editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

B2B Marketing’s New World: Leaning Into the Lessons Learned From COVID

November 19, 2021 No Comments

There’s never been a better time to be a B2B marketer — that seems to be the prevailing sentiment these days. The pandemic has accelerated innovation and digital adoption, creating opportunities for marketers to seize the moment, convert leads and accounts more quickly to revenue, and demonstrate marketing’s return on investment. But the data show a much different side of the story.

The reality is that marketers are burned out, stretched to the breaking point, and currently mulling over the right time to submit their resignations. Just how bad is it? According to Sitecore, nearly 80% of marketers described 2020 as “the most challenging time in the history of their careers.” What’s more, the Rosie Report found 70% of marketers working across freelance, B2B brand and agency disciplines plan to leave their jobs this year.

While much of this stress is environmental, the old ways of working are contributing to these issues. To be a marketer today is to be on a never-ending rollercoaster. New platforms and new approaches put marketers in a constant state of flux, and they rarely have a fundamental understanding of what is expected of them and how their work aligns with business goals.

In a recent study conducted by Heinz Marketing on “The Future of Marketing Work,” nearly 60% of B2B marketers are not entirely confident that their marketing strategy, technology and team structure effectively support their marketing goals. And a further breakdown of that data finds that number jump to 87% for ABM teams and 74% for revenue marketing teams.

B2B marketers are suffering under the internal issues that have plagued marketing departments for years without being addressed: siloed organization structures, tangled tech stacks, and dated strategies that do not account for the way customers buy today.

However, organizations can take steps to lessen the burden on marketers and create more positive experiences for them. So how does it get fixed? By redefining marketing’s dated org structures, broken processes and tech stack messes to align with the essential tenets of effective, buyer-centric, omnichannel B2B marketing.

Only through re-evaluating their teams through a clear, mature, omnichannel lens — optimizing organizational structures, integrated technology and connected strategies — can organizations reclaim a meaningful focus while motivating their employees.

Step 1: Rethinking the Marketing Org Structure

One of the most foundational steps B2B marketers can make is to take a hard look at their existing organizational structures. Many marketing departments remain in antiquated org charts where individuals are siloed in individual channels. Meanwhile, we now live in a robust omnichannel world where teams must work together and share best practices to appeal to their most valued customers wherever they are consuming information.

Gone are the days where you knew the five or so places you were most likely to reach and capture the attention of buyers. The advent of social media, apps, programmatic advertising, and the pandemic-forced break from event-based marketing means customers are reachable in more places, but it is harder to connect.

In addition, the world changes so quickly that static structures can never adapt quickly enough to achieve the first-mover advantage of reaching customers through new channels or opportunities.

The world is embracing agility — it is high time marketers did as well. But they will not be successful unless they exist within a new structure that enables better sharing of information and flexibility of individual roles, which in turn enables marketers to create cross-channel buying experiences for their buyers.

Step 2: Connecting Your Martech Stack

As reaching customers has grown more complex, companies that fail to equip their marketers with innovative tools to identify, target and monetize customers will fall quickly behind the competition. While poor structure often causes the many organizational silos that impede success, this is exacerbated when marketers don’t have a tech stack that securely maintains valuable customer data to provide a single-pane-of-glass view.

Technology that connects your data across channels and systems ensures you’re measuring the right metrics of success across the entire department. It will free up your employees from manual data collection and tedious analysis processes that are rife with errors.

By having that data immediately accessible and tied to targeting and outreach tools, marketers can identify and message in-market buyers before the competition. The right tech stack — which connects data, channels and campaigns — makes it easier for marketing teams to collaboratively reach the organization’s buyers during every step of the customer journey.

Step 3: Adopting a Buyer-Centric, Omnichannel Strategy

Connecting channels, breaking down silos within organizations, and meeting the buyers where they are on their journey allows for a more precise, agile, buyer-driven approach. Here are the five tenets of a redefined marketing strategy to benefit and empower your employees:

Target: Identify and target the right buyers, accounts and buying committees with precision, using intent data and data intelligence to inform your cross-channel campaigns, including display advertising, content syndication, event marketing, digital events and social media marketing programs.
Activate: Configure and activate cross-channel demand campaigns to scale your demand marketing programs and orchestrate personalized buyer and account experiences. Activation must happen across multiple channels to serve your customers better.
Connect: Connect your martech stack through programmatic integrations to amplify your reach, boost pipeline generation, and increase conversion opportunities in real-time with unparalleled access to thousands of ready buyers.
Measure: Gain real-time visibility across your demand channels to understand and optimize program performance, refine account-based tactics, monitor budget, track ROI, and defend your marketing spend. Use every interaction with your customer as an opportunity to learn and optimize.
Govern: Ensure your data is protected, compliant, and ready for actioning across your marketing programs with an air-tight governance wrapper. Remember, unless your data is accurate and compliant, it is extremely difficult to execute marketing campaigns.

