editor, Author at Mediastreet

In News

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

May 4, 2021 No Comments

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

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NFTs and AI Are Unsettling the Very Concept of History

April 30, 2021 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

In News

WhatsApp announces new Business features for e-commerce

April 30, 2021 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

In News

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

April 30, 2021 No Comments

By Dan Goodin

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.”

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 Goodin

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.

Sourced from ars TECHNICA

In News

Did Facebook Just Take a Step Toward Connected TV?

April 29, 2021 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.

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Feature Image Credit: Getty Images.

By Jeremy Bowman

Sourced from The Motley Fool

In News

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

April 29, 2021 No Comments

By Fatima Yusuf.

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

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

Sourced from protocol

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3 new technologies ecommerce brands can use to connect better with customers

April 29, 2021 No Comments

By Andrea Hak

Hint: Less talking and more listening

Ecommerce was already a fast-growing industry at the beginning of 2020. Now it’s experiencing an unprecedented boom as billions of shoppers seek to replace their physical shopping carts with virtual ones.

What’s more, customer loyalty has been uprooted and is now up for grabs. A study by McKinsey & Company found that consumer behaviours have changed drastically across the globe with extremely high numbers of consumers having tried new shopping behaviours, including purchasing products from new brands, in the past few months.

These changes are creating new opportunities but also increased competition.

As a result, companies have been investing in new tech, from AR-generated apps being used to allow customers to ‘try on’ make-up and clothes virtually to gamified shopping promotions.

But, in the rush to adopt the latest trends and attract new customers, many companies are feeling more out of touch with their audience than ever.

We spoke with three ecommerce experts to find out what companies are getting wrong and how they can better connect with their audiences using technology. As part of Techleap.nl’s most recent batch of Rise Programme participants, these fast-growing scaleups represent the best of the best in Dutch innovation. Here’s what they had to say:

Go where your customers are

When choosing a spot for a brick-and-mortar store, everyone knows the most important consideration is location, location, location. You want to set up your store where your customers like to hang out and shop regularly. According to Jorrit Steinz, CEO of ChannelEngine, your ecommerce strategy should be no different.

And just where is your audience shopping online? According to a study by Digital Commerce 360, sales on marketplace sites accounted for 62% of global web sales in 2020, with the top online marketplaces in the world selling $2.67 trillion in products.

“While consumers were first searching on a search engine, now they’re searching on marketplaces. Even if they’re searching on Google, they will still find marketplaces so it’s essential for brands to be where consumers are searching,” Steinz said.

Even if consumers do start with a Google search, individual retailers still have to compete with marketplaces for top spots in search results.

Most new webshops completely rely on Google driving traffic. Then you see the marketplaces competing for the same set of keywords. On top of that, Google itself is competing with Google Shopping. So it’s getting harder and harder to optimize for your own webshop. There’s a whole ecosystem of brands that are only selling on marketplaces, social media, and not even on their own webstore.

ChannelEngine is a software as a service platform that connects brands, retailers, and wholesalers to online marketplaces. Instead of having to manage an Amazon account, eBay listings, and a Zalando portal, companies can manage multiple marketplaces across the globe from this one platform. This means stock levels and orders can be synchronized, product updates can be made automatically, and price levels can be controlled in one place.

For brands looking to break into new markets, rather than spending time on translating websites, researching keywords, and creating specialized campaigns, the transition can be as simple as selecting the marketplace with the best reach in that country.

As Steinz pointed out, it’s not just about traditional marketplaces. Social media channels are also now transitioning towards becoming virtual shopping malls.

A lot of click channels, like Instagram, Google, and comparison sites, are all turning into transactional channels, which is basically a marketplace. So that means there’s going to be more and more entry points for potential customers.

Instead of navigating to an online shop, consumers will now have their credit cards linked to their Instagram accounts, allowing them to simply click on an ad and buy directly in the app.

“That’s going to be a massive shift for any ecommerce retailer and, if they’re not prepared, it’s going to cost them some potential revenue,” Steinz predicted.

You get the best customer insights by simply listening

“We’re always talking about digital data sources now online. The tendency is to think that ecommerce is something and then traditional retail is something else. This is absolutely not true,” said Riccardo Osti, CEO of Wonderflow.

BazaarVoice found that 56% of online shoppers and 45% of brick and mortar buyers read reviews online before purchasing a product. This has created a multiplier effect for some product categories, meaning that each dollar a company makes online is equal to between four and six dollars they make offline.

