Salesforce has made its Service GPT, Sales GPT and the Einstein GPT Trust Layer generally available.
The new features, which take a open ecosystem approach, are designed to help organizations “tap into the productivity and efficiency benefits of AI while ensuring that enterprise-grade trust and data security remain at the centre,” says Clara Shih, CEO of Salesforce AI.
Brands can use Service GPT to auto-generate personalized replies and summarize customer interactions.
The tool is designed to help “traditional and field service teams leverage AI to work more efficiently, giving service professionals more time to focus on higher-order tasks and establish strong customer relationships through personalized interactions,” says Bill Patterson, EVP & GM, C360 Applications, Salesforce.
Sales GPT provides users with AI-generated, personalized customer emails based on contextual customer data stored in Salesforce.
Reps can send emails with CRM context from inside Sales Cloud or through Gmail and Outlook with just one click, Salesforce says.
The Einstein GPT Trust Layer prevents customer data from being stored outside Salesforce. The audit trail in this feature securely logs all prompts, outputs, interactions, and feedback data, the firm says.
The new offerings provide these capabilities:
– Encrypted Communications — This is done with TLS safeguards prompts sent to an LLM, with the responses sent back to Salesforce
– Data Access Checks — This ensures that the end user is allowed access to data when generating a tailored response
– Feedback Store to allow past success to guide future outcomes
– Audit Trail to help with compliance
One client, the Auto Club Group, has increased case resolutions by 20%, using Service GPT in its pilot deployment.
Another customer, CRS Temporary Housing, has used the email prompts in SalesGPT to “re-engage our customers quickly and easily, allowing our sales representatives to focus more on interactions with cases, and less on formulating emails,” says James Fee, CTO, CRS Temporary Housing
In addition, SumUp has deployed Service GPT to “empower our agents across 40 different countries to increase efficiency and lower operational costs,” says Bruno Fransoni, CRM and Support Channels PM of SumUp.
Fransoni adds: “Using Interaction Summarization alone, our teams have lowered their after call work by 50%, resulting in better overall customer support and shorter wait times.”
Like every new mobile software release, iOS 17 has hidden features and settings that are just as useful as the better known and popular features — and ones you might end up using every single day on your iPhone.
If you want to take a deep dive into what your iPhone has to master, read on to check out seven hidden features I discovered while using the iOS 17 public beta. For more, here’s our hands-on look at the upcoming iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, and my favourite new Apple Watch feature, Double Tap.
Automatically delete verification codes sent to you via text or email
Every time you sign in to an application that uses two-factor authentication, or 2FA, you’ll first need to get a text message or email verification code sent to you. You might have hundreds of these verification codes littered in your text messages or email, and though you can delete these codes one by one, there’s now an easier way to clean house, thanks to iOS 17.
In Settings > Passwords > Password Options, you can now toggle on a new Clean Up Automatically setting so that verification codes in the Messages and Mail applications are automatically deleted after being used with the autofill feature that appears at the top of your keyboard.
The text message or email with the verification will disappear shortly after you use autofill.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Lock your private tabs in Safari
Private Browsing in Safari allows you to surf the web without your details, like browsing history and cookies, being saved. However, if you have tabs open in Private Browsing, these tabs don’t automatically go away when you’re done with your private browsing sessions. Instead, they live in Safari unless you close them, which means that if anyone gets access to your phone, they could potentially see what you’ve been browsing in private.
Thanks to iOS 17 though, you can now place a lock on the Private Browsing section of Safari. In the Settings app, go to Safari, scroll down and toggle on Require Face ID to Unlock Private Browsing. Now, when you go to Safari, you must use Face ID or type in your passcode to access Private Browsing in Safari.
You can unlock Private Browsing in Safari with Face ID, Touch ID or your device passcode.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Use Apple Maps offline to navigate
You might be surprised to learn this, but you’ve never been able to use Apple Maps offline. Instead, you’d have to be connected to the internet, which is useless if you need to find your way back home when you’re out in the wilderness or in an area with no connection. In iOS 17, you can finally download an offline map to grab directions even when you don’t have service.
In Maps, tap your profile photo in the top right of the navigation window and go into Offline Maps. Depending on where you drive most, you may see a suggested map to download, along with the size of the map, in case you don’t have much storage. You can also just hit Download New Map, type a city, manually adjust the map if needed and download it to your iPhone.
Updates to the map are downloaded automatically.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Crop your photos using the zoom feature in Photos
Cropping a screenshot or picture in the Photos app is a relatively easy process, but Apple has made it even easier with iOS 17.
Now, when you’re viewing a photo and you zoom in on it, a new Crop button will appear in the top-right. This will automatically take you into edit mode and allow you to then adjust the crop even more, or you can simply hit Done to finish the crop. You must act quick though, as the crop button appears for only a few seconds after you zoom in to a photo.
You can further adjust the crop before hitting Done.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Use Visual Look Up to figure out laundry codes
You grab a shirt and look at the tag. It’s filled with symbols that are supposed to help you figure out how to wash this specific article of clothing — maybe it can only be washed in cold water, or it might require a dry cleaning. Unfortunately, you might not know how to read these laundry symbols. But your iPhone can.
With iOS 17, you can now use the Visual Look Up feature, which can identify words and objects in your photos, to decipher what these laundry codes say. All you have to do is take a clear photo of your laundry symbols, go into the Photos app, find the image of the laundry symbols, swipe up and tap on Look Up Laundry Care. The results will show you what each of the recognized laundry symbols mean.
Each laundry symbol has a link to a suggested website where you can learn more about what it means.
Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Use Crossfade for smoother transitions in Music app
If you’re in charge of playing music at a friend’s party or in the car, you now have the option to use a cross-fade effect between songs in Apple Music on iOS 17.
In the Settings app, go to Music and toggle on Crossfade. Once the setting is enabled, you can choose how long you want the cross-fade to be: Choose between one second and 12 seconds, in second intervals. If you choose five seconds, for example, the next song in the playlist/album will begin to slowly play in the background five seconds before the current song ends.
The default crossfade is four seconds long.
Screenshots by Nelson Aguilar/CNET
Interact with certain widgets on your home screen
The widgets that live on your home screen are no longer there just for looks. Apple has brought interactive widgets to the iPhone, allowing you to control applications from your home screen, much like you would from the control center.
For now, the number of interactive widgets is limited, but if you want to add one to your home screen, press down on an empty space on your home screen to enter edit mode, tap the plus sign in the top right, and scroll through the list of widgets. A few interactive widgets available include Podcast, Home, Notes and Music.
For example, in Music you can play or pause music, while in Home, you can turn any connected devices off and on, such as a smart light bulb or a thermostat.
In the Home widget, you can turn connected accessories on and off.
Is Elon laughing? Reports say Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Twitter-killer’ just suffered a stunning 50% collapse in daily active users after white-hot start — but here’s why Musk should still worry
Threads seems to be unravelling — for now.
After a record-breaking launch, Mark Zuckerberg’s new app Threads has seen the numbers wane — significantly. Threads attracted over 100 million users within five days of its launch, demolishing ChatGPT’s record of fastest-growing consumer app and earning it the nickname “Twitter killer.”
However, recent data from industry sources suggest many of these users haven’t stayed active on the platform since the white-hot launch.
Engagement settles lower
Active users on the new app declined by 50% from 49 million on July 7th to 23.6 million on July 14th, according to a new report by SimilarWeb. That means only a quarter of the platform comes back to check and interact on the app every day. Even Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the number of people returning to the app is in the “tens of millions.”
This means that the so-called “Twitter killer” still has plenty of work ahead of itself. Twitter is a private company that doesn’t release these numbers publicly, but the latest figures from the company’s last earnings report suggest the daily active user base stood at roughly 238 million. According to Elon Musk, that number has surged to 259.4 million recently.
Effectively, Threads has only 10% of the daily active users of its biggest rival. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean Musk will get the last laugh.
Why Twitter should be worried
There is evidence to suggest that rivals like Threads are seeping users and engagement from the legacy social app. Web traffic to Twitter was down 5% within the first two days of Threads being launched, according to data from SimilarWeb. Although this has recovered a little since then, traffic is still 11% lower year-over-year.
