#like how does that make sense..??? ban reason: being a cyber bully victim

[strawbszz]

[sympler]

Brands: It’s time to be vulnerable

Younger audiences have little reason to trust the media like their parents once did. For the latter group, the fourth estate provided a democratic force built on the principles of truth, integrity, and reach to keep an honest eye on the elected powers. Developments in technology helped to strengthen these pillars, enabling truer truths, greater reach, and consistent quality. But somewhere along the way, this model stopped delivering returns. Transparency and truth appear increasingly subjective, reach is available to anyone with a sex tape and an Internet connection, and consistency looks more like farce in the era of epic flip-floppers.

If you can’t trust the established media, where do you go?

You go home. Media needs to come home, get into bed with us, court us, cook us dinner, listen to our gripes, and let us be us. Our youngest audiences, known as Generation Z, are already there, ditching so-called "social" media for the more sociable, safer, and private "dark social," where they might chat freely and express themselves from the comfort of their own small cliques. This shift is led by the growth in mobile messaging apps, with platforms seeing smaller groups coalesce around more focused topics. Mass media is out. Niche, intimate dark social is in.

The key to credibility in the era of conversational media will be to get more personal. Rather like the disembodied avatar in "Her," media will be a gentle voice whispering intimately into your ear. After centuries of mass media and advertising barking at you from its respective box, book, or banner, media is about to humanize. Fueled by data science, AI and NLP, it will now be able to mimic our own positive traits of listening, sensing, and empathizing in order to better itself.  

I like to call this "sentient marketing." Four skills will allow brands to become more sentient in this developing space: intimacy, presence, empathy and vulnerability.

1. Intimacy

Since the creation of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the Internet has been voraciously connecting the fringe interests previously ignored by the mainstream. The true power of this medium has been in its ability to unite people with common areas of passion, no matter how niche. In the messaging era, users can go even deeper, exploring and developing their passions without fear of being judged or misunderstood, as their actions don’t need to be kept for posterity as with social media.

Reddit has built a network of rock-solid communities precisely because they aren’t mass or mainstream. With their strict policies, secretive names, and insider lingo, Reddit communities aim for deep understanding and connection rather than widespread acceptance.

It is no coincidence that the largest and fastest growing online medium is messaging, as it lends further personalization and depth to connections across all subject areas. Messaging now has 3.6 billion users worldwide, exceeding social media users by 1.2 billion. Unlike on social media, users are not expected to parade their socially pre-approved talents and perfect lives in the messaging space. Rather, users on messaging platforms increasingly "share feelings, not information," according to meme-making agency founder Steve Bartlett.

It is here that we now share our most private, personal pieces of ourselves.

As such, brands must tread carefully in the messaging space, making sure not to violate this intimacy. You are not just entering homes, as TV does, you are engaging people on a deeply personal level.  Lower your voice, listen, be gentle. Most importantly, don’t overstay your welcome.

2. Presence

The growth of VR and AR is allowing audiences to play with their sense of place and inhabit spaces that weren’t available to them before. "The Matrix" may have been science fiction when it was released, but today it is closer than ever as reality-enhancing tools feature increasingly in our everyday technology. 2017 was the year that "Live" video dusted off its variety show image and shot back into fashion as Periscope-like services were added to Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. This development brought fans closer to the objects of their adoration and gave publishers ways to make audiences feel more involved in events without actually attending them.

The expansion of technologies such as live video is blurring the lines between celebrities and fans. Users can converse with celebrities that aren’t actually there through the miracle of chat bots. They can even experience what it feels like to be famous through new technology on platforms like Snapchat that allows you to assume the likeness and personality traits of your favorite star. Access, exclusivity, and experience can now be downloaded.

The proliferation of messaging channels has enabled an unprecedented level of proximity to anyone we choose, more or less around the clock. The voyeuristic social experiments of the '90s such as Big Brother and the Real World felt overblown, but today seem almost quaint as features such as Instagram stories have us living in each other's lives minute by minute. Similarly, Generation Z has popularized Houseparty, Hangouts, and Live.ly, which enable group fun to be initiated and experienced remotely.

Brands would be wise to think of the latest digital channels as experiential, with the ability to bring consumers into new worlds. With these technologies, brands can offer the depth, authenticity and proximity that consumers crave.  Voice-enabled assistants bring brand and celebrity voices right into your living room or headphones, creating an intimate, personal connection between brand and consumer.

