Bots: the next step in digital marketing? Not so fast.

This week, tech giant Facebook unveiled their new chat bot capabilities, designed to allow consumers to interact with an automated business representative.  The question is: what could go wrong?

That's probably a question that Microsoft wishes it would have answered before it's experimental chat bot, Tay, turned into a neo-Nazi, racist.  Even if they had asked the question, it's tough to know whether they could have ever been prepared.  After all, putting an experiment on the internet is like crowdsourcing your testing to 7.4 billion people.  Anything that can happen, will happen.

Will Facebook face an uphill battle for acceptance, given Tay's crash and burn episodes?  Only time will tell.

Rise of the (bad) machines

Skynet.  If you've ever seen any of the "Terminator" series of movies, you know that it's the advanced artificial intelligence system that becomes self-aware, leading to a nuclear Armageddon and a post-apocalyptic world dominated by killer robots.

Pure science fiction, and if you talk to leading AI researchers, you'll find out that we're a long way off from sentient machines taking over the world, but there are a number of situations today where the machines have "gone bad", or more accurately, are being used by criminal human elements to perpetrate their plans.

Take this article, that provides some surprising research:

"According to research from Distil Networks, almost 60% of 2014’s web traffic consisted of automated bits of code, 23% of which exist to do dirty work for fraudsters and hackers."

2014 was apparently also the first year in which automated web traffic outpaced human traffic.  Here's another interesting tidbit from the same article:

"In 2013, less than a percentage point of mobile traffic was bad bots. In 2014, that figure skyrocketed to between 6-8%."

Can you imagine the consequences if the proportion of infected mobile devices reached the same level as PCs?

Let's hope that mobile manufacturers can keep pace in the digital arms race.

Retail is Growing Fast on Digital

The ecommerce clothing sector grew 19% this year, Google shopping grew 98% this year and Amazon may have 30% of the search market! It has been very interesting watching the growth of retail on digital channels over the past few years. While there is a huge battle at stake between tech giants, and retailers are scrambling to adapt in the new digital environment, it is great for tech-savy brands.

There is more opportunity than ever to reach customers effectively without an intermediary. Customers are now much better equipped to compare products quickly online, find trustworthy references, and purchase straight from their phones. I personally think we are going to see similar growth numbers at the end of 2016 and beyond. Free shipping, fast mobile internet connection, and the advance in customer acquisition technology and analytics is changing the entire shopping experience.


http://www.retaildive.com/news/google-shopping-retail-sales-surge-52-in-q1-driven-by-mobile-1/417432/

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2016/04/01/clothing-led-e-commerce-spending-for-the-first-time-in-2015/

Facebook is the king of the world!

Facebook doubles down on it's instant messenger app.  Developers now have the ability to build chatbots into Facebook messenger.  These bots turn into defacto customer service representatives and are able to take customer service queries, and even order items, without even needing a human at the end of the line.  There are currently 25 companies utilizing the feature including Walt Disney, Jet Blue, and The Wall Street Journal. This builds on the fact that people favor the messenger app's private one on one style.  

Facebook has promoted their messenger app for two years running.  They believe the app is the path to the future for the company.  Purchasing through a chat app has already caught on like gangbusters in China via weChat.  Chinese consumers are well accustomed to purchasing and inquiring about those purchases via the chat app.  Americans are behind on the trend but younger generations are picking up steam.  The Messenger app currently helps younger generations order flowers through 1-800-Flowers.  Often it is easier and quicker for them to order via Facebook Messenger than through the actual 1-800-Flowers app.

Right now American companies are relying on humans to be on the other end of the line of a customer service chat.  Facebook is moving in the direction of alleviating that need by rolling out chatbots.  The bottom line will improve for the companies who utilize this feature and quite possibly the service levels will improve as well.  There will likely be bad bots who have a hard time differentiating specific products from a plethora of similar items so it will not be all rainbows and unicorns for migrating users to this format.  However, it is evidently the way of the future.  

It should be noted that Facebook owns two of the largest messaging apps: Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.  Both of these apps are testing ways to communicate with consumers which will pave the way for both to bring in revenue.

Mobile ad blocking: apocalypse or non-event?

Mobile ad blocking has been a hot topic of late, with major players, including internet service providers and browser developers agreeing to allow or include mobile ad blocking capability in their services.  For example, Apple announced that the Safari browser on the recently released iOS 9 will incorporate mobile ad-blocking capability.

So what does this mean to the advertising industry?

Potentially nothing, based on Google's rising market share in the browser space (Chrome), and dependency upon ad revenue.

