Mediastreet
Author

editor

Browsing
In News

Winning The Social Commerce Game In 2021: How Social Media Creators Monetize Their Fame

No Comments

By Dennis Doerfl

As the co-founder of an influencer marketing technology company and the commercial director of a merchandise shop solution, I’ve had a front-row seat for the rise of social commerce. Influencers are using merchandise to boost their brands not only for income but also to forge deeper connections with their followers. Some key players in the e-commerce space have taken notice, giving rise to SaaS companies and print-on-demand services integrating with social media giants.

In 2021, look for influencer culture to inspire more powerful social media retail integrations with almost limitless earning power for creators and the platforms that serve them.

Despite the challenges of the last year, I’ve seen three changes in the industry that I know will benefit influencers and creators in 2021. E-commerce professionals, social media agencies and influencer marketing agencies should pay attention.

1. Increasing use of e-commerce and the rise of selling via social media have produced creator commerce.

Last year was difficult for retail, but worldwide e-commerce sales grew by 27.6%. Within that rise, social commerce grew as well, and apparel and accessories remain the largest category. The global licensed merchandise market is expected to reach $338.7 billion by 2027, with a compound annual growth rate of 2.2%.

At the same time, e-commerce platforms have upped their game. Powerful and easy-to-use print-on-demand shop systems now integrate with social media platforms. Spreadshop is one such POD system, but others include Spring, Bonfire and Printful. Influencers have long been able to open an e-commerce shop, but these developments give them the advantage of immediacy, which allows them to deliver both engaging content and buying options in the very same moment.

Influencers now have an alternative to just ads and brand collaborations. Promoting their own merchandise has become a way for them to diversify revenue streams and grow their brands. Audiences look for entertainment and then buy into their brands.

2. Influencers are becoming skilled at social commerce tactics to monetize their fame and content.

To their followers, influencers are like trusted friends whose opinions are sought and emulated. As Nielsen’s research points out, we are more likely to buy from people we know and trust. Influencers come together on social platforms like Clubhouse and Facebook; they share tips and tricks on how to gain followers and connect with fans. I’ve seen top creators often note that producing niche content and staying authentic is the foundation of the influencer-follower relationship.

Monetizing content through merchandise is funding creators and deepening the connection with their followers. I expect this to continue through 2021 with three merchandise trends:

• Personalization/everybody merchandise. What do you want to wear today? A brand, a business or a cause? Personalization means we can wear our allegiances in a size, colour and style to suit us. Creators can leverage this trend to increase brand awareness.

• Instant moment merchandise. With POD, new designs are available for purchase as soon as they are uploaded by creators. POD can move almost at the speed of a meme, quickly delivering on-trend items to customers’ doorsteps and making moment merchandise possible.

• Campaign merchandise. In the U.S., many politicians blur the line between political figure and social media icon. Campaign merchandise sales help candidates raise funds. It’s quite the statement to wear a political slogan, but it’s also an opportunity to publicly support a chosen candidate.

3. POD shop solutions have integrated with social channels to enable frictionless buying for the customer and full-service fulfilment for the shop owner.

The need for POD merchandise solutions is growing rapidly. Great new platforms are also pushing into the space, and the global POD software market size is expected to reach $10.8 billion by 2026, up from almost $1.9 billion in 2020.

To support growth, creator commerce solutions will have to deliver high-quality sales platforms and integrate new technologies. One of the most recent developments is the connection between influencer videos and merchandise. As Philip Rooke, CEO of Spread Group (Spreadshop’s parent company), recently wrote for InternetRetailing, “The potential success of video plus commerce is the combination of technology and the customer desire coming together at the same time. … Entertainment and frictionless commerce are going to be the big trend of retail in 2021.”

Platforms can stay ahead of the game by understanding what influencers and creators value. From our own research and observation, I know that the following five platform features are key:

• Social selling integrations.

• Highly customizable products.

• Premium-quality items.

• Zero cash out of pocket required.

• Full-service e-commerce.

Final Thoughts

From my vantage point, creators will continue to promote their personal brands using merchandise in 2021. To be proactive as an e-commerce professional, engage with influencers directly and address their needs.

As the decade progresses, we may see influencers and creators aim not just for the magic 1 million followers mark but also for comparable commission. Follower millionaires could start to become T-shirt millionaires as they monetize their fame. SaaS companies, social media agencies and influencer marketers that harness this trend will likely have an advantage in the highly competitive online retail space.

Make sure you exercise caution, however. Merchandise companies that fail to integrate with content delivery platforms are at great risk for obsolescence. All-in-one solutions allow simultaneous content distribution, merchandise solutions and persona monetization. As influencers seek to simplify processes, stand-alone solutions that serve limited needs may not survive.

From followers to merchandise, I see influencers making a big play in the social commerce game to truly monetize their fame. Will your brand be a part of it?

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Dennis Doerfl

Dennis Doerfl, a former Groupon and Accenture executive, is Co-Founder of Fourstarzz Media and Commercial Director at Spreadshop. Read Dennis Doerfl’s full executive profile.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Saving our planet is now a creative communications challenge – are you up for it?

No Comments

On Tuesday 27th April THINKHOUSE joined us to host “DELAY IS THE NEW DENIAL: COMMUNICATING FOR PLANET EARTH” an event for anyone working in marketing and communications for brands and businesses. This presentation followed Thinkhouse’s Earth Day event which took place 4 days before our AAI toolkit webinar.

Hosted by THINKHOUSE’s cross-functional PLANET team and powered by insights from The Youth Lab, the event is designed to strengthen our industry’s role in restoring our earth.

The full webinar is now live on our website so if you missed out you can still catch up here

Read More
By
In News

Long Tail SEO in 2021: How You Can Have It All or Die Trying

No Comments

By Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Head keywords. Long-tail keywords. The chunky middle. The chonky thorax. Is it any wonder why most people outside of SEO think we’re talking gibberish? Ask a dozen SEOs what keywords qualify as “long-tail” and you’ll get 13 opinions and 17 fistfights.