The fact that a rival app captured 10% of the user base within weeks should also be a concern. Zuckerberg has a track record of successfully scaling social media platforms — Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp each boasts billions of daily active users.
Elon Musk recently admitted that Twitter’s revenue had dropped 50% while the company was cash flow negative due to a “heavy debt load.” Musk’s decision to scale back content moderation may have scared off advertisers, according to a Bloomberg report. Researchers have seen a significant uptick in hate speech and violent content on the site in recent months.
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban mocked Musk on Twitter by saying “Go red, no bread,” while retweeting Musk’s announcement about revenue declines.
Cuban has been a vocal critic of Musk’s policies ever since he took over the social media brand last year.
“Who he supports or denigrates is the Twitter equivalent of State intervention. He owns the platform, he can do what he chooses,” he said in a tweet earlier this year. “But it’s disingenuous to say Twitter is the home of free speech when he chooses to often put his thumb on the scale of reach.”
Cuban is an active user of both Threads and Twitter
Vishesh Raisinghani is a freelance contributor at MoneyWise. He has been writing about financial markets and economics since 2014 – having covered family offices, private equity, real estate, cryptocurrencies, and tech stocks over that period. His work has appeared in Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool Canada, Motley Fool UK, Mergers & Acquisitions, National Post, Financial Post, and Yahoo Canada.
Artificial intelligence is the hot new skill on the job market, and even those who don’t work in tech could use it to open up a new world of job opportunities.
The U.S. is leading the way in artificial intelligence and generative AI jobs, according to data from the global job search platform Adzuna. Many roles fall squarely in tech, like software engineer, product designer, deep learning architect and data scientist.
But there are plenty of non-technical roles where having the emerging skillset can give you a leg-up, says James Neave, Adzuna’s head of data science. One fast-growing role where there’s “absolutely a shortage” of qualified applicants is tax manager. Accounting and consulting firms are looking for candidates with a mix of financial and AI skills to make their business more efficient using large language models.
It can be a lucrative move, too: The average tax manager job that’ll use AI pays $100,445 a year, according to Adzuna, and the average job using the skill in general pays $146,244.
Experts say there’s also lots of opportunity for AI to be used in customer service, writing, HR, education and health-care jobs, to name a few.
As such, Neave says it would be smart for non-technical workers to consider picking up AI skills and learning how it could apply to their work: “There are brilliant opportunities for people out there who want to get their hands on these tools and get experience,” he says. “Suddenly, your employability options go through the roof.”
Neave says generalist workers can build their AI skills, and boost their employability, in three steps:
First, get to know the most popular AI tools. “Go in and get your hands on the OpenAI website, practice a few prompts and see what comes back.”
Second, seek out online resources to understand how you might apply AI to your own line of work. Neave recommends finding YouTube videos and articles that introduce how ChatGPT, the generative AI tool released in late 2022, is used in different tasks. For example, you might research more about the best way to use ChatGPT to write a blog or create automated responses to customer emails, he says. You could also look into certification and training courses online, from the University of Michigan, Coursera and other e-learning platforms.
Finally, put your new knowledge to work in some of your routine tasks. “Once you feel confident enough using it, seek out and find any way to use it in your day-to-day work,” Neave says. It’s a good idea to check with your manager about your company’s policy on using AI in your work before doing so. And get a clear understanding of what you’re allowed to input into generative AI tools and what you’re not. For example, “there’s a general proviso that workers should not enter sensitive proprietary company data into ChatGPT to get answers, as it’s a public tool,” Neave adds.
Overall, Neave says, “if a future employer is looking at your CV, it’s going to be much more powerful if you can say you’ve gotten hands-on with ChatGPT using it for a certain purpose. That’s going to be the most compelling thing for potential employers.”
But listen. There’s a big problem with glorifying KPIs — or at least relying on them too much. And too many companies today are falling into this trap.
The “right way” to see KPIs
Okay, let’s be reasonable here. KPIs can be useful — and powerful for guiding an organization’s direction. When used properly, KPIs are objective, easy to interpret and measured with specific intent. These are truly reliable data points that can be used to empower decision-making.
However, even in this hypothetical perfect scenario, it’s important for organizational leaders to use these metrics properly. You should never use a single metric to fuel your decision-making, and you shouldn’t use metrics alone to guide all of your visions for the future of the company.
You can think of KPIs as being different types of food in a well-balanced diet, or as different assets with different strengths and weaknesses as part of your overall investment portfolio. They’re incredibly useful, but they’re only a portion of your strength in organizational decision-making.
The KPI monsters we’ve created
Why have we deviated from this vision? There are a few explanations worth exploring. Personally, I think it’s mostly about disproportionate evaluation. Collectively, we’ve come to see KPIs as being more powerful and informative than they actually are. That’s not to say that they’re not powerful or not informative; this is merely an assertion that we’ve overestimated and misinterpreted them. Let’s take a look at some of the specific ways this manifests.
An exercise in vanity
Vanity metrics are a prime example of how KPIs can be misused and misinterpreted. Put simply, vanity metrics are metrics that make you feel good about a specific outcome or strategy, without really providing information on how things are running.
For example, follower count is a commonly tracked vanity metric in social media marketing. It does have some value, and it certainly feels good to see your follower count increase. But your number of followers has little to do with more measurably impactful things like follower engagement, brand awareness, conversions or revenue generated.
Ambiguous meanings
Sometimes KPIs carry ambiguous meanings. Let’s take a commonly used one in the customer service and customer experience world: net promoter score (NPS). Hypothetically, NPS helps you estimate consumer sentiment, and you measure it by asking people how likely they are to recommend your business to others. But sometimes, these answers have little to do with consumer sentiment. It’s nice to know that some of your customers would hypothetically recommend your business to others, but why would they do this? What’s driving them? And how likely are they to follow through on this?
There are tough complexities to work out with almost any KPI; attempting to boil down large, complex topics into a single measurement is an exercise in futility.
Misleading data
You can use data to support just about any argument you want. For example, let’s say we’re using data to compare the effectiveness of different marketing strategies. There is one strategy that’s very challenging to pull off, but if you use it successfully, it’s incredibly powerful. If you want to make the argument that you should use this strategy, you can cherry-pick the best case studies and prove how powerful it can be. If you want to make the argument that you should not use this strategy, you can take a measurement of the average results and show that typically, this strategy isn’t worth using.
In this way, data points can sometimes become crude tools with which we simply assert our previously formed opinions. In their best applications, KPIs should challenge us and force us to think critically.
The almighty incremental change
Embedded growth obligations (EGOs) drive countless companies forward, forcing them to grow, grow, grow. And on a smaller scale, organizations are sometimes held back by a focus on incremental change, shackled by the KPIs that guide them.
Once you identify that a KPI is important, the organization becomes incentivized to keep pushing that KPI higher. The goal is usually to see a change of at least a few percentage points after each predefined time period. Obviously, incremental growth is a net positive in most cases, but sometimes, it’s better to take a short-term KPI loss in pursuit of a more fundamental, disruptive change that leads to better long-term results.
In other words, obsession over incremental changes can limit the true potential of organizational development.
Lack of actionability
One final problem to note about KPIs is that they sometimes lack actionability, or a “so what” factor. It’s great that your organization is seeing higher CSAT, but what does that mean for the organization, how should it change your decision-making, and where do you go from here?
None of this is meant to suggest that you should stop tracking KPIs or using them as part of your approach to organizational decision-making. But we need to get real about our obsessiveness and misuse of these sometimes-trivial and sometimes misleading data points.
Companies — including Ben & Jerry’s — are interested in advertising on platforms with high value and “low tumult,” according to Emburse. And since Musk acquired the platform and loosened up content moderation, gutting the teams previously responsible for that task, the platform has been tumultuous. And, according to many users and some researchers, more hateful than ever.
Despite this, Twitter said Tuesday that hate speech has dropped significantly on the platform, adding that “99% of content users and advertisers see on Twitter is healthy.”
The reach of the hate speech that does exist on Twitter, the platform said, continues to be limited, representing an “extremely small fraction of the overall conversation.”
The Bird app partnered with Sprinklr in March in an effort to measure hate speech on the platform; in May, according to Sprinklr’s models, the average daily reach of English-language hate speech impressions was .003% between Jan. and May 2023.
“We estimate hate speech impressions are 30% lower on average vs. pre-acquisition,” Twitter said.
Twitter’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, went further, attempting — in a lengthy tweet — to disprove a recent Bloomberg article that highlighted the rise in hate speech on Twitter as the most significant thing keeping advertisers from returning to the platform.
Users, including U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have remained skeptical of Twitter’s claims, with some calling for greater transparency, specifically in terms of how Sprinklr’s AI model defines “hate speech.”
“I have never experienced more harassment on this platform than I do now,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. “People now pay to give their harassment more visibility.”
One user explained that his timeline used to consist of movies, news and people he followed. Now, the Twitter algorithm recommends “misogynistic, sexist, racist, homophobic and inflammatory tweets from Republicans.”
As of February, more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers have abandoned the platform. Advertisers, according to several advertising executives that Vox spoke to at the time, are concerned with tarnishing their brand reputation by placing ads on a platform that allows hateful and offensive content.
Ian Krietzberg is a breaking/trending news writer for The Street with a focus on artificial intelligence and the markets. He covers AI companies, safety and ethics extensively. As an offshoot of his tech beat, Ian also covers Elon Musk and his many companies, namely SpaceX and Tesla.
Known’s Liz Hess describes a world where linear customer journeys have given way to a complex matrix of platforms and routes. Worse, attempts to map them too often fall short with internal misalignment.
In today’s fiercely competitive and optimization-obsessed market, understanding and enhancing the customer journey has emerged as a crucial aspect of success. Customers have come to expect personalized, proactive, and anticipatory experiences. Delivering exceptional customer experiences throughout the entire journey is the key to building strong relationships, fostering loyalty, and driving sustainable growth.
The customer journey has become a pivotal concept that empowers organizations. With marketers embracing the idea that excellent customer experiences can be the best advertisement for a brand, customer journey mapping has become an obligatory aspect of go-to-market planning.
To create the seamless experiences that customers have come to expect, marketers dissect customer needs and aggregate an amalgamation of data: marketing metrics to define the details of how customers have been acquired, user research for a step-by-step analysis of the shopper journey, market research gleaned by interviews with customers and survey data, and details on how a buyer persona uses a product. There’s also a treasure trove that can be gleaned from customer touchpoints including email interactions, social media engagement, abandonment of part-filled shopping carts, returns to the site after abandonment, or chats with sales or support representatives.
Welcome to the matrix
The customer journey, once linear, has been replaced by a complex matrix of touchpoints with the customer at the centre. Somewhere along the way, customer journeys have gotten so fluid that we’ve forgotten who and what we’re serving. Marketers need to strive for a dynamic, collaborative, and socialized customer journey that works harder and smarter.
As brand marketers, we often witness clients invest significant time and resources into (and apply painstaking detail to) defining a brand strategy, only to hit a crossroads when socializing the direction among other departments. They fall in love with a vision but struggle to evangelize colleagues with the same energy, vigour, and inspiration.
For companies to live up to their brand promise and keep up with ever-evolving consumer demands, they need to be aligned and involve each division and department. While completely breaking down silos isn’t realistic, a collective journey map can be an effective bridge to connect teams and disciplines. Still, there are a few principles to position the customer journey as a tool for internal alignment.
1. Make it universal
The customer journey shouldn’t live within one department. A customer journey is best used as a tool for building consensus, and a contract between each discipline as to what they’re ultimately working towards.
The map should provide the business with a common language and understanding of how all efforts intersect. All initiatives should stem from the journey by translating customer needs into business rationale.
2. Make it personal
A customer journey map should outline not only how disciplines intersect but also how specific individuals in the company support customers’ needs. This is particularly impactful in healthcare marketing, where it’s been shown that when employees understand how they impact patients’ lives directly, it leads to higher job satisfaction, employee retention, and overall marketing and sales effectiveness. Naming clear roles and responsibilities, escalation protocol, and internal systems creates a sense of collective ownership.
3. Make it actionable
Brand strategies can often fail in implementation. Your brand is everything that you do, so it’s crucial to thread foundational brand elements into the journey. Beyond characterizing your customer, you can also use a journey map to humanize the brand. For instance, we can imagine and define how a brand archetype would behave at critical moments that matter, based on its values and focuses.
4. Make it holistic
Remove the purchase funnel and think about what a customer is really doing before they’re engaging with or thinking about the category. Customers enter and re-enter the funnel at various points, and with different states of mind and needs. Designing these pre-entry points helps us to imagine what motivates a customer, and when.
At times, imagining a category-agnostic customer journey can help widen the aperture to identify moments and touchpoints that can bring a customer into the journey at various stages.
While there are many schools of thought, training courses, and step-by-step guides to creating customer journeys, marketers and brands looking to create a competitive advantage and win need to break convention in favour of utility. Want to create customer journey maps that are enlightening, inspiring, and effective? Flexibility is the key to success.
Feature Image Credit: Amirali Mirhashemian via Unsplash
Whether it’s showcasing your company’s work, building your reputation as an industry thought leader, or trying to create demand for your products, a blog is one of the most important marketing tools a brand can leverage.
Posting about your brand on social media has become an essential part of any business marketing plan. But if you’ve let your blog lapse because longer-form content seems like too much of a commitment, you’re missing out on a major opportunity to connect with your audience — and convert them into customers.
At the content marketing agency I co-founded, I’ve seen just how incredibly powerful (and successful) blogging has been for clients like OXO and Nutanix that incorporate it into their business strategies. In fact, 68 percent of marketers find blogging more effective than it ever has been, according to data tracking tool Databox; brands that post content on blogs produce about 67 percent more leads than those that don’t. That’s because blogging can be one of the best ways to drive visitors to your site, whether it’s through organic search or the call to action you include in your posts on another platform — I like to think of both of those as free digital foot traffic.
If the idea of having to write blog posts regularly feels overwhelming, keep in mind that one of the best parts about blog content is it can be repurposed in so many ways. You can rework blog articles into social media posts, LinkedIn thought-leadership pieces, and editorial-style newsletters, helping to fill several channels at once and reach different audiences. Even if you don’t have the time to post very often, as long as you do it with some regularity, you’ll build a body of work that serves to tell your brand’s story and lets customers feel more connected to you.
There are lots of excellent blogging platforms out there, and they serve different needs. These are five of my favourites.
This might be the first site you think of when it comes to blogging. That’s because WordPress made a name for itself in the early days of self-published websites and blogs. Now, 43 percent of all websites are built using the platform.
WordPress has ready-made themes and layouts but also has a treasure trove of customization options. It’s easy to manage and maintain, thanks to the number of tutorials, and also has plug-ins that can help you drive sales, create newsletters, and more. The platform supports various types of media, so if you want to spice up your blog posts with images and videos, WordPress can handle it. Another plus is that most creators already know how to use the platform, so if you’re thinking of hiring someone to help write your blog posts, they’ll most likely be able to jump right in–no training required.
WordPress is best for those who want heavy customization, greater control over the function of the blog, and search engine optimization features. You can set up a site for free if you don’t mind the “.wordpress.org” tacked on to your URL. If you’d prefer your own domain name, you can do that starting at $4 a month.
If you’re not too concerned with customization, Wix is the platform for you. The drag-and-drop builder plus the ready-made layouts mean you’ll soon be able to get down to writing. The platform is optimized for mobile, so once you get your feet wet, if an idea for a post strikes you, you can write and publish even when you’re on the go.
Though Wix wasn’t always known for good SEO tools, a recent update means you can now optimize your blog posts. The paid plan is free for the first year and $22 per month thereafter. So you can play around and get up to speed at no cost, and once the paid plan actually kicks in, you may already be seeing the ROI.
Squarespace is the place for e-commerce businesses that want to leverage content to help them reach potential new customers and boost sales. And Squarespace is one of the best platforms for e-commerce functionality. With its easy-to-use platform (like Wix, it is drag and drop) and e-commerce features (including integrated shopping carts and product pages), Squarespace is ideal for that combination of selling products while sharing your brand story. Prices start at $16 a month, but the platform does have a free trial, so you can give it a test drive before committing.
