#WhatsApp Echo Bot

[sinchwhatsapp]

Streamlining Operations and Increasing Efficiency: Optimizing Business Processes with WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp Business application and Business API have proven to be game-changers for diverse types of companies. This innovative communication channel paves the way for intimate and effective customer-business interactions. You can use WhatsApp Echo Bot, Quick Replies, Digital Catalogs and various other features and innovations to simplify and optimize your business processes.

Use digital catalogs

WhatsApp allows you to create and share digital catalogs of your services and products directly through the messaging app. These catalogs can act as virtual storefront where customers can browse your offerings at leisure. You may use images, descriptions, process and product codes for each item in your catalog, to provide an engaging shopping experience to the customers at their fingertips.

Provide customer support

Use of Whatsapp Cloud API and chatbot are among the best ways to deliver prompt customer service today. AI enabled WhatsApp chatbots can handle a variety of routine inquiries and tasks around the clock and provide immediate responses to the customers, thereby improving customer service and satisfactions. These bots can help users track orders and schedule appointments, answer their product related queries and more, thereby lowering the workload of your  customer service team.

Share Content via the Status Feature

The WhatsApp Status feature permits you to communicate updates, promotions, and behind-the-scenes content with your audience in a engaging format. Through text, photos, videos, and GIFs, you get the ability to craft interesting stories. As the Status updates vanish after 24 hours, they instill a sense of urgency, prompting customers to engage promptly with your content. This feature proves useful when you aim to swiftly share updates with a broader audience in a visually appealing manner.

Develop creative marketing campaigns

WhatsApp Integration would be a good way to develop creative marketing campaigns. With its assistance, you can share exclusive discount codes, organize contents, or even conduct surveys to keep the customers engaged. You may even use the broadcast feature for the purpose of sending out personalized promotional messages to a segmented contact list.

[zockainternet]

Nesse passo a passo estarei mostrando um exemplo de como integrar um chat bot GPT-3 que é uma API da OPENAI, que criou o ChatGPT.   Integrando Chat GPT com WhatsApp Para fazer esse procedimento estou usando um servidor com Debian (mas já testei o funcionamento com ubuntu 18...). A integração está sendo feita com: node.js venom-bot api da openai OBS IMPORTANTE: Nos testes que realizei, criei um servidor apenas para essa finalidade, se você não tiver conhecimento técnico suficiente para entender o que está sendo feito, sugiro que instale em uma maquina virtual. Neste exemplo, estou utilizando usuário "root" para fazer todo procedimento.   Instalando o node.js e atualizando o servidor Vamos começar atualizando o sistema e instalando node.js no servidor: sudo apt-get update -y && apt-get upgrade -y curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_current.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get update sudo apt install nodejs -y Depois disso, vamos instalar as dependências no servidor: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install -y gconf-service libasound2 libatk1.0-0 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgcc1 libgconf-2-4 libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 ca-certificates fonts-liberation libappindicator1 libnss3 lsb-release xdg-utils wget libgbm-dev Após a instalações dessas bibliotecas, considere reiniciar o servidor. Prosseguindo, agora vamos instalar o venom-bot que será responsavel por conectar o chatbot ao WhatsApp: cd /root mkdir chatbot-whatsapp cd chatbot-whatsapp touch index.js npm i venom-bot No arquivo index, você vai colocar esse código: const venom = require('venom-bot'); venom .create() .then((client) => start(client)); function start(client) client.onMessage((message) => if (message.body === 'Olá' ); Agora teste o funcionamento e veja se o chatbot está funcionando digitando esse comando abaixo no terminal do servidor: node index.js Se estiver tudo certo, será exibido um QRCode para você autorizar o navegador dessa aplicação a usar o seu WhatsApp [caption id="attachment_1011" align="alignnone" width="300"] Exemplo de QRCode do chatbot[/caption] Depois disso, poderá testar digitando um "Olá" ou "Oi" para o WhatsApp conectado ao chatbot. E ele deverá responder pra você "Estou pronto!" [caption id="attachment_1012" align="alignnone" width="300"] Exemplo de resposta do chatbot[/caption] Se até essa etapa está tudo ok, podemos prosseguir.   Instalando a API do OPenAI e integrando com WhatsApp Agora vamos para integração com a api do openai, vamos fazer a integração do gpt-3 com o WhatsApp Para isso, vamos instalar a api do openai: cd /root/chatbot-whatsapp npm i openai Deverá criar um arquivo chamado ".env" com suas credenciais de acesso do openai (organização e api de acesso). OBS IMPORTANTE: é necessário se cadastrar no site da openai.com Depois disso poderá adquirir as informações nos seguintes links: OPENAI_API_KEY=https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys ORGANIZATION_ID=https://platform.openai.com/account/org-settings Já o "PHONE_NUMBER=" é o numero do WhatsApp que você vai colocar no qrcode. touch .env echo "OPENAI_API_KEY=COLEAQUISUAAPI" >> /root/chatbot-whatsapp/.env echo "ORGANIZATION_ID=COLEAQUISUAORGANIZACAO" >> /root/chatbot-whatsapp/.env echo "PHONE_NUMBER=5511998765432@c.us" >> /root/chatbot-whatsapp/.env Agora você pode substituir o código do arquivo index, ou criar um novo arquivo para testar, neste exemplo estou criando um novo arquivo: touch gpt.js E deverá colocar o seguinte código nele: const venom = require('venom-bot'); const dotenv = require('dotenv'); const Configuration, OpenAIApi = requ

ire("openai"); dotenv.config(); venom.create( session: 'bot-whatsapp', multidevice: true ) .then((client) => start(client)) .catch((error) => console.log(error); ); const configuration = new Configuration( organization: process.env.ORGANIZATION_ID, apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY, ); const openai = new OpenAIApi(configuration); const getGPT3Response = async (clientText) => const options = model: "text-davinci-003", prompt: clientText, temperature: 1, max_tokens: 4000 try const response = await openai.createCompletion(options) let botResponse = "" response.data.choices.forEach(( text ) => botResponse += text ) return `Chat GPT ??\n\n $botResponse.trim()` catch (e) return `? OpenAI Response Error: $e.response.data.error.message` const commands = (client, message) => const iaCommands = davinci3: "/bot", let firstWord = message.text.substring(0, message.text.indexOf(" ")); switch (firstWord) case iaCommands.davinci3: const question = message.text.substring(message.text.indexOf(" ")); getGPT3Response(question).then((response) => /* * Faremos uma validação no message.from * para caso a gente envie um comando * a response não seja enviada para * nosso próprio número e sim para * a pessoa ou grupo para o qual eu enviei */ client.sendText(message.from === process.env.PHONE_NUMBER ? message.to : message.from, response) ) break; async function start(client) client.onAnyMessage((message) => commands(client, message)); Agora teste o funcionamento e veja se a integração está funcionando digitando esse comando abaixo no terminal do servidor: node gpt.js Se estiver tudo certo, será exibido um QRCode para você autorizar o navegador dessa aplicação a usar o seu WhatsApp Depois disso, poderá testar digitando qualquer frase ou pergunta iniciando por "/bot" Então o bot vai responder você com a inteligência artificial configurada no código do arquivo gpt.js [caption id="attachment_1014" align="alignnone" width="300"] Resposta do chat gpt-3[/caption] Bom é isso, espero que esse passo a passo ajude você. Reiterando que utilizei um servidor somente para essa finalidade, ou seja, para fins de testes. Referencias para publicação desse passo a passo: https://github.com/victorharry/zap-gpt https://platform.openai.com https://github.com/orkestral/venom

[deepdonutkid]

Social media and the Shelby Family

Let’s go from youngest to oldest…

Finn, as said in the first part, is an influencer, who likes to live his life online. He tweets a lot, he has a ton of insta stories and likes to keep his followers updated. Also he follows some trends like trying bubble tee or these weird tik tok dances. Finn even bribed his brothers to try some with him. They refused of course. Tommy said a no and walk right out of the room. John laughed and brushed it off. Arthur tried, but failed hilariously. Good for him, that Finn was teaching him the steps and not filmed the miserable attempt.   Michael did and was actually good… and Ada did quite okay. Well, Polly wasn’t even asked, because Finn already knew her answer was no.

A lot of his pictures online are with his friends, especially Jesaja.  They skate sometimes and film their tricks. (I added this, because I saw a video of Finn’s Actor- Harry Kirton- skating and I thought it also fit Finn) Whenever he is eating something instagramable, he definitely take a picture. Finn also take good selfies, but he only uses funny filters. So no Dog ears or sparkly flowers here!

He answers messages mostly direct, no waiting time, ‘cus this guy doesn’t play games, but as a Gen Z he would definitely be scared of phone calls. Especially if it’s Polly and there are already two missed calls. Then he just freaks out right away.

And to add a little funny extra: Finn tried among us on his phone and he is kinda sus!

His Whatsapp status would be: “my milkshake brings all the bees to my car. Shit… there are bees in my car!”

