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YouTube turns to Wikipedia to help it fight conspiracy theory videos

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By Minda Smiley.

At SXSW, YouTube chief executive Susan Wojcicki revealed that the site will begin using Wikipedia to try and curb the spread of conspiracy theory videos.

Conspiracy theory videos on the site will now include text from Wikipedia pages that users can click on to learn more about the topic in question. For instance, someone watching a video about chemtrails would see a “companion unit” featuring Wikipedia’s “Chemtrail conspiracy theory” page.

According to Wojcicki, the feature is set to roll out in the coming weeks. While she did not explicitly say how exactly YouTube plans to determine what is considered a conspiracy theory video, she did say that the site will be “using a list of well-known conspiracies from Wikipedia” to help it decide which videos should receive the additional information.

“When there are videos that are focused around something that’s a conspiracy, we will show as a companion unit next to the video information from Wikipedia,” said Wojcicki. “People can still watch the videos, but they actually have access to additional information.”

The move comes weeks after YouTube was criticized for letting a conspiracy theory video about last month’s mass shooting in Parkland, Florida take the top spot in its “Trending” section. The video accused David Hogg, a survivor of the shooting who has since spoken out for gun control, of being a “crisis actor.” YouTube eventually pulled the video for violating its policies.

Over the past year, YouTube has struggled to keep its platform free of extremist and offensive content. About a year ago, brands including Verizon and PepsiCo pulled advertising from the platform due to concerns that their ads were appearing next to videos that promote terrorist groups.

In December, the Google-owned video site rolled out a four-step action plan in hopes of curbing the brand safety concerns that have plagued it in recent months.

Feature Image: Conspiracy theory videos on the site will now include text from Wikipedia pages that users can click on to learn more.

By Minda Smiley

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Digital Marketers Will Devote More Resources to Online Reputation Management in 2018

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Online reputation management is very necessary all of a sudden.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Businesses say they plan to allocate more resources to their online reputations in response to the growing popularity of social media and online reviews.

According to a new survey from Clutch, 40% of businesses will increase their investment in online reputation management (ORM) this year.

All this is due to the growing power of social media and third-party reviews sites, which impact businesses’ control over their online reputation.

Clutch surveyed 224 digital marketers and found that more than half of businesses (54%) consider ORM “very necessary” for success. As a result, 34% said they allocated more resources to ORM in 2018, and an additional 43% said they plan to hire a professional public relations or ORM agency in 2018.

Businesses already invest a significant amount of time observing their online reputation, Clutch found. More than 40% of digital marketers (42%) monitor their companies’ brand online daily, while 21% monitor their online reputation hourly.

According to public relations experts, businesses frequently monitor how their brand is portrayed online because they know even one negative media mention can quickly damage the public’s perception of their company.

“When people search for brands online, they tend to search for stamps of credibility,” explained Simon Wadsworth, managing partner at Igniyte, an online reputation management agency in the UK. “If potential customers find anything negative, that could end up being a significant amount of leads the business won’t get from people who are put off from using the service.”

Social media also has shifted the ORM landscape because it gives consumers free-reign to share their opinions and experiences quickly and frequently: 46% of businesses look to social media most often to monitor their online reputation.

By using professional agencies that have expertise in online reputation management, businesses can minimise losing new customers who may be dissuaded from purchasing their product or service.

To read the complete report, click here.

 

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Intelligent Content Can Transform Your Content Process. Here’s How to Tell if It’s Right for Your Brand.

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By Shama Hyder

The concepts behind intelligent content are an important glimpse into the future of content marketing.

As you can tell from the number of chatbots that are popping up across the web, brands of all types have begun investing in artificial intelligence, mainly for their customer service departments.

But ask these same forward-thinking brands whether they’re using intelligent content, and their answer will probably be either “No,” or “What’s intelligent content?”

Here’s a quick explanation of this content development, and how to determine whether it’s right for your brand.

What is intelligent content?

Intelligent content is content that can be adapted, changed, and/or released on different channels, to different audiences, without needing a human to touch it. Intelligent content is to content what adaptive design is to design – it adapts to the device, context, and situation in which it’s being consumed.