“Whatever happens online has an impact on the real world. When I buy something offline, I first read reviews online. Then I go to the shop already knowing which products I want to see and buy,” Osti said.

The more companies realize this and begin to combine online and offline data to inform their strategy as a whole, the better.

I think a very big mistake is that most companies don’t try to connect with their audience. Historically many brands, especially ones that have a very technical product offering, focus a lot on their product and not on their customers. But times have changed.

Customers are more than willing to share their opinion and connect with brands in the form of online reviews, NPS scores, and customer center feedback. This means there’s already a plethora of customer data at companies’ fingertips. The problem is, many simply don’t know how to translate this data into usable information.

Wonderflow is a Voice of the Customer (VoC) analytics solution that allows companies to glean insights from different customer feedback sources. Their platform leverages natural language processing to aggregate and analyze all of this feedback (both public and private) in one place.

The next, and more difficult step, is to translate this information into actionable advice and that’s where Wonderflow’s strength lies. Their predictive technology is able to take current consumer insights, and use them to create actionable predictions for the future. Osti explained:

At Wonderflow we’re now trying to predict what your future appreciation score or new star rating of a specific product is going to be in one month or in one year.

We start by analyzing what customers say about the product and we identify where there’s space for improvement. So, for example, if the star rating is 3.8 out of five, we can tell you ‘if you want to get a 4.5-star rating in the future, you need to improve features x and y.’

The second step we’re working on is the prescriptive part. This allows us to tell you which action you should take to make that improvement happen. For example, ‘run an engineering workshop to identify what the problem is with this specific component of the product.’

Perhaps one of the most exciting things about this new technology is that, by providing narrative text-based prescriptions, absolutely anybody in your company will be able to glean insights from them, not just data analysts.

“This is the big change that we will see in the industry for the next few years, moving from the old fashioned, unreadable business intelligence platforms that we’ve seen for decades, to intuitive charts and narratives,” Osti told TNW.

Embrace niche audiences

Thomas Slabbers, CEO of SocialDatabase, believes that the biggest mistake companies make when it comes to connecting with their audiences is not spending enough time defining who those audiences are.

At SocialDatabase, we believe in the following formula: RESULT = CONTENT X DATA. Brands spend a lot of time creating the right content, but when it comes to creating the right audience, they often fall short. With just native targeting options available and limited access to data, brands struggle with reaching the right audience. We believe that enriched public data should be the starting point of every campaign.

SocialDatabase created a unique solution for this.

By amplifying publicly available Twitter data, we’ve created SUPERAUDIENCES. SUPERAUDIENCES allow brands to selectively target more relevant audiences through a deeper analysis of public data. These are custom audiences designed to match campaign goals, increasing receptivity and media effectiveness, without using third-party data.

But do we really want to narrow our audience? Isn’t casting a wider net better?

“First of all, the majority of social media users feel the communication coming from brands is irrelevant or unimportant to them. A more narrow audience would make ads more interesting and relevant. Secondly, reducing the waste in a target audience simply saves a lot of budget that would have been spent on the wrong audience. Finally, a more focused audience enables brands to make more impact in a shorter amount of time,” Slabbers explained.

SUPERAUDIENCES are particularly relevant for use cases where quality is more important than scale, whether you’re looking for a niche, B2B, or relevant consumer audience.

As a Formula 1 partner, Heineken used SUPERAUDIENCES to distinguish hardcore F1 fans from casual fans during the Grand Prix of Australia, China, and Spain. Meanwhile, Nutricia, a company that specializes in therapeutic food and clinical nutrition, is using SUPERAUDIENCES to specifically reach healthcare professionals.

There you have it, location, listening, and spending more time in defining your audience will help you build a stronger connection with them. Although brick and mortar stores are starting to open up again in some countries, the continued rise and preference for ecommerce is not something that’s going away. But, as Osti explained, combining your retail and ecommerce strategies is the best way to get ahead of the game.

By Andrea Hak

Sourced from TNW

In News

5 ways to make your small business website more dynamic and engaging

April 28, 2021 No Comments

By Frank Wazeter

Businesses’ digital and social media strategies should inspire engagement and action.
Bold and creative content on a website is the best way to keep people engaged.
Encourage interaction by providing options that help direct visitors to a call to action.

The purpose of any website comes down to two factors: engaging a person and getting that person to take action.

You must create sufficient interest with visitors for them to stay on your page. Failure to engage and get users to take action renders your website purposeless. What good is the small business site that doesn’t get potential customers to call, purchase or contact? What good is the ecommerce site that doesn’t get someone to buy?

Your digital strategy comes down to getting people to the site and getting them to stay on the site. What most people don’t realize is that every social media platform you can think of is fundamentally a website. They’re extraordinarily complex websites that are technically in the category of applications, but they’re still rendered in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, read in a browser and accessed anywhere the internet is accessed.

Social media keeps people engaged on their platforms more than any other website types because that’s their business model. They’ve invested hundreds of millions — if not billions — in making sure people stay glued to the screen and stay on their site.

There’s quite a bit of psychology that goes into these website designs in order to get them to be as addictive as possible. And while there’s an ethical discussion to be had about how far the line has gone in the addictive nature of social media, we’d be foolish to not take lessons and apply them from the observations above. Thanks to their research, we can “growth hack” what works and take key lessons and leverage them for our own gain, without spending millions of dollars to do so.

1. Use dynamic content

In order to get people to routinely visit your site, you need to give them a reason to continuously come. Static content simply doesn’t do this, as the nature of static content is to have a relatively unchanged page that you can continuously reference.

Dynamic content is more about information and entertainment. It’s about having a regular conversation with potential customers and being able to provide them with ongoing value and insights that they wouldn’t necessarily think about. Blog entries are dynamic content types most commonly associated with websites, but there’s so much potential variety here that your site can embrace to give people value again and again. You could mix up short content types, post video content from YouTube that you’ve created and also mix in long-form posts.

In effect, what you want to do is have something that is consistently updated, but also varied so people who are viewing the site can consume the content in the format they most prefer.

2. Make your content brief and give people a way to read more

People scan content before they commit to reading, watching or listening. Not only is this a basic human tendency to scan before committing to reading the whole thing, but it’s also being drilled into us as a habit by every single social media and multimedia platform out there. Netflix gives previews of every show with highlights, Twitter exclusively only allows brief communication, and Facebook posts cut down the extra stuff until you click to see more.

Properly done brief content is powerful, authoritative, and gives you expert status. When you’re able to consolidate complex ideas into small snippets and chunks of information that people can understand, that’s true expertise. Start with brief content and allow your audience to delve deeper into more information.

3. Your content must be visually appealing

Recently, while watching a friend of mine’s new-born son, he began having a crying episode. What ended up calming him down was exposure to bright colours and animated colours. He was delighted with the vivid colours and movement on screens to the point of fascination.

Adding visual stimulus — even if it’s just changing the background colour — enhances engagement with your website because it makes something primal in us say, “Oh, what’s this?”

Social media heavily uses visual stimuli and movement to attract and keep attention. You need to have strong and consistent visual elements and cues.

4. Use a variety of content types

Different people have different preferences. Some people are readers, some are watchers, and others are listeners.

As a business owner, it’s not up to you to decide what content is best for your clients. Rather, your clients are going to have varied tastes. For me, I want to read things before I watch or listen. It’s why I’ll write content first and then make video and audio out of it.

Allowing people to consume content the way they want means achieving a very simple result: more conversions, more leads and more customers.

5. Find ways to encourage interaction with your website

At the heart of everything, social media is interaction. Sharing on social media gets the other person to become an active participant rather than just an audience member.

While having social media-esque interaction on a small business site probably isn’t going to happen due to the nature of your site, you can take lessons from different platforms. Allow people to comment on posts and content you put up. Actively encourage them just like you do on social media. Add buttons for people to like or share your content directly from your site to the social media of their choice. Provide plenty of buttons that call to action. Any number of these micro-interactions get people involved and doing new things on the site, rather than simply being a casual observer.

At the end of the day, interaction gets people to take action. If visitors on your website are taking action, you’re one step closer to profit.

Feature Image Credit: JGI/Tom Grill/Getty Images

By Frank Wazeter

Sourced from INSIDER

In News

Amazon’s Ad Frenzy: How To Stay Relevant In 2021’s Hyper-Competitive Advertising Space

April 28, 2021 No Comments

By Chris Mole

The Amazon empire has well and truly taken the world by storm over the past year. Lockdowns all over the world allowed Amazon to step into a new role as an essential provider for consumers unable to leave their homes. And revenue benefitted as a result, topping $100 billion for the first time in the last quarter of 2020.

Three-quarters of Amazon sellers are spending their ad budgets on Amazon. As brands pile on to the e-commerce site to capture their share of growing consumer demand, the increased competition is causing brands to ramp up their advertising spend. Amazon’s ads business is growing faster than any other division, and this rapid growth is even beginning to put Amazon in competition with Google and Facebook.

With more brands turning to Amazon ad spend to boost sales, marketing teams must ensure they are getting the most bang for their buck. To stay competitive, brands should align their advertising plans with overall sales strategy. This means prioritizing an agile advertising strategy and looking ahead to future trends rather than simply relying on what has traditionally worked in the past.

My team of experts recently predicted the trends that we expect to capture the attention of Amazon advertisers in the coming year: programmatic advertising, which we expect to be more reliant on first-party data, personalized ads that involve advanced targeting strategies, video advertising revolving around short-form videos, and mobile advertising, with expected updates to Amazon’s mobile app to engage mobile shoppers and a “story” ad format.

Amazon has also introduced Amazon Live in response to the recent popularity of livestream platforms like Twitch. Using this tool, brands can promote their products through livestreaming, allowing customers to ask questions and view or buy the featured products.

While brands need to keep up with these trends to stand out, it’s also important that they don’t lose sight of the basics of Amazon advertising. Most advertisers should know that a potential customer will rarely ever be converted by seeing an advertisement only once.

Brands need to think tactically to ensure that they can increase digital touch points to tie in with discounts or product launches. Looking to the future is vital, but assessing past performance is just as important. Whether past ad campaigns were a success or slump, there is much for brands to learn from former ROI and ad strategies, as long as they continue to update these to incorporate current trends.

Too often, I see messy ad accounts with little structure or organization and budgets spread too thinly across thousands of keyword targets. Many brands shy away from targeting broad search terms, but in doing so, they miss out on massive audiences. They should also be using all three types of sponsored ads — sponsored brands, sponsored display and sponsored products — to maximize product visibility and achieve as many objectives as possible.

With so much going on with Amazon advertising, it’s easy to think about Amazon ad strategy in a silo. But it’s simpler than ever to manage the relationship between on- and off-Amazon advertising, and brands should take advantage. Amazon Attribution allows brands to track and manage traffic sources and media spend holistically. E-commerce managers can now properly understand, using solid data, how running advertising outside of the Amazon platform has a direct impact on Amazon sales. As a result, they can — and should — focus on crafting an omnichannel strategy that has a real impact.

As Amazon advertising takes its spot in the limelight and continues to narrow the gap between the giants of advertising, the company will no doubt be making changes in line with current ad trends to improve service for the hordes of advertisers flocking to Amazon — and keep them coming. But in this age of content consumption and online competition, only the brands that prioritize innovative advertising while still understanding the basics and can respond quickly to frequent changes will feel the full benefit of Amazon’s advertising boom.

Feature Image Credit: getty

By Chris Mole

Founder and CEO of Molzi.

Sourced from Forbes

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How creativity can drive business results: Adobe, Lego, Unilever, IBM and Diageo will show the way

April 28, 2021 No Comments

By amit bapna

A year on from Covid-19’s first lockdowns, nations and economies seem to have better control and growth is on the mind as a semblance of recovery is in sight, particularly in Asia Pacific.

Even within this chaotic situation, the region has shown signs of faster recovery than many other parts of the world and are even providing learnings to other parts of the world on how best to navigate through the challenges. While that is heartening news, it also leads to the question on how ready are brands from a creative standpoint to navigate this new and emerging reality?

To help marketers unravel this critical puzzle, The Drum and Adobe have put together a power-packed panel with senior representatives from formidable brands like Lego, Unilever, IBM and Diageo. These top brand leaders will come together for a 60-minute session with live Q&A and deep-dive into the key challenges that the marketers and creatives are facing in producing content that engages customers as well as connects with them, at scale.

The session will discuss how a good mix of talent and technology can help in unlocking the answers to these challenges and allow collaboration to thrive in a new hybrid way of working. It will also look at the following key themes:

The changes that the brands have had to navigate and adapt to since the pandemic began
The evolving creative approaches
Raising the role of creativity in driving business goals
The emerging face of creative collaboration in the new world

The discussion, on 21 April 2021, will be moderated by Charlotte McEleny, The Drum’s Asia Pacific publisher, who will be joined by Michael Stoddart, director, strategic business development (APAC) at Adobe, Grace Astari Italiaander, creative lead – innovation at Diageo, Primus Nair Manokaran, head of creative at The LEGO Agency (APAC), Kartik Chandrasekhar, global brand vice president of Lifebuoy at Unilever and Isabella Bain, sales and creative associate director at IBM.

By amit bapna

Sourced from The Drum