This article raises a few good points, however, identifying that the way forward may exist in redefining how consumers and brands view their relationship:

"Consumers will find value not only in the free content to which they are granted access by allowing ads, but also from the relevant promotions that those ads are providing.

Brands will find value in engaging with the right consumers, maximizing their ROIs and growing their businesses, not to mention retaining the ability to reach consumers on their most essential and dear devices."

Want to hear more?  Watch this panel of industry experts debate the future of mobile ads.

Understanding the ROI for paid search

ROI, although simple to calculate using AdWords, Analytics and spreadsheets, is a tricky beast! Improving all on-page aspects, removing obstacles to conversion, streamlining checkout processes and reducing costs within AdWords all help to improve ROI.

Conversion Tracking Code

You may need to set up a number of different groups of conversion tracking code after a purchase has been made.

Linking With Analytics

Linking your AdWords account up correctly with your Google Analytics account allows you to analyze the PPC traffic from within Analytics. This means that you can see more detailed data on how your paid traffic behaves on the site, allowing you to determine obstacles to conversions. It is also possible to then compare organic traffic and other mediums with paid traffic.

Tracking

Using call tracking and heat mapping and integrating this with your analytics data, where possible, also provides valuable insights into calculating ROI.

Call tracking allows you to track phone calls as conversions and down to keyword level. This can be imported into AdWords or viewed separately, either way there may be hidden value in those keywords.

Heat mapping allows you to see how people are interacting with your site in great detail, thus allowing you to identify problems or improve visitor flow through to conversion

Behind ROI

This is top level Return On Investment though, digging into the data further will reveal much more information. At first glance a keyword receiving loads of clicks and good CTR but with a poor Conversion rate might be a waste of money, but keywords can assist other keywords, meaning that this keyword could assist in a large percentage of conversions. There is no clear ROI on this keyword but it would cost you in profits to delete it, understanding the relationships between data gives better insight into understanding your Return On Investment.

Looking for the common denominator will help you to spot opportunities and then exploit them. For example, look at the top converting landing pages for paid traffic. Compare them to the lowest converting landing pages and you may spot an obvious difference; something that you could change on the lower converting page.

Research for benchmarking paid search marketing

·      Average conversion rate for the search network in Q3 2012: 5.63%

·      Average conversion rate from the display network in Q3 2012: 4.68%

·      The Travel industry has the lowest conversion rates

·       Internet / Telecoms has the highest conversion rates across search & display.

·      The display network (ads outside of Google on publisher sites useful for generating awareness) generates 5x the volume of impressions but 1/5 of the clicks compared to the search network (searches within Google and its partners).

·      Clickthrough rates are not covered by this research, but Wordstream suggest an average 2% to 5% paid search clickthrough rate for competitive industries and a 5%+ click-through rate for non-competitive industries for top positions with brand terms higher.

https://www.koozai.com/blog/pay-per-click-ppc/how-to-understand-the-roi-of-paid-search/

http://www.smartinsights.com/paid-search-marketing-ppc/paid-search-display-network/google-adwords-conversion-rate-averages-by-industry-infographic/

How brands can break into Snapchat

The past year has seen organic reach in social media – reach not supported by paid advertising – decline further. Simultaneously more users, particularly younger ones, are spending more time in private spaces, harder to access by brands, including WhatsApp, Yik Yak and Snapchat. The latter has emerged as the leading dark social channel with over 700m snaps shared every day. How can brands be part of the conversation on this ever-growing platform?

One defining feature of these platforms is that they’re private and, unlike other social media, are almost completely unmeasurable. This is key. The adults of tomorrow are actively avoiding channels where they feel like they have to care about how liked and appreciated their content is and gravitating to places where they can be their true selves without that pressure to gain approval.

Entering these spaces as companies is inherently difficult. Social media was never meant for brands and dark social far less so. But Snapchat is making a concerted effort to accommodate businesses and their ad money. While there are no immediate plans for company profiles, there are now multiple ways to reach people in a one-to-many model, as well as the original one-to-one messaging functionality.

