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Shel Holtz
Communicating at the Intersection of Business and Technology
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Friday Wrap #161: Chatbot goes bad, a new live-streaming app, Millennials love email, a VR surgery

Friday Wrap #161: Chatbot goes bad, a new live-streaming app, Millennials love email, a VR surgery

Friday Wrap #161The Friday Wrap is my weekly collection of news stories, posts, studies, and reports designed to help organizational communicators stay current on the trends and technology that affect their jobs. These may be items that flew under the radar while other stories grabbed big headlines. As always, I collect material from which I select Wrap stories (as well as stories to report on the For Immediate Release podcast, along with stuff I just want to remember to read) on my link blog, which you’re welcome to follow. If you want to make sure you never miss an edition of the Wrap, subscribe to my weekly email newsletter.

News

Twitter was the place to find out if colleagues in Brussels were safe—Facebook activated its Safety Check feature in the wake of the terror attacks in Brussels, but PR agencies took to Twitter to let everyone know their employees were safe. The takeaway: While Facebook is exponentially more popular than Twitter, the latter is viewed as being more timely, a better place to share urgent information and updates. Keep that in mind the next time you need to share something people will see right now. Read more

Microsoft’s chatbot was built to learn, then it learned the wrong stuff—Microsoft developed an AI chatbot for Twitter that was supposed to learn through the conversations people had with it. Unfortunately, what it learned was racism and other of humanity’s uglier traits. For example, when asked if the Holocaust actually happened, it reportedly replied, “It was made up,” followed by an applause emoji. And that was far from the worst of it. Microsoft turned the chatbot off. The takeaway: Artifical Intelligence will be applied to chatbots with some amazing results, but clearly there is still some work to be done. Read more

Google to compete with Periscope and Facebook Live—Meerkat couldn’t make a go of live streaming video, but that’s not stopping Google from trying to get in the game. YouTube Connect is Google’s attempt to capture share of the live-streaming market. A release date hasn’t been announced. The takeaway: Some feel that the two dominant apps—Periscope and Facebook Live—represent just about all the market can handle. But as part of YouTube (which already offers live video), it makes sense. It also speaks to the growing interest in live streaming. Read more

“Live from E!” to be broadcast via Facebook Live—NBC Universal’s E! cable network will produce a 20-minute entertainment news and gossip talk show, shot entirely on an iPhone 6S and broadcast exclusively via Facebook Live. While E! is one of the first media outlets to create a recurring program just for Facebook’s live streaming tool, others will undoubtedly follow. The takeaway: This is a remarkable opportunity for brands. If you have a Facebook page dedicated to a topic that your customers care about, a recurring live program could attract a following at a ridiculously low cost. If every company is a media company, we should pay attention to the moves media companies are making, and live recurring programs via Facebook Live are coming from “Good Morning America,” TMZ, ABC, and MSNBC. Read more

Microsoft offers free data visualization tool—Attention chart geeks: SandDance is a free data visualization app that opens in your browser. Upload a data set and pick the data view youw ant to see. Among the options: 3D scatterplot, maps, charts, and histograms. SandDance is at its best with data sets containing between 50 and 300,000 rows. The takeaway: Data can make more sense when you see it graphically. There’s also nothing stopping you from grabbing a screenshot of the data and using it in content. Read more

Quora tops 100 million monthly visitors—Quora’s monthly visitor tally has grown 20% in only three months, from 80 to 100 million. The social question-and-answer site—which seeks to be a middle-ground between Wikipedia and Facebook for people seeking authoritative information—has introduced new features, including an"Ask Me Anything” service called “Writing Sessions.” An updated editor makes it easier to create more visible answers, and Knowledge Prizes offer incentives for participation by experts. The takeaway: It’s not a typical social network, but it can be an ideal venue—particularly given its growth—for building thought leadership and demonstrating subject matter expertise. Read more

Trends

Oh, those retro Millennials—they love their email—If you think about email, you probably envision Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers who just can’t abandon what younger people consider to be a clunky, outmoded tool. A new study of shopper behavior, though, finds Millennials are using email more than those of other, older demographic groups to find products and services. Forty-three percent of Millennials look at retailers’ emails more frequently in the past six months, compared to 32% of other shoppers. Millennials have gone retro in other ways, too, with 47% saying they used more printable coupons in the last six months (versus 34% of the rest of the population). The takeaway: Assuming younger consumers are all about the digital can be a mistake. Even print book reading is up among younger segments of the population. While email may be on its way out as a communication tool in the enterprise, it’s going strong in the consumer marketplace. Read more

This guy is why it’s so hard for PR to build a good reputation for itself—Most of the people I know working in public relations are ethical, honest, hard-working souls who employ best practices and avoid behavior that could be seen as ethically-challenged. But when Martin Shkreli—the pharma CEO who outraged pretty much everyone with a 5,000% increase in the price of a life-saving drug—hired Mike Kulich to do his crisis PR, he was hiring someone with zero PR background who employed stunt-driven tactics that would make most professionals cringe. The Takeaway: As long as people like Kulich—a former porn producer—can hang out a shingle and call his work PR, it will be impossible for the industry to gain the respect it craves. I wish I knew the answer to this conundrum beyond requiring all practitioners to be licensed or certified. It wouldn’t get rid of the bottom-feeders, but at least they’d have to call what they do something else. Read more

Millennials embrace social for B2B buying—The oldest Millennials are 35 years old, which puts a lot of them right in the middle of the corporate world, with plenty making business purchase decisions. A survey found 73% of Millennials are involved in B2B buying decisions and at one-third of companies, they’re the sole decision makers. How do they go about making decisions? Search engines, vendor websites, recommendations from peers and colleagues, and social media top the list. The takeaway: While business-to-consumer companies have figured out the inescapability of social media, business-to-business remains wary. Recognizing that the audience is now made up of a sizable number of Millennials should put that hesitation to rest. Read more

Streaming media advertising pays off—The streaming music service Pandora is free if you don’t mind the occasional ad. For a year, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority advertised on Pandora in an effort to attract people ages 25 to 54 from specific geographic locations to the city. The campaign is responsible for a 6% increase in travel to Las Vegas among Pandora’s audience. That’s 152,462 visitors who might not otherwise have come to spend an average $724 (for a total of $110 million). The takeaway: Wait, you mean we have to add streaming music services to the pile of possible advertising and marketing channels? Answer: Of course we do. If we understand the audiences and their tastes, we can achieve much better results by targeting non-conventional channels for our ads, assuming we’re strategic about how we use them. For example, in this case, the ads were on a branded radio station featuring artists who live and play in Vegas hotels and clubs. Read more

Amazon’s Echo is a new partnership opportunity—I love my Echo, even though I don’t yet have any of the connected devices it can be used to control (e.g., “Alexa, turn on the porch light” or “Alexa, turn the heat up two degrees”). Now we’re seeing brands introducing “skills” for the Echo that allow customers to interact with it. Domino’s, for instance, has introduced a skill that lets you order pizza while Uber lets you call for a car. The takeaway: Call it the “voice space” and consider how an Echo skill could help build the relationship between customers and your company. Read more

More evidence that marketers have embraced emojis—An analysis of 9,000 marketing campaigns that used emojis and found the use of the visual icons has grown by 775% over the previous year and continued their rise by 20% per month during 2016. The takeaway: Go ahead and hate them. Just stop ignoring them. Read more

How Instagram’s new algorithm-based feed will change how brands use it—Instagram is now showing the images and videos its algorithm thinks you want to see rather than a chronological stream of the latest images shared by those you follow. This will result in more followers, but the number of followers you have won’t be as useful a metric, sharing a photo will no longer mean it will necessarily appear in each of their feeds. It’ll be more important to measure engagement, since the more clicks, comments, and likes you get, the more likely it is that content will appear regularly in those followers’ feeds. It’s also likely that brands will turn to Instagram influencers and celebrities, since their content is more likely to appear in the feeds of people who have followed them. Paid advertising on Instagram is also likely to increase as marketers pony up to be seen. The takeaway: The need to adapt to the new Instagram is pretty clear, though nearly 200,000 people have signed a petition demanding the return of the old chronological feed. Read more

Mobile and Wearables

Mobile consumers expect brands to ask for feedback—Ninety-eight percent of consumers who prefer to leave feedback for companies from within a mobile app are likely to do so when asked, and two-thirds expect to be asked. However, one-third of companies have never asked customers for feedback. Fifty-five percent of respondents who leave feedback in a mobile app could abandon the company if they’re not acknowledged for their thoughts, and 67% who leave feedback never get a response. The takeaway: This is all supposed to be about engagement, relationships, and conversation. I noted last week that 97% of brands’ social content is 1:1, but most companies still aren’t taking it seriously. One-to-one engagement needs to be elevated on your social media priority list. Read more

Ford looks to mobile messaging to erode apathy toward the brand—Ford Motor Company has been testing WhatsApp at some auto shows and sees Snapchat Stories as another channel that could potentially chip away at the apathy Europeans feel toward its cars. Part of the strategy will shift from car sales to a more holistic experience that spans the customer journey from pre- to post-sale. The takeaway: Recognizing the growing relevance of mobile messaging, Ford’s effort is focused on building a relationship, not selling cars. Looking to social tools like mobile messaging can create a better overall customer experience. It’s important to learn how mobile messaging works in these kinds of cases. Read more

Ads go vertical—Some people still resist vertical video, but Hearst is dishing up ads in the vertical format for its mobile sites. The full-screen vertical video ads appear on the mobile iterations of all Hearst’s sites, with the highest demand showing up on sites that cater to younger audiences, such as Cosmo, Elle, Seventeen, and Marie Claire. Hearst has been playing in the vertical video sandbox for a while, running two channels on Snapchat. The takeaway: As younger audiences become accustomed to vertical video as a standard, they’ll expect to see it more often (and certainly won’t object to it). Consider where vertical video fits in your communication plan and learn the fundamentals of good vertical composition. Read more

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Marketers need to view VR as a consumer-first medium—A lot of early marketing concepts for employing Virtual Reality are little more than TV scripts, often from marketers who have never even put on a VR headset. According to the creative director at a VR studio, marketers need to make their VR content native and compelling, “where the lines between the audience and narrative are blurred beyond recognition.” The takeaway: History repeats itself. Most marketers and communicators use a new medium to do the same old thing. Consider social media’s early days, when corporate blogs were stuffed full of press releases. There will be less patience with bad VR, especially once the novelty wears off. Read more

Cancer surgery will be livestreamed via VR—Virtual Reality viewers around the world will feel like they’re in the operating theater when a London surgeon performs an operation on a cancer patient. The surgery will start at 1 p.m. on April 14. The technology improves on the in-person experience of sitting in the theater, since viewers will be able to position themselves anywhere. The surgeon, Shafi Ahmed, is a pioneer in the use of VR for surgery. The takeaway: There is no doubt in my mind that both VR and AR will find massive uptake in business, medicine, and other disciplines that don’t involve games or entertainment. Read more

Research

Social Media Inflation Index finds massive Instagram growth—TrackMaven’s annual report on audience growth across the most popular social networks found that Instagram grew at twice the rate of LinkedIn and more than three times the rate of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. The audience for brands across all social networks grew 42% over the prior year. The study analyzes 27,000 brands in every industry. This year’s report suggests that nearly one-third of the world population will be on social networks by 2018. The takeaway: There is no longer any doubt that marketers and communicators have to consider Instagram a major social network and redouble their efforts to implement a sound visual communication strategy. Read more

20% of your employees may be your biggest security risk—One out of five employees would sell their work passwords, with 44% of those saying they’re amenable to an offer would let their passwords go for less than $1,000.  In the U.S., 27% of employees can see themselves making a few extra bucks by taking money for their passwords. The takeaway: There are two solutions to this problem. The quick fix is better security for corporate networks. Longer-term, though, organizations need to do a better job of building engagement. Engaged employees would never consider such a betrayal. Read more

Long load times (more than 3 seconds) lead to site abandonment—We knew this instinctively. Now there’s data to support it. Fifty-seven percent of users will abandon a site that takes more than 3 seconds to load, according to research from Radware Ltd. Seventy-eight percent of the top news websites exceed that limit, as do nearly all sports-related sites and 80% of travel sites. The takeaway: This data applies to desktops, so you can imagine what it means to mobile! Javascript is a major culprit in long load times. Work with IT to get those times down or risk losing business. Read more

Nobody missed email when it was taken away—A study restricted 13 employees at a government research facility from using email for a week. The group included managers and non-managers. The result. You could hear the crickets chirping. “Not only did they avoid bad outcomes,” Cal Newport writes, “the employees felt happier, achieved more deep work states, experienced stress, and moved a lot more.” They also got more work done, the work quality was improved, and they enjoyed it more. The takeaway: Email is not dead (as noted above), but as an internal communication tool, it should be. Given more effective communication tools, I’m sure your company could live without it (except for communicating with external audiences). Read more

Reputation study finds a company’s behavior drives customer perceptions—MSLGroup’s report, “Corporate Reputation in a Global Setting,” found that the general public’s view of an organization and its reputation are driven by the products and services the company delivers, but also by its business behavior. That is, companies need to deliver the goods in an ethical and transparent manner. And while brands are global, company reputation is local, with company behavior regionally driving perceptions within those regions. The takeaway: Corporate Social responsibility is a bigger deal than ever. It should no longer be the concern of a single department, but rather baked into a company’s DNA and reported alongside performance metrics. Read more

This week’s wrap image—of an LED slap-wrap bracelet—courtesy of Plusea

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