(Intelligent content is a complex topic, so for a full, in-depth explanation, you may want to pick up Ann Rockley’s book Managing Enterprise Content: a Unified Content Strategy. Rockley is a top expert on intelligent content, having pioneered the idea more than 10 years ago.)

In order for this to be possible, your content needs to be structured in such a way that it can be mixed and matched, as it were. It has to be broken into fragments, easily customizable, and – perhaps most importantly – properly tagged, so that both your marketing team and your customers can find the pieces they need easily.

In other words, intelligent content is content that takes a lot of the guesswork, rewriting, and repetition out of content creation. It replaces it with content that can be easily automated, recombined, personalized, and distributed.

How can I tell if it’s right for my brand?

Intelligent content isn’t something every brand needs.

For example, if you’re a small business that sells one product to one audience, there’s really no need for you to put in the effort to take your content from standard to intelligent. You likely have a bank of content that already works for you, and that needs little adaptation.

However, if you’re a business that sells lots of products, to lots of different audiences, then intelligent content can allow you to drastically cut down on the amount of time you spend creating new content and adapting what you already have.

Consider this example. Your company creates 5 different software packages, each of which is used in 3 different industries. Within each of those industries, you’ve got 7 different buyer personas for whom you’re creating content.

While you’re likely reusing and adapting content already, to some degree, the process of creating new content for every persona, in each industry, for every product, is extremely time-intensive.

Switching to an intelligent content approach could work extremely well for this company. That would mean that instead of spending time writing new content from scratch, the marketing team would begin breaking down their existing content into fragments, and tagging it with metadata to make it easily findable.

For example, they would have one sentence about the company itself – they could tag that “about company.” They might have an intro paragraph that they use consistently – that would be removed and tagged “intro.”

Then they could begin getting into their more detailed, individual content needs. For each software package, three features could be selected and summarized, with each feature tagged “feature 1,” “feature 2,” etc. One testimonial per industry, per software package could be chosen and tagged.

This process would continue until they had the building blocks to create the content they needed quickly and efficiently.

That’s just the beginning, though. Depending on your resources, you can invest in artificial intelligence programs that can automate your content and even, in some cases, produce some for you.

One program, Wordsmith, can create written reports from reading your Google Analytics and AdWords data. Wordsmith pulls your data and then analyzes it for insights, creating a robust report that reads as though it were written by a human. Programs like this can save your team huge amounts of time, and even, in some cases, produce better data analysis.

While intelligent content may not be for every brand, the concepts behind it are an important glimpse into the future of content marketing. For more, read my post “3 Crucial Truths You Don’t Know About the Connected Consumer.”

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images

By Shama Hyder

Founder and CEO, Marketing Zen Group

Sourced from Inc.

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Women-Owned Small Businesses More Likely to Use Social Media

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Women-owned businesses are most likely to use social media. Men! What y’all doing?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A woman-owned small business is more likely to use social media, according to a new survey from Clutch, a leading B2B research and reviews firm.

Among women-owned businesses, 74% use social media, compared to 66% of men-owned businesses.

The findings came as no surprise to experts, who said women overall are more likely to use social media. Given that trend, female small business owners more easily can bring their business onto social media.

“Women are generally better conversationalists than men,” said Jeff Gibbard, chief social strategist at digital agency I’m From the Future. “They tend to be more expressive and more emotive. It’s no surprise to me why more women business owners use social media.”

Women often communicate better than men, which translates to the online world where they are more likely to use social media effectively.

Millennial-Owned Small Businesses Lead Social Media Use

There is also a generational divide among small businesses’ social media use. The survey finds that 79% of millennial-owned small businesses use social media compared to 65% of small businesses owned by older generations.

Millennials, like women in general, frequently use social media for their personal lives. Their social media skills easily carry over into their businesses – unlike older generations, experts say.

“The older people didn’t grow up with social media, so many don’t understand how to use it for their business,” said Shawn Alain, president of social media agency Viral in Nature. “They went through a significant part of their life without even the internet, and they remember what it was like not to have a smartphone or email.”

Millennials are also more likely to use Instagram and Snapchat than older generations, but Generation Xers and Baby Boomers are more likely to use LinkedIn.

Most Small Businesses Use Facebook

Facebook remains the most popular social media channel for small businesses, no matter the gender or generation of the owner – 86% say they use it, which is nearly twice the number of small businesses that use the second-place channel, Instagram (48%).

Among small business users of social media, 12% say they use Facebook exclusively for their social media efforts.

Overall, 71% of small businesses use social media, and more than half (52%) share content at least once per day. Images and infographics (54%) are the most popular content types that businesses post to social media.

Read the full report here. 

 

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Facebook’s Trust Crisis: What Now?

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Less than 1 in 3 people call Facebook a responsible company, according to a new survey.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Barraged by accusations of spreading divisive fake news and amid new allegations that it handed over personal information on up to 50 million users without their consent, Facebook is losing the faith of the people, according to a new survey.

Almost 4 out of 10 people surveyed said: “Facebook is not a responsible company because it puts making profits most of the time ahead of trying to do the right thing.” Less than 1 in 3 said that Facebook is a “responsible company because it tries to do the right thing most of the time even if that gets in the way of it making profits.” The rest were unsure.

By a 7-1 ratio people surveyed said that Facebook has had a negative influence on political discourse. Sixty-one percent said that “Facebook has damaged American politics and made it more negative by enabling manipulation and falsehoods that polarize people.”

The survey was conducted as new revelations surfaced that the company connected to the 2016 Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, inappropriately harvested personal information on millions of Facebook users.

The sharp rise in negative feelings is a significant departure from Facebook’s standing prior to the 2016 election, when the rise of so-called Fake News and polarizing content led to calls for the company to take greater responsibility for the content on the popular social media site – or face government regulation.

By a 2-1 margin, people surveyed said it’s Facebook’s responsibility to remove or warn about posts that contain false or misleading information. And 59 percent reported that the company is not doing enough to address the issues of false and inflammatory information that appear on its site.

“Facebook is at a crossroads because of its inability – nearly a year-and-a-half after the election – to get a handle on its divisive effects on society,” said Tom Galvin, Executive Director of Digital Citizens, who commissioned the survey. “From spreading fake and manipulative information to becoming a ‘Dark Web-like’ place for illicit commerce, Facebook seems to losing the trust of the American public. Regulation will not be far behind for social media companies if things don’t change.”

This declining trust reflects a growing concern about the impact Facebook and other social media sites have on young teens.  In the survey, more than two in five people surveyed said that the minimum age to have a Facebook account should be at least 18 years old.

“Digital platforms have to rise to the occasion and assure internet users that their personal information will be safe, that the content will be legal, safe and not contrived to manipulate. In short, they have to demonstrate they will be the positive influence on our society that they espouse to be,” said Galvin.

 

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How to Win at Marketing Using a Hashtag

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A travel company has managed to stir up a lot of viral traffic with their hashtag. Watch and learn, people.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

What do a dream wedding in New York, an adventure through the mountains of Sri Lanka and a family’s search for their roots in Scotland all have in common? All saw a hospitality professional going out of their way to make or save someone’s trip. And a holiday booking company use this mushy sequence of events with a hashtag to fire up social media views and get a great repsonse from them.

Booking.com call themselves the global leader in connecting travellers with the widest choice of incredible places to stay. Established in 1996 in Amsterdam, Booking.com B.V. has grown from a small Dutch start-up to one of the largest travel e-commerce companies in the world. Part of The Priceline Group (NASDAQ: BKNG), Booking.com now employs more than 17,000 employees in 198 offices in 70 countries worldwide.

So, what are they doing with their social media marketing? They are riding hastags like a showjumper would a prize horse.

They have had some great success with their recent hashtag #BookingHero. They asked people to share their travel stories using the hashtag. The best story won travel prizes and big kudos online.

Following thousands of submissions via social media, Booking.com selected the three most touching and inspiring accounts of hospitality professionals going above and beyond to create unique and unforgettable travel experiences for their guests.

The customers were then flown back to say thank you to the person who saved their trips. Here are the stories.

 

 

The point isn’t the stories though. The point is that real people’s journeys made the hashtag come alive and generate traffic for booking.com. In fact, the call out for submissions via social media has been so successsful that Booking.com is now using the hashtag to extend the social media campaign with long-form video content that extends the #BookingHero message, with TV to follow.

According to recent research conducted by Booking.com across 25 markets in 2017, a personal connection is essential for many travellers with 29% saying that an accommodation feeling like home is key and 24% sharing that a welcoming host is a make or break factor during the first 24 hours of their trip.

Said Pepijn Rijvers, Chief Marketing Officer, Booking.com. “These stories beautifully demonstrate that an amazing trip is about more than simply finding the right destination or the perfect accommodation– it’s also about the people you meet along the way which truly make for an unforgettable journey. And that’s what travel is all about.”

And for the company, it is about finding the right hashtag and getting it to go viral.

 

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Anti-Brexit group ‘Best for Britain’ plans ATL ad campaign

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By Taruka Srivastav

Anti-Brexit group Best for Britain (BfB) is planning to launch an advertising ‘blitz’ to keep the UK open to EU membership.

The Financial Times has reported the group aims to highlight the benefits of staying in the EU and plans to target much of its advertising at voters in the Midlands and the North of the UK.

Its chief executive officer Eloise Todd told the FT that in terms of media spend, she is planning for “some billboards”, as well as “a lot of digital spending”. The latter evokes the strategy of 2016’s Leave campaign, with Todd adding that her group was “taking a leaf directly” from the original Brexiters.

BfB claims to have raised more than £170k from more than 500 online supporters, and has further received £500,000 from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. Overall, it has declared £1.2m in donations.

By Taruka Srivastav

Sourced from THEDRUM

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Uh-Oh. How Do We Mobile-Advertise to Gen-Z When They Don’t Like Their Phones That Much?

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Gen Z use their phones a lot, but are relieved when they are taken away. So how do marketers reach this age group if they have a love/hate relationship with their smartphones?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Members of Generation Z are relieved when placed in a situation where they are unable to access their smartphones for several weeks. This is according to a new study conducted by Screen Education, a non-profit organisation that addresses smartphone addiction.

The study involved participants aged from 12 to 16, who spent 2-4 weeks at Camp Livingston during the summer of 2017.  Because Camp Livingston does not permit its campers to bring smartphones with them, they are an ideal group for conducting research about refraining from smartphone use.

According to Michael Mercier, President of Screen Education, “Many children said they have become overwhelmed by their smartphones. They no longer can keep up with all their notifications, and they are burdened by the ‘drama’ they encounter through social media via their smartphones. Consequently, they were relieved to be separated from their smartphones because it eliminated that stress.”

This relief was reflected in a survey conducted with the campers after they had returned home.  The campers were asked the extent to which they experienced feelings of gladness and frustration from being without their phones. “A large number − 92% − experienced gladness, while only 41% felt any frustration. We had expected the opposite,” said Mercier.

When asked what their experience would have been like if they had been allowed to bring their phones to camp, campers revealed just how severe smartphone addiction is among their age group. “They almost unanimously admitted they would have spent the entire time on their phones,” recounts Max Yamson, Executive Director of Camp Livingston. “They said they would not have formed deep relationships with the staff and fellow campers, would not have connected with their surroundings and nature on the same level, and would not have engaged as much in recreational activities.”

According to Yamson, “The study shows that the campers were glad to have left their phones behind so that they could experience a deeper level of engagement.”

“The research also revealed a stunning insight,” said Mercier. “Many campers discussed the experience of face-to-face communication as though it were a novel one. They exhibited a sense of discovery at learning that face-to-face communication is far superior to screen communication when it comes to building friendships and getting to know other people.”

Yamson added, “One camper said that in four short weeks she got to know her friends at camp better than she knows some of her friends at home – because she mostly communicates with her friends at home through screens.”

Other key findings include:

  • 92% said it was beneficial to have gone without their phones while at camp
  • 83% considered having gone without their phones for several weeks to be an important life experience
  • 35% were successful at curbing their smartphone use after leaving camp
  • 17% tried to influence a friend to spend less time on their phone after leaving camp

The researchers plan to follow this study up with additional research during the summer of 2018.

 

Marketers trying to catch the attention of this demographic may need to think carefully about how they approach mobile advertising for this generation of digital natives. It’s another day in the life of modern media.

 

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Using Models in Your Advertising Campaign? Be Careful With Their Make-Up

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It could be sending the wrong message to your intended audience.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An academic study has found that women wearing heavy makeup are less likely to be perceived as leaders. Of course, it depends on what you are selling and to whom. But if you want your model to portray leadership, then stay away from the make-up kit.

The research from Abertay University found that women wearing heavy makeup were less likely to be thought of as good leaders. The study was led by Dr Christopher Watkins of Abertay’s Division of Psychology, and published today in Perception journal. It revealed that the amount of makeup a woman is wearing can have a negative impact on perceptions of her leadership ability.

Study participants were asked to view a series of images featuring the same woman without cosmetics and with makeup applied for a “social night out”.

Computer software was used to manipulate the faces and the amount of makeup was also manipulated in the face images.

Each participant completed a face perception task where they judged sixteen face-pairs, indicating how much better a leader they felt their chosen face to be compared to the other face.

It was found that both men and women evaluated women more negatively as a leader if the image suggested she was wearing a lot of makeup.

Dr Watkins said, “This research follows previous work in this area, which suggests that wearing makeup enhances how dominant a woman looks. While the previous findings suggest that we are inclined to show some deference to a woman with a good looking face, our new research suggests that makeup does not enhance a woman’s dominance by benefitting how we evaluate her in a leadership role.”

The study was carried out by Abertay graduates Esther James and Shauny Jenkins and used a measurement scale common in face perception research, which calculates the first-impressions of the participant group as a whole, working out an average verdict.

Dr Watkins has carried out previous high-profile studies including work looking at how women remember the faces potential love rivals and the role of traits related to dominance in our choice of allies, colleagues and friends.

To view the full study click here.

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Why Facebook Video Ads Should Only be Just Six Seconds Long

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Facebook is now the most popular places that advertisers are putting their video ads, even beating YouTube.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Top marketers know that digital video is one of the most powerful tools to increase consumer engagement and brand loyalty. In fact, according to a new study from Clinch, brand marketers are ramping up their production of digital videos with an emphasis on creating campaigns specifically for Facebook and YouTube.

The study found that 78 percent of marketers plan to increase their production of video ads in 2018, while only 43 percent of marketers plan to increase their production of static banner ads this year.

Social is Video

When it comes to digital video campaigns, Facebook reigns supreme, representing 46 percent of all video ads produced. When adding Facebook-owned Instagram into the mix, this number leaps to 74 percent. YouTube comes in a close second at 41 percent.

Says Oz Etzioni, CEO of Clinch, “It’s no secret that Facebook and YouTube dominate the digital media landscape and we don’t expect this to slow down, particularly with the Facebook algorithm change which requires brands to pay in order to be seen. In 2018 brands will increase spend and leverage the rich data that these platforms provide. However, the data and platform are just two pieces of the puzzle. Creative is the critical third piece. If brands aren’t uniquely tailoring their creative specifically for each platform and by audience, opportunities will be missed and ROI will be lowered.”

Nearly three quarters of marketers are adopting online video from their TV commercials. 44 percent indicated that they don’t shorten commercials for each platform’s suggested length. While TV ads remain a critical source of video content, the user experience of each social platform is very different than traditional TV. For example, TV ads are 15 to 30 seconds long but Facebook and YouTube recommend six-second videos.

Etzioni continued, “We were really surprised to learn that marketers were taking a one size fits all approach to video. In 2018, marketers will awaken to the fact that investment in creative will increase ROI and personalisation at scale, and will become the norm for digital video as it has become for static ads.”

Defining Social Personalisation

While 50 percent of respondents say they personalise their video campaigns, brands can be doing a lot more. Those that are personalising their creatives based on data are seeing big results. Nearly 90 percent of respondents who have customised Facebook or YouTube video ads reported seeing benefits. Furthermore, 70 percent of those who customise said that they have seen improvements in their key performance indicators (KPIs).

According to Etzioni, in the next few months, the definition of personalisation will change. “Rather than creating a handful of versions – one for men, one for women, one for the East Coast and one for the West Coast, we expect brands to be using data insights to personalise at scale. This means hundreds if not thousands of versions of videos where the message and creative is tailored to their specific needs and interests. This will create a more meaningful experience for the consumer and transform video campaigns from simply brand awareness to direct response opportunities,”

The full report, “How Leading Brand Marketers are Using Personalised Video to Drive Sales,” is available for download here.

 

 

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