-.-.-.-.-

Michael is king of selfie. He knows he looks like god’s gift to the women and he plays that card. His phone is filled with all kinds of selfies. Little narcissist, here! Well, he needs to take a picture from every ankle to capture his beauty.

He also posts some stories on insta, but not so often like Finn. Michael keeps it casual. Just a few party pictures with friends or something super cool like new car.  

But as we all know Michael Gray, he likes to play games with da ladies. So sometimes you wouldn’t even get a goodnight from him. If you tease him, he’ll tease back. Probably posts a picture with another woman. She is just a friend, but you’ll not know that. Yes, he can be mean, but if you’ll call him drunk and late at night, that you miss him, he’ll be glad to hear that.

His status would be: “P1 cleaner than your church shoes.” And yes, this is a weeknd lyric from the song starboy

-.-.-.-.-.-

Ada. Yes. I almost forgot her. How could I? She is gorgeous!

Already mentioned in part one… She knows her stuff pretty well. Technology… no problem for this gal right here. Ada can hack into stuff and write codes and programs, but this also made her very aware of data getting misused or stolen from bots. This is why she chose to keep distance from social media. She doesn’t use the gram or snapchat or whatsoever, but she uses secure text messenger and is likely to be found on a super dank meme page and to understand the memes you need the knowledge of years and years internet culture. And Ada talks to Finn and Michael about unprotected data and how they shouldn’t spill so much information about them online.  

But she takes a lot of pictures from her kids, her husband, her cute outfits, her house and garden, their vacations. She doesn’t use a normal cloud and prefers to show you the pictures together. One after one and she’s making a comment to every single one of them. About that she could talk for hours.

Her status would be… well, she wouldn’t have any!

-.-.-.-.-.-

So… John-boy! Here isn’t much to say. He uses Instagram, but it’s a rare thing. John might follow some artist, so he is up to date for new concerts to go to and also some friends, but that’s it. On a good day which happens to be every half year he might post a picture, when he went somewhere. To get a new tattoo or if he went to see a game, probably soccer and rugby. If he gets the chance to travel, he’ll make pictures, but he totally forgets to post them or even show them to his family. He prefers to talk with his brothers about the experience of traveling and not starting a slide show.

What he is talking pictures of? Selfies are rare, but do happen, if they are a special request from a gal… and it’s probably shirtless, ‘cus he has got the body.  Then again, he took pictures, if he was abroad, not on the usual roads, but only a few. While texting he might send a funny meme, if he sees any and thinks of you. And the occasional picture of “Look what I just got”… and it’s a Vinyl or a band shirt. Even though, he answers his family rarely, when he is in Birmingham, he’d be texting with his lady a lot, having this grin on his face, while Ada asks who he is writing to.

His status would be something like: “punk in drublic.” Which is a festival for said genre, but he just finds it funny. Likely to add “Y/N with an emoji of choice”, when he is in a relationship.

-.-.-.-.-.-

Tommy hates social media and refuses to try it for a long time, but Finn uses it so much, that Tommy had a little interest, what’s going on there. His youngest brother had a lot of explaining to do, which probably went like:

T: “How do I tell the person I like the picture?”

F: “There is the comment button.”

T: “No, I mean the… like thing.”

F: “Double tap on the picture, Tom.”

T: “Good, so… what’s next?”

F: “Nothing. What should happen?”

T: *shrug* “So, this is completely useless!” *deletes the app immediately*

And Tommy is also not the guy to answer private messages directly or often. Sometimes you said on read for days with this fellow, because he is super busy and doesn’t have the time to type. If you’re lucky, you get a quick okay. But if it’s important, he’ll call you right away and asks what happened, and if you need any help. With business he always answers straight and don’t like to waste time.

He doesn’t take pictures really. There may be some incidences where he hit the button by mistake. And there some photos of documents, which he need proof of… so he doesn’t have to rip out a page from a book like its 1920s. And all the pictures of his family has been send to him, he just don’t delete them.

His status would be: “Available” or “At work. Only important calls.”

-.-.-.-.-.-

Arthur… well… he has Facebook and uses it like anyone going on forty… really weird boomer mems, that might have been funny ten years ago. He sends them to everyone and they’re so annoyed by it, but he spares Tommy as his time is too important to waste on ‘funny pictures’.

Some gave him an Echo thing, the one with Alexa, you know, and he was so frustrated by it, that he threw the thing against the wall. Arthur couldn’t get past the set-up and got to angry. His family laughed about it, but it’s better this way.

Thanks to Finn and his little videos, Arthur became a meme himself, because his little brother filmed him while Arthur did something ridiculously stupid. That vid went viral. (Unsure what he did exactly)

His status would be: “Hey, there I am using whatsapp!”

-.-.-.-.-.-

I don’t know what to say about Polly and Freddie… so I leave them out now, but if you have something to add or whatever, feel free to do so!

[siewwen666]

WEEL 7 PUBLIC HEALTH

Where do you search for information regarding Covid-19 these days? I bet that most of us reach for Covid-19 information through social media, ether Twitter, Facebook or from WhatsApp by our ‘uncles’ and ‘aunties’. So today we will be discussing on how social media have influence public health.

Public Health Campaigns

Let’s start by talking about the campaigns regarding public health on social media. Remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? It was actually a campaign to promote awareness for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) — also known as Lou Gehrig's disease — and encourage donations for research. A person is filmed as a bucket of water and ice is dumped over the individual's head. The individual then nominates a minimum of three people to do the same thing, having only a 24-hour time frame to complete the challenge and make a donation to the Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association. 

It went viral in July and August 2014, using social media as a platform to reach a worldwide audience. More than 17 million people posted videos online, including Bill Gates and former US president George W. Bush. Over a two-year period, the money raised through the challenge helped fund research and development of treatment drugs.  

Why was the Ice Bucket challenge so popular? The challenge first received media attention after professional golfer Greg Norman nominated news anchor Matt Lauer in July 2014 on NBC’s Today. This sparked a trend that led millions of people to post videos on social media to raise awareness of ALS. (Trejos 2017)

False Information

Now that Malaysia is facing a 2nd wave of Covid-19, we are keen to receive information about the new positive cases each day. As I have mention in my previous blog on week 5, the Ministry of Health and Dr. Noor Hisham will update Covid-19 news on their official Twitter account every day. Which is very convenient for us to follow up on the current situation in Malaysia. But there are still a lot of false information being leak out by our adults, or as we Malaysians call them ‘uncles’ ‘aunties’. The older generation will easily believe any information they saw on social media, and spreading it to their family members. So what makes them believe in those false information and how does false information spread so fast.

How does fake news replicate across social media? The researchers have adapted a model for understanding diseases that can infect a person more than once. It looks at how many people are “susceptible” to the disease – or in this case, likely to believe a piece of fake news. It also looks at how many have been exposed to it, and how many are actually “infected” and believe the story; and how many people are likely to spread a piece of fake news. 

Much like a virus, the researchers say that over time being exposed to multiple strains of fake news can wear down a person’s resistance and make them increasingly susceptible. The more times a person is exposed to a piece of fake news, especially if it comes from an influential source, the more likely they are to become persuaded or infected.

What makes it spread faster? The so-called “power law'” of social media, a well-documented pattern in social networks, holds that messages replicate most rapidly if they are targeted at relatively small numbers of influential people with large followings.

Researchers are also looking at the relative effectiveness of trolls versus bots. Trammell says bots, which are automated programs that masquerade as people, tend to be particularly good for spreading massive numbers of highly emotional messages with little informational content. Think here of a message with the image of Hillary Clinton behind bars and the words “Lock Her Up!” That kind of message will spread rapidly within the echo chambers populated by those who already agree with the basic sentiment. Bots have considerable power to inflame people who are already like-minded, though they can be easier to detect and block than trolls.

By contrast, trolls are typically real people who spread provocative stories and memes. Trolls can be better at persuading people who are less convinced and want more information. (Andrews 2019)

As covid-19 is getting more and more serious here in Malaysia, I really hope that the adults can stop sharing false information that may cause a panic to the public. We should get health information from official media sites for example Ministry of Health’s Twitter account. A friendly reminder for those ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’ out there, please don’t believe in those weird ways of preventing covid-19, like eating raw garlic and chili. Most importantly is to sanitize and keep a social distance. Although there are lots of false information out there, but social media is still a good platform in bringing awareness regarding public health. Hence, we should be focusing on the campaigns of public health rather than spreading false information.   

[localbizlift]

Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook “isn’t going to help”

With the look of someone betrayed, Facebook’s CEO has fired back at co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed calling for regulators to split up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues. So I think that if what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference” Zuckerberg told France Info while in Paris to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Zuckerberg’s argument boils down to the idea that Facebook’s specific problems with privacy, safety, misinformation, and speech won’t be directly addressed by breaking up the company, and instead would actually hinder its efforts to safeguard its social networks. The Facebook family of apps would theoretically have fewer economies of scale when investing in safety technology like artificial intelligence to spot bots spreading voter suppression content.