Putting It All Together

Marketers must evolve to survive and thrive in the current environment. We marketers have an opportunity to reinvent ourselves and by doing so, serve the needs of our buyers.

This precision demand marketing approach enables marketers to retain high-performing, sustainable teams, empower richer connections with evolved B2B buyers, and accelerate lead-to-revenue conversions.

But marketers cannot change if their dated strategies, tech stacks and organizational structures remain the same. It requires a rewriting of the rules of engagement with the new B2B buyers, their partners, and most importantly, their talent.

In this new era, marketers must master these core functions to build and retain high-performing, sustainable teams, empower richer connections with evolved B2B buyers, and accelerate lead-to-revenue conversions for meeting their businesses’ demanding goals.

The old ways of doing things will not return just because the pandemic is over. B2B marketers are overwhelmingly requesting a new way of doing things. They just need a map. Being thoughtful about your approach, where you are in the journey, and putting your customer at the centre of everything you do can be the very thing to set B2B marketers free. Free to align their work to reachable and meaningful goals and minimize or eliminate the stress that has many B2B marketers looking for other opportunities.

Feature Image Credit: Guilherme Stecanella on Unsplash

By Colby Cavanaugh

Colby Cavanaugh is the Vice President of Product Marketing at Integrate where he is responsible for leading the strategy and execution for go-to-market product launches, messaging and positioning, pricing and packaging, sales enablement, and competitive analysis. Prior to leading product marketing at Integrate, Cavanaugh was the VP of Business Development & Alliances at Integrate, where he led the creation of the Demand Acceleration Platform Ecosystem, consisting of hundreds of partnerships with marketing technology companies, data partners, services companies, and agencies.

Sourced from CMS Wire

In News

How To Earn Media Backlinks For Your Website

November 19, 2021 No Comments

By Amine Rahal

Gone are the days when you could publish keyword-loaded blog articles and rank seemingly overnight. These days, any successful SEO strategy has to go the extra mile by building authentic inbound links from distinguished sources. It’s not always enough to publish valuable content; you also want reputable domains to cite it.

There are two ways you can generate inbound links to your content: through paid link building (considered “black hat SEO” and worthy of penalization) or through earned media exposure. As the founder of two digital marketing agencies with decades of experience in SEO, I’ll always recommend the latter to my clients.

The problem is that some website owners think that earning their links isn’t worth the effort when they can simply pay for them. Not only is paying for links a bad idea in its own right, but earning them is also easier than you might think. In this article, I’ll explain how and I’ll comment on why I think earned media is the cornerstone of any successful SEO strategy.

Earned Media 101

Earned media is the opposite of paid media (and technically, it’s also the opposite of owned media, but that’s beyond the scope of this article). Below, I’ve laid out their respective differences.

• Paid media refers to content that you pay an outlet to publish on your behalf.

• Owned media refers to content that you publish on your own platforms.

• Earned media refers to content that other platforms publish for you freely (e.g., news coverage or by-lined articles).

Although the early SEO days saw many small domains rise to the top via paid media strategies, that’s a major no-no these days. Today, paid backlinking is often considered a manipulative marketing tactic because it usually tries to pass itself off as an unpaid citation. In reality, paid-for backlinks are no more than paid advertisements.

As I’ve written about before, buying links through a private link-building network is considered a black hat SEO technique that can land you costly Google PageRank penalties. To avoid having your ranking position penalized, it’s always a better idea to score backlinks by creating genuinely interesting and useful content without paying for it.

How To Earn Media Backlinks For Your Website

While this is by no means an exhaustive list, these are a few core strategies that I employ when garnering earned backlinks for my clients.

1. Provide Expert Commentary To Journalists

This one’s the easiest of the three for earning media citations because it generally requires the least amount of effort and time. This method involves using online reporter-source networks such as HARO (“Help a Reporter Out”) or Qwoted to provide expert commentary for news articles.

These platforms are home to hundreds of journalists who need outside sources to provide well-thought-out comments or testimony for their stories. That’s where you come in. Find the journalists who specialize in your website’s niche, and provide them with a paragraph or two that assists with whatever article they’re currently working on.

For example, if your website specializes in finance — like many of my own clients’ do — then you’re going to want to filter for journalists in this niche. Do your research and provide thoughtful and insightful commentary and, if you do this well, they may reward you with a citation in their article.

Make sure you respectfully request that they include a link to your web property if they decide to use your quote.

2. Issue Press Releases For Events, Surveys And Launches

If you want to make the news, you have to produce something newsworthy. For some, this could be an innovative product launch or partnership with an established brand. If your website has done something (or intends to do something) that could generate buzz, write a press release and submit it to a PR software platform such as:

• PR Newswire.

• Cision.

• Meltwater.

• eReleases.

For a fee, these services will publish your press release or announcement to newswire services. If your release announces something interesting or newsworthy, a journalist who’s interested in covering your story might pick it up.

Major upcoming events (e.g., a charity fundraiser) or provocative survey data (e.g., “20% Of Americans Have Nothing Saved For Retirement, Surveys Show”) make for excellent press release material. An easy hack I use for generating interesting press releases is to conduct a nationwide survey using an online survey tool and then publish the resulting data in the form of a press release.

3. Be A (Tactful) Social Media Superstar

Nobody appreciates when someone relentlessly self-promotes on social media. However, when you do it tastefully and respectfully, advertising your content on social media can earn you some interesting media coverage.

The key is to find dedicated forums, groups and community networks dedicated to your website’s niche. Then, join these groups and provide helpful advice, support or information for the other community members. Without obnoxiously self-promoting, assert yourself as an authoritative source of support and knowledge within your niche.

For example, some of my clients are involved in the alternative investing space, so I frequently share some of our original content if I genuinely think it could assist the community. I find branded infographics and videos to be especially useful because they lend themselves well to viral peer-to-peer sharing on social media.

The Importance Of Earned Media For SEO

Earned media is helpful for transferring “link equity” from high authority websites to your own website. In fact, this is the only legitimate way to do so because paying for links can jeopardize your ranking if Google catches on and levies a penalty against you.

In short, you may have trouble ranking if reputable websites don’t refer back to your content. But you can’t generate those all-important backlinks (at least not legitimately) without implementing an earned media strategy and staying away from paid-for black hat techniques. By working the three pillars of my earned media strategy into your SEO campaign, you too can earn these crucial backlinks and improve the odds of ranking above your competition.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Amine Rahal

Amine is a tech entrepreneur and writer. He is currently the CMO at Regal Assets and CEO at IronMonk Solutions. Read Amine Rahal’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

In News

Breitbart Leads Climate Change Misinformation On Facebook, Study Says

November 18, 2021 No Comments

By Carlie Porterfield

Topline Just ten publishers are responsible for nearly 70% of user interactions with content that denies climate change on Facebook, according to a study released Tuesday by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which found that far-right news outlet Breitbart is the leading source of misinformation on the platform.

The ten outlets, branded as the “Toxic Ten” by the CCDH, have a combined 186 million followers on social media, not accounting for overlap, and have brought in a collective $5.3 million in Google advertising revenue in the past six months alone, according to the study.

Breitbart led the way, the study found, with the alt-right website once headed by President Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon capturing about 17% of all platform engagement with climate change misinformation analysed by the CCDH.

Close behind was The Western Journal, a Phoenix-based conservative news and politics website responsible for nearly 16% of engagement.

In September last year, Facebook launched a new Climate Science Information Center and pledged in February to attach labels to posts about climate change and to expand fact-checking in a move to combat misinformation, but 92% of the climate change misinformation reviewed by the CCDH was not labelled by Facebook and 99% had no additional context or fact-checking attached.

The CCDH used Newship, a social media analytics tool, to identify 7,000 Facebook posts featuring climate change denial and to calculate engagement rates between October 2020 and October 2021.

Tangent

Following Breitbart and the Western Journal, the rest of the top ten outlets publishing climate change denial content according to the study are Newsmax, Townhall Media, the Media Research Centre, the Washington Times, the Federalist Papers, the Daily Wire, Russia Today and the Patriot Post.

Contra

The CCDH used a “flawed methodology” that overstates the scale of climate change misinformation on the platform and is “designed to mislead people,” Facebook said in a statement to Forbes. The narrow sample examined by the CCDH only made up roughly 0.3% of the over 200 million interactions of Pages and public group English-language content, the platform said. Facebook said it actively reduces distribution of content fact-checkers rate as false or misleading and also rejects ads that have been debunked, according to the statement.

Key Background

Facebook has repeatedly come under fire over the amount of misinformation distributed and shared on the platform. Amid the coronavirus pandemic, content spreading misleading claims about the origins of the virus and the safety and efficacy of vaccines has become particularly problematic. In July, President Joe Biden said Facebook and other social media platforms where coronavirus vaccine misinformation spreads are “killing people.” Last week, a whistle-blower released thousands of documents to media companies that allege Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg let celebrities and politicians break the platform rules and makes exceptions for right-wing news sites, specifically Breitbart, when they post misinformation. The CCDH is a British non-profit that campaigns for big tech companies to tackle misinformation and hate speech on their platforms. In the study, CCDH called on Google and Facebook to stop accepting advertising dollars from the outlets and for Facebook to follow through on its pledge to label climate change denial posts.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Carlie Porterfield

I am a Texas native covering breaking news out of New York City. Previously, I was an editorial assistant at the Forbes London bureau.

Sourced from Forbes

In Uncategorized

Why It Might Already Be Too Late For Zuckerberg’s Metaverse

November 18, 2021 No Comments

By Rolf Illenberger

Mark Zuckerburg’s metaverse is one of avatars and virtual experiences—with an interface that looks eerily like if “The Sims” met Google Glass. And he just bet the future of his trillion-dollar company on it.

We’ve seen the eye candy, including the Billie Eilish / Beat Saber commercial that’s inescapable to American TV viewers these days. The rhythm-based VR video game looks cool. Not totally practical, but eye-catching.

What we haven’t seen—more damning to Meta’s brand than its new logo—is a pathway to sustainability and success. How do you generate consumer interest in the metaverse experience? How do you recreate the market share and market dominance that Facebook had during its period of rapid growth? How do you fend off threats, either through acquisition or innovation, like the social media giant did with Instagram and Snapchat? How do you sell the Metaverse to advertisers, fundamental in Facebook’s profitability? And are they even interested in the first place?

When Facebook declared its IPO in 2012, it answered the concern of critics who wanted to understand how the company would eventually make money. It accomplished this by tinkering with the algorithm, parting ways with a linear timeline for nearly a billion users in favour of EdgeRank, which gave big-pocketed advertisers a means to place themselves on the News Feeds of millions with favourable CPM rates. When the company acquired Instagram in 2013, users knew it would ultimately mean the end of that brand’s linear timeline in favour of the same ad-friendly mechanism.

But users are the biggest challenge for Meta’s foray into metaverse dominance. There simply aren’t enough of them to entice advertisers at the moment. Oculus has only sold 1.87 million units of its Quest 2 headset to date and rough data has nearly 17 million VR headsets sold across all brands to date. By comparison, Apple sold 60 million AirPods in 2019 alone and approximately 100 million all-time.

Apple’s mixed reality headset is rumoured to launch at some point in 2022, which will certainly play with the brand’s avid following of phone, wristwatch, earphone and laptop consumers.

In what could be considered a fitness metaverse, or community for those beyond coining buzzwords, Peloton has sold 2.33 million units to date at a price point 4-6 times the Quest 2.

Other aspects of a metaverse are already fairly well established, like online gaming, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, gaming and virtual events—all of which have been further amplified due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

If Facebook/Meta was going to build something on-par with its near-monopoly of the social media space a decade ago, it might not have the cash or infrastructure this late in the game. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has already announced their intention to go toe-to-toe with Facebook from a hardware standpoint by acquiring Pico Interactive. And a recent major advertising campaign suggests that, with China’s financial backing, Facebook might be facing its greatest competitive threat to date.

The brands and advertisers that drive Facebook’s bottom line currently are also aware that they’ll want to own and control more of the metaverse experience, which they weren’t able to do with social media. When Facebook, Twitter and Instagram first appeared, most corporate entities delegated the management of these new platforms to inexperienced employees as Zuckerberg amassed his power. Now, digital heads, agencies and the C-suite will be more aggressive in wanting to build and sustain a metaverse strategy that they can own and isn’t subject to algorithms they might not control. They probably prefer a more disjointed metaverse at the end of the day.

That’s all without mentioning that there is already intense user backlash over Facebook/Meta’s desire to tie every Oculus device to a Facebook account—part of the financial model to profitability, opening up users to targeted advertising. The business-targeted Oculus Quest 2 device will set you back $500 more but won’t force you to part with your data.

While Zuckerberg’s vision to unite the metaverse under a single umbrella will fail, the future of the metaverse won’t. Like 3D printing a decade ago, which futurists the early adopters and most successful use cases will fall in the B2B space. 3D printing has changed our access to PPE (Personal Protective Equipment), car parts, medical and dental devices, hearing aids and even 3D-printed homes are starting to turn up as an affordable housing solution.

The metaverse will do the same—B2B adaptation leading the way as B2C consumers dip their toes in the water on whether or not the technology is for them.

For instance, auto manufacturers need new ways to display cars to interested buyers. It’s becoming more and more common for customers to buy houses based on VR technology. HR departments need ways to recruit the best talent, especially as remote work becomes more commonplace. My company, VRdirect, has offered B2B clients the opportunity to do this with relative ease, using software that allows anyone to become a creative.

Even in a disjointed metaverse, benefits like the environmental impact of reduced business travel become obvious, especially when it comes to our personal carbon footprint. There’s also the added benefit of work-life balance gained by not having to go on that business trip or not having to commute to that big meeting.

But we’re still a social species at heart. One of the things Zuckerberg got right with social media was our desire to weave an in-person experience with our desire to talk about it online. The thought that humans will have the same thirst about a strictly digital metaverse experience remains to be seen.

Feature Image Credit: Remy Gieling via Unsplash

By Rolf Illenberger

Rolf Illenberger is the founder, CEO and managing director of VRdirect, a platform that allows anyone to create and publish VR experiences, with an emphasis on enterprise users.

Sourced from Worth

In News

The 7 ‘terrifying’ mistakes when working with influencers

November 18, 2021 No Comments

By Luís Marçal

Collaborating with these influencers doesn’t have to be a chilling experience.

Some brands are still “afraid” of venturing into influencer marketing despite being an industry that is in full growth. In fact, it is estimated that social commerce can reach a global value of 604 billion dollars by 2027, with an annual growth rate of 31.4 percent over the next seven years, according to data cited from Internet Retailing.

Collaborating with these influencers doesn’t have to be a chilling experience. It’s about creating key and valuable relationships with them; understand that they are not employees but strategic partners, with whom brands can effectively manage their relationships.

Before starting a collaboration with influencers, consider these seven terrifying mistakes to avoid if you want your campaign to have an impact:

1. Have a ghost target

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The first step in creating a winning strategy is setting your goals and objectives. Without goals, there is no way to measure success and return on investment (ROI).

In the same way, you have to know what the brand’s target is and what its budget is. If you do not have a set goal at the start, the campaign will be created without direction, will be subject to course changes midway, and will be doomed.

2. View the audience as a zombie

^{Image: Depositphotos.com}

If you believe that audiences are behaving like zombies, that is, that they are all looking for the same thing, your campaign will fail horribly. Before thinking about a collaboration with influencers, you need to make sure that your audience matches your buyer persona. For example, it wouldn’t do any good to ask a swimming influencer to share soccer tips. Although most swimmers play another sport, your audience won’t take it very seriously if you give advice on soccer socks.

However, choosing people who represent your brand values and avoiding misleading metrics can be challenging.

3. Believe that influencers are Frankenstein’s monster

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Obviously, influencers promote brands for monetary or other compensation, but they also choose to collaborate for other reasons. This applies particularly to micro-influencers: the suggestion is to treat them as customers and not as a monster over which you think you have control.

After all, if they don’t like the products or services the brand offers or the treatment they receive, they probably wouldn’t join the campaign in the first place (unless they are offered a huge monetary compensation that makes them rethink their decision ). The public knows when their favorite people in the networks endorse something that they really like. The goal of collaborating with influencers is to nurture and leverage that trust.

Followers trust influencers and it’s not easy to create a community of people who like and trust you as a brand. What is easy is losing their trust, so they will only promote companies they trust and like to work with.

4. Treat your motivation like the invisible man

^{Image: Depositphotos.com}

Don’t ignore what motivates them. You have to see what moves them. A great long-term relationship between the brand and the influencers it works with can only be achieved if both parties are happy. It can be achieved if the brand asks the influencers directly what their expectations of this collaboration are and if there is something they specifically want from whoever contacted them.

For example, some micro-influencers prefer exposure over monetary compensation. Those influencers can be made happier if the brand shares some of their posts in which they talk about their products or services instead of paying them.

Other influencers who are interested in what the company offers might want product or service discounts, while some might prefer samples that they can offer to their followers. To find out, you have to ask them at the beginning.

5. Scare away your creativity

^{Image: Depositphotos.com}

Creative freedom is of the utmost importance to successfully collaborate with influencers. Who knows the audience best? The brand or the influencer? Without a doubt, the influencer.

They know better the tastes, preferences and opinions of their followers. This means that the influencer knows what type of content will engage their audience in an authentic and organic way. Their motto is to publish content that not only attracts followers, but also hooks them.

6. Forgetting to do a good “spell” for the campaigns

^{Image: Depositphotos.com}

To see what works and what doesn’t, you need to track the content of each campaign. Members of the company that hired the campaign can do this daily or weekly, but the important thing is to have a monitoring system and record the results of how each post has worked.

7. Drive them away with a scare compensation

^{Image: Depositphotos.com}

When managing the team of influencers, it is very important to motivate each of them. Like any company that wants to obtain the greatest benefit for the investment it has made, motivating influencers, especially micro-influencers, is crucial in this process.

If the deal is with smaller micro-influencers, you can exclude the monetary reward if you have some other lucrative and creative way to compensate them. This is important because if they are rewarded exclusively with money, they could lose their intrinsic motivation and see this collaboration as just another job.

Brands can also offer promo codes and giveaways that influencers can give to their followers and create a win-win situation for both them and the brand.

Feature Image Credit^{: Depositphotos.com}

By Luís Marçal

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

Zoom to Start Showing Ads for Some Free Users

November 17, 2021 No Comments

By Michael Kan

The pilot ad program will help support continued free access to the video-conferencing service, Zoom says.

To keep its service free, Zoom will experiment with displaying ads after video calls.

On Monday, the company announced that it’s rolling out a “pilot advertising program” for non-paying Basic users in certain countries. For now, it seems the ads will only appear for Zoom calls viewed on a web browser.

“For this initial program, ads will be rolled out only on the browser page users see once they end their meeting,” the company says. “Only free Basic users in certain countries will see these ads if they join meetings that are hosted by other free Basic users.”

How the ads will appear.

Zoom says the ads will “enable us to support investment and continue providing free Basic users with access to our robust platform.” Its growth exploded last year during the pandemic, and the video-conferencing service continues to be in demand to this day.

“With this in mind, today we are excited to roll out a pilot advertising program that we expect will enable us to support investment and continue providing free Basic users with access to our robust platform,” the company says.

However, Zoom stresses it won’t be using data from user video calls for ad-targeting purposes. “As noted in our Privacy Statement, we will not use meeting, webinar, or messaging content (specifically, audio, video, files, and messages) for any marketing, promotions, or third-party advertising purposes,” the company says.

Instead, the ads will rely on browser-based cookies to serve up relevant marketing to users. The banner ads on Zoom’s website will also feature a link, enabling users to access the cookie management tool.

Zoom didn’t provide a list of countries where the ads will appear. But the program is poised to pave the way for a larger expansion in the future. We’ve reached out to Zoom for more information, and we’ll update the story if we hear back.

By Michael Kan

Sourced from PC Mag

In News

Facebook to Axe Controversial Facial Recognition System

November 17, 2021 No Comments

By Kana Ruhalter

Facebook announced that it will be shutting down its controversial facial recognition system this month, the New York Times reports. The embattled social-media giant says it will be deleting the face scan data of over a billion users, a move that comes during a tumultuous time for the company, as it’s been met with fierce scrutiny over privacy and regulation concerns and is the subject of official probes.

Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence at Meta—Facebook’s newly-rebranded parent company—explained why the network was axing the system in a blog post: “We need to weigh the positive use cases for facial recognition against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.”

The facial-recognition system identifies people through pictures uploaded onto Facebook and suggests the users “tag” and link friends’ accounts in the photos. Growing concern about the abuse of such software—including by China’s government, as it tracks the minority Uighur population, and by law-enforcement in the United States—has prompted immense criticism.

Read it at New York Times

Feature Image Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

By Kana Ruhalter

Sourced from Daily Beast

In Uncategorized

Google Ads Rolls Out Performance Max Globally

November 17, 2021 No Comments

By Ronan Shields

Google Ads today announced the rollout of an ad unit that it claims will help advertisers bolster their incremental reach.

Top line

Dubbed Performance Max, the new offering lets media buyers book inventory across a range of Google properties including YouTube, Search, Discover, Gmail and Maps as part of a single campaign.

The Google Ads team is pitching it as a complementary service to keyword-based Search campaigns—still the bulk of its business—in a further bid to boost advertiser-spend.

Between the lines

Performance Max campaigns launched in beta last year with the Google Ads team reporting that advertisers that trialled the service saw a 13% increase in incremental conversions on average.

Brands including Allianz, Deezer, and MG used Performance Max since it was rolled out in beta with marketers reporting that it helped them increase conversion rates, find new customers and bolster their consumer insights.

Bottom line

The Google Ads team claimed it will introduce more features specifically geared towards marketers that want to attract consumers to their brick-and-mortar outlets, such as retailers, to Performance Max in the coming year.

“We know the holidays are a critical time of year for your business. You should continue using Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to reach more shoppers across online and in-store experiences this holiday season,” wrote Eduardo Indacochea, Google, senior director, product management, in a blog post.

“However, when the time is right for your business, you can start testing Performance Max campaigns before next year’s campaign upgrades.”

Feature Image Credit: Performance Max lets brands further boost their campaign reach of their keyword-based campaigns.Google

By Ronan Shields

Ronan Shields is Adweek’s programmatic editor.

Sourced from ADWEEK

In News

Disappear from the internet forever: 6 things you have to do

November 16, 2021 No Comments

By Eric Franklin

Getting off the grid isn’t as easy as it should be, but we’ll show you where to start.

If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely your personal information is available to the public. And by “public” I mean everyone everywhere. So, how can deleting yourself from the internet stop companies from getting hold of your info? Short answer: It can’t. Unfortunately, you can never completely remove yourself from the internet, but there are ways to minimize your digital footprint, which would lower the chances of your personal data being out there. Here are some ways to do that. We’ll update these tips periodically.

Be forewarned, however: Removing your information from the internet, as I’ve outlined below, could adversely affect your ability to communicate with potential employers.

1. Delete or deactivate your shopping, social media and web service accounts

Think about which networks you have social media profiles on. Aside from the big ones (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn), do you still have old accounts on sites like Tumblr? MySpace? What about your Reddit account? Which shopping sites have you registered on? Common ones might include information stored on Amazon, Gap.com, Macys.com and others.

screen-shot-2018-02-27-at-2-35-06-pm — Using a service like DeleteMe can make removing yourself from the internet less of a headache.

Screenshot by Eric Franklin/CNET

To get rid of these accounts, go to your account settings and look for an option to either deactivate, remove or close your account. Depending on the account, you may find it under Privacy or Security, or something similar.

If you’re having trouble with a particular online account, try searching online for “How to delete,” followed by the name of the account you wish to delete. You should be able to find some instructions on how to delete that particular account. (Here’s how to permanently delete your Facebook account without losing your photos.)

If for some reason there are any undeletable accounts, change the info in the account to something other than your actual info. Something fake or completely random.

2. Remove yourself from data collection sites

There are companies out there that collect your information. They’re called data brokers, and they have names like Spokeo, Whitepages.com and PeopleFinder, as well as plenty of others. They collect data from everything you do online and then sell that data to interested parties, mostly in order to more specifically advertise to you and sell stuff.

Now you could search for yourself on these sites and then deal with each site individually to get your name removed. Problem is, the procedure for opting out from each site is different and sometimes involves sending faxes and filling out actual physical paperwork. Physical. Paperwork. What year is this, again?

Anyway, an easier way to do it is to use a service like DeleteMe at joindeletme.com. For just $129 per year, the service will jump through all those monotonous hoops for you. It’ll even check back every few months to make sure your name hasn’t been re-added to these sites.

Be warned: If you remove yourself from these data broker sites, you’ll also mostly remove yourself from Google search results, therefore making it much harder for people to find you. DeleteMe also gives you a set of DIY guides on how to remove yourself from each individual data broker if you’d like to do the process yourself.

3. Remove your info directly from websites

First, check with your phone company or cell provider to make sure you aren’t listed online and have them remove your name if you are.

If you want to remove an old forum post or an old embarrassing blog you wrote back in the day, you’ll have to contact the webmaster of those sites individually. You can either look at the About us or Contacts section of the site to find the right person to contact or go to www.whois.com and search for the domain name you wish to contact. There you should find information on who exactly to contact.

Unfortunately, private website operators are under no obligation to remove your posts. So, when contacting these sites be polite and clearly state why you want the post removed. Hopefully they’ll actually follow through and remove it.

If they don’t, tip No. 4 is a less effective, but viable option.

4. Remove personal info from websites

If someone’s posted sensitive information of yours such as a Social Security number or a bank account number and the webmaster of the site where it was posted won’t remove it, you can send a legal removal request to Google to have it removed.

You may have to exercise Google’s legal powers to get your personal information removed from a stubborn site.

Screenshot by Eric Franklin/CNET

The removal process could take some time, and there’s no guarantee it’ll be successful, but it’s also your best recourse if you find yourself in this vulnerable situation.

5. Remove outdated search results

Google’s URL removal tool is handy for erasing evidence of past mistakes from the internet.

Screenshot by Eric Franklin/CNET

Let’s say there’s a webpage with information about you on it you’d like to get rid of — like your former employer’s staff page, months after you’ve changed jobs. You reach out to get them to update the page. They do, but when you Google your name, the page still shows up in your search results — even though your name isn’t anywhere to be found when you click the link. This means the old version of the page is cached on Google’s servers.

Here’s where this tool comes in. Submit the URL to Google in hopes it’ll update its servers, deleting the cached search result so you’re no longer associated with the page. There’s no guarantee Google will remove the cached info for reasons, but it’s worth a try to exorcise as much of your online presence as possible from the internet.

6. And finally, the last step you’ll want to take is to remove your email accounts

Depending on the type of email account you have, the number of steps this will take will vary.

You’ll have to sign into your account and find the option to delete or close the account. Some accounts will stay open for a certain amount of time if you want to reactivate them.

An email address is necessary to complete the previous steps, so make sure this one is your last.

One last thing…

Remember to be patient when going through this process, and don’t expect to complete it in one day. You may also have to accept that there are some things you won’t be able to permanently delete from the internet.

Feature Image Credit: Josh Miller/CNET

By Eric Franklin

Sourced form C/Net

In News

How to Design a Data-Driven Marketing Strategy

November 16, 2021 No Comments

By Michael Stelzner

Do you need a better strategy? Wondering how to use data to gauge when to start, stop, or scale your marketing efforts?

In this article, you’ll discover why data is important, what data to look at, and how to use data to inform your strategy.

Why Data Is Crucial to Your Marketing Strategy

It’s important to understand that data is for everyone, whether you’re a new business owner or have been in business for a long time and already know your ideal customer very well. Without data, as you’re building your strategy, you’re flying blind with little more than a feeling and some hope that you’re right.

We tend to develop our strategies focusing on things we like, things we’ve been told, and ideas that we see others finding success in, and put blinders on to whether these things are actually working. Are your time, money, and effort being returned to you in the form of conversions moving toward your goal?

Data removes those blinders.

Additionally, data makes it easier to connect each of your efforts to dollars. Whether you’re a marketer or business owner running all of your own marketing, understanding exactly how each point within your marketing strategy connects to that revenue helps identify the value of that point in the big picture. This is one of the ways in which data becomes so powerful in the realm of social media marketing because it lets you see exactly where you’re leaking money.

Pro Tip: As a best practice, you should start collecting the data even before you need it. If you’re starting a brand-new business and you don’t need the data right away, track it anyway. Because once you need the data, you need the data. As with anything else, data takes a while to collect, and Google Analytics doesn’t work retroactively. So while you may not look at the data right away, having it collected as early in the business as possible will only help you in the long run.

Click HERE to read the remainder of the article.

By Michael Stelzner

Sourced from Social Media Examiner