Wearables Pose Security Risks

Takeaway: Thanks to the advance of IoT, the market for wearables keeps expanding to the point that it should hit 50 billion devices by 2020. While these devices offer hands-free convenience for specific functions, they also introduce new points of vulnerability that can be opportunities for hackers.

Cisco predicted that by the year 2020, 50 billion new wearable devices will be connected through the IoT. This increases points of connection exponentially, and that translates into a huge opportunity for hackers.

Demonstrated Hacks

That wearable devices like Fitbits can be be manipulated through acoustic interference was demonstrated by a number of research experiments. It’s true that there are no immediate ramifications of a nefarious nature other than possibly gaming the count of one’s steps, but the researchers do warn of this: “For instance, should one trust the step count from a Fitbit as evidence for an alibi?” How can it be relied upon if it’s possible to inflate the number of steps through a hack?

This is a question of reliable accuracy, but sometimes it is the accuracy itself that poses a problem. Wearables might be picking up accurate information that is traced directly to the individual and so reveal quite a lot.

Read more in Hacking Wearable Tech: The Potential Danger of Advancing Wearable Technology

Riding the rails with social media

So many brands have jumped on the bandwagon of influencer marketing that it may be losing all association with originality and authenticity. So when Amtrak decided on an angle for reach through social media, it went about it differently. Its goal was to work off people whose social reach run deep rather than merely wide. 

Late in 2018, Amtrak launched its #AmtrakTakeMeThere Social Media Residency Program. It’s intended to showcase the diversity of the trains’ riders by following the stories of individuals who offer a unique perspective on travel. Applicants will be assessed on the basis of their writing skills, photography and videography skills, social community engagement' and online personality.    

Those selected to represent the Amtrak brand get a free round-trip as Sleeper Service passengers. That means they get the kind of amenities one does in a full-service hotel, like meals, bottled water, linens, and a travel allowance up to a thousand dollars.   

Olivia Irvin, Amtrak’s public relations manager shared some insight into what prompted this direction for the brand. She explained, “Today’s market has become saturated with 'influencers' who seem more like ad units than actual people. We don’t want that disconnect — we want stories that resonate.” 

Read more in 

All Aboard for a New Amtrak Platform

Women speak

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Podcasts, which are becoming increasingly important as a journalistic medium,  have generally been male-dominated. But the medium is getting more diverse, thanks in part to a new podcasting studio dedicated to giving women a voice.

Raina Penchansky, founder and CEO of Digital Brand Architects, (DBA), a digital talent management and social media marketing firm, spoke to me about her company’s latest endeavor, the recently launched  Dear Media (DM). Located in West Hollywood, this new podcasting studio focuses on leading female voices and narratives that can now be heard on Apple iTunes and Spotify. .

They reach a “highly engaged listener,” through this medium Penchansky explained.  “It’s a targeted millenial audience, and in a lot of ways,” which makes it “very much the right medium” for this demographic that has been “cord-cutting and consuming content differently” than the previous generation. 

The business model for  Dear Media follows the pattern set by DBA back in 2010. It  helps individuals conceptualize, develop, and produce customized communication through new media. The difference is that it puts the emphasis on female hosts and voices, placing women and their stories at the forefront of conversation.

Read more in Giving Women a Voice

Extracting marketing value from data

As businesses strive to become more data-driven, the challenge lies not amassing data for
data's sale, but in getting the right data.

According to research from Harvard Business Review, data records are so prone to critical errors that less than three percent of data meets basic quality standards. Accuracy matters, and banking on the wrong data can translate into serious business losses. In 2016 IBM estimated that losses due to poor data quality cost the US economy $3.1 trillion annually

Gary Read, CEO of Import.io, a web data integration solution provider, spoke about how his business gathers data from publicly available websites and puts it into a common format to enable organizations to gain insights that can inform their marketing strategy.  What Import.io does is take care of the data so that businesses can focus on the insights.

Read more in 

Tapping Data for Marketing Insights

LinkedIn Hops On the Story Bandwagon with Student Voices

Story Time at LinkedIn

LinkedIn has rolled out its own stories feature. Here's how college students are using it

ARIELLA BROWN

 DECEMBER 27, 2018

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We all have our own stories to tell, and some of us choose to share them with the world on social media in video format. That’s why a person’s “story” on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook refers to a video post.  Now LinkedIn is going to try to be a platform of stories, too, rolling it out first for American college students.