Facebook’s co-founders (from left): Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Mark Zuckerberg

Hughes claims that “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American” and that Facebook’s rampant acquisitions and copying have made it so dominant that it deters competition. The call echoes other early execs like Facebook’s first president Sean Parker and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya who’ve raised alarms about how the social network they built impacts society.

But Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s size benefits the public. “Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that. You know, we invest more in safety than anyone in social media” Zuckerberg told journalist Laurent Delahousse.

The Facebook CEO’s comments were largely missed by the media, in part because the TV interview was heavily dubbed into French with no transcript. But written out, his quotes offer a window into how deeply Zuckerberg dismisses Hughes’ claims. “Well [Hughes] was talking about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social issues that we face” Zuckerberg says before trying to decouple solutions from anti-trust regulation. “The way that I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issue around harmful content and finding the right balance between expression and safety, for preventing election interference, on privacy.”

Claiming that a breakup “isn’t going to do anything to help” is a more unequivocal refutation of Hughes’ claim than that of Facebook VP of communications and former UK deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg . He wrote in his own NYT op-ed today that “what matters is not size but rather the rights and interests of consumers, and our accountability to the governments and legislators who oversee commerce and communications . . . Big in itself isn’t bad. Success should not be penalized.”

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes

Something certainly must be done to protect consumers. Perhaps that’s a break up of Facebook. At the least, banning it from acquiring more social networks of sufficient scale so it couldn’t snatch another Instagram from its crib would be an expedient and attainable remedy.

But the sharpest point of Hughes’ op-ed was how he identified that users are trapped on Facebook. “Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms” he writes. After Cambridge Analytica “people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?”

That’s why given critics’ call for competition and Zuckerberg’s own support for interoperability, a core tenet of regulation must be making it easier for users to switch from Facebook to another social network. As I’ll explore in an upcoming piece, until users can easily bring their friend connections or ‘social graph’ somewhere else, there’s little to compel Facebook to treat them better.

[rankwell]

Brought to you by Rankwell https://www.rankwell.com.au Rankwell

# leadgen # leadgeneration #internetmarketing #rankwell #digitalmarketing #ppc #sem #seo #smm 

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of the digital marketing comfort zone, but this can be a path into complacency, under-performance and ultimately decline.

When marketing campaigns consistently perform year after year and momentum is positive, you may be fooled into thinking that everything is working to near-peak levels with no need to stretch the boundaries or challenge this “everything is going great” sentiment.

If this sounds familiar it is likely (unless you are the only active player in your industry) that results will begin to stagnate and regress, and there is a need to consider a more robust digital strategy.

The solution is being actively aware of new and changing opportunities including technology, industry, audience and associated items, and taking action on them.

Action-taking is key as this fuels a culture of exploration, testing, and refinement required to be an industry leader and maintain closer to peak marketing performance for a longer duration.

In this post, I share five of the most useful marketing approaches to enrich your own strategic plans and increase your robustness to changing external competition.

1. Proximity Marketing & Beacons

The technology for proximity marketing is nothing new, in fact, it has been available since 2013.

What has changed though is the readiness of technology such as Google Beacons for effective marketing use and practical application within more common marketing approaches.

What Are Proximity Beacons?

Beacons are a form of technology that can transmit signals over a certain (generally small) radius.

This means that devices such as mobile phones and GPS can receive marketing messages tied to their geo-location and be pinpoint targeted with relevant messaging.

How Can They Be Used for Marketing?

Proximity marketing and Beacons specifically are being widely used for everything from table service within restaurants through to sending SMS messages with discounts to existing customers when they pass by a store.

Based on a recent article from a colleague of mine “Google Beacons: Is proximity marketing ready to take off in 2020?,” the main benefits for marketing include:

Location targeting of people/potential new and repeat business.Mapping of marketing success and closing the online/offline marketing attribution.In-store messaging and promotional offers for hyper-local messaging.Guiding people through entire shopping centers, stadiums, airports, and cities.Gamification.Cross-selling during the buying process (for example in-store related product offers).Loyalty.Much more.2. Conversational Commerce & Chatbots

Conversational commerce is a bigger opportunity than simply chatbots alone.

However, for the purposes of this post, chatbots are the suggested technology-based action to explore for diversifying and strengthening your strategic plans for 2020.

When Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014, no small part of the strategic thinking was based on the fact that people spend more time in messaging apps than they do on social media.

Chatbots can integrate your business within external platforms (such as Facebook) allowing you to reach your audience on the messaging apps they prefer.

As chatbot integration can include your website, social media channels, and external messaging apps you can fill the gaps within your business coverage and provide an ‘always available’ face to your organization.

When skewed towards conversational commerce you are able to provide controlled and consistent expertise, shorten the distance from awareness to purchase and facilitate offline access to information that users demand online and instantly.

What Are the Marketing Benefits of Chatbots?

The benefits will vary massively based on your objectives, application and successful implementation of them for marketing but commonly expected gains would include:

Improved Customer Service​s & Support

Helping existing and prospective customers understand the product/service which is best suited to their bespoke needs and budget.

The ability to quickly providing answers to questions and filtering more complicated inquiries for your Customer Service/Support Team.

​Financial Savings Versus Traditional Staffing

Implementing a chatbot is considerably cheaper than hiring employees to perform tasks that can be automated and handled by a bot/computer.

This form of removing and reducing manual and repeated activity from companies can support increased efficiencies, time and cost savings for investment elsewhere. Chatbots can also work on smaller budgets.

Proactive Customer Engagement​ and Increased Nurturing Through the Buying and Servicing Funnels

The ability to initiate a conversation with your customers based on know behavior and activity triggers.

One practical example might be communication as part of any ordering and delivery process.

Generating Valuable Insights & Obtaining a More Thorough Understanding of Your Customers

Data is marketing fuel and a performance enhancer. By using the additional knowledge obtained from chatbot use, you can refine and maximize your marketing tactics.

As an example of this in action, the new forms of user engagement and data can be recombined with other existing data sources to:

Improve products/services.Fill information gaps on the site.Fix newly discovered barriers to conversion.

​24/7 Customer Support​

As discussed earlier, chatbots are ‘always on’ and can handle concurrent user interactions at the same time.

This means that there is a reduced loss of potential business from people so there‘s no waiting in telephone queues for information, or dropping out of the purchase funnel before getting the brand effectively in front of them.

3. Voice Search Optimization (VSO)

In this case organic inclusion of ​VSO as a core part of your non-paid digital marketing investment.

The statistical justification for voice search optimization is widespread:

Per comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.Gartner predicts that 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020.A Google study found that 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers say that their devices are used as part of their daily routinesNPR’s Smart Audio Report revealed that 55% of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine going back to the days before they had a smart speakereMarketer reported that 35.8% of millennials use voice-enabled digital assistants at least once a month

The big change in VSO is that there are clearly defined tactics to target and implement to improve results.

Tactics for Voice Search Optimization

Like most areas of organic search engine optimization, there are many ways to implement VSO.

Targeted optimization can be undertaken with a mobile and voice-first approach.​

Broader tactics in this area can include question and answer targeting of activity to reach the longer tail and solution-led queries growth tied to voice.

Other tactics can include:

Creating fresh content (for closely matched voice intent targeting).Reworking existing pages with technical ‘format’ updates (schema.org, for example) so that information can be clearly identified, matched, and presented for use in voice search results.

Here are some more granular actions for VSO gains:

Local Intent

“Near me”, “close by”, and “local” intent opportunities are ready for driving forward spanning most, if not all, industries.

Organic search demand on these query topics is growing rapidly and has been for some time.

This can be linked to mobile growth, voice growth and related search engine preference for mobile-first result delivery and local intent filter for many results.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are a core tactic for voice and these are a primary source for voice results.

Schema updates such as Organization​, Open graph​, Q&A, Article and more, can provide opportunities to increase results.

Content updates (tables, lists, images, short paragraphs, simple language) and content types ​can also help target Featured Snippets.

Local Search

Location optimization cannot be overstated for VSO. Action examples to consider include:

Location terms identification, seeding and content building.Bing Places and Google My Business listings, reviews, posts/maximizing.Company and broader business citations.Local links and mentions​.Third-party reviews​.

Technical SEO

Ongoing focus on technical SEO and related updates (website health/audit score, speed (mobile/desktop), etc.) is also essential.

4. Integrating User-Led Design

User experience has changed dramatically over the years and evolved from often one-off, holistic and project-based services with limited commercial or data-driven justification to business-critical design changes and ongoing data-driven updates that directly impact ROI.

From a recent article of a Performance UX colleague of mine, it was confirmed that the factors most important for 2020 design fueled strategy include:

Designing to Ease User Concerns & Reinforce Trust

From fake reviews through to favicons and increased site information displayed in mobile SERPs, designing for trust is becoming a standard requirement for making the most out of every person landing on your website (and getting them there in the first place).

Rethinking & Revising Information Architecture & Navigation

When you combine website data, iterative testing, and refinement with a data-led design you will be amazed at the impact that can be achieved as part of conversion rate optimization.

Often design can be omitted from traditional SEO and CRO conversations when it comes to site architecture and navigation and that has to change for optimum performance

Creating Differentiation Through Experience

Regardless of the scale of your business and size of your immediate online competition, you can create a better user experience, increase repeat custom, and satisfy your users more

5. Increasing the Practical Value from Your Data

Most companies are gathering more data than ever before and investing in added data expertise, wider data tracking, collection, plus related items.

There is still a gulf however in the volume of data companies are exposed to compared to the value derived from it.

The inconsistent use of data and ineffective processes in place for systematically generating value from data are part of this.

There are many data-fueled marketing niches (for example personalization of marketing through data) that require increased marketing focus and time to get right.

There are also lots of practical data recombination and workflow activities that can be implemented now for quick wins.

Examples of this are:

SEO keyword and topic targeting triggered by unfeasible return on advertising spend (ROAS) Google Ads keywords data.Content gap identification from search query high volume/zero-click data from Google Search Console.Product/service gap exploration led by Google Analytics site search.Content change analysis from automated competitor analysis to fill product/content/service gaps.Summary

These are five of my current strategic “must-haves” which will help expand, diversify and strengthen many marketing approaches for 202 and beyond.

The common thread through this article comes back to:

Taking action.Using all of the new and changing data more effectively to challenge the status quo.The need to always be testing/refining and experimenting with new technologies and marketing opportunities.

More Resources:

[roomoncall-blog1]

The future of chat bots in business travel

Recent years have seen a major increase in the popularity of messaging apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat. In fact, the number of people using these messaging apps has already surpassed the number of people using networking apps like Facebook and Twitter. One cannot deny that networking apps are also being used extensively but it has been observed that younger generations are making more use of the messaging apps. The use of these apps has increased extensively because what the users are able to do within the app holds significant value. With the increase in the number of users of the messaging apps, there has been an emergence of web-powered robots called chatbots. These bots automate many functions allowing them to be delivered at scale. Bots are powered by Artificial Intelligence to ensure that the answers given by them to the users are correct.

Image: techcrunch.com  

The leisure travel industry all around the world has also witnessed the increasing usage of bots to provide customer service. By providing customer services on the various messaging apps, the industry is taking leisure travel to the next level. With the advancements in the field of technology, artificial intelligence is making digital tools human-friendly. A few travel companies have also launched travel chatbots for Skype. With the help of this chatbot, the traveler is able to hold a call with an agent, within the platform. This gives the access to the traveler to search for and make hotel bookings, manage certain elements of travel booking such as hotel confirmation/cancellation or flight confirmation/cancellation.

Image: chatbotnewsdaily.com

Although the travel industry is yet to fully embrace chatbots, but it is expected that once chatbots become a part of each and every travel organization’s customer service, they will entirely revolutionize this industry. Consider this – When you travel for business, what do you expect? The answer to this is – a time-saving, hassle-free, smooth experience, isn’t it? Well, a chatbot coupled with AI and data can overcome this challenge easily. A unique feature of chatbot is that it can understand and assist the traveler throughout the journey. But besides this, a major advantage of the chatbot is that it is backed by data, which makes it a very powerful tool to provide the travelers with an extremely rich experience.

Many travel companies worldwide are now also using the power of voice in the form of AI assistants to raise the game to the next level. Voice allows you to check the travel itineraries and even make payments. It is expected that in the next five years voice will become a major part of the travel industry and will bring about many changes.

Future of bots in business travel

Although leisure travel is enjoying the emergence of bots, it will take some time for business travel segment to embrace it. Travel companies all over the world are now focussing on putting the experience and learning of chatbots in leisure travel to business travel. The main issue that one needs to overcome when it comes to the introduction of chatbots in business travel is the privacy. For instance, in managed travel, the account you have on the booking tool is usually not your own. So the question is that to what extent will a company accept the linking of a corporate account to a public company? Since it is a matter of data privacy, hence some corporates will be willing to but some won’t. But even if the privacy issues are resolved a few technical challenges also need to be fixed. The main technical issue that needs to be dealt with is the choice of interface.

Interfaces such as Amazon Echo and Facebook messenger are developing at a rapid scale. This means that in the future business travel booking will take place on these platforms. So now the big question is that as a travel manager will you be ready to allow access to such services through their corporate firewalls? Most travel managers will give the same answer to this question, which is – In the current scenario, probably not! But as these services grow and develop, they will easily penetrate into the business travel segment. Moreover, the leap will not seem quite so large when in the future your AI bot will help you tweak travel policy or access travel program details by simply asking your home-based Echo a question.

Pic credits: techcrunch.com

Although chatbots may take some time to become a significant part of business travel, automation technology powered by Artificial Intelligence has already become a major part of this segment. Room on call is India’s very first start-up, which is catering to the needs of many Fortunes 500 companies at present with a version trav3.0 is set for a launch shortly.Room on call’s tool helps the corporates manage their travel programs in a seamless manner. As a result of this, the corporates are able to save the huge amount of time and money by removing their travel desks, Admin teams and clear visibility on expense with a view to plug flaws in business travel. Besides this, the tool is extremely simple and enhances the experience of the travelers, while at the same time helping them with policy compliance. The product introduced by this start-up is unique and considered to be a Hybrid model of peers such as Concur, China Lodging, and FCM.

Though chatbots may take some time to enter business travel, automation technology has already become the driving wheel of the business travel segment. Some of the companies like Egencia, DNATA, GBTA etc are struggling hard to get involved into real-time inventory management and supply to multinational companies particularly in Hotel segment and usually dependent on third-party integrations further adding to cost of traveler. Wherein chatbots are mostly been used as post-sales value-add by most of the companies.

[bigyack-com]

Rise of fake news and echo chambers | Opinion - india news

In 2009, life was simple. You would get news from the newspaper or its online avatar, the political buzz from television channels or your cousin who knows someone who knows someone in the local MP’s office, and “Good Morning” or “Good Night” greetings over SMS on your phone. If there was something important, it had to come from a top media house, otherwise you risked getting snubbed by your grandfather at the dinner table. Finding out the national anthem wasn’t voted the best in the world was a moment of embarrassment. A decade later, everything has gone wrong. Credible sources of information appear to hold little value anymore as people are buried under an avalanche of information – most of it generated by spam bots, skilful manipulation algorithms, or groups people working at the behest of political parties – and facts are lost in a sea of anonymous forwarded messages, and overnight mushrooming of “news channels” and “news websites” that end up confirming biases. As a result, the biases and impulses that would earlier be shared in whispers in locker rooms have now grown into the deafening roar of street rallies, mob violence and family WhatsApp groups. This has made the world a morass of anti-immigrant sentiment, nativist attitudes and hostility for anyone who looks, feels or talks different. This larger narrative runs across the world, including places where it would once be considered improbable - from Brazil to the US and from the UK to India. More insidious has been the slow seepage of bias and hate into every strata of society – classmates openly spewing hate on alumni groups, neighbourhoods refusing to rent houses to people of certain communities -- that fuelled white nationalist rallies in the US and mob lynchings in India. This has left minorities on tenterhooks, anxious that they may become second-class citizens. How did we get here? The initial sign was the dismantling hierarchy of news. It was conventionally accepted the more important a piece of news was, the more trusted the source needed to be. No more. Somewhere in the early 2010s, people’s trust in technology morphed into their trust of anything that their device threw at them. With more news outlets cropping up and more people coming onto the internet grid than ever, people were flooded with catchy headlines, and they latched onto the one that confirmed their bias.This was aided by two conflicting and simultaneous events. The first was the growing ubiquity of the smartphone that enmeshed itself into every hour of every day of our life. As phones became indispensible, so did the “facts” it flashed. The second was, ironically, the rising democratisation of internet, which took away the entry barriers to the news business and ensured that two men in a corner room could churn out enough “content” to keep millions buzzing. As the bubble grew, we entered the second phase: the creation of echo chambers. Real-time mining of personalised data – what you like to watch, read, eat, order – enabled specific targeting of advertising, news and information. This was great news for e-commerce but bad news for facts. On social media, conversations were increasingly walled off and you could only see updates and thoughts of people whose ideology you broadly agreed with – and therefore got idea whether your outlook was close to reality. The shock and unpredicted victory of Donald Trump in the US was the biggest testament that even engaged commentators had no idea that vast numbers of people didn’t agree with their ideas. The end of privacy had also ended fact-based argument. And thus we entered the final phase: The age of disinformation, where it was impossible to distinguish myths from facts, where fake news mushroomed faster than any fact-checks, where ordinary people struggled to sift through often contradictory propaganda masquerading as news. This was weaponised by political parties, leaders, and wily nations alike. So is there no hope? After all, this decade also birthed the still-nascent movement to safeguard personal data and privacy and various civil society groups were able to deftly use the internet to put out information and organise protests. But the real frontier is the fight against tribal hate and the sowing of bias in friends, neighbours and family. The outcome of that struggle may determine the trajectory of the next decade. Read the full article

[maisruth]

Bitcoin trifft WhatsApp: Neuer Bot ermöglicht Senden und Empfangen von Bitcoin und Litecoin Während die Gerüchte von einem Stable Coin aus dem Hause Facebook nicht abreißen, erobern bestehende Kryptowährungen schon einmal den Messaging-Dienst WhatsApp.   Source: BTC-ECHO Der Beitrag Bitcoin trifft WhatsApp: Neuer Bot ermöglicht Senden und Empfangen von Bitcoin und Litecoin erschien zuerst auf BTC-ECHO.