You may be surprised to see a career platform on a list about blogging, but you can easily create “article” pages from your own personal account or business page. It’s as simple as typing up your article, choosing a header image to go with it (always a best practice to include an image!), and clicking publish.
I personally use LinkedIn as my blogging platform because it has the best engagement with our client base at Masthead Media and has allowed me to build a stronger connection between the LinkedIn community and my company. I highly recommend it if you already have a large following and if SEO isn’t your top priority.
If writing is something of a passion for you, and you like to share insights and opinions about your industry, Medium is your platform. Unlike WordPress and Wix, Medium won’t give your company a homepage with a unique URL, but it comes with an already-engaged audience who receive a daily email promoting the best new stories posted to the site. You simply write your piece and publish it, and it has the potential to be shared with millions of readers.
The platform has also rolled out a new payment model whereby popular pieces can earn you money. So if your blogging objective is to share your thought leadership with a broad audience, check out Medium.
Meta is reducing its engagement with news publishers, focusing less on current affairs on its platforms.
The company launched a text-based app, Threads, that prioritizes non-news content.
Meta is in conflict with Canada’s government over legislation requiring platforms to pay for publishers’ content.
Tensions are escalating as Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Whatsapp, Threads, and Instagram grows increasingly distant from news publishers, sparking widespread concern.
This move comes amidst a shift in strategy where the technology titan has been giving less attention to politics and current affairs on its platforms, while simultaneously shrugging off governmental calls for increased payments to media outlets.
Meta’s growing reluctance: A strategic move
In a pivotal turn, Meta has distanced itself from the traditional news sector, despite years of appeasing key publishers through the funding of non-profit journalism initiatives and forging partnerships with entities like Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
This alteration in stance manifests in Meta’s latest product release – Threads, a text-based application designed to rival Twitter. In less than a week, Threads managed to draw in an astounding 100 million users, thanks to its integration with the globally popular Instagram platform.
Much like Instagram, Threads prioritizes content from creators and friends over hard news or political stories. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, has firmly declared the platform’s intent to avoid promoting news content.
In a controversial move, Meta has decided to exclude news from its feed in Canada, as new legislation demanding platforms pay for content from publishers and broadcasters comes into effect.
This law was formulated to uplift smaller news organizations with limited bargaining power. However, the law has been met with resistance not just from Meta, but also Google, which threatens to impose a news blackout in Canada.
The corporate tussle has elicited backlash from a host of advertisers in Canada, some of which are threatening to withdraw their advertisements. The implications for Meta are significant, given that Canada contributed approximately $3 billion to the company’s $117 billion annual revenues in 2022.
A history of friction
Historically, Meta has made attempts to ally with publishers through various initiatives, such as deals for content to be featured on Facebook’s News Tab product.
However, the senior leadership at Meta has concluded that the company’s interests conflict with those of the news industry. This stems from the notion that the growth of the company’s digital advertising business is perceived as a contributing factor to the global revenue decline experienced by newspaper groups.
Additionally, Meta’s internal research has revealed that users gravitate more towards short-form videos and content from influencers rather than news and political content. Consequently, the tech giant has reduced the presence of political content in users’ feeds since 2021.
Despite its ongoing withdrawal from the news industry, the ramifications of Meta’s actions are far-reaching.
With allegations that the company’s inadequate moderation of its applications fuelled discord surrounding the election of former US president Donald Trump, as well as the 2021 Capitol building riots, the technology behemoth is treading on thin ice.
As a result, industry insiders argue that Meta will eventually suffer from the escalating rift with news publishers. The absence of reliable news sharing could potentially isolate the firm from real-world happenings, leading to the question of whether its strategy will prove sustainable in the long term.
As the tension unfolds between Meta and news publishers, the future of news content on social media platforms remains uncertain.
However, one thing is clear: the technology titan’s standoff with news organizations and governments alike is set to redefine the relationship between social media and the world of journalism.
Jai Hamid is an enthusiastic writer whose current area of interest is the blockchain sector. Whenever she is not reading or writing, you can find her tending to her plants in the garden. She strongly believes that crypto is going to transform the world for the better.