 As TechCrunch recently reported, LinkedIn will allow student to post short videos on their Campus Playlist. They can then be viewed there for one week, though they will remain accessible for as long as the student wishes under the the individual profile’s “Recent Activity.”

If you’re a regular LinkedIn user you might have noticed that it now encourages people who post to add in hashtags, generating several suggestions you can just click. It also does this for Student Stories, according to the TechCrunch report, which is why there will likely be more instances of the hashtag #OnCampus appearing on the videos linked to the school’s Campus Playlist.

To get deeper into this story, I reached out to students on LinkedIn. Cammy Okmin, a student at California Polytechnic who holds the title of LinkedIn Campus Video Editor, graciously answered my questions via email.

Read more in 

Story Time at LinkedIn

Planning for 2019: B2B Marketing

CIOs at successful B2B companies are planning for a 2019 marketing stack roadmap with a focus on #CustomerTech. That means not just collecting data but using it to address the business needs of their customers to achieve an unprecedented lift in KPIs defined around understanding customer behavior.

Next year is set to be one for businesses to fully optimize their customer data quality and insights by setting up the right technology platform for marketing to business customers. As you plan your 2019 budgets, the essential thing to think about is the customer aspect of #CustomerTech. Approaching tech from that perspective results in better customer data and analytics -- the prerequisites for account based marketing (ABM).

Thanks to the rise of digital transformation, marketing models have evolved. The same demand for personalization that has arisen in the B2C realm now applies to the world of B2B marketing.

Read more in Gearing up for B2B marketing in 2019

Biggest Cyber Monday Ever

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This year’s Cyber Monday was the biggest ever. Impressive as they are, the numbers for sales only tell one part of the story. The other is which brands invested in ads in kicking off the holiday shopping season and how customers responded and reached out to them.

Crunching through the numbers, Adobe Analytics reported that this year’s Cyber Monday Sales broke US sales records, thitting  $7.9  billion, an amount that represent 19.3 percent YOY growth and which exceeded the predicted spend of  $7.79 billionthat would have translated into 17.6 percent YOY growth  for the day.

Those represent just online sales, but some of the same people also spent money in stores over the Thanksgiving weekend. According to the National Retail Foundation(NRF)  over 89 million gave business to both online and physical retail outlets, which represents an increase of close to 40 percent over last year.

Investing in the technology that enables multichannel shopping had a real payoff, according to the NRF. “The multichannel shopper outspent the single-channel shopper by up to $93 on average.”

So what role did marketing play in the billions of dollars of spending? Working with DialogTech, 4C Insights put out a report that presented the data on ads, social lift, and phone calls. What they found was that the top 10 advertisers were made up not just of retailers but also financial services, automotive and other industries. The impact of their TV ads appears in the increase in social media engagement that immediately followed their ads...

Read more in 

Why Cyber Monday 2018 Was Biggest Ever

Related posts: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/11/time-to-say-tis-season.html

http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

AI: Inception to Present

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Takeaway: AI has a surprisingly long history, marked by periods of optimism and support followed by disenchantment. Now that we're at a new high point, we appear poised for the inevitable third round of AI winter. But perhaps this round will be different.

Today we have all kinds of “smart” devices, many of which can even be activated by voice alone and offer intelligent responses to our queries. This kind of cutting-edge technology may make us consider AI to be a product of the 21st century. But it actually has much earlier roots, going all the way back to the middle of the 20th century.

AI Roots

It may be said that Alan Turing’s ideas for computational thinking lay the foundation for AI. John McCarthy, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University, gives credit to Turing for presenting the concept in a 1947 lecture. Certainly, it is something Turing thought about, for his written work includes a 1950 essay that explores the question, “Can machines think?” This is what gave rise to the famous Turing test. (To learn more, check out Thinking Machines: The Artificial Intelligence Debate.)

Even earlier though, in 1945, Vannevar Bush set out a vision of futuristic technology in an Atlantic Magazine article entitled “As We May Think.” Among the wonders he predicted was a machine able to rapidly process data to bring up people with specific characteristics or find images requested.

Emergence

Thorough as they were in their explanations, none of these visionary thinkers employed the term “artificial intelligence.” That only emerged in 1955 to represent the new field of research that was to be explored. It appeared in the title of “A Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence.” The conference itself took place in the summer of 1956.

As they were poised at the beginning of the decade of optimism, researchers expressed confidence in the future and thought it would take just a generation for AI to become a reality. There was great support for AI in the U.S. during the 1960s. With the Cold War in full swing, the U.S. didn’t want to fall behind the Russians on the technology front. MIT benefited, receiving a $2.2 million grant from DARPA to explore machine-aided cognition in 1963.

Progress continued with funding for a range of AI programs, including, MIT’s SHRDLU, David Marr’s theories of machine vision, Marvin Minsky’s frame theory, the Prolog language, and the development of expert systems. That level of support for AI came to an end by the mid-1970s, though.

And now winter is coming

Read more to learn about AI winters and whether we may be entering into the third one now in A Brief History of AI

Time to say "'Tis the season?"

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The song "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" may have been running through people's heads yesterday due to the snow. But for marketers, the picture of Christmas starts to form a lot earlier -- too early for some, in fact. But there is some method to the madness of holiday marketing for those who pay attention to their customers. 

Here we are in November, and holiday marketing is in full swing already. In fact, some holiday marketing has been in place already since early October, much to the chagrin of those of us who think they should at least let us get through Halloween before decking things out in red and green. 
Read more in  
‘Tis the season for what exactly?

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2018/08/capitalizing-on-holiday-marketing.html

Measuring the Metrics that Matter

Click-through rate (CTR) has long dominated as a core marketing metrics because it is so easily tracked. With video, new metrics, like engagement rates and completion rates (VCR), are also taken into account.

However, these metrics don’t necessarily prove the campaign is working toward the marketing goal if it isn’t defined properly.

Anthony Coleman, senior director, search and social, Digital Remedy, believes that easily-accessible metrics are not as useful as some people think. CTR only tells you how someone interacts with an ad, and can reflect some level of awareness, but not what actions the person takes in response, Coleman said. Another drawback of CTR is that it is easily manipulated to inflate numbers for more impressive results.  

“When you’re trying to run an active campaign and get new users in the door...a metric that is so easily shifted is not a good metric,” Coleman said.

Read more in 

Beyond Click-Through Rates: Metrics That Matter

Live Event Marketing for Journalism

Even in our high-tech, hyper-connected world, people crave the type of human connection that only comes through live events. According to EventMarketer's  2018 Event & Experiential Marketing Industry Forecast & Best Practices Study, 84 percent of marketers surveyed consider events integral to their marketing operations.

Among the brands tapping into the power of live events are the local journalism outlets under the USA Today Network umbrella.  

“We’ve focused on a couple of key areas, that are passion areas for local markets and audiences,“ Andy Yost, the company’s CMO said. “They offer an opportunity connect in a meaningful and consistent way, and show that their unique portfolio of local brands can provide value beyond great journalism.”

People are not one-size-fits-all. USA Today Network crafted different types of branded events that range in price and attendance, depending on the type of event.  >

“All events are designed to show the extension of the powerful network we’ve built and to expand connection with our audiences,” Yost said.

Read more in How USA Today Reaps the Benefits Of Live Events

Capitalizing on Holiday Marketing Throughout the Year

Every holiday occasions sales, though some have greater effects than others, and Labor Day is anticipated to be one of those bigger days. According to Adobe’s Digital Dollar Report, this year’s Labor Day is expected to reach the $2 billion mark in sales.

What marketers can do to capitalize on these occasions is not just to offer the usual promotional pricing but to engage customers by reaching out to them in a data-driven and emotionally intelligent way.

The data that Optimove  pulled up on holiday sales indicates Labor Day, like Memorial Day, enjoys a marked lift in sales. While the Fourth of July does occasion an increase of nine percent over an average order, which is ahead of Labor Day’s three percent and Memorial Day’s one percent, it falls behind other key measurements.

Read more in 

What to Expect on Labor Day

What you really need to make it as a freelancer

Having been a freelancer for nine years now, I knew I'd be disappointed with the insight offered by the clickbaity title
"Do You Have What It Takes to be a Moneymaking Freelance Writer?"

But because I really am a curious  person who checks things out rather than assuming they are what I believe them to be, I clicked it to find out for myself.

All the advice in that post focuses on  writing well and being disciplined about sticking to it, reading voraciously, and being curious. In other words, we have the old cliche of work hard to follow your dream, and you will attain it.

Utter nonsense! Real life doesn't work like a Disney movie.

The difference between those who really make money and those who don't is not the skills you develop but the connections you make... and a touch of serendipity.

Why skills alone don't cut it
 You can be a writer on par with Jane Austen, but if you don't get your abilities noticed by the right person at the right time, you could end up churning out blogs for just $5- $10 a piece on sites like Upwork. Just working hard won't advance you that far.

The content mill proposition 
 In fact, that myth is what content mills use to lure writers into complicated reward structures that assure them of only fractions of a cent per view payable at some unattainable threshold level. "Just keep generating content, and you'll increase your earnings," they say, dangling that carrot that will forever remain out of reach for the poor souls caught up in such systems.

Fame without fortune
A similar ploy is used by those sites that will offer you no compensation other than exposure, which, they say, will, ultimately lead you not just to fame but at least some fortune.Don't you believe it!

Those who get sucked into such system will be mired in the false reality of low rates, which are not a reflection of quality of work as much as they are of the resources or generosity of the publisher.

The only way forward as a freelancer 
You have to connect with people who either have the power to hire or who can recommend you to those who do. You also need to get on board when the publication is flush enough with funds to offer a decent rate rather than demanding you work fora pittance. That's where the next quality comes in.

Serendipity
The way I ended up writing on tech was due to serendipity. In 2010, when I was starting to see possibilities in freelancing, I discovered an ad for work on Internet Evolution (it no longer exists). It was offering writers $10 per comment (that not per blog but just per comment). It seemed easy enough, so I signed on and then signed on to comment on additional sites form the same publisher.

 After a short while I was invited to writer at the rate of $200 a blog. For someone who was still at the beginning of her writing career, it seemed to be pretty good rate, particularly as it had the buying power beyond what $200 buys today. In fact, some would still consider that a good rate because there are publishers out there that won't pay more than $100 or even $25 a blog. I know this because every once in a while I reach out to a publication or have it reach out to me and get offered those very low rates despite having hundreds of publications to my name now.

The point is that without having connected with the people who were then offering a rate that they considered fair rather than what they considered what was the least writers would settle for, I had an anchor amount that didn't put as far down as those plugging away for $25.

As it turned out, my timing was especially fortuitous because some time later the comment compensation dropped to $5, and newer sites tried to get writers to work for just $150 a piece. I only still got the $200 because I insisted on it.

Myths of merit 
Did I retain what was becoming a higher than average rate  it because I'm that much of a better writer? No, nor do I believe that writers who have positioned themselves to consistently earn $1 a word are necessarily better wordsmiths than I, though they likely are better negotiators and networkers.

That  merit is always rewarded and that better performers are always compensated better because they're worth is is a myth.  While it's good to read myth-like stories and  fairy tales to build you imagination as a writer, it's not good to believe that virtue, hard work,  or event talent is inevitably rewarded in real life.

Reality
 As in any business, for freelancers to prosper, they need to make those vital connections that will give them opportunities for work and income.

Not Your Parents' Back-to-School Marketing

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While the heat of summer draws us to the beach, marketing campaigns pull us in another

direction – back-to-school season. Yes, it’s that time of year again, and today’s marketing campaigns must work with the expectations of parents -- and students – to be successful.

The back to school shopping season is a big deal for retailers. The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimates the spending for back-to-school shopping to hit $82.8 billion this year. That’s one of the highest on record.

According to a recent JLL Retail survey, low costs and wide selection are important factors to the majority (70 percent) of parents. They favor stores associated with low prices, ranking Walmart (50 percent) and Target (47 percent) among their top picks, and far ahead of Amazon (16 percent). Kids have substantial influence on purchases. More than 57 percent are involved in deciding which store to shop at, and specific items to buy.

Read more in 

Back-to-School Marketing Trends: It's All About Gen Z

Blockchain Could Track Ads

Digital ads have the advantage of scaling personalization effectively. But with the rise of ad fraud pushed forward by “bots,” numbers can appear inflated way beyond true human audiences. Some see blockchain as the most promising solution to this problem, given its function to act as an immutable ledger,

Blockchain has the potential to play a significant role in marketing and advertising. That vision is now being realized, thanks to the increasing awareness of digital ad fraud that is prompting marketers to seek greater transparency -- a primary attribute of blockchain technology.

The revenue currently lost to ad fraud is staggering. According to Juniper Research, losses will amount to $19 billion this year, which translates to roughly $51 million a day. Those numbers are expected to more than double over the next five years, to the tune of $44 billion. 

Shidan Gouran, president and CEO of Global Blockchain Technologies Corporation,says the problem is exacerbated by “programming bots to emulate human behavior to simulate engagement and traffic to earn revenue from those ads.” But he sees the possibility of curbing the fraud through blockchain by implementing solutions like adChain.  

Read more in 

Using Blockchain To Beat The Bots