[workfromhom]

Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook “isn’t going to help”

With the look of someone betrayed, Facebook’s CEO has fired back at co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed calling for regulators to split up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues. So I think that if what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference” Zuckerberg told France Info while in Paris to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Zuckerberg’s argument boils down to the idea that Facebook’s specific problems with privacy, safety, misinformation, and speech won’t be directly addressed by breaking up the company, and instead would actually hinder its efforts to safeguard its social networks. The Facebook family of apps would theoretically have fewer economies of scale when investing in safety technology like artificial intelligence to spot bots spreading voter suppression content.

Facebook’s co-founders (from left): Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Mark Zuckerberg

Hughes claims that “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American” and that Facebook’s rampant acquisitions and copying have made it so dominant that it deters competition. The call echoes other early execs like Facebook’s first president Sean Parker and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya who’ve raised alarms about how the social network they built impacts society.

But Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s size benefits the public. “Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that. You know, we invest more in safety than anyone in social media” Zuckerberg told journalist Laurent Delahousse.

The Facebook CEO’s comments were largely missed by the media, in part because the TV interview was heavily dubbed into French with no transcript. But written out, his quotes offer a window into how deeply Zuckerberg dismisses Hughes’ claims. “Well [Hughes] was talking about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social issues that we face” Zuckerberg says before trying to decouple solutions from anti-trust regulation. “The way that I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issue around harmful content and finding the right balance between expression and safety, for preventing election interference, on privacy.”

Claiming that a breakup “isn’t going to do anything to help” is a more unequivocal refutation of Hughes’ claim than that of Facebook VP of communications and former UK deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg . He wrote in his own NYT op-ed today that “what matters is not size but rather the rights and interests of consumers, and our accountability to the governments and legislators who oversee commerce and communications . . . Big in itself isn’t bad. Success should not be penalized.”

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes

Something certainly must be done to protect consumers. Perhaps that’s a break up of Facebook. At the least, banning it from acquiring more social networks of sufficient scale so it couldn’t snatch another Instagram from its crib would be an expedient and attainable remedy.

But the sharpest point of Hughes’ op-ed was how he identified that users are trapped on Facebook. “Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms” he writes. After Cambridge Analytica “people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?”

That’s why given critics’ call for competition and Zuckerberg’s own support for interoperability, a core tenet of regulation must be making it easier for users to switch from Facebook to another social network. As I’ll explore in an upcoming piece, until users can easily bring their friend connections or ‘social graph’ somewhere else, there’s little to compel Facebook to treat them better.

from Facebook – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Vw6bBn via IFTTT

[pmsocialmedia]

Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook “isn’t going to help”

With the look of someone betrayed, Facebook’s CEO has fired back at co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed calling for regulators to split up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues. So I think that if what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference” Zuckerberg told France Info while in Paris to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Zuckerberg’s argument boils down to the idea that Facebook’s specific problems with privacy, safety, misinformation, and speech won’t be directly addressed by breaking up the company, and instead would actually hinder its efforts to safeguard its social networks. The Facebook family of apps would theoretically have fewer economies of scale when investing in safety technology like artificial intelligence to spot bots spreading voter suppression content.

Facebook’s co-founders (from left): Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Mark Zuckerberg

Hughes claims that “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American” and that Facebook’s rampant acquisitions and copying have made it so dominant that it deters competition. The call echoes other early execs like Facebook’s first president Sean Parker and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya who’ve raised alarms about how the social network they built impacts society.

But Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s size benefits the public. “Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that. You know, we invest more in safety than anyone in social media” Zuckerberg told journalist Laurent Delahousse.

The Facebook CEO’s comments were largely missed by the media, in part because the TV interview was heavily dubbed into French with no transcript. But written out, his quotes offer a window into how deeply Zuckerberg dismisses Hughes’ claims. “Well [Hughes] was talking about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social issues that we face” Zuckerberg says before trying to decouple solutions from anti-trust regulation. “The way that I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issue around harmful content and finding the right balance between expression and safety, for preventing election interference, on privacy.”

Claiming that a breakup “isn’t going to do anything to help” is a more unequivocal refutation of Hughes’ claim than that of Facebook VP of communications and former UK deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg . He wrote in his own NYT op-ed today that “what matters is not size but rather the rights and interests of consumers, and our accountability to the governments and legislators who oversee commerce and communications . . . Big in itself isn’t bad. Success should not be penalized.”

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes

Something certainly must be done to protect consumers. Perhaps that’s a break up of Facebook. At the least, banning it from acquiring more social networks of sufficient scale so it couldn’t snatch another Instagram from its crib would be an expedient and attainable remedy.

But the sharpest point of Hughes’ op-ed was how he identified that users are trapped on Facebook. “Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms” he writes. After Cambridge Analytica “people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?”

That’s why given critics’ call for competition and Zuckerberg’s own support for interoperability, a core tenet of regulation must be making it easier for users to switch from Facebook to another social network. As I’ll explore in an upcoming piece, until users can easily bring their friend connections or ‘social graph’ somewhere else, there’s little to compel Facebook to treat them better.

via Social – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Vw6bBn

[un-enfant-immature]

Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook “isn’t going to help”

With the look of someone betrayed, Facebook’s CEO has fired back at co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed calling for regulators to split up Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues. So I think that if what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference” Zuckerberg told France Info while in Paris to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Zuckerberg’s argument boils down to the idea that Facebook’s specific problems with privacy, safety, misinformation, and speech won’t be directly addressed by breaking up the company, and instead would actually hinder its efforts to safeguard its social networks. The Facebook family of apps would theoretically have fewer economies of scale when investing in safety technology like artificial intelligence to spot bots spreading voter suppression content.

Facebook’s co-founders (from left): Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Mark Zuckerberg

Hughes claims that “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American” and that Facebook’s rampant acquisitions and copying have made it so dominant that it deters competition. The call echoes other early execs like Facebook’s first president Sean Parker and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya who’ve raised alarms about how the social network they built impacts society.

But Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s size benefits the public. “Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that. You know, we invest more in safety than anyone in social media” Zuckerberg told journalist Laurent Delahousse.

The Facebook CEO’s comments were largely missed by the media, in part because the TV interview was heavily dubbed into French with no transcript. But written out, his quotes offer a window into how deeply Zuckerberg dismisses Hughes’ claims. “Well [Hughes] was talking about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social issues that we face” Zuckerberg says before trying to decouple solutions from anti-trust regulation. “The way that I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issue around harmful content and finding the right balance between expression and safety, for preventing election interference, on privacy.”

Claiming that a breakup “isn’t going to do anything to help” is a more unequivocal refutation of Hughes’ claim than that of Facebook VP of communications and former UK deputy Prime Minster Nick Clegg . He wrote in his own NYT op-ed today that “what matters is not size but rather the rights and interests of consumers, and our accountability to the governments and legislators who oversee commerce and communications . . . Big in itself isn’t bad. Success should not be penalized.”

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes

Something certainly must be done to protect consumers. Perhaps that’s a break up of Facebook. At the least, banning it from acquiring more social networks of sufficient scale so it couldn’t snatch another Instagram from its crib would be an expedient and attainable remedy.

But the sharpest point of Hughes’ op-ed was how he identified that users are trapped on Facebook. “Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms” he writes. After Cambridge Analytica “people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?”

That’s why given critics’ call for competition and Zuckerberg’s own support for interoperability, a core tenet of regulation must be making it easier for users to switch from Facebook to another social network. As I’ll explore in an upcoming piece, until users can easily bring their friend connections or ‘social graph’ somewhere else, there’s little to compel Facebook to treat them better.

[verbaendedigital]

Bots in Verbänden nur ein Randthema?

Grafik Annika Mierke aus Klauss, Mierke:”Szenarien einer digitalen Welt - heute und morgen”

Künstliche Intelligenz, Maschinelles Lernen und (Ro)Bots sind das technologische Topthema nicht nur in diesem Jahr! Was steckt wirklich dahinter? Was können die künstlich intelligenten Programme leisten und was nicht? Welche Verbandsleistungen können oder könnten von Bots übernommen werden? Sind Bots eine Gefahr für Verbände, oder eine Chance auf effizientere Arbeitsabläufe und neue, moderne Leistungsangebote?

Auf diese und weitere Fragen versucht mein Artikel aus der September-Ausgabe des Verbändereport 06|2018 Antworten zu finden.

Hier ein paar Auszüge:

“ Direkten Kontakt mit Bots hatten schon viele Internetnutzer: Meist mit Kommunikationsrobotern, die Kontakt mit Besuchern von Online Shops und anderen e-Commerce-Websites aufnehmen.

[...]

Laut einer Oracle Studie sollen Chatbots bis 2020 einen Großteil des Kundendienstes übernehmen: 80 Prozent der großen Marken werden demnach Chatbots als Kundenberater einführen.

Schon heute kann sich jeder vierte Bundesbürger Gespräche mit einem Chatbot vorstellen, so die Ergebnisse einer repräsentativen Befragung im Auftrag des Digitalverbands Bitkom. Darüber hinaus ist die Nutzung der bekanntesten Sprachbots von Alexa, Cortana und Siri verbreiterter, als viele vermuten: 75 Prozent der Deutschen haben laut einer Umfrage des BVDW bereits Erfahrungen mit digitalen Sprachassistenten gemacht Die allermeisten Chatsbots tummeln sich heute jedoch in Chat-Anwendungen wie dem Facebook Messanger, Twitter oder WhatsApp – nur sind sie dort oft nicht als solche erkennbar.

[...]

Ein Trend zeichnet sich eindeutig ab: Heutige und zukünftige Social Media Kanäle werden immer mehr von künstlichen Akteuren, Algorithmen dominiert. In Sekundenbruchteilen analysieren Programme Inhalte und Aktivitäten im World Wide Web und generieren

automatisch Posts, um Produkte, Dienstleistungen zu bewerben oder Meinungen zu propagieren. D.h., Wer hier ein Wörtchen mitreden will, kommt bald nicht mehr ohne die Unterstützung künstlich intelligenter Systeme aus.

Bots finden sich schließlich nicht nur als E-Lobbyisten in Social Networks, sondern auch in immer mehr Anwendungszenarien als "Erstberater" - ob bei Banken, Versicherungen oder zu vielen juristischen Themen. Damit berühren sie wichtige Bausteine der Verbandsarbeit.

Mit Deep Learning Algorithmen sind Maschinen heute schon in der Lage, rasend schnell Kommunikationsmuster zu erkennen und nachzubilden, wodurch die Unterscheidung zwischen natürlichem und künstlichem Kommunikationspartner zunehmend schwieriger wird. Dies wird im Übrigen durch stark vereinfachte, Sprechakte (nach Searle, s. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprechakttheorie), wie sie vor allem in sozialen Medien gang und gebe sind, beschleunigt - s. Dump Bot als Donald Trump.

Ohne diese noch recht junge Technologie wären Sprachassistenten wie Amazon Alexa oder Echo, Google Home, Apples Siri, Microsofts Cortana, Intelligenzmaschinen wie IBMs Watson (IBM), SAPs Sana, Google Brain autonome Roboter und Fahrzeuge oder auch nur die Gesichtserkennung (im Sicherheitsbereich oder bei Facebook) heute kaum möglich.

[...]

Das Handelsblatt und AP lassen Bots Artikel über Quartals- und Börsendaten verfassen: Bei der Nachrichtenagentur schafft die Software 14-mal mehr Artikel pro Jahr, als die zuvor verantwortlichen Redakteure.

[...]

Nach Aussage von Mitarbeitern eines Verbandes, der hier nicht genannt werden soll, könnten mindestens 80% des aktuell laufenden, juristischen Beratungsangebotes mit dieser Technologie automatisiert werden!

Selbst wenn es weniger wäre, ist ein beträchtlicher Teil häufiger/klassischer Verbandsleistungen von Automatisierung bedroht. Die Geschichte zeigt, was ökonomisch sinnvoll automatisiert werden kann, wird automatisiert. Gerade in der IT kommt die Entwicklung oft schneller, als viele denken.

Die Frage ist nur, wer hierbei die Richtung vorgibt. Soll heißen, ob Verbände selbst ihren Interessen entsprechende Entwicklungen in die Wege leiten oder das Feld komplett den mächtigen IT-Giganten oder in deren Gefolge agierenden Startups überlassen.

Da neben der Datenmenge vor allem die Datenqualität entscheidend für die Leistungsfähigkeit/Qualität der Beratungs-Bots ist, liegt hier die Chance für Verbände, ihren Vorsprung gegenüber Themenfremden Bot-Diensten zu nutzen.

Der Vorteil, den Verbände noch in der Hand halten aber dabei sind, aus den Händen zu geben ist das Wissen, das nötig ist, um die Lernalgorithmen zu füttern, sie für ein Themengebiet anzulernen.

Doch ein großer Teil des in Dokumenten, Präsentationen, Posts und anderen digitalen Medien fomulierten Wissens landet in nicht geschützten Datenspeichern, die von IT-Giganten (oder Startups) fortlaufend und immer detaillierter gescannt, und von ihren maschinellen Lernalgorithmen analysiert werden.

Die Verbände füttern so ihre Konkurrenz und laufen Gefahr, sich ihres Vorteils den fachfremden Anbietern gegenüber zu berauben.

Wenn Sie den vollen Artikel lesen möchten, senden Sie mir einfach eine E-Mail an t.klauss@verbaende-digital.de

[fcharles]

Engageons la réflexion sur l'avenir de l'Intelligence artificielle

Dans l'actualité de la semaine on ne pouvait pas manquer l'annonce par Axelle Lemaire, secrétaire d'Etat en charge du numérique et depuis octobre dernier de l'innovation, du lancement de la mission "France IA" pour définir une stratégie nationale en Intelligence Artificielle pour la France. Une démarche pleine de sens, tant la France a d'atouts sur ce sujet (mathématiques, ingénieurs, recherche...), mais une démarche tardive à moins de quatre mois d'un nouveau gouvernement... Espérons que cette démarche réussira au moins à boucler  sa première étape d'identification des acteurs et à faire parler de ces atouts, à défaut de pouvoir déjà fédérer ces acteurs façon "French Tech" avec par exemple un label "France IA" démontrant la qualité du savoir faire français. Les domaines de l'IA sont très vastes, mais tous sont stratégiques pour l'évolution de l'Industrie et des services numériques. Il rassemblent principalement :

l'apprentissage automatique (machine learning)

la vision des ordinateurs en temps réel ou par analyse d'images/vidéos

les robots intelligents (versus simplement programmés)

les assistants virtuels

la reconnaissance du langage (speech to speech)

la reconnaissance des gestes

En parlant d'intelligence artificielle, aujourd'hui les plateformes GAFA+MI n'en sont plus à simple la réflexion. Elles sont opérationnelles ! Leurs organisations ont recruté les meilleurs spécialistes, elles ont racheté ou investi dans les startups disruptives et se font la course pour trouver le modèle économique qui dominera :

Google a développé une stratégie d'enrichissement de ses services avec Google Now qui vise a être votre assistant personnel, mais aussi Google Maps et les débuts d'Allo qui amène son IA dans une messagerie instantanée pour devenir un assistant virtuel.

Amazon a surpris toute l'industrie avec "Echo" - dont GreenSI a déjà parlé - un appareil dans la maison dopé à l'IA d'Alexa pour déplacer cette assistance virtuelle dans le quotidien et non en mobilité (où le smartphone reste le terminal n°1 en attendant la voiture)

Facebook

Apple, le pionnier avec Siri, l'assistant virtuel sur iPhone, mais qui dans ce domaine aussi peine a se renouveler et innover depuis quelques années.

Microsoft, avec une stratégie résolument dans le Cloud depuis l'arrivée de Satya Nadella, où la Cortana Intelligence Suite et les "Azure Cognitive Services" sont mis à la disposition des entreprises qui développent des applications pour les enrichir avec de l'IA.

IBM parti plus tôt avec Watson dès 2011, qui est devenu une division d'IBM en 2014, a une stratégie similaire mais totalement orientée vers les grandes entreprises, même si ses services sont disponibles en ligne sur BlueMix sa "plateform as a service" (PaaS).

GreenSI, a une position plus tranchée sur Facebook qui semble un peu derrière ces acteurs sur le plan des réalisations opérationnelles. Annonce de "M" en 2014, ouverture d'un Lab (à Paris) en 2015, pourtant son IA est uniquement présente avec des "bots" dans Messenger dont l'intelligence est réellement dans l'ecosystème des startups comme Chatfuel qui permettent de les faire fonctionner. Et ce malgré une communication bien rodée en fin d'année dernière avec la vidéo "intime" de Mark Zuckerberg parlant à Jarvis qui pilote sa maison. Mais si on regarde quelques années en arrière, les jeux dans Facebook ont explosés avec des sociétés comme Zinga et non avec des développements propres. Rappelons-nous aussi que Facebook a failli rater le virage mobile en 2011. Leur application interne n'était pas au point. C'est le rachat d'Instagram (2012) puis de Whatsapp (2014) qui leur a donné la légitimité et qui a fait décoller leur cours de Bourse mi-2013, une fois les analystes rassurés sur le fait que Facebook pourrait capter la manne de la publicité mobile. La stratégie de Facebook semble donc pour l'instant beaucoup plus axée sur son écosystème et la co-innovation. Cela pourrait changer quand Facebook exploitera les conversations de ses 1,7 milliards de membres actifs mensuels (1 sur mobile) et mieux connaître le genre humain... Dans les autres acteurs, on peut aussi citer ceux qui sont en embuscade et qui entrerons dans le peloton de tête de façon opportuniste avec un rachat ou de nouveaux services, mais qui pour l'instant agissent via leur fonds d'investissement qui prennent des positions : Salesforce (Digital Genius, MetaMind ), Samsung et pourquoi pas le français AXA qui avec AXA Ventures s'interesse de très près au sujet dans ce qui pourrait outiller la santé (Neura, BI Beats, Medlanes) ou la location immobilière (price methods devenu Wheelhouse) Au niveau des applications, les assistants virtuels et les objets intelligents (et connectés) en B2C et B2B,vont certainement tirer les usages à court terme. Dans les assistants virtuels, attendons-nous a voir les sites fleurir des "chatbots" pour améliorer la qualité de service en ligne dont une partie sous Facebook. En terme d'industries, la santé est celle qui oriente 15% des investissements des startups (selon CB Insights) suivi de près par l'expérience client et l'analyse de données. Le marché B2C sera donc tiré par la santé et le B2B pour les deux derniers. L'IA n'est pas non plus une nouveauté puisque l'origine est souvent donnée à "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" d'Alan Turing en 1950 et les premiers algorithmes de diagnostic médical datent des années 1970 (Mycin). Notre ex-pépite nationale Ilog créée en 1987 s'est faite avaler par IBM en 2009. On constate donc une effervescence mondiale, et des investissements en hausse depuis 2010. Les voyants de la stratégie française devaient donc clignoter depuis longtemps quand Axelle Lemaire est passée devant, et finalement malgré un contexte peu favorable a décidé de relever le défi avec Thierry Mandon (Recherche). Oui, la "France des ingénieurs" a une certaine avance sur le sujet. Car même si elle fleurte avec le dernier rang du classement PISA en mathématiques au collège, sa recherche et son enseignement supérieur sont au plus haut niveau mondial. L'ambassade de cette excellence comptant dans ses rangs Cédric Villani, médaille Fields en 2010, qui par sa photo officielle qui a fait le tour du monde, incarne à merveille la modernisme et la tradition pour les sciences. L'intelligence artificielle est aussi un vrai sujet de société qui dépasse largement le champ du numérique, puisqu'elle vise à développer des dispositifs imitant ou remplaçant l'humain. Son rôle dans la société sera donc certainement débattu, domaine par domaine, industrie par industrie dans les années qui arrivent. L'algorithme est déjà sous les feux du débat, avec la question très naïve de sa neutralité, mais l'IA va plus loin puisqu'elle donne la main à un machine. L'IA sera acceptée quand elle permettra par exemple de sauver des vies en accélérant les décisions et en réduisant les risques d'erreurs de diagnostic, mais certainement très challengé quand les usines Michelin de Clermont-Ferrand auront plus de robots que d'humains syndiqués... Ce débat a été lancé cette semaine au Forum Economique Mondial de Davos où Satya Nadella participait à un débat sur l'intelligence artificielle : "Quels profits la société toute entière peut attendre de l’IA". Le PDG de Microsoft a défendu l'idée que ceux qui disposent des platerformes d'IA devraient l'orienter vers des tâches aidant les humains plutôt que supprimant des emplois. Au delà de l'intention très louable de Microsoft, et de l'humanisme avéré de son leader, ne soyons quand même pas dupes, car cette question est celle qui différencie un Microsoft d'un Google pour rejoindre le cercle très fermé des GAFAs... Microsoft ou IBM en B2B vendent leur technologie à des entreprises qui décideront des usages. On a encore du mal a croire qu'ils refuseront une vente quand un patron d'usine viendra les voir pour outiller ses usines avec leur technologie. Il est aussi probable que les investisseurs qui depuis 2011 mettent des centaines de millions dans le développement de startups visent en priorité les usages qui valoriseront le mieux leur participation sans nécessairement prendre en compte l'avenir de l'humanité.

Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft et Amazon ont aussi créé un alliance pour instaurer de « bonnes pratiques » dans ce domaine, et mieux informer le grand public. Et puis à la conférence Frontiers en octobre dernier (billet GreenSI), la Maison Blanche avait organisé un débat et pris des engagements sur l'IA et les robots.

Donc oui, la France a un autre risque de retard. Celui de ne pas participer à la réflexion sur l'éthique de l'IA qui est enjeu majeur dans les années qui arrivent.

Une réflexion qui se traduira demain en usages standards qui pourraient s'imposer à tous, et surtout ne pas limiter les usages qu'on ne voudrait pas voir se développer. Car dans ce jeu, les plateformes mondiales seront certainement les plus influentes, et il sera ensuite trop tard de vouloir interdire telle ou telle plateforme depuis le sol français, ou européen. L'IA n'est bien sûr pas un ennemi mais un redoutable allié au service de la stratégie d'entreprise, et certainement du développement de nouveaux services intelligents pour l'industrie et la ville numérique. C'est surtout une comp��tence qui se marie très bien avec les capteurs et l'augmentation du nombre de données capturées par les systèmes d'information. Dans l'entreprise en 2017, GreenSI conseille donc que ce soit l'année de la réflexion pour anticiper cette technologie qui au-delà de transformer les usages va modifier les relations entre l'Homme et la machine. Une autre façon de se repenser son avantage concurrentiel. from www.GreenSI.fr http://ift.tt/2jQmZxb

[localbizlift]

Zuckerberg says breaking up Facebook ‘isn’t going to help’

With the look of someone betrayed, Facebook’s CEO has fired back at co-founder Chris Hughes and his brutal NYT op-ed calling for regulators to split up Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. “When I read what he wrote, my main reaction was that what he’s proposing that we do isn’t going to do anything to help solve those issues. So I think that if what you care about is democracy and elections, then you want a company like us to be able to invest billions of dollars per year like we are in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference,” Zuckerberg told France Info while in Paris to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Zuckerberg’s argument boils down to the idea that Facebook’s specific problems with privacy, safety, misinformation and speech won’t be directly addressed by breaking up the company, and that would instead actually hinder its efforts to safeguard its social networks. The Facebook family of apps would theoretically have fewer economies of scale when investing in safety technology like artificial intelligence to spot bots spreading voter suppression content.

Facebook’s co-founders (from left): Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes and Mark Zuckerberg

Hughes claims that “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” and that Facebook’s rampant acquisitions and copying have made it so dominant that it deters competition. The call echoes other early execs like Facebook’s first president Sean Parker and growth chief Chamath Palihapitiya, who’ve raised alarms about how the social network they built impacts society.

But Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s size benefits the public. “Our budget for safety this year is bigger than the whole revenue of our company was when we went public earlier this decade. A lot of that is because we’ve been able to build a successful business that can now support that. You know, we invest more in safety than anyone in social media,” Zuckerberg told journalist Laurent Delahousse.

The Facebook CEO’s comments were largely missed by the media, in part because the TV interview was heavily dubbed into French with no transcript. But written out here for the first time, his quotes offer a window into how deeply Zuckerberg dismisses Hughes’ claims. “Well [Hughes] was talking about a very specific idea of breaking up the company to solve some of the social issues that we face,” Zuckerberg says before trying to decouple solutions from anti-trust regulation. “The way that I look at this is, there are real issues. There are real issues around harmful content and finding the right balance between expression and safety, for preventing election interference, on privacy.”

Claiming that a breakup “isn’t going to do anything to help” is a more unequivocal refutation of Hughes’ claim than that of Facebook VP of communications and former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg . He wrote in his own NYT op-ed today that “what matters is not size but rather the rights and interests of consumers, and our accountability to the governments and legislators who oversee commerce and communications . . . Big in itself isn’t bad. Success should not be penalized.”

Mark Zuckerberg and Chris Hughes

Something certainly must be done to protect consumers. Perhaps that’s a break up of Facebook. At the least, banning it from acquiring more social networks of sufficient scale so it couldn’t snatch another Instagram from its crib would be an expedient and attainable remedy.

But the sharpest point of Hughes’ op-ed was how he identified that users are trapped on Facebook. “Competition alone wouldn’t necessarily spur privacy protection — regulation is required to ensure accountability — but Facebook’s lock on the market guarantees that users can’t protest by moving to alternative platforms,” he writes. After Cambridge Analytica, “people did not leave the company’s platforms en masse. After all, where would they go?”