What we can agree on is that — due to Google’s advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) — the long tail of search has exploded. However, I will argue that NLP has also imploded the long tail, and understanding how and why may save our collective sanity.

What is the long tail of SEO, exactly?

The long tail of search is the limitless space of low-volume (and often low-competition) keywords. Tactically, long-tail SEO centres on competing for a large number of low-volume keywords instead of focusing on a small set of high-volume keywords.

Long-tail SEO encourages us to let go of vanity, because high-volume, so-called “vanity” keywords are often out of reach or, at best, will empty our bank accounts. Low-volume keywords may be less attractive on the surface, but as you begin to compete on hundreds or thousands of them, they represent more traffic and ultimately more sales than a few vanity keywords.

You’ve probably seen a graph of the long tail like the one above. It’s a perfectly lovely power curve, but it’s purely hypothetical. And while you may smile and nod when you see it, it’s hard to translate this into a world of keywords. It might help to re-imagine the long tail of SEO:

I’m not sure the “reclining snowman of SEO” is ever going to catch on, but I think it helps to illustrate that — while head keywords are high-volume by themselves — the combined volume of the long tail eclipses the head or the middle. Like the familiar curve, this visualization dramatically underestimates the true scope of the long tail.

What are long-tail keywords?

In the words of the ancient SEOs, “It doth depend.” Typically, long-tail keywords are low-volume, multi-word phrases, but the long-tail is relative to your starting point. Historically, any given piece of the long tail was assumed to be low-competition, but that’s changing as people realize the benefits of targeting specific phrases with clear intent (especially commercial intent).

Targeting “widgets” is not only expensive, but searcher intent is ambiguous. Targeting “buy blue widgets” narrows intent, and “where to buy Acme Widget LOL-42” laser-focuses you on a target audience. As searchers and SEOs adapt to natural language search, previously “long-tail” keywords may become higher volume and higher competition.

The long tail has exploded

Google has told us that 15% of the searches they see every day are new. How is this possible? Are we creating that many new words? That’s sus, bruh!

I can explain it to you in a very short story. The other day, my (half-Taiwanese) 10-year-old daughter couldn’t remember what her Chinese zodiac sign was, so she asked Google Home:

Hey, Google, what’s the animal for the Chinese new year calendar thingy for 2010?

It’s easy to get hung up on the voice-appliance aspect of this, but whether or not you believe in the future of voice appliances, the reality is that voice search in general has driven the need for natural language search, and as Google becomes better at handling natural language, we’re reverting to using it more often (it’s our default mode). This is especially evident in kids, who never had to learn to dumb down their searches for antiquated algorithms.

How can we hope to target keyword phrases that are literally evolving as we speak? Fortunately, NLP cuts both ways. As Google understands context better, the algorithm recognizes that many variations of the same phrase or question are essentially the same. Which leads us to…

The long tail has imploded

Back in 2019, I did a keyword research case study at SearchLove London on UK mega-retailer, John Lewis. In my research, I was surprised to see how many searches Google was automatically redirecting. There’s the obvious, like Google assuming that people who searched for “Jon Lewis” in the UK probably meant “John Lewis” (sorry, Jon):

It’s interesting to note that Google has gradually, quietly moved from the previously more prevalent “Did you mean?” to the more assertive (some might say aggressive) “Showing results for…” In this case, optimizing for Jon Lewis in the UK is probably pointless.

I expected a rabbit hole, but I landed in a full-on bunny chasm. Consider this search:

Hjohjblewis?! I landed on this misspelling entirely by accident, but I imagine it involved an attention-starved cat and cat-adjacent keyboard. This level of rewriting/redirecting was shocking to me.

Misspellings are just the beginning, however. What about very similar long-tail phrases that don’t surface any kind of rewrite/redirect, but show very similar results?

Note that this same set of terms in the US overwhelmingly returns results about former US Representative and civil rights leader, John Lewis, demonstrating just how much not only intent can shift across localities, but how Google’s re-interpretations can change dynamically.

That same year, I did an experiment for MozCon targeting long-tail questions, such as “Can you reverse a 301-redirect?”, demonstrating that posts written around a specific question could often rank for many forms of that question. At the time, I didn’t have a way to measure this phenomenon, other than showing that the post ranked for variations of the phrase. Recently, I re-analysed my 2019 keywords (with rankings from April 2021) using a simplified form of Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) called RBOLite. RBOLite scores the similarity between two rank-ordered lists, yielding a score from 0-1. As the name implies, this score biases toward the higher-ranked items, so a shift at #1 will have more impact than a shift at #10.

Here are the scores for a sampling of the phrases I tracked for the 2019 post, with the title of the post shown at the top (and having a perfect match of 1.0):

You can see visually how the similarity of the results diverges as you change and remove certain keywords, and how this creates a complex interaction. What’s fascinating to me is that changing the question phrase from “Can you” to “How do you” or “How to” made very little difference in this case, while removing either “301” or “redirect” had more impact. Switching “you” vs. “I” by itself was fairly low impact, but was additive with other changes. Even the SERPs with “undo” in place of “reverse” showed fairly high similarity, but this change showed the most impact.

Note that the week-over-week RBOLite score for the initial phrase was 0.95, so even the same SERP will vary over time. All of these scores (>0.75) represent a fair degree of similarity. This post ranked #1 for many of these terms, so these scores often represent shifts farther down the top 10.

Here’s another example, based on the question “How do I improve my domain authority?”. As above, I’ve charted the RBOLite similarity scores between the main phrase and variations. In this case, the week-over-week score was 0.83, suggesting some background flux in the keyword space:

One immediately interesting observation is that the difference between “improve” and “increase” was negligible — Google easily equated the two terms. My time spent debating which keyword to use could’ve been spent on other projects, or on eating sandwiches. As before, switching from “How do I” to “How do you” or even “How to” made relatively little difference. Google even understood that “DA” is frequently substituted for “Domain Authority” in our industry.