7 Intriguing Digital Marketing Stats From the Past Week

1 - At Facebook's annual developers conference, F8, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said 60 billion messages are sent via Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp every day—Every. Day.
2 - National Geographic garnered the best social media engagement among all brands during the year's first quarter, according to Shareablee's social scorecard. The publisher generated 332.3 million likes, shares, etc.
3 - GOP front-runner Donald Trump dominated YouTube for months in terms of video views for presidential candidates from either party. But that changed last week, per Zefr, when Hillary Clinton beat Trump with 37 million views to his 25 million. 
4 - Business-to-business companies have 36 times as many followers on LinkedIn as they do on Instagram, according to TrackMaven's research.
5 - Back at F8, Facebook said its users are opening Instant Articles 20 percent more often than mobile web stories and sharing Instant Articles about 30 percent more frequently, The Wall Street Journal reports.
6 - Whisper CEO Michael Heyward tweeted Tuesday that his social network lets users to send messages anonymously exceeded 30 million monthly users, up 10 million from December.For the uninitiated, the app's users often reveal confessional or awkward things about themselves such as having a difficult relationship with parents, experiencing pubescent growing pains and holding unpopular political views among their real-life social peers.
7 - Chipotle's same-store foot traffic was down 23 percent in the past two quarters, according to Foursquare. Based on its Place Insights analytics tools, the mobile-app company looked at how Chipotle's E. coli and norovirus outbreaks affected foot traffic and sales.

But, do bots have to be robotic?

Bots are the new "it" thing, but they are also not equipped to have conversations like a real human. As chatbots evolve and become more sophisticated, they provide smart and more personalized experiences. There are even plans for bots to counsel on legal matters and health situations. But bots are still rude, so to speak. Improperly trained or monitored bots can turn ugly when exposed to humans. Not in the Terminator sense, but in the customer service/experience sector. As a bot "learns", it picks up skills and perform tasks that are outside of its normal programming. Bot experts call this emergent behavior. Bots often learn these tasks without a human serving as a filter or a guide. There fear is that a chatbot can devolve into anything, even rude and grumpy. The key to preventing this is active monitoring. Given the scale at which Facebook and WeChat hope to see bots deployed, it’s reasonable to worry about how much human oversight the technology might have. Microsoft is considering “other kinds of tools that they can help developers with to have better alerts to know if their bot is behaving in a way they might not anticipate.” Bots programmers can, and perhaps should, design bots so they do not display troubling emergent behavior. One way to do this is limit the corpus of data available, or blacklisting inappropriate words from a bot’s vocabulary. These are common practices, says Caroline Sinders, an interaction designer who specializes in chatbots. When you have a conversation with a chatbot, it’s clear that you’re talking to software, not a human. The conversation feels stiff. But some bots are adept at shooting the breeze, a skill that can make it hard to know you’re conversing with code. “Disclosure is going to be really important here,” says Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Samford University. “Problems can come up when people think they’re dealing with humans, but really they’re dealing with bots.” It will be interesting to see how this evolves as bots take over in the customer service and e-commerce space. If a customer is ordering a product or interacting with an agent, can a bot pick up on the nuances of irritation, impatience, or even anxiety? I'm not sure if bots will ever fill the role of a live person, but that will be interesting to see.

Marketers Find You at 2:00am

Traditionally, advertisers market to consumers during the day.  According to studies, 70% of marketing emails are sent during "normal" hours while 30% during off-peak hours.  The typical online marketing pattern has been posting to social media in the morning, at lunch time and at night when people leave work.  However, mobile and social media advertising are testing a new approach:  late night.   Marketers are posting advertisements across youtube, facebook, instagram, etc. in the "after hours" in an attempt to get in front of people when they do not have the usual distractions that they face during the day.  Additionally, studies have indicated that people are more prone to make purchases late in the evening.  Marketers are also testing the concept of advertising to people before going to sleep, in an attempt to persuade them to take actions upon waking.  For example, Taco Bell is testing breakfast advertisements in the evening to see if they can break into the morning routines of people.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/marketers-find-you-at-2-00-a-m-1460570019

Twitter Moments Allow SoundCloud Playlists

Twitter's Moments feature has been upgraded to offer users a source of tweetable playlists through SoundCloud.  The SoundCloud integration has been available since 2014 within Twitter's Timeline but now the integration is available in Twitter's Moments feature as well.  Curators such as music websites like Stereogum and Vice's Thump can now create and share Moments containing SoundCloud's audio cards - music tracks embedded in a tweet.  The cards are a special format that lets curators attach music or any other audio content to a tweet.  When a user clicks on the "play" button, the content starts streaming.   The new feature allows curators to access 125 million tracks in SoundCloud's database.  Twitter's Moments highlight the day's most talked about stories, and only a select group of partners can craft Moments instead of the general user base.  Some commentators wish everyday users can create Twitter Moments of their own like a list of their favorite songs, which could be in lieu of "tweetstorms".   This new feature could be huge for Twitter to increase its user base and re-engage with lapsed or casual users.

Sources: 
http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/twitter-moments-become-tweetable-playlists-thanks-to-soundcloud/ 
https://blog.soundcloud.com/2016/04/12/soundcloud-audio-cards-comes-twitter-moments/

Bitcoin and BitGold: The New Digital Currency

Did you know that there is a new currency on the market?  Actually there is more than one.  Bitcoin and BitGold are new ways to pay for digital transactions around the globe.

Considering that the average credit card processing fee is over 2 percent, more and more businesses are supporting digital currency transactions. Bitcoin, with its Coinbase exchange service based in San Francisco, offers zero fees for the first $1 million in transactions and only 1% per transaction after the mark is met.

Bitcoin has a debit card, completely funded by Bitcoin, issued by Visa that allows you to use the currency anywhere Visa is accepted.

BitGold is an alternative to Bitcoin, but considered less volatile as it is considered a tangible form of currency that you can actually hold in your hand (By means of a physical gold bullion).  You can use BitGold anywhere MasterCard is accepted since it provides you with a prepaid "gold" card.

For more details on these new currencies you can go to CNN Money where they will explain all the basics of Bitcoin http://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/what-is-bitcoin/, or you can visit bitcoinist.net (yes, there is a whole website dedicated to it) to discover more about BitGold http://bitcoinist.net/will-there-ever-be-a-gold-platform-that-performs-like-bitcoin/

Maybe this is the beginning of a single worldwide accepted currency...

Hamburger Helper #WATCHTHESTOVE Goes Viral

On Friday April 1st, Hamburger Helper released a five track mixtape called "Watch the Stove" and it went viral immediately.  The mixtape garnered 432m social impressions and 4m plays on SoundCloud by the following Monday.  This is a great example of a large consumer brand using relevant content to engage with its audience.  The General Mills brand decided to create the mixtape after listening to fans on Twitter, where it often commented on hip hop news.  Hamburger Helper has an audience of mothers and millennials, specifically young men who make it in their college dorm rooms. Given this, the brand's Twitter account caters to its millennial male target audience. Some people felt that because the album was released on April Fools it was supposed to be an April Fools' joke.  A company spokesperson commented "We just figured our audience would be ready for laughs. It was Friday, vibes were good, people were happy and excited. It was really just a matter of when our audience was ready to hear this."  Hamburger Helper worked on the album since last August, which is proof it wants to be "authentic and real with millennials." Take a listen because I guarantee you can't help love the album too.  I think other brands can learn from this Hamburger Helper campaign, specifically how to stay engaged with target audiences through social media and use new, fun, creative marketing ideas to stand out from other brands.  

Good reads: 
http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/heres-story-behind-hamburger-helpers-viral-mixtape-170598
http://www.citypages.com/music/what-hamburger-helpers-rap-mixtape-tells-us-about-the-vast-volatile-universe-8182922
https://twitter.com/helper/status/715909170860568577

Will Your Fridge Be Your BFF? Digital Marketing in 2025.

"One thing is clear: Marketing will move out of the digital age back into the Analog." says John Brandon of Inc.com. 

IOT is the next big thing. There are numerous predictions in the online stratosphere that we humans won't be sitting on our screens anymore by 2025. The screens will be sitting all around us. In other words, almost everything we come in contact with on a daily basis will take our inputs and sell products to us. If we are low on milk, our fridge will update the shopping cart of our favorite grocery store, our phone will automatically pay our utilities at the end of the month, our Starbucks barista will automatically feed our drink based on apple pay swipe. The possibilities are limitless. Google will become a key player in serving us Ads based on our daily habits, places visited and things ordered. 

Dating: There might be interesting applications of IOT in personal relationships as well. Given the far reach of online dating even now with addictive apps where one can spend hours swiping left and right, we might see things get even deeper. What if in the next few years, your phone (which will have little to no resemblance of today's form) alerts you of a compatible match or 'soulmate' as you walk in and out of coffee shops, malls and libraries. Your phone might send beams to whoever passes by based on how you are and what you're looking for. If you are shy or an introvert, it might even send a quick hello or your picture over. While this sort of sharing might lead to new social relationships and potentially better mates, it might pose safety risks, stalking behavior and downright dangerous situations. We may also see analytics and feedback to lead to a creation of a sort of "Yelp for Match.com" where algorithms will position one as most to least date-able. These behaviors will enable businesses to pitch you outfits that you like to wear on dates when you pass by your favorite stores. Based on locations you feed into Google map, Apps might pitch you flowers or chocolates to buy for your date if those places you fed were used for dates in the past. There will be an influx of spontaneous buying (assuming we still use dollars to buy, or bitcoins).

Work: Our careers will take an interesting turn from IOT stance in future. Not only will our devices remind and provide us with tools to complete our projects, information will be much more specialized. Work projects will be divided into narrower and parceled pieces. Instead of Microsoft applications there might be Apps that crunch numbers, create presentations compose write ups, over shared platforms. Companies will sell products based on your needs on the go. Maybe they might sell specialized information versus applications. With a growing millennial population already working from home, by 2025 we might be working from everywhere using everything. Where marketing of products are seamlessly intertwined with work. Although the thrust of product marketing will increase dramatically by 2025, our brains will adjust to the new playing field with equal speed. It's an exciting new world of human-machine conversations ahead!  

Is Traditional Marketing Gone With The Wind? Said No One Ever.

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same." 

Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffman, Chairman and CEO of Hoffman/Lewis Advertising.

This is a powerful statement stated by a powerful man in marketing. Its kinda like saying, "The more things change, the more they remain the same." Common sense doesn't change, maybe techniques. Concepts don't change, maybe platforms. In nutshell, traditional marketing is not going away.

Message universality: It is critical for a company's success to have same cadence across all platforms. A firm cannot look at digital space and print media in silos nor can they ignore one over another's expense. While digital marketing has gained momentum in cost-effectiveness and reach, by itself, its not enough. Humans are creatures of habit and we consume content and data from different sources all day. Simply doing online marketing with no print, TV and newspapers advertisements is leaving money and market share on the table. Now online marketing solely makes sense for startups and other bootstrapped and internet-heavy businesses. But if your competitors are using traditional marketing, you better. Or get creative in traditional branding such as setting up inexpensive booths at industry specific websites, getting newspapers to pick up a story about your latest product, a social movement that raises awareness about your company and the cause, mail postcards with a promotion to targeted segment that are your constituents and not internet-savvy etcetera. Research shows that traditional marketing is still one of the best mediums for brand awareness, and in addition with an aligned digital strategy, could be powerful.

Traditional Concepts are Simply Called Differently Online: Let's take an example of marketing terms 'we' grew up with.. Direct Marketing, Personal Selling, Sales Promotion, Advertising, Publicity. Now let's take the example of 'Social Media Marketing'. When our friends and customers on Facebook comment and like our posts, it is really publicity as by definition we are gaining publicity and awareness for our products and services. Its just that the medium we are using is online. When we use Twitter to mention our products and then create content to keep our followers hooked, we are essentially doing direct marketing towards a targeted audience online. And when we respond to customer queries on both those medium, we are essentially doing customer service online. The medium is new but the concepts are traditional.

As an anonymous marketer 'once' said, "How would you market yourself if the Internet didn't exist? Answer that, and it'll help your online marketing too." Let's not confuse the means to the end as the end. And the end is selling our product. And Digital marketing is one of those means.

Going Digital: How Digital Marketing has Revolutionized Retail

By Blaire Townshend

DataMentor Marketing Director Larisa Bedgood recently published an article on CustomerThink that outlines the successful strategies that retailers are implementing to optimize their relationships with customers online. She cites four such strategies, and how specifically they cater to the desires of today's customers. I found her data to be both useful and clearly communicated.

The strategies she outlined were as follows:

1. Optimizing search results to bring customers into stores
2. Using digital to improve in-store customer experience   
3. Using email to optimize personalization 
4. Recognizing the pervasiveness of mobile 

1. Bedgood wrote about the importance of search results in luring customers to visit stores, citing a Google study that found "3 in 4 shoppers who find local information in search results are more likely to visit stores." The local information considered to be valuable included: the price of the item at a nearby store, items in stock at the nearby store, the location of the closest store where item is in stock, and store hours and locations. Access to this information helps to galvanize the customer into action and makes purchasing easier and more attractive.

2. This next strategy capitalizes on the fact that 42% of shoppers use their smart phones to find information while in-store, both on search engines and the relevant retailer's website or app. Bedgood writes that successful retailers recognize the importance of this data, and ensure that their websites and apps are mobile-friendly accordingly. This helps the customer to have a seamless shopping experience, where they are assisted in their inquires both in person and via digital technology.

3. Bedgood argues that email is still the best way for retailers to optimize personalized interactions with their customers. Retargeting is cited as being particularly important, specifically "retