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A major security breach at online micro-blogging site Twitter has been blamed on owner Elon Musk’s mass firing of staff.

Over 200 million Twitter users woke up to find their email and log-in details had been posted online.

According to several reports, the data was stolen over a year ago but has only just been put up for sale on ‘Breached’, a dark web market place.

The data, contains emails and partial log-in details for over 200m users is available for sale for the crypto currency equivalent of $2 (£1.69) each.

Alon Gal, of Israeli cyber security firm Hudson Rock first reported the breach over LinkedIn, he said it was “one of the most significant leaks I’ve seen.”

Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer, a New York based tech and security firm. said they had confirmed the validity of a number of the leaked emails. They also said the data included not only email addresses and phone numbers but also names, screen names/user handles, follower count, and account creation date.

The security breach comes as experts question whether Twitter will be able to handle system vulnerabilities. Since taking over the social media platform, Elon Musk has fired over half of Twitter staff.

Last week, two UK politicians saw their Twitter accounts hacked, spelling trouble for public figures on the platform.

A senior threat researcher at Sophos has advised caution saying: “Now is the time to assume a brace position for a possible crash of Twitter. This is what many information security professionals are doing: it’s what everyone should be doing now.”

According to cybersecurity experts at Wedbush Securities, Musk’s mass firing means that no one is left to “fix things” that are broken.

“There’s skeleton staff right now left and I think that’s pretty scary, especially around the cybersecurity side. You start to lose some key engineers, developers, key people internally, I think that’s where this thing can really cascade,” technology analyst Daniel Ives was quoted saying.

Twitter has been approached for comment.

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Sourced from CITY A.M.

Sourced from The Guardian

From the benefits of choosing a niche subject to building a community and bringing in income

Focus on your niche

If you haven’t already chosen a blog topic, thinking about your hobbies, passions and personal experiences is a good starting point.

Pamela Rae-Welsh, the creative director at the online visibility specialist Worsley Creative, says: “With so much online content, you’ll need to carve out a unique purpose that your blog will serve. For example, rather than creating a general cooking and recipe blog, consider a specific niche, such as Italian-inspired vegetarian cooking.”

Whatever your subject, also think about what you are hoping to achieve to refine your blog’s aim. For example, that might be to help people, make them laugh or teach them something.

Choose your blog name

Once you have decided on your subject, you need a blog name. Bear in mind that your blog and domain name should be the same, and ideally one that will stand out from the crowd.

It could be relevant to your subject but it doesn’t have to be. Lynn Beattie, a personal finance expert and the founder of Mrs MummyPenny, says: “You simply need it to be as short as possible, and memorable, so it could be a specific word, phrase or play on words.” You could spark some ideas by using the Google keyword planner and the Wordtracker keyword tool to search for the terms you might write about.

Overhead image of a female blogger writing on the laptop
The name of your blog does not have to be relevant to the subject. Photograph: lechatnoir/Getty Images

However, make sure your name isn’t already taken, so search across web domains and social media. You can search and buy your domain through different registrars such as GoDaddy and 123 Reg. See if you can buy the .com and .co.uk extensions.

Pick your platform

You will also need to pick a blogging platform that you will use to design and write your blogposts and publish online. There are several to choose from, including WordPress, Typepad, Blogger and Tumblr.

WordPress claims to be the world’s most popular platform, and is great for beginners who are looking for a simple site that enables them to build a blog within minutes. There are plenty of YouTube tutorials that can help you get set up. You can then work on personalising your blog.

Tumblr social networking website
Blogging platforms include Tumblr, WordPress, Typepad and Blogger. Photograph: NetPhotos/Alamy

Design your blog

Choosing your design theme is important because first impressions count. Francesca Henry favours WordPress for her money-saving blog the Money Fox. She says: “You can buy some beautiful and functional themes from about £50 to £150, and get free plug-ins that help you do loads of things such as create a standalone homepage.”

A simple theme is usually best, while making your blog as user-friendly as possible, including a call to action to let your readers know where they can find you, with links to Twitter and Instagram, for example. You could also get a professional logo designed to complete your brand, or work on one yourself.

Find your audience

Go where your readers are. This could be on specific Facebook groups, for example, TikTok, Instagram or LinkedIn. Follow blogs on similar subjects, start conversations and tweet your posts.

Georgina Durrant runs the SEN Resources Blog, which is for parents and teachers of children with special educational needs and disabilities. “The blog now has more than 30,000 social media followers but it took a lot of regular, consistent posting of blogposts on my site, as well as posts on social media, and a lot more work than I initially expected to get there,” she says.

“You don’t get very far just sharing links. It’s about building a community around the blog. My following increased when I joined in and started conversations on social media. The readership of my blog kept on increasing as the community grew.”

YouTube logo
You could add a YouTube channel to your blog. Photograph: Éric Piermont/AFP/Getty Images

Add other channels

There will be people who prefer to listen or watch rather than read, so you could add a YouTube channel or podcast to your blog. Marie Brown, a blogger at Beyond the Kitchen Table, which builds websites for small businesses, also has a podcast called the Website Coach. She says: “A podcast is a great way to market your blog, and featuring as a guest on other people’s podcasts is another option.”

She matches her podcast and blog topics. “You can either use the podcast transcript as the basis of the blog or, as I do, write the blogpost and use this as the outline for the podcast episode. I link the blogpost in the show notes to the podcast episode,” she says.

Keep building your blog

You will want to focus on getting your brand known, producing content and sharing your expertise before potentially turning a profit. Networking to build up backlinks will ultimately help you to monetise your blog, too.

Rae-Welsh says: “Google is looking for unique, relevant and trustworthy content to rank in the search engines – the more you add relevant and quality content, the more traffic you will get, which will give you more opportunity to monetise.”

There are free tools such as Google Search Console or Google Analytics that will help you create content that will be seen by search engines. “But it’s worth investing in learning SEO [search engine optimisation] properly if you want to make your blog a success,” Rae-Welsh adds.

Make a profit

There are various ways to make money from your blog. For example, firms that are relevant to your blog’s subject may want to buy some space and advertise their services using a box or banner. You may also want to consider approaching a particular brand to collaborate and produce a specific campaign on a subject you are passionate about.

You can also make money from sponsored links, where advertisers pay bloggers to publish a post that includes a link to their website. But you will need to ensure you make it clear that the post is sponsored.

Alternatively, there is affiliate marketing, where links are placed into your posts or on your page that direct readers to a website selling something. You will earn a commission on any sales. You can find companies looking to place affiliate links on sites such as Tradedoubler and Amazon Associates.

Beattie adds: “There are so many other ways a blogger can make money, such as writing for brands, product sales, public speaking and social media advertising. The key is getting a well-diversified income stream.”

Feature Image Credit: Illustration: Jamie Wignall

Sourced from The Guardian

By Aisha Malik

TikTok is testing a new horizontal full screen mode with select users globally, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Users who have access to the test feature will see a new “full screen” button appear on square or rectangle videos in their feed. Once you click the button, the video will shift into a horizontal full screen mode that takes advantage of all the real estate on your phone.

The test feature marks yet another way that TikTok is steadily inching into YouTube’s territory. Earlier this year, TikTok rolled out the ability for users to upload videos up to 10 minutes in length. The move was seen as a way for TikTok to attract the same sort of longer-form video creators who normally post content on YouTube. With the expansion, creators gained more flexibility to film things like cooking demos, beauty tutorials, educational content, comedy sketches and more, without having to worry too much about the video’s length.

Now that TikTok has been supporting long-form content for a while, it makes sense for the company to enhance the viewing experience for users who are watching these sorts of videos, while also making the creative experience better for creators. Oftentimes creators will add a “turn your phone” message at the start of a video to get users to fully enjoy the content that’s about to play if they recorded a video horizontally. With this feature, creators would no longer have to do that.

Although some people may welcome the test feature and the opportunities that it brings, others may not. TikTok is the app that largely popularized the vertical video scrolling format that other companies were quick to copy, so its users may not exactly be fond of the new full screen mode after being accustomed to the vertical format.

TikTok's new full screen mode

Image Credits: Screenshot/TechCrunch

As with any test feature, it’s unknown when or if TikTok plans to release the full screen mode widely to all users. It’s also worth noting that if TikTok does decide to release the feature officially, the final product may look different than the test product.

One way that TikTok could possibly change the feature before an official rollout is by making it more intuitive. You currently have to click the button to switch to full screen mode, but maybe in the future users will just have to turn their phone sideways to watch in full screen, which is something that other apps allow users to do.

The test feature comes at a time when data has shown that kids and teens now spend more time watching TikTok than YouTube. This has been the case since June 2020, when TikTok began to outrank YouTube in terms of the average minutes per day people ages 4 through 18 spent accessing these two competitive video platforms. By enhancing its viewing experience, TikTok is continuing to inch further into YouTube’s territory.

On the other hand, YouTube is also continuing to rival TikTok with Shorts, its TikTok competitor. In September, YouTube announced major changes to its YouTube Partner Program, allowing creators to earn ad revenue on Shorts. Prior to this, no short-form video platform quite figured out how to share ad revenue, which gives Shorts a leg up on the competition.

Feature Image Credit: TikTok

By Aisha Malik

Sourced from TechCrunch

By Gerry McGovern
Cheap and free cost the Earth. And we’re all a part of the problem, along with digital giants.

Much of the digital world is built on lies. A search is not free. A tweet is not free. Facebook is not free. Packing and shipping are not free. Every year, billions of trees are cut down for packaging. Every year, Amazon uses enough plastic to smother the Earth. Delivery trucks cost. We return four times more bought online than in stores. Most returns end up being dumped rather than resold. Cheap and free cost the Earth.

Digital Brands and Humans Are to Blame

The digital brands cleverly hide from us the true and total costs, and we hide from ourselves the acknowledgment that costs must be paid so that we can do these things for “free.”

We are in a climate crisis that has exploded onto a whole other level of harm since the 1970s. Of all the CO2 damage that humans caused over millions of years, we have caused 75% of it since 1970. In 50 years we caused three times more damage than in the previous three million years. This explosion in harm runs hand in hand with the explosion in technology.