Perhaps counterintuitively, adding “Moz” made more of a difference. This is because it shifted the SERP to be more brand-like (Moz.com got more mentions). Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, my post still ranked #1. Looking at the entire first page of the SERPs, though, adding the brand name caused a pretty clear intent shift.

The long tail is dead. Long live the long tail.

In the past decade, the long tail has exploded and then imploded (in many ways, due to the same forces), and yet somehow we’ve landed in a very different keyword universe. So, where does that leave us — the poor souls fated to wander that universe?

The goods news of this post (I hope) is that we don’t have to work ourselves to death to target the long tail of search. It doesn’t take 10,000 pieces of content to rank for 10,000 variants of a phrase, and Google (and our visitors) would much prefer we not spin out that content. The new, post-NLP long tail of SEO requires us to understand how our keywords fit into semantic space, mapping their relationships and covering the core concepts. While our tools will inevitably improve to meet this challenge (and I’m directly involved in such projects at Moz), our human intuition can go a long way for now. Study your SERPs diligently, and you can find the patterns to turn your own long tail of keywords into a chonky thorax of opportunity.

By Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Sourced from MOZ

Read More
By
In News

The Anatomy Of A Digital Decision

No Comments

By Bill Waid

It’s easy to confuse digitization — be it a sleek app design or automated business intelligence — with digital decisioning. Both play a role in the larger concept of digital transformation, but the difference is digital decisioning is at its centre. Think of decisioning as the brain and central nervous system of your business. It provides you not only intelligence, but also the ability to coordinate your entire body to move and respond to the world around you. Together, this creates a feedback loop that enables you to continuously learn and adapt.

Digital decisioning is active and anticipatory. It moves you to act — to take the next step before you know that step exists — by showing you the bigger picture of your business, your products and your customers. With digital decisioning, split-second actions are continuously optimized for the best outcomes. Holistic, 360-degree customer views are powered by a tailored, ever-expanding data feed from multiple sources and the ability to seamlessly share “decision assets” across the company.

In essence, digital decisioning enables radical, customer-focused change because it gives you two things: clear visibility into and across your business and the power to act on that insight.

It’s a disruptive market force that facilitates innovation, allowing businesses to introduce new offerings, collapse protracted timelines and personalize customer journeys, all while fuelling business continuity and “next-best-actions” that boost incremental revenue.

Currently, an estimated $6.8 trillion of direct investments in the digital experience are expected through the next two years, as 75% of organizations pursue comprehensive digital transformation. Organizations with more mature digital strategies in place are reporting significantly above average net profit margins and revenues, compared to those with less mature digital strategies. The digital revolution is well underway, and digital decisioning is at the centre of it all.

It Answers ‘What Do I Do Next?’

Digital decisioning is a complex analytic process that occurs behind the digital interface. It determines a customer’s immediate situation at the moment of engagement and automatically triggers the right actions at that precise moment, without human intervention. The keyword is “action.” Digital decisioning is about taking action, responding in real time to data and insights to drive outcomes. It intelligently answers the question, “What do I do next to achieve the results I want?”

Say a bank customer applies online for a credit card. As they’re being pre-qualified, digital decisioning will instantly analyse all the customer’s accounts with the bank including disclosed and undisclosed cash flow. It assesses risk exposure and other details and uses machine learning to anticipate the customer’s immediate need(s). Based on the bank’s comprehensive understanding of that customer at that moment, it triggers a personalized cross-sell offer for another relevant financial product, automatically boosting incremental revenue.

Think about scaling this speed, efficiency and agility across key operational functions and millions of transactions — per second. Put simply, no amount of manpower or human expertise can match it.

Business applications for digital decisioning extend far beyond banking and financial services. To name a few, organizations across the supply chain and logistics, insurance, health care, airlines and retail industries are using digital decisioning.

A Synergy Of Inputs, Outputs And AI

Digital decisioning is a culminating synergy of inputs (a continuous data feed that bridges silos), outputs (a direct feedback loop) and AI-powered technology. Each component is essential to the digital decision, and when adopting digital decisioning technology, you should make sure any solution you consider has these qualities:

• Continuous Data Feed: This is the lifeblood of the digital decision. It might include operational data, customer data or digital footprint data; however, regardless of the source, it’s critical that data across the enterprise is coalesced into a single, virtualized view. This breaks down data siloes, where critical information might be held in separate databases or repositories.

• AI-Powered Technology: The action or decision is sparked by machine learning technology. It evaluates the customer profile at the exact point of engagement and determines what personalized outcome will be most successful as learned from the feedback loop. It can even balance competing priorities and efficiently optimize resource constraints to ensure the organization maximizes its desired outcomes.

• Direct Feedback Loop. Every decision has an outcome. For example, an automated loan offer is either accepted or declined by the customer. These outcomes — good and bad — automatically feed into the decisioning model, which enables the machine learning technology to “learn” which decisions are optimal, given the circumstances and customer profile. This enables it to adapt and grow more accurate and precise over time.

Spark Growth, Innovation And Imagination

When customer data, decisioning assets and analytic expertise are mobilized under a shared decisioning platform, organizations are empowered to experiment and find new ways to solve customer problems.

• Organic Growth, Customer Lifetime Value: By better understanding customers from all angles, you can dig deeper and target high-potential niche audiences with more personalized offers and incentives. Likewise, you can create personalized customer treatments, which leads to higher customer satisfaction, retention and lifetime value.

• Net-New Growth, Untapped Markets: Detailed customer and market insights and hardened decisioning assets enable new levels of granularity and precision, just as advanced profiling and feature generation can reveal new markets fit for existing offerings.

• Innovation, Experimentation And Collaboration. Imagine setting up a digital “twin” of your business where you can safely experiment with key processes, product development, customer treatment strategies and more. Forward-thinking businesses are already doing this, using digital decisioning platforms to orchestrate simulations, perform experimentation with different components and strategies.

As businesses look for ways to adapt to increased competition and customer demands for immediacy and personalization, digital decisioning technology is providing the enterprise-level visibility, speed and agility necessary to intelligently pivot. It’s the start and the heart of any successful digital transformation, as it can move an entire organization forward by automatically answering one simple question: “What do I do next?”