3. Empathy.

For more than a decade, social media and online advertising companies have been building large data sets around our "likes" and behaviors. With machine learning, we can now aggregate that data from across multiple customer interactions, making automated conversational interfaces even smarter than their human counterparts.  The question, however, is how to leverage this data to connect with consumers on their terms.

A person can only experience so many things, but a chatbot can assimilate data from every customer exchange in a fraction of a second and become much more "thoughtfully" responsive as a result. Empathy and the power to leverage it will become a huge and valuable commodity as we move deeper into the conversational era. While there has been much criticism of the unrealistic expectations placed on bots, those that play within their field of expertise can successfully express their "intelligence." National Geographic rolled out a bot on Facebook Messenger to celebrate the launch of a TV series on Albert Einstein. The Einstein bot could chat with NatGeo followers about a variety of topics, entertaining and educating with amusing responses.  Capitalizing on these new technologies can allow brands to blend humor and humanity into consumer interactions.

In the age of empathy, consumer research should be conducted differently as well. My company already delivers "conversational research" on behalf of brands, going beyond social listening to learn about the motivations behind the statements, turning more interactions into sources of consumer information. Conversational research is designed for a generation not only more comfortable in messaging, but one that’s able to express more deeply as they’re equipped with tools that empower them visually and metaphorically.  It makes sense, therefore, for brands to start building that empathy and courting consumers in the places that they will ultimately be delivering marketing messages (if we can call them that now). We believe that conducting marketing outreach and research separately will soon be a relic of another age and bringing the two together will illuminate "dark social."

Finally, that same machine learning can help consumers make better calls on what, when, and how to chat with their friends. Not only will companies use empathy to generate better customer experiences but they will also bestow it upon consumers themselves. We won’t simply be reminded of our friends’ birthdays, we’ll also be presented with exactly the right GIF to share with them at exactly the right moment.

4. Vulnerability.

It seems like Snapchat has been a victim, not just a conduit, of cyber-bullying this year.  Last month 1.2 million users and Kylie Jenner weighed into a brawl that began with investors, advertisers and the brutish Facebook empire.

The fight, at its core, is about authenticity. Who is really your ‘friend?’ Evan Spiegel wants you to know that celebrities certainly aren’t, which has bloodied the noses of both fans and celebs. Jenner was credited with wiping over a billion from Snapchat’s share price after a drop in fan adoration stemming from relegation to a secondary part of the platform.

Snapchat had stood firm in the face of Wall Street and Madison Avenue, who’d clamored for a traditional media model where publishers might buy their way into consumers’ attention.  The app’s rapid growth occurred precisely because it refused that model, choosing to give the youngest users of social media a place to be more honest, unpolished, and vulnerable. Yes – one of Donald Trump’s banned words of 2017 represented an unexpected shift in direction for an industry more commonly associated with image preservation. Perhaps this is why the investment and marketing communities struggled to make sense of it. But the second-most downloaded iOS app of 2017 spoke to a new type of media relationship where the brands didn’t own the lion’s share of airtime. Money didn’t dictate who consumers hear. Intimacy did.

The magic of Snapchat was that it let us experiment, probe boundaries, make mistakes, ask questions, or just try out silly faces. It is in this sandbox that millions of young users developed themselves and their relationships. Authenticity was easier to achieve than the ultra-polished Instagram and it is less risky when only your inner circle of trusted friends are watching.

But what if you want Kylie Jenner in your inner circle of friends?

Social media brings people such unparalleled proximity to stardom that we’ve become accustomed to following the micro-actions of the rich and famous and believe the best ones to actually be our friends. While scale and perfection were the old battlegrounds of marketing, both Snapchat and Instagram now compete around values of depth, connection, humanity, and friendship. Snapchat had a lead on Instagram when it allowed "influencers" to be followed as friends, surfacing their stories side by side. But by stripping the Jenners of their "friend" status, Snapchat removed this advantage. While Spiegel’s crusade for authenticity is an admirable one, we feel that there is a middle ground.  There is genuine power in building bonds through vulnerability.  Snapchat stands to gain by remaining a conduit for this, so should consider rewarding publishers, artists, and even brands that promote honest, unguarded, and vulnerable behaviors. Only those that foster the types of connections that made Snapchat a success can be included as friends. All others should live in the "discover" section.

As brands move deeper into the messaging space, they must be sure to engage with users in an empathetic manner, being mindful of the intimate, vulnerable nature of the engagement on those platforms. Like the friends that they will inevitably be communicating with, brands should consider bringing their own vulnerability to the relationship, letting down their intricately polished exterior, if they are to flourish in this new age of intimacy