A human with their bare hands can only do so much damage. A human with a smartphone is lethal. To manufacture, that phone caused 60 kg of CO2; 90 kg of earth were dug up; 4,000 liters of water were wasted. Using the phone, we can book “cheap” flights, order four pairs of jeans when we only intend to keep one, browse the superficial features of the next planet-killing SUV we plan to buy. Digital has turned humans into devourers.

What Facebook, Google Really Represent

This is some of the cost of free. Relentless, AI-manipulating advertising. Google is an AI advertising machine, not a search engine. Facebook is an advertising machine, not a community. The free model of the Internet can only be maintained through overconsumption and constant growth. If we continue this free model, we are guaranteed to eliminate life on Earth within the next 50 years.

In 1970, we dug from the Earth 25 billion tons of material. In 2020, we dug 100 billion tons. In 2050 we will dig 170 billion tons. Mount Everest has a mass of 150 billion tons. Life on Earth cannot survive a species that is devouring a Mount Everest every year.

I have been very slow to change myself. Since 1996, I have been publishing this opinion piece for free. From January 2023, I intend to charge €10 for a 12-month subscription to the email version. Perhaps nobody will subscribe. That’s OK. It’s much better than sending thousands of emails every week to people who no longer want them. I will leave it for free on my website for those who genuinely can’t afford to pay but who would like to read it.

If you’re using the free model, I ask you to reconsider it. It is a poisonous and deceptive model, full of tricks and multi-layered costs. The advertising industry has an enormous underworld web, consuming vast quantities of energy and creating enormous and utterly unsustainable levels of waste.

Digital advertising is probably an even greater threat to life on Earth than the fossil fuel industry. Every time we buy into the Big Lie of free, we make a down-payment on our extinction.

When it’s free, you are the product, and the Earth pays the price.

By Gerry McGovern

Gerry McGovern is the founder and CEO of Customer Carewords. He is widely regarded as the worldwide authority on increasing web satisfaction by managing customer tasks.

Sourced from CMSWIRE

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When you played video games as a kid, you would likely often look for cheat codes to help you gain a competitive advantage. Specific cheat codes would help you get to the next level of the game when you feel stuck.

Suddenly, this cheat code would unlock a new achievement and allow you to save yourself a significant amount of time. Did you know that there are cheat codes to life that could put you ahead of others?

We’re going to look at 15 cheat codes that will put you years ahead of 95% of people out there.

1. Become comfortable with getting rejected. The sooner you stop fearing rejection, the sooner you can become unstoppable.

Every successful entrepreneur or person has been through a laundry list of failures. As much as we love to glamorize risk-takers, we can’t ignore how much they’ve failed on the road to success. One could even argue that the road to success is paved with failures and crushed dreams.

The good news is every rejection or failure brings you one step closer to a yes that could change your entire life. They say that when one door closes, another one opens. This may not seem like the case at the moment, but those rejections will help you become more tenacious so that you’re ready for whatever life throws at you.

2. Pay attention to how people treat service workers because this reveals their true colours.

How someone treats those who can’t do something for them accurately indicates character. You can learn plenty from how someone treats service people.

There’s one quote that summarizes this best, and we really can’t argue with the greatest of all time:

“I don’t trust anyone who’s nice to me but rude to the waiter. Because they would treat me the same way if I were in that position.” ― Muhammad Ali

3. Embrace adversity because it will help you grow more than being stuck in your comfort zone.

Your comfort zone is the worst place you can spend any time if you want to see growth in your life. The comfort zone is where dreams go to die because nothing remarkable ever came from playing it safe.

How can you embrace adversity?

  • Don’t be afraid to suck at something new.
  • Challenge yourself constantly.
  • Try a new sport regardless of your age.
  • Seek feedback from people who aren’t afraid to hurt your feelings.
  • If it scares you, then it means that you need to do it.
  • If your goals aren’t intimidating, then they’re not bold enough.

4. Take action first and then figure it out as you go.

So many of us want to know everything upfront before taking action. Taking action when you don’t know all of the answers is a true superpower. The stars will never align, and the universe won’t conspire to give you the perfect conditions for starting. You have to take action first and then watch how everything conspires in your favour once you start to build momentum on your own.

This Ryan Holiday quote from “The Obstacle is The Way’” summarizes this notion best:

“We often assume that the world moves at our leisure. We delay when we should initiate. We jog when we should be running or, better yet, sprinting. And then we’re shocked –shocked!—when nothing big ever happens, when opportunities never show up, when new obstacles begin to pile up, or the enemies finally get their act together.”

Instead of waiting for the perfect conditions to start, focus on progress over perfection. Your future self will thank you for the risks you take today when you don’t feel fully prepared.

5. Know what you want out of life, or you’ll never get what you want.

They say that no road will take you there when you don’t know where you’re going. You must figure out what you want from life to start planning to make it happen. So many people walk through life aimlessly without a plan, and they wonder why they never seem to get lucky.

Knowing what you want out of life is the ultimate cheat code. Once you know what you’re after, you can craft a plan to go after it. The best part is that no matter what you want to accomplish, chances are that someone out there has already done it, so you can learn from them by buying a book, taking a course, or paying for coaching.

6. Never stop investing in yourself because this is the most important thing you can do.

Making yourself a priority isn’t selfish; it’s actually the most important thing that you can do because you can’t pour from an empty glass. Every investment you make in yourself today will pay dividends for years.

How can you invest in yourself right now?

  • Learn a new skill. The more that you learn, the more that you earn.
  • Buy a book on a topic that fascinates you. Everything that you could want to learn about has been written about. You can spend $20 on a book to acquire a lifetime of knowledge.
  • Spend money on your health. Always spend the money on eating better and the best physical training you can get. You want to ensure that you’re physically and mentally prepared for whatever life brings you.
  • Take someone out for coffee or lunch. You can learn something from someone who’s a few steps ahead of you by offering to take them out for lunch.
  • Attend an event or conference in your field. They say that your network is your net worth. You want to do what you can to get around those who are already where you want to be one day.

7. Focus on one thing at a time because multi-tasking is the biggest trap.

Multi-tasking is a recipe for doing a mediocre job on a bunch of random tasks. If you want to see remarkable results, you must focus on one thing at a time to give it your full attention. When you chase two rabbits, you end up catching none of them. While social media is filled with people bragging about how much they do, the reality is that we’re all better off focusing on one important task at a time.

You owe it to yourself to read “The One Thing” by Gary Keller if you struggle with focusing on one task at a time. Here’s a quote that simplifies the entire book into one sentence.

“It is not that we have too little time to do all the things we need to do, it is that we feel the need to do too many things in the time we have.”

Most of us don’t have an issue with time management. We struggle with figuring out the one thing that deserves our focus, so we try to complete multiple different tasks simultaneously.

8. Stop lying to yourself if you want to become unstoppable.

You have to know yourself and be self-aware enough to accept your limitations. There’s no sense in lying to yourself because you’re only going to set yourself up for disappointment. As tempting as it is to make audacious statements about what you plan on doing, you’re better off setting small and attainable goals that will help you get to the finish line.

9. Focus on quality friendships to build deeper relationships.

How many times have you seen a documentary about an athlete, musician, or celebrity who ended up losing everything they had? These people were always surrounded by an entourage, yet it seemed like they didn’t have any real friends. You don’t want this to happen to you.

A few quality friendships with deep connections are worth more than many acquaintances who don’t care about you. You want to surround yourself with people on a similar mission so that you don’t get side-tracked or brought down by anyone’s misery.

10. If you want to achieve greatness, you have to accept suffering.

You won’t get anywhere in life if you avoid all suffering. There’s a reason why so few people end up building a successful business or can get into amazing physical shape. Most of us will give up on suffering because we’re not sure if the short-term discomfort is worth the long-term results.

Knowing that suffering today for a better tomorrow is worth it is a cheat code that very few will accept. Whatever you’re going through today will be worth it when you get to the other side. Nothing worth doing has ever been easy.

11. How you react is much more important than what happens to you.

Life isn’t about what happens to you. It’s about how you react to what happens to you. Instead of blaming the world for your problems, you have to get into the habit of taking accountability for your situation.

You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you react to it. How you respond to conflict and challenges will say plenty about you.

12. Choose to change your life if you want it to change by tomorrow.

Your life won’t change until you change. This means you have to decide to change your life because nobody else can do it for you.

You can hire coaches, pay for mentorship, and join a mastermind, but none of that will mean anything if you don’t decide that you’re going to change. The choices you make today will be reflected in the results you get tomorrow.

13. To become successful, you’ll have to make many sacrifices.

While it’s easy to admire successful people when you see what they’ve accomplished, you don’t know what they went through to get to where they are.

Many sacrifices are required if you want to get to the next level. The good news is that every sacrifice you make today will be evident in the rewards you receive in the future.

14. You become more powerful when you don’t worry about what others think of you.

So many of us worry about the opinions of others when in reality, those people don’t even know what’s best for us. It would be best if you didn’t worry about the opinion of those who don’t know what you’re going through.

The truth is that most people will judge you because they’re jealous that you’re not afraid of taking risks. You’ll never be criticized by someone who’s doing better than you. Criticism tends to come from those who aren’t doing as well as you.

This quote about worrying about what others think always makes me think…

“When you’re 20, you care what everyone thinks, when you’re 40, you stop caring what everyone thinks, when you’re 60, you realize no one was ever thinking about you in the first place.”

This quote was originally attributed to Winston Churchill, but the original author hasn’t been verified. Regardless of who said this, we spend far too much time worrying about what others think of us when their opinions don’t pay our bills.

15. Your vibe attracts your tribe.

Smiling may not seem like a big deal at the moment, but your energy will attract many opportunities. You may have heard how your vibe attracts your tribe, but you don’t realize how accurate this is until you try it. How you present yourself to the world will determine what kind of energy you attract into your life. It’s important to remember this when you step out into the world.

Those are 15 cheat codes that will help you get ahead in life. Save this list and refer to it when you’re looking for some inspiration or when you’re just feeling stuck.

Work Hard to Win at the Game of Life

Why cheat at video games? Because you want to win! Old-school gamers will remember the days of pressing Down Up, Right, Left, Left, A, B, B, A, B, Up, Down, and similar combinations to unlock unlimited health, wealth, and more. If you can find a cheat code for life, you’re better positioned to find yourself winning at your goals.

Feature Image Credit: Due

By

Sourced from Entrepreneur

By Jon Porter

It is no longer planning to begin turning off the old extensions standard in January and says the rest of the timeline is ‘under review.’

Google no longer plans to begin turning off the Chrome browser’s old extensions standard in January, the company’s developer advocate for Chrome Extensions, Simeon Vincent, has announced (via 9to5Google). The company is currently in the process of transitioning from the Manifest V2 (MV2) extension standard to Manifest V3 (MV3), which Google says will improve the security and performance of its browser. Critics, however, have claimed MV3 will make it harder for ad-blocking extensions to work.

My former colleague Corin Faife wrote an excellent explainer on the controversy earlier this year. But the TL;DR is that MV3 swaps out a powerful API used by ad-blocking extensions called Web Request for another called Declarative Net Request. The latter gives less power to ad-blocking extensions in an attempt to minimize security risks, but critics argue it restricts actions legitimate extensions might take to protect user privacy. Corin’s piece is well worth reading for a more thorough explanation.

As of late September, Google had planned to experiment with turning off MV2 in Chrome’s Canary, Dev, and Beta channels starting in January 2023, broaden the experiments to include the browser’s stable releases in June 2023, and stop running MV2 extensions entirely in January 2024. But as of December 9th, it’s postponing the January experiments and placing future milestones “under review.”

In his post, Vincent says the timeline has been pushed back to address feedback from developers. “We’ve heard your feedback on common challenges posed by the migration, specifically the service worker’s inability to use DOM capabilities and the current hard limit on extension service worker lifetimes,” he writes. “We’re mitigating the former with the Offscreen Documents API (added in Chrome 109) and are actively pursuing a solution to the latter.”

While rival privacy-focused extension Ghostery has opposed the MV3 changes, it’s worth noting they have the support of Adblock Plus. But ad-blocking is a sensitive topic when it comes to Google, given advertising still provides so much of the company’s income. And since the changes are being made to the Chromium project and not just Chrome specifically, they’re likely to impact other browsers like Edge, Brave, and Opera.

Despite the delays, it sounds like Google doesn’t have any plans to ditch its migration to MV3 entirely. Vincent says that Google will announce an “updated phase-out plan and schedule” in March next year.

Feature Image Credit: Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

By Jon Porter

Sourced from The Verge

By Bernard May

As marketers and brands around the world start 2023, one subject I find myself discussing more and more frequently is creativity. Internally, creativity is critical for keeping agencies competitive. Externally, creativity is key for driving results for our clients and partners.

But just saying “think creatively” is a vague request and, therefore, a lost cause. Creativity means different things across the spectrum of marketing channels and expertise.

Looking forward to next year, I want to take some time to outline not only why creativity is key but also where creativity comes into play for improving performance and maybe even helping to future-proof the marketing industry.

Automation Fuels Creativity

While some fear automation as a threat to their particular area of marketing expertise, I personally see automation innovations as gifts that allow us to refocus our creative mindsets.

The time that may have been taken up by manually tracking data points for optimizing the performance of a landing page, for example, can now be reinvested into creating more landing pages for testing. New ad platform innovations like Google’s Performance Max may free up time for Google marketers to create more differentiated ad messaging for more rapid testing and optimization.

As another example, not too long ago, we had to crack open a laptop and dedicate hours upon hours to edit video content. Now edits, flashy transitions and color correcting can be automated on our phones if we desire.

I urge fellow marketers to take advantage of and embrace automation for reasons like these. Time is our most precious commodity, and automation offers us all more time to get creative with our content.

Strategy Requires Creativity

Often overlooked is the need to flex creative thinking to develop effective marketing strategies. Developing creative strategies is an underappreciated but deeply important skill for effective marketing campaigns.

At its core, strategy is problem-solving—mapping out a solution of tactics, tools and processes for going from where you are to where you want to be. Now, this may require thinking about data in creative new ways, exploring the connection of marketing channels from different angles and even re-exploring the pieces of the marketing funnel for different clients.

Remember, a creative mindset is not confined to copy, messaging and design. Without a strategy, there is no vision for how the pieces of the marketing puzzle will fit together. Without creativity, your marketing strategy is likely to fall flat.

Context Takes Creativity

If you take one thing away from this exploration of creativity, let this unpacking of context be the winner.

Context, in my opinion, generates 80% to 90% of the power attached to any piece of marketing content. Ad channels, website content, emails, social platforms, etc.—each require a different understanding when adapting content to the specific medium.

This is a very jargon-filled way of saying “what works in one place may not work in another.” For example, it requires creativity to take the essence of a product page on a website and pivot it to work for a Google ad. Even repurposing the minimal text of a Google ad for Facebook demands an understanding of the context so you can make the appropriate changes.

Just because someone is an amazing blog writer does not mean they can just bang out copy for a Google ad, Facebook ad or email drip campaign—and vice versa. It takes rapid creative thinking and an understanding of the content’s real-world context to be effective. Take the time to ensure you have the right creative minds in the right seats.

Loyalty Needs Creativity

In 2023, customer loyalty, and in turn better customer lifetime value, will become even more important. With a possible recession on the horizon, brands need to hold on to as much repeat business as possible.

So, where does the creative mindset come into play? Well, what drives loyalty is different across the board. It may take a combination of data, messaging and channel creativity to find an effective strategy for outreach, follow-up and loyalty-based promotions that are personalized for your various customer cohorts.

This might even mean polling your customer base to better understand their needs and desires so that you can proceed with creative and innovative loyalty programs.

Customers Want Creativity

All in all, customers have a thirst for creativity—something that breaks through the noise and makes them pay attention. There is a reason that people always talk about the commercials they see during the Super Bowl—it’s the “Super Bowl” of creative ideas.

The good news (and bad news) is that there are no rules surrounding creative concepts. “Got Milk?” and “Think Different” were beyond basic but broke through decades ago and are still remembered today.

There is a reason that consumers across demographics have pivoted to a platform like TikTok: We are attracted to new ideas. This platform has fostered a completely new avenue where creators are promoting products in ways that massive brands could never have seen coming.

The point is that customers and clients will always be in the market for new creative ideas and concepts. Businesses and brands will forever need creative strategies to progress. Marketers cannot ignore the power of creativity.

Creativity Is Non-negotiable

We have to invest in creative minds and ideas to keep our customer bases secure. You, your business or your agency partner may not (understandably) have every single creative angle covered. Anyone who claims to be an expert in every creative sphere is either lying to you or themselves.

So consider the various touchpoints of creativity, from the aesthetic to the strategic, and be sure to have your bases covered as you welcome 2023.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Bernard May

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website.

Bernard May is the CEO of National Positions, a 5-time Inc. 500 company, award-winning marketing agency and Google Premier Partner. Read Bernard May’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

By Emma Grace

Out-of-home (OOH) is often considered a paid media buy with ad agency-led creative. However, for PR agencies OOH is just another channel we can leverage to start a wider earned conversation around a campaign.

Creative OOH has long been a tool in the PR armoury. It’s like a comfy pair of slippers. We know they have been used to death, but we still pull them out.

OOH is a (comparatively) economical method of implying the bravery, scale & intent of an advertising campaign, without having to buy all the media spots. If done well (and some are not), one OOH media buy alone can be enough: the tenacious publicist and social media team will do the rest.

Captured with a bit of creativity (ideally some interaction from a blindsided passer-by i.e. someone from the office), the assets can then be used in paid, earned, shared and owned channels.

The average Joe doesn’t know that it was just one OOH site on a residential street that cost very little.

The PR filter

Creative OOH with a success metric of ‘talkability’ needs to be run through a PR filter. Is it meaningful to the consumer? Is it provocative? Does it add to a cultural conversation (or respond to the news agenda)?

There are two or three examples a year that really get the ‘I wish I thought of that’ respect of the industry. The first ones that came to my mind were a few years old, which goes to show their memorability (and the fact that their iconic status hasn’t yet been surpassed).

If PR-led OOH campaigns were Spice Girls, they would be…

1. Interactive Spice

These are the OOH activations that invite the audience to participate.

PrettyGreen once worked on a campaign to amplify billboard-size peelable cards for 10 free Nando’s meals. The promise of free Nando’s got many fans up ladders, peeling off the giant velcro vouchers Free Nando’s is news, as were the fans up the ladders.

Nandos large novelty loyalty card

In a similar vein, Carlsberg’s ‘Probably the best poster in the world’ included a beer tap for free drinks. Mr Kipling’s ‘Better with cake’, an OOH campaign made of cake – respect to that production team.

2. Provocateur Spice

Think Relate’s wonderful ‘Joy of Later Life Sex’ campaign. Rankin’s shouldn’t-be-taboo-but-totally-were-images of older people getting it on were daring, beautiful and stopped people in their tracks when displayed on giant billboards.

Rankin

Similarly, Muslim dating app Muzmatch saw Birmingham Bachelor Muhammad Malik use billboards to seemingly “save me from an arranged marriage”. Media interest was huge, because it was seemingly an authentic story which tapped into a cultural insight – of course, it was later revealed as a PR stunt for the app.

3. Activist Spice

These are OOH activations used by brands to convey a punchy opinion. Nothing does that better than making it a big shouty 48 sheet billboard.

Brewdog is a dab hand; the latest Qatar World Cup shaming ad is a recent example which has since drawn criticism for being inauthentic, but the initial interest was there and their opinion adequately spikey.

BrewDog World Cup

Similarly, ‘Wave of Waste’ from Corona x Parley For The Ocean has its place in the OOH hall of fame. The 3D installation was a work of art and a sobering image of a surfer surrounded by plastic, showing Corona’s commitment to the marine pollution cause.

4. Newsjacker Spice

These are the campaigns that know exactly what is on the news agenda and respond accordingly. We have not been short on these this year.

Butterkist’s ‘Here for the Drama’, complete with a large demonstration outside 10 Downing Street during the Partygate controversy was low-fi and so on the money it got talked about.

Likewise, Burger King’s ‘Turns out there are too many Whoppers’ and Quorn’s ‘No more porkies’ when Boris Johnson resigned. The media are desperate for content to endlessly talk around big news moments; these activations delivered.

Quorn

5. Brand-led but gets away with it Spice

There aren’t many brands in this category: they demand consumer attention because of brand affection.

Marmite Dynamite fits in here: a Marmite lid smashed through a car window to launch the new chilli variant. The interaction of the product and its surroundings was funny, but not all brands would have garnered the same attention with the same activation. Marmite has done the hard yards to gain brand love. As it turns out, PR-led OOH is actually quite a science.

Can’t wait to see the next one.

By Emma Grace

Managing Director: PrettyGreen An Independent, Award Winning Agency for PR Less Ordinary ​

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Sourced from The Drum

By John Turner

Do you want to learn how to improve your email marketing return on investment and connect with your target audience?

Did you say yes? If so, you’re in the right place!

Email marketing is an extremely powerful tool that can help business leaders grow their brands. Once a visitor joins your email list, you have an opportunity to build rapport and highlight your value proposition. If done correctly, the results speak for themselves. Across all industries, the average ROI is $45 for every $1 spent. If you’re not quite up to this point yet, don’t worry!

Today, I’m going to show you several sustainable and effective ways you can increase your email marketing profits.

Set measurable goals.

The biggest mistake I see new business owners make is not setting measurable goals for their email marketing campaigns. If you have no idea what you hope to achieve with your strategy, you will likely struggle to grow your list and connect with subscribers.

Think of it this way: You can’t improve what you don’t understand.

I suggest coming up with a list of actionable goals and accompanying key performance indicators.

For instance, you may notice that your open rate is below the industry average of 31.50%. In this case, you could develop a list of content ideas that you think will resonate with readers. Since you’re tracking your open rate, you can easily tell if your new content is popular with your subscribers.

Here’s a little bonus tip: Don’t forget to track your progress over time. You don’t want to stop as soon as you create a clickable campaign. You have to continuously track your analytics and fine-tune your campaigns if you hope to boost your ROI.

Don’t forget about smartphone users.

As shocking as this sounds, over 6.2 billion people own smartphones. Many people prefer to check their email with their phone instead of a desktop PC.

If you don’t optimize for mobile devices, you’re not getting your full return on investment. Think about the last email you opened that was clearly designed for a PC instead of a phone. The best-case scenario is everything looked a little off. In the worst scenario, you could not read the message or engage with the brand.

You don’t want to create this same type of negative experience for your loyal subscribers.

Now, let’s look at a few mobile email optimization tips:

• Use a mobile-responsive template.

• Write short, impactful sentences and headlines.

• Choose benefit-driven calls to action.

• Don’t put the purpose of your message on an image (in case subscribers can’t see it on their phone).

• Send email tests to your team so you can test your messages across multiple devices and operating systems.

Personalize your emails.

Personalization is a fantastic way to boost your engagement rate and sales, which is how you improve your ROI.

People love interacting with businesses when they feel like the content, offers and emails are tailor-made to match their needs. Plenty of companies already use this strategy and have seen tremendous success.

The best way to start personalizing your emails is to segment your list into different groups. Each group has unique goals and pain points, which you can use to develop a conversion-worthy personalization strategy.

For example, the marketing team at an online pet store likely has two different campaigns for cat and dog owners. When you think about it, it makes sense. Cat owners have different needs compared to dog owners. Additionally, each group uses a specific type of product. The team likely wouldn’t send a promotion for potty training pads to a cat owner because they don’t need the product.

Experiment with split testing.

Lastly, let’s tie some of the other tips together while we talk about split testing. You’re likely familiar with this term. If not, a split test is an experiment that business owners and marketers run so they can improve conversions and learn about their audience.

A simple example that comes to mind is a call-to-action color change. If you’re currently using a green call-to-action with white text, you may want to consider showing some of your viewers a red or blue CTA so you can figure out which one results in more clicks.

You can run countless split tests, though some options are limited to your industry. I suggest coming up with ideas and running tests one at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know which change produced positive results.

You can experiment with your subject line, offers, images and much more. Feel free to make a few tweaks over time and see if you can turn a good campaign into something extraordinary.

If boosting your email marketing ROI is a top priority, the tips presented today should help you get started. It’s worth remembering that it takes time to grow your list and improve sales. Don’t get discouraged if things don’t go your way right away. Practice patience and persistence; you can do amazing things with your email marketing strategy.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By John Turner

By John Turner, founder of SeedProd, a popular coming-soon page solution for WordPress used by over 800,000 websites.

Sourced from Forbes

Here’s why you’ve been hearing so much about ChatGPT.

A few weeks ago, Wharton professor Ethan Mollick told his MBA students to play around with GPT, an artificial intelligence model, and see if the technology could write an essay based on one of the topics discussed in his course. The assignment was, admittedly, mostly a gimmick meant to illustrate the power of the technology. Still, the algorithmically generated essays — although not perfect and a tad over-reliant on the passive voice — were at least reasonable, Mollick recalled. They also passed another critical test: a screening by Turnitin, a popular anti-plagiarism software. AI, it seems, had suddenly gotten pretty good.

It certainly feels that way right now. Over the past week or so, screenshots of conversations with ChatGPT, the newest iteration of the AI model developed by the research firm OpenAI, have gone viral on social media. People have directed the tool, which is freely available online, to make jokes, write TV episodes, compose music, and even debug computer code — all things I got the AI to do, too. More than a million people have now played around with the AI, and even though it doesn’t always tell the truth or make sense, it’s still a pretty good writer and an even more confident bullshitter. Along with the recent updates to DALL-E, OpenAI’s art-generation software, and Lensa AI, a controversial platform that can produce digital portraits with the help of machine learning, GPT is a stark wakeup call that artificial intelligence is starting to rival human ability, at least for some things.

“I think that things have changed very dramatically,” Mollick told Recode. “And I think it’s just a matter of time for people to notice.”

If you’re not convinced, you can try it yourself here. The system works like any online chatbot, and you can simply type out and submit any question or prompt you want the AI to address.

How does GPT even work? At its core, the technology is based on a type of artificial intelligence called a language model, a prediction system that essentially guesses what it should write, based on previous texts it has processed. GPT was built by training its AI with an extraordinarily large amount of data, much of which comes from the vast supply of data on the internet, along with billions of dollars, including initial funding from several prominent tech billionaires, including Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel. ChatGPT was also trained on examples of back-and-forth human conversation, which helps it make its dialogue sound a lot more human, as a blog post published by OpenAI explains.

OpenAI is trying to commercialize its technology, but this current release is supposed to allow the public to test it. The company made headlines two years ago when it released GPT-3, an iteration of the tech that could produce poems, role-play, and answer some questions. This newest version of the technology is GPT-3.5, and ChatGPT, its corresponding chatbot, is even better at text generation than its predecessor. It’s also pretty good at following instructions, like, “Write a Frog and Toad short story where Frog invests in mortgage-backed securities.” (The story ends with Toad following Frog’s advice and investing in mortgage-backed securities, concluding that “sometimes taking a little risk can pay off in the end”).

The technology certainly has its flaws. While the system is theoretically designed not to cross some moral red lines — it’s adamant that Hitler was bad — it’s not difficult to trick the AI into sharing advice on how to engage in all sorts of evil and nefarious activities, particularly if you tell the chatbot that it’s writing fiction. The system, like other AI models, can also say biased and offensive things. As my colleague Sigal Samuel has explained, an earlier version of GPT generated extremely Islamophobic content, and also produced some pretty concerning talking points about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China.

Both GPT’s impressive capabilities and its limitations reflect the fact that the technology operates like a version of Google’s smart compose writing suggestions, generating ideas based on what it has read and processed before. For this reason, the AI can sound extremely confident while not displaying a particularly deep understanding of the subject it’s writing about. This is also why it’s easier for GPT to write about commonly discussed topics, like a Shakespeare play or the importance of mitochondria.

“It wants to produce texts that it deemed to be likely, given everything that it has seen before,” explains Vincent Conitzer, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon. “Maybe it sounds a little bit generic at times, but it writes very clearly. It will probably rehash points that have often been made on that particular topic because it has, in effect, learned what kinds of things people say.”

So for now, we’re not dealing with an all-knowing bot. Answers provided by the AI were recently banned from the coding feedback platform StackOverflow because they were very likely to be incorrect. The chatbot is also easily tripped up by riddles (though its attempts to answer are extremely funny). Overall, the system is perfectly comfortable making stuff up, which obviously makes no sense upon human scrutiny. These limitations might be comforting to people worried that the AI could take their jobs, or eventually pose a safety threat to humans.

But AI is getting better and better, and even this current version of GPT can already do extremely well at certain tasks. Consider Mollick’s assignment. While the system certainly wasn’t good enough to earn an A, it still did pretty well. One Twitter user said that, on a mock SAT exam, ChatGPT scored around the 52 percentile of test takers. Kris Jordan, a computer science professor at UNC, told Recode that when he assigned GPT his final exam, the chatbot received a perfect grade, far better than the median score for the humans taking his course. And yes, even before ChatGPT went live, students were using all sorts of artificial intelligence, including earlier versions of GPT, to complete their assignments. And they’re probably not getting flagged for cheating. (Turnitin, the anti-plagiarism software maker, did not respond to multiple requests for comment).

Right now, it’s not clear how many enterprising students might start using GPT, or if teachers and professors will figure out a way to catch them. Still, these forms of AI are already forcing us to wrestle with what kinds of things we want humans to continue to do, and what we’d prefer to have technology figure out instead.

“My eighth grade math teacher told me not to rely on a calculator since I won’t have one in my pocket all the time when I grow up,” Phillip Dawson, an expert who studies exam cheating at Deakin University, told Recode. “We all know how that turned out.

Feature Image Credit: Carol Yepes

Rebecca Heilweil is a reporter at Vox covering emerging technology, artificial intelligence, and the supply chain.

Sourced from Vox