach a younger audience. We have seen this from many advertisers and companies that use Snapchat as a platform for advertising.

Yet, is Snapchat a powerful enough platform to get millennials to vote? From personal experience and being a millennial myself I believe that using celebrities could be beneficial but it's really going to be what the celebrities say in terms of content that will get millennials to vote. They will need to relate to the younger generation when convincing us to go and vote, and provide us with an easy way to register. "The snaps themselves can't help would-be voters go quite all the way, but they will direct people to a mobile website to go through the rest of the process (Swant)." According to many statistics, for many years there haven’t been a lot of young voters. “Back in 2010, the last midterm election fewer than a quarter of voters ages 18 to 29 showed up to the polls (Seipel).” We have seen a lot of coverage for this year’s election and I think that alone plus the candidates is going to get more millennials to the polls. Snapchat is powerful platform but so are the candidates, so it will be interesting to see the voter turnout for the 2016 election.

This YouTube video provides instructions on how to register to vote using Snapchat.

Being Mobile Friendly

An article on Social Media Today titled Google to SEOs: Time to AMP Up discussed the importance of being mobile friendly. Google is consistently coming out with new updates, and this deals with the mobile web pages how quickly they load on a mobile device. You will need to do this update ASAP if you want your pages to rank organically in 2016.

This technology advancement involves speed so unnecessary page scripts and server calls don't break the user experience. “It effectively closed the unrestricted playground that web developers have enjoyed- often at great cost to the under experience- for decades (Baldwin). The article points to the importance of SEOs being aware of the new format and it should be a top priority.

I found this article very interesting because I was able to handle work that would involve this new update. For instance, over the summer when I was doing my internship abroad I was working very closely with our SEO manager and when we were helping build the content on a website we realized the importance of being mobile friendly when it comes to the content and document of a web page. “Content marketers have shown a great interest in the technology because Google has indicated in the past year that AMP-optimized pages will receive preferential rankings on SERPs. Additionally, such pages will obtain greater reach for the publishers because they will be selected for display more often and travel much better on bandwidth-constrained networks (Baldwin).”

Below is a Youtube video that explains the relationship between SEO and AMP.