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Bill Waid

GM, FICO Decision Management | Delivering innovative analytics & decision management for better business outcomes. Read Bill Waid’s full executive profile here.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

Despite Often Low Public Opinion Of Social Media, It’s Still Where Businesses Need To Be

No Comments

By Lisa Montenegro

Social media has long been in the spotlight; however, over the last few years, the giants have been under fire for numerous reasons. Pick your platform — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok. They’ve all been embroiled in problems and scandals, with public and political outrage often the result. Yet many of us still flock to them in droves. And where the public goes so do businesses and marketers. If public opinion is often so low for social media platforms, why do we still use them?

A good start to answering this is remembering what exactly the giants of the industry have done, and there’s no better one to start with than Facebook. The social media behemoth has more than 2.7 billion monthly active users and by 2025 is expected to be used by just over 69% of the U.S. population. Yet even those who have no time for social media or have little care for the news likely know about at least one of the multitude of controversies the social media giant has found itself in. Tax avoidance, censorship, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and how the platform handles users’ data are just the start of the dizzying list. Then there’s the scrutiny it has come under for shirking its responsibility to monitor what is posted on the site, such as hate speech.

And this is not to say the other major social media sites have not been in similar trouble. Instagram, YouTube and Twitter have all been accused of not being proactive enough when it comes to regulating what people post online, as well as a whole array of other problems, like taking a rape threat and making it into an advertisement or fake Twitter accounts trying to sway public opinion. Such controversies have been met with public disgust and anger, prompting politicians to move toward more regulation.

All of the incidents above have been major controversies, but social media platforms also have made smaller moves like algorithm and design changes and the infamous Instagram shadowbans, which, aside from being a mild irritant to daily users, have created major hurdles for marketers and businesses. In early March, many Instagram users suddenly found that likes were no longer shown on their posts. This turned out to be a trial of a feature that accidentally included too many people. But here in Canada, this is how it has been for two years now. Add in changes to Facebook’s algorithm to put friends and family first, and suddenly you’re likely dealing with a loss of impressions, reach and likes.

You would think with all of this that social media platforms would be losing millions of followers, right?

Facebook actually saw its U.S. and Canadian user bases decrease toward the end of last year, but the drop has done little in the grand scheme of things. The social media site still recorded huge revenue and gained more new users in Asia and the rest of the world. Instagram has over a billion monthly users, and that number is predicted to continue rising. Twitter has over 322 million users and will likely continue gaining them. And TikTok set a record for app installs last year after surpassing 2 billion downloads. Despite all the outrage and dislike of social media sites, people still flock to them in the millions and billions. But why?

The simple answer is that they connect us. It’s been over a year since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and lockdown measures closed stores and cut off our usual social interactions. The importance of sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and many others for keeping people connected not just to the people they are close to but also to strangers or people in need of support has truly been shown.

We live in an age when we can publish a post in Boston that can be seen within seconds in Berlin. We can communicate with friends around the world in an instant, and often the main way we do this is through social media. We can connect with those with the same interests. We can find jobs and network. And businesses can connect with audiences on a larger scale and reach more potential customers. Social media is a major part of how we stay connected. Last year proved that.

But what does that mean for those of us in marketing and PR or running businesses trying to connect with our audiences? We must go where the customers are. But this leaves us at the mercy of algorithms and major platform changes. When Instagram decides to tweak its systems again or a social media site finds itself grappling with a government, what can you do? Major changes can have serious effects, and before you know it, your reach and interactions can drop drastically. So how do you work around this?

To use an old phrase, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Diversifying between multiple social media platforms may mean posting in more places, but it can offer many benefits. The main one is that you are not dependent on a single social media site. If one is hit by regulations or changes its algorithms suddenly and accidentally takes out your page, you have others to fall back on. It also can provide you with a much larger reach. While a large section of your audience may be on a single platform, that doesn’t account for all of them. With a presence on other social media platforms, your brand can reach more people and possibly a wider range of demographics.

It will be interesting to see from here what happens to the social media giants with regulations and their relationships with audiences. For those of us in Canada, it would be nice if Instagram could let us see the number of likes on our posts again.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Lisa Montenegro

Founder & President at Digital Marketing Experts – DMX Marketing, a Premier Google Partner Agency located in Toronto, Canada.

Sourced from Forbes

Read More
By
In News

NFTs and AI Are Unsettling the Very Concept of History

No Comments

By Rick Prelinger

Non-fungible tokens and artificial intelligence make tracing the origins of a digital object more fragile. What are the world’s archivists to do?

As an archivist, I’m excited about what disruptive innovations like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and artificial intelligence may mean for archives. But I’m also worried. These developments pose existential threats to our field, and by extension, to the survival of human history and culture.

I give old films away for free. It started in 1999 when I was seduced by the promise, excitement, and just-felt-rightness of the gift economy. Not 30 seconds after we first met, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle asked me, “Want to put your film archives online for free?” Braving the new world of video digitizing and sputtery streaming changed my life. Our archival footage enabled thousands, maybe millions of artists, video makers, educators, and even post-Communist Polish village kids to remix history and bring the past into the present. I never knew how many people were using our material or who they were—but wasn’t that the point?

In 1999 the future of our archives was to be consumed, to enrich public memory with new evidence without hassle. I wanted our archives to be as ubiquitous as infrastructure, to work their way into every corner of the net, to propagate everywhere without need for attribution or credit. I wanted our archives to vanish in the web.

I still do.

But now the survival of archives as we know them is uncertain. Whether we know it or not, we all rely on a patchwork of chronically underfunded public and private institutions that hold the world’s histories and cultural heritages in trust for all of us and make them accessible. Every time we see an old photo, hear a historical recording, see a news clip, or find a family history document, it likely originated in an archive. While we see and touch massive digital archives online, most archives are still largely undigitized collections of physical media like film, video, music, photographs, and paper documents. By design, archives are deliberate and thoughtful, with a timeline designed to preserve culture “forever.” They’re not built to nimbly weather disruption.

It was only a matter of time before the market figured out a way to manufacture and sell digital scarcity, and the marketplace for cultural objects has moved well past the archival ecosystem. Artists, gamers, entertainers, athletes, and executives now sell NFTs, tokenized digital objects whose authenticity is said to be assured by the reverse traceability of blockchain transactions. The combination of Covid-19 isolation and cryptocurrency profits created a powerful incentive for digital-positive collectors to compete for these NFTs, and some creators are raking in Ethereum.

Law professor Tonya M. Evans optimistically suggests that crypto art offers Black artists and communities opportunities to bypass white art gatekeepers and “capture and own the value of the culture that they produce.” While the current boom may well go the way of the 1920s Florida land-rush hype, NFTs are the first step in what’s likely to be a robust market for unique or scarce digital objects. Many of these digital objects won’t be born-digital; instead they’ll be one-off digitized copies of physical materials, for which there could be a huge market. Who wouldn’t want to own the master digital copy of their favourite author’s journal, a photograph of Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass, or the recently rediscovered newsreel of the 1919 Black Sox scandal?

Nothing could be a greater cultural and ethical shock to archives than NFTs. Prevailing archival ethics generally dictate that all users are treated equally, and that archival materials aren’t exposed or sold only to high bidders. And once archives select materials for retention, they consider themselves in most cases ethically bound to do so permanently.

If an archive has a merch business, it’s tiny: keychains and postcards. As poor a fit with archival DNA as tokenizing archive collections as NFTs may be, the possibility of leveraging digital scarcity by selling NFTs while retaining physical materials is a hefty temptation. The archival world is a world of inadequate budgets and financial constraint, filled with underpaid workers and massive, poorly resourced projects like digital preservation, and the challenging task of digitizing analog materials. Will archives be tempted by the potential upside of NFTs and tokenize digital representations of their crown jewels (or the rights to these assets)? This would worsen an already bad situation, where institutions like our Library of Congress hold physical copies of millions of films, TV programs, and recordings that can’t be touched because someone else holds the copyright. Ideally, archives and museums should own and control both the physical and digital states of its collections. That won’t happen if they have to sell or license NFTs in order to survive. And there’s another risk: Minting NFTs requires a lot of energy (though we may hope for a cleaner process), and the future security of archives is threatened by climate change. Researchers have discovered that almost all archives will be affected by risk factors like sea level rise, increased temperature, or heavy rainfall.

For those working with the raw materials of history, integrity and authenticity are the chief necessities. How do NFTs address these? While the blockchain is supposed to draw an unbroken link between creator/tokenizer and purchaser, it’s just a record of transactions that might be tainted or even bogus. We know the original Mona Lisa resides in the Louvre, but it’s very hard to identify who really created and who owns many of the millions of creative works made in the analog era. It’s nearly impossible to track who owns the even greater number of digital works made every year. So while the blockchain can help us follow sales and transfers of digital objects, how do we know the original representations made about these objects can be trusted? Already there are many NFTs on offer that are nothing more than tokenized versions of works belonging to third parties, often scraped from museum websites. This isn’t a new problem—after we put digitized films from our archives online for free, many other stock footage companies downloaded them and sold them as their own. Who will be the arbiter of which copies are closest to the original? The quagmire recalls Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, where American craftspeople build near-perfect counterfeits of American cultural collectibles. Authenticity is based on aura, aura on belief. If many Alices sell tokenized, pirated copies of the Zapruder film to many Bobs, this bombs the blockchain with many transactions that obfuscate the fact that these might be pirated versions. The solution, obviously, is to know your source—to authenticate objects and their provenance by authenticating their owners. But can that scale in a marketplace where transactions might number in the billions?

Registries are emerging to authenticate sources and provenance, and perhaps even indemnify purchasers against false representations by sellers. These have long existed in the collectibles business. Rare coins are frequently processed by trusted grading and authentication services, which charge to inspect coins and then encapsulate them in sealed plastic slabs. While I can see this happening for the four existing colour versions of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, how would it work for millions of new digital works? Will these registries be proprietary or open, and how much will their services cost? And authentication systems ultimately rest on the accuracy of information they receive. Who would arbitrate conflicting claims between potentially millions of squatting bots feuding over provenance and authenticity issues? And could such registries be flooded with blockchain-authenticated look-alikes and deepfakes? If you think this is improbable, just look at YouTube, where Content ID, its suite of pattern-matching algorithms that’s claimed 800 million videos since its launch, supposedly enforces the rights of copyright owners by flagging unauthorized uploads. The system generates huge numbers of false positives and won’t authorize legitimate fair uses of content. And copyright to millions of videos (including many public domain works) is claimed by squatters. Fuzziness and a high error rate may be OK for a commercial service like YouTube. But it’s a disaster for cultural and historical institutions that derive income from reuse. How would a blockchain full of false transactions complicate ownership and authenticity?

One working solution is for cultural and historical institutions like archives to run their own trusted registries of digital objects. But this is expensive, and it creates further incentives for archives to monetize their holdings and become less accessible to non-commercial users, like genealogists, the group that uses archives more than anyone else. If the need to administer NFTs makes NFTs inevitable, that’s a loss. Today’s archivists are faced with the need to come to terms with NFTs without having the resources to ensure their needs are met.

NFTs make archival authenticity, and thus history, more fragile. And right now authenticity is threatened by AI.

If you’ve seen Denis Shirayev’s upscaled historical videos, you’ve seen the past enhanced by a touch of the future. He takes videos scanned from very old films, like our poignant A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire, shot just days before the 1906 quake and fire that devastated San Francisco, upscales them to 4K, smoothes out jitter and adds colour. (Today any video editor can make something almost as good using off-the-shelf tools like Topaz Video Enhance AI.) Shirayev’s videos are beautiful and compelling, but they show you something that never was. They’re not archival; they’re fiction. Artist and author Gwen C. Katz recently demonstrated the flaws of AI colorization, showing that software substitutes a drab colour palette for the brilliant colours of historical reality, and pointing out that only primary historical evidence unaffected by our preconceptions can present a plausible image of the past. Will prettified AI-enhanced digital objects made to draw in the eyeballs of distracted web surfers push the original, less attractive evidence out of view? Will people modify archival materials in such a way as to marginalize their original source? Will established archives sit by as others embellish their collections into prettier, more marketable objects? And, worst of all, will pretty images stand in for the inconvenient, hard-to-view authentic record?

The question of “real” vs. “pretty” recently exploded when a Vice article (now removed) revealed Matt Loughrey‘s colorization and alteration of mug shots taken in a Khmer Rouge torture center just before their subjects were murdered. Cambodian genocide survivors led a protest against Loughrey’s project, which added smiles to a few victims’ faces, and the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and the Government of Cambodia called for his apology and for the photographs to be taken down. From the viewpoint of historical and archival authenticity, Loughrey’s call for infusing archival photos with a sense of contemporary realism was perhaps most disturbing. “The image that we’ve come to accept as standard is becoming obsolete owing to the advance in display technology,” he told the Daily Mail. “When we consider a museum or a library or a documentary, as these displays advance, which they are rapidly, the producers of these are going to be less inclined to display and use these images. They’re going to have to find new images by repurposing them.” The actual archival record, in other words, can no longer stand by itself.

Together these two developments pose an existential threat to archives. Archives won’t go under, but it’s going to take serious thinking, significant new funding, and public education to help these under-resourced, deliberate organizations respond to rapid change. The integrity and survival of these important institutions are in everyone’s interest. Archives aren’t perfect, but they can help keep us honest. They’re a force for historical accuracy and accountability, if we trust the records in their collections and know their provenance. All of us should hope the promise of NFTs and AI won’t slide us into a world of “fake archives” and speculation in archival collectibles.

I still want our film archives to be consumed freely by makers in familiar media and in media we haven’t yet begun to imagine. I still want our archives to vanish in the web. But I don’t want history and the institutions that painstakingly preserve it to disappear into an eternal and amnesic present.

Featured Image Credit: Sam Whitney; Getty Images

By Rick Prelinger

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer, and educator whose collection of 60,000 films was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. He is currently chair and professor of film and digital media at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sourced from WIRED

 

Read More
By
In News

WhatsApp announces new Business features for e-commerce

No Comments

The instant messaging platform had introduced its Catalogs feature back in 2019, allowing businesses to create a storefront and menus for products they sell.

Facebook-owned instant messaging platform WhatsApp on Wednesday expanded its offerings for business users. The company announced two new features that make WhatsApp Business–the new e-commerce side of the platform–more effective and friendly for businesses. The features include better support for WhatsApp Catalogs on desktops, and the ability to hide items that are out of stock.

The instant messaging platform had introduced its Catalogs feature back in 2019, allowing businesses to create a storefront and menus for products they sell. The company says it has over 8 million business catalogs worldwide, including one million in India. But businesses can only create and manage these from mobile right now.

With the new update, the same will be possible from WhatsApp’s web/desktop applications. This could be especially helpful for established businesses, which would have already digitized their systems through ERP software and more. WhatsApp may not allow these ERP systems to be integrated, but at least it will allow businesses to do all their work from desktop computers.

The second update allows businesses to temporarily hide items that are unavailable from customers. The feature is common amongst e-commerce platforms, grocery delivery and food delivery services, where a dynamic storefront is required. It essentially lets sellers change their menus on the go, and avoid delays in delivery or taking orders for products that may not be immediately available.

The feature updates bring WhatsApp Business more up to speed with competing platforms. While the company has been trying to get more small businesses on board, it competes with virtually every delivery service on the market today. WhatsApp does have a large user base already, but a well rounded feature set will be just as important.

The company is just about a month away from enforcing its new privacy policies, which landed it in trouble with users and the Indian government. The new policies allow the company to share some data with partnering business, which the Indian government has asked the Delhi High Court to block.

By Prasid Banerjee

Sourced from mint

Read More
By
In News

Brace yourselves. Facebook has a new mega-leak on its hands

No Comments

By

Facebook Email Search v1.0 can process 5 million email addresses per day, researcher says.

Still smarting from last month’s dump of phone numbers belonging to 500 million Facebook users, the social media giant has a new privacy crisis to contend with: a tool that, on a mass scale, links the Facebook accounts associated with email addresses, even when users choose settings to keep them from being public.

A video circulating on Tuesday showed a researcher demonstrating a tool named Facebook Email Search v1.0, which he said could link Facebook accounts to as many as 5 million email addresses per day. The researcher—who said he went public after Facebook said it didn’t think the weakness he found was “important” enough to be fixed—fed the tool a list of 65,000 email addresses and watched what happened next.

“As you can see from the output log here, I’m getting a significant amount of results from them,” the researcher said as the video showed the tool crunching the address list. “I’ve spent maybe $10 to buy 200-odd Facebook accounts. And within three minutes, I have managed to do this for 6,000 [email] accounts.”

Enlarge

Ars obtained the video on condition the video not be shared. A full audio transcript appears at the end of this post.

Dropping the ball

In a statement, Facebook said: “It appears that we erroneously closed out this bug bounty report before routing to the appropriate team. We appreciate the researcher sharing the information and are taking initial actions to mitigate this issue while we follow up to better understand their findings.”

A Facebook representative didn’t respond to a question asking if the company told the researcher it didn’t consider the vulnerability important enough to warrant a fix. The representative said Facebook engineers believe they have mitigated the leak by disabling the technique shown in the video.

The researcher, whom Ars agreed not to identify, said that Facebook Email Search exploited a front-end vulnerability that he reported to Facebook recently but that “they [Facebook] do not consider to be important enough to be patched.” Earlier this year, Facebook had a similar vulnerability that was ultimately fixed.

“This is essentially the exact same vulnerability,” the researcher says. “And for some reason, despite me demonstrating this to Facebook and making them aware of it, they have told me directly that they will not be taking action against it.”

On Twitter

Facebook has been under fire not just for providing the means for these massive collections of data, but also the way it actively tries to promote the idea they pose minimal harm to Facebook users. An email Facebook inadvertently sent to a reporter at the Dutch publication DataNews instructed public relations people to “frame this as a broad industry issue and normalize the fact that this activity happens regularly.” Facebook has also made the distinction between scraping and hacks or breaches.

It’s not clear if anyone actively exploited this bug to build a massive database, but it certainly wouldn’t be surprising. “I believe this to be quite a dangerous vulnerability, and I would like help in getting this stopped,” the researcher said.

Here’s the written transcript of the video:

So, what I would like to demonstrate here is an active vulnerability within Facebook, which allows malicious users to query, um, email addresses within Facebook and have Facebook return, any matching users.

Um, this works with a front end vulnerability with Facebook, which I’ve reported to them, made them aware of, um, that they do not consider to be important enough to be patched, uh, which I would consider to be quite a significant, uh, privacy violation and a big problem.

This method is currently being used by software, which is available right now within the hacking community.

Currently it’s being used to compromise Facebook accounts for the purpose of taking over pages groups and, uh, Facebook advertising accounts for obviously monetary gain. Um, I’ve set up this visual example within no JS.

What I’ve done here is I’ve taken, uh, 250 Facebook accounts, newly registered Facebook accounts, which I’ve purchased online for about $10.

Um, I have queried or I’m querying 65,000 email addresses. And as you can see from the output log here, I’m getting a significant amount of results from them.

If I have a look at the output file, you can see I have a user ID name and the email address matching the input email addresses, which I have used. Now I have, as I say, I’ve spent maybe $10 using two to buy 200-odd Facebook accounts. And within three minutes, I have managed to do this for 6,000 accounts.

I have tested this at a larger scale, and it is possible to use this to extract feasibly up to 5 million email addresses per day.

Now there was an existing vulnerability with Facebook, uh, earlier this year, which was patched. This is essentially the exact same vulnerability. And for some reason, despite me demonstrating this to Facebook and making them aware of it, um, they have told me directly that they will not be taking action against it.

So I am reaching out to people such as yourselves, uh, in hope that you can use your influence or contacts to get this stopped, because I am very, very confident.

This is not only a huge privacy breach, but this will result in a new, another large data dump, including emails, which is going to allow undesirable parties, not only to have this, uh, email to user ID matches, but to append the email address to phone numbers, which have been available in previous breaches, um, I’m quite happy to demonstrate the front end vulnerability so you can see how this works.

I’m not going to show it in this video simply because I don’t want the video to be, um, I don’t want the method to be exploited, but if I would be quite happy to, to demonstrate it, um, if that is necessary, but as you can see, you can see continues to output more and more and more. I believe this to be quite a dangerous vulnerability and I would like help in getting this stopped.

By

Dan is the Security Editor at Ars Technica, which he joined in 2012 after working for The Register, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and other publications.
Email [email protected] // Twitter @dangoodin001

Sourced from ars TECHNICA

Read More
By
In News

Did Facebook Just Take a Step Toward Connected TV?

No Comments

By Jeremy Bowman

A new ad product could help unlock a valuable new revenue stream for the social media giant.

Connected TV is probably the fastest-growing advertising sector out there at the moment.

The transition from linear television to streaming has unleashed a boom in streaming-based digital ads, also known as Connected TV, which offer better targeting than traditional TV ads and give both the media publisher and advertiser much more data about who is watching.

A November 2020 report by eMarketer.com forecasts that the CTV market will grow 40% in the U.S. to $11.36 billion this year, and the market should continue to expand rapidly as a number of new services have just entered the streaming TV market.

And it now appears that digital advertising kingpin Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) could be the latest company to have its eye on the CTV prize.

Dynamic ads for streaming

On Monday, Facebook announced a new ad product: dynamic ads for streaming. The tool allows Facebook and Instagram users to click on an ad for a streaming service and see personalized, relevant titles based on their own interests on Facebook and Instagram. The solution replaces the old way of doing business, in which a streamer would have to advertise individual titles to show off their content. Now streaming advertisers can set up their campaigns once and automatically generate unique ads for each title, rather than having to create individual ones for each time.

James Smith, head of entertainment at Facebook, explained, “With Dynamic Ads for Streaming, advertisers no longer have to manually create new campaigns for each individual title. Once an advertiser uploads their content catalog to Facebook, the dynamic ads deliver personalized recommendations, giving people a similar personalized experience they’re used to seeing from their streaming services.” Advertisers that have tested the new product, like Brazilian streaming service Globoplay, have seen strong engagement so far.

It’s unclear if Facebook has a goal with these ads beyond their current implementation, but they could serve as a beachhead to build relationships with streaming services from which the company can further expand into streaming and Connected TV. The company’s user data is unique, and no other social platform can identify users’ streaming content preferences the way Facebook can — and that’s a valuable asset to streamers. Additionally, the company’s user profiles offer considerable value for ad targeting, so an account obtained through a Facebook ad could potentially have more value than a direct sign-up.

An old idea

Facebook made a play for the CTV ad market back in 2016, but it eventually shut down its audience network for the category in 2018. Part of the reason was that Roku, the leading streaming device maker and a powerful force in CTV, blocked Facebook from selling ads on its platform, as it saw advertising as a valuable business.

There were other challenges as well. Facebook didn’t separate its streaming ad inventory on the audience network, and advertiser awareness of the CTV option seemed to be too low. Additionally, Facebook’s base of advertisers didn’t align well with a product that users can’t easily click on. CTV tends to be more suitable for “brand advertising,” or brand-awareness-building campaigns, rather than the kind of performance marketing with easily trackable data that Facebook typically serves.

However, the Connected TV market was much smaller in 2018, and Facebook may have a different experience today. Since it pulled the plug, ad-based services like Hulu, now owned by Walt Disney, have grown significantly, and a number of others have hit the market, like Comcast‘s Peacock, ViacomCBS‘s Paramount+, and Discovery Communications’ Discovery+. In other words, CTV has reached a tipping point over the last year, so it’s not surprising that Facebook might want a piece of the market.

The company is at a disadvantage against fellow tech giants like Apple, Alphabet, and Amazon, all of which offer their own streaming devices and services — and Facebook Watch, which was billed as the company’s answer to YouTube, has underwhelmed since its 2017 launch. But the dynamic ads product is a reminder that the company can do things with customer targeting that none of its peers can, and that could give it a unique inroad into streaming ads.

It’s still unclear if the new product will lead to anything more than just a convenient way for streaming services to attract new users, but it’s a reminder to investors that even as the stock is priced for slowing growth, Facebook has plenty of optionality in its arsenal — including in VR/AR, e-commerce, payments, and new ad products like dynamic ads for streaming.

It’s a good bet that at least one of those emerging businesses will pay off big down the road.

Should you invest $1,000 in Facebook, Inc. right now?

Before you consider Facebook, Inc., you’ll want to hear this.

Investing legends and Motley Fool Co-founders David and Tom Gardner just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now… and Facebook, Inc. wasn’t one of them.

The online investing service they’ve run for nearly two decades, Motley Fool Stock Advisor, has beaten the stock market by over 4X.* And right now, they think there are 10 stocks that are better buys.

Feature Image Credit: Getty Images.

By Jeremy Bowman

Sourced from The Motley Fool

Read More
By
In News

Ecommerce offers app developers billion-dollar opportunities. They just need to know where to look.

No Comments

By

Commerce is complex and diverse, and merchants have different needs depending on their scale, what they sell and where they are in the world. Developers hold the key to removing this complexity and solving these problems for merchants, as they are driving the pace of change in commerce. When you go deep on these elements, you’ll find there are billion-dollar industries waiting to be developed within each of them.

SaaS is capturing massive amounts of VC attention and funding around the world: Klaviyo raised $200 million in Boston, as did Yotpo in NYC; Bold Commerce raised $27 million in Canada; Xentral raised $20 million in Germany; and Holded raised $18 million in Spain, just to name a few.

Based on the shifting needs of merchants, there are four areas where developers should spend time building to take advantage of these burgeoning billion-dollar industries.

Mobile-first messaging

Conversations are the lifeblood of commerce. SMS marketing in particular is an area that has seen monumental growth in recent years, and hit warp speed in 2020. That’s no surprise when you consider that the average person spends about four hours a day on their phone. Text messages have a 95% to 99% open rate, and 75% of consumers are OK with receiving messages from brands after they’ve opted in. In fact, 50% of the top 1,000 online retailers are already using SMS marketing. Itzy Ritzy, a brand that sells new-born products, used SMSBump to try its hand at this tactic, and has driven its abandoned cart recovery rate up to 19% — achieving a return on investment north of 26,000%.

It’s clear that the future of commerce is commerce everywhere, sleekly integrated so that it’s there when you need it and gone when you don’t. Increasingly, that includes mobile. Other mobile-first areas like social media have already started to integrate with commerce; we’ve seen the rise of social commerce on platforms where consumers are already spending time for connection and entertainment, like on TikTok and Instagram.

This empowers business owners to become content creators, give their brand a voice and sell a product. It’s only a matter of time before commerce and SMS meet head-on, to move beyond marketing and into selling. Platforms like WhatsApp are experimenting with shoppable messages, but the space continues to be ripe for innovation.

Bringing real life online

Last year, many retailers looked to replicate offline experiences online. And now, even as stores open back up, there’s been a permanent shift in consumer behaviour: Retailers will continue to experiment with technology to bring the in-store shopping experience online. Video, 3D and AR are great ways to do this. People want to see the couch in their living room before they buy it; they want to view the product from all angles.

Retailers surveyed reported conversion increases of more than 50%, with 25% larger average order sizes, when they used 3D and AR assets on their sites. It’s clear that video converts far higher than static images; consumers connect better with a layered experience that includes sound and moving imagery. Plus, AR/VR technology is becoming more and more accessible. Even the iPhone is compatible with this tech now.

Social commerce is everywhere

Content and commerce are coming together to power the creator economy. While this trend is not new, it is gaining incredible speed. Commerce is popping up on every social platform, including TikTok, where people can now make their videos shoppable with a Shopify integration. This is not a passing trend, this is a new way that people want to shop — especially young people.

Our Future of Commerce report found that 54% of younger consumers discover brands on social media, and 28% of them have purchased via social media. From February 2020 to February 2021, installs of Shopify’s social commerce channels grew by 76%. Watch this space, and build for it. It’s so powerful that it’s even fuelling our fourth area of opportunity.

An explosion in live-selling

Livestreaming is already a booming market, projected to reach nearly $224 billion by 2028. Such a large, captive audience is the perfect fit for commerce. Live-selling has been popular in China for some time, with sales projected to reach half a trillion dollars by 2023. North America is behind the curve, but not for long. We’ve seen steady live-selling growth in North America, presenting an upended retail industry the opportunity to breathe new life into businesses. With live-selling, a store becomes a studio, and staff members take on the role of brand advocates. This space is also a clear opportunity to work with influencers who have mastered the art of social commerce. In the future, merchants will need technology that helps them rethink their physical space in the digital world, giving them yet another asset they can leverage to reach their customers.

For people watching, live-selling is a way to feel part of something. There’s an element of scarcity, too: If a particular offer is available for a short period of time or with limited inventory, live-selling can promote a frenzied sense of urgency to make the purchase right now. For retailers, live-selling is a great way to collect real-time feedback from potential buyers: “This product is great, do you have it in red?” Some companies are already taking advantage of the potential in this space: Montreal-based livestreaming platform Livescale grew its revenue tenfold from March 2020 to January 2021.

There are near limitless opportunities for developers in 2021. Retail is ripe for building, and now is the perfect time to start.

Feature Image Credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images 

By

Fatima Yusuf is the director of partnerships for Shopify’s app developer ecosystem.

Sourced from protocol

Read More
By
Load More