That’s why given critics’ call for competition and Zuckerberg’s own support for interoperability, a core tenet of regulation must be making it easier for users to switch from Facebook to another social network. As I explore in this follow-up piece, until users can easily bring their friend connections or “social graph” somewhere else, there’s little to compel Facebook to treat them better.

Friend portability is the must-have Facebook regulation

[rankwell]

Brought to you by Rankwell https://www.rankwell.com.au Rankwell

# leadgen # leadgeneration #internetmarketing #rankwell #digitalmarketing #ppc #sem #seo #smm 

It is all too easy to fall into the trap of the digital marketing comfort zone, but this can be a path into complacency, under-performance and ultimately decline.

When marketing campaigns consistently perform year after year and momentum is positive, you may be fooled into thinking that everything is working to near-peak levels with no need to stretch the boundaries or challenge this “everything is going great” sentiment.

If this sounds familiar it is likely (unless you are the only active player in your industry) that results will begin to stagnate and regress, and there is a need to consider a more robust digital strategy.

The solution is being actively aware of new and changing opportunities including technology, industry, audience and associated items, and taking action on them.

Action-taking is key as this fuels a culture of exploration, testing, and refinement required to be an industry leader and maintain closer to peak marketing performance for a longer duration.

In this post, I share five of the most useful marketing approaches to enrich your own strategic plans and increase your robustness to changing external competition.

1. Proximity Marketing & Beacons

The technology for proximity marketing is nothing new, in fact, it has been available since 2013.

What has changed though is the readiness of technology such as Google Beacons for effective marketing use and practical application within more common marketing approaches.

What Are Proximity Beacons?

Beacons are a form of technology that can transmit signals over a certain (generally small) radius.

This means that devices such as mobile phones and GPS can receive marketing messages tied to their geo-location and be pinpoint targeted with relevant messaging.

How Can They Be Used for Marketing?

Proximity marketing and Beacons specifically are being widely used for everything from table service within restaurants through to sending SMS messages with discounts to existing customers when they pass by a store.

Based on a recent article from a colleague of mine “Google Beacons: Is proximity marketing ready to take off in 2020?,” the main benefits for marketing include:

Location targeting of people/potential new and repeat business.Mapping of marketing success and closing the online/offline marketing attribution.In-store messaging and promotional offers for hyper-local messaging.Guiding people through entire shopping centers, stadiums, airports, and cities.Gamification.Cross-selling during the buying process (for example in-store related product offers).Loyalty.Much more.2. Conversational Commerce & Chatbots

Conversational commerce is a bigger opportunity than simply chatbots alone.

However, for the purposes of this post, chatbots are the suggested technology-based action to explore for diversifying and strengthening your strategic plans for 2020.

When Facebook acquired WhatsApp back in 2014, no small part of the strategic thinking was based on the fact that people spend more time in messaging apps than they do on social media.

Chatbots can integrate your business within external platforms (such as Facebook) allowing you to reach your audience on the messaging apps they prefer.

As chatbot integration can include your website, social media channels, and external messaging apps you can fill the gaps within your business coverage and provide an ‘always available’ face to your organization.

When skewed towards conversational commerce you are able to provide controlled and consistent expertise, shorten the distance from awareness to purchase and facilitate offline access to information that users demand online and instantly.

What Are the Marketing Benefits of Chatbots?

The benefits will vary massively based on your objectives, application and successful implementation of them for marketing but commonly expected gains would include:

Improved Customer Service​s & Support

Helping existing and prospective customers understand the product/service which is best suited to their bespoke needs and budget.

The ability to quickly providing answers to questions and filtering more complicated inquiries for your Customer Service/Support Team.

​Financial Savings Versus Traditional Staffing

Implementing a chatbot is considerably cheaper than hiring employees to perform tasks that can be automated and handled by a bot/computer.

This form of removing and reducing manual and repeated activity from companies can support increased efficiencies, time and cost savings for investment elsewhere. Chatbots can also work on smaller budgets.

Proactive Customer Engagement​ and Increased Nurturing Through the Buying and Servicing Funnels

The ability to initiate a conversation with your customers based on know behavior and activity triggers.

One practical example might be communication as part of any ordering and delivery process.

Generating Valuable Insights & Obtaining a More Thorough Understanding of Your Customers

Data is marketing fuel and a performance enhancer. By using the additional knowledge obtained from chatbot use, you can refine and maximize your marketing tactics.

As an example of this in action, the new forms of user engagement and data can be recombined with other existing data sources to:

Improve products/services.Fill information gaps on the site.Fix newly discovered barriers to conversion.

​24/7 Customer Support​

As discussed earlier, chatbots are ‘always on’ and can handle concurrent user interactions at the same time.

This means that there is a reduced loss of potential business from people so there‘s no waiting in telephone queues for information, or dropping out of the purchase funnel before getting the brand effectively in front of them.

3. Voice Search Optimization (VSO)

In this case organic inclusion of ​VSO as a core part of your non-paid digital marketing investment.

The statistical justification for voice search optimization is widespread:

Per comScore, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020.Gartner predicts that 30% of all searches will be done without a screen by 2020.A Google study found that 72% of people who own voice-activated speakers say that their devices are used as part of their daily routinesNPR’s Smart Audio Report revealed that 55% of people who own an Amazon Echo or Google Home can’t imagine going back to the days before they had a smart speakereMarketer reported that 35.8% of millennials use voice-enabled digital assistants at least once a month

The big change in VSO is that there are clearly defined tactics to target and implement to improve results.

Tactics for Voice Search Optimization

Like most areas of organic search engine optimization, there are many ways to implement VSO.

Targeted optimization can be undertaken with a mobile and voice-first approach.​

Broader tactics in this area can include question and answer targeting of activity to reach the longer tail and solution-led queries growth tied to voice.

Other tactics can include:

Creating fresh content (for closely matched voice intent targeting).Reworking existing pages with technical ‘format’ updates (schema.org, for example) so that information can be clearly identified, matched, and presented for use in voice search results.

Here are some more granular actions for VSO gains:

Local Intent

“Near me”, “close by”, and “local” intent opportunities are ready for driving forward spanning most, if not all, industries.

Organic search demand on these query topics is growing rapidly and has been for some time.

This can be linked to mobile growth, voice growth and related search engine preference for mobile-first result delivery and local intent filter for many results.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are a core tactic for voice and these are a primary source for voice results.

Schema updates such as Organization​, Open graph​, Q&A, Article and more, can provide opportunities to increase results.

Content updates (tables, lists, images, short paragraphs, simple language) and content types ​can also help target Featured Snippets.

Local Search

Location optimization cannot be overstated for VSO. Action examples to consider include:

Location terms identification, seeding and content building.Bing Places and Google My Business listings, reviews, posts/maximizing.Company and broader business citations.Local links and mentions​.Third-party reviews​.

Technical SEO

Ongoing focus on technical SEO and related updates (website health/audit score, speed (mobile/desktop), etc.) is also essential.

4. Integrating User-Led Design

User experience has changed dramatically over the years and evolved from often one-off, holistic and project-based services with limited commercial or data-driven justification to business-critical design changes and ongoing data-driven updates that directly impact ROI.

From a recent article of a Performance UX colleague of mine, it was confirmed that the factors most important for 2020 design fueled strategy include:

Designing to Ease User Concerns & Reinforce Trust

From fake reviews through to favicons and increased site information displayed in mobile SERPs, designing for trust is becoming a standard requirement for making the most out of every person landing on your website (and getting them there in the first place).

Rethinking & Revising Information Architecture & Navigation

When you combine website data, iterative testing, and refinement with a data-led design you will be amazed at the impact that can be achieved as part of conversion rate optimization.

Often design can be omitted from traditional SEO and CRO conversations when it comes to site architecture and navigation and that has to change for optimum performance

Creating Differentiation Through Experience

Regardless of the scale of your business and size of your immediate online competition, you can create a better user experience, increase repeat custom, and satisfy your users more

5. Increasing the Practical Value from Your Data

Most companies are gathering more data than ever before and investing in added data expertise, wider data tracking, collection, plus related items.

There is still a gulf however in the volume of data companies are exposed to compared to the value derived from it.

The inconsistent use of data and ineffective processes in place for systematically generating value from data are part of this.

There are many data-fueled marketing niches (for example personalization of marketing through data) that require increased marketing focus and time to get right.

There are also lots of practical data recombination and workflow activities that can be implemented now for quick wins.

Examples of this are:

SEO keyword and topic targeting triggered by unfeasible return on advertising spend (ROAS) Google Ads keywords data.Content gap identification from search query high volume/zero-click data from Google Search Console.Product/service gap exploration led by Google Analytics site search.Content change analysis from automated competitor analysis to fill product/content/service gaps.Summary

These are five of my current strategic “must-haves” which will help expand, diversify and strengthen many marketing approaches for 202 and beyond.

The common thread through this article comes back to:

Taking action.Using all of the new and changing data more effectively to challenge the status quo.The need to always be testing/refining and experimenting with new technologies and marketing opportunities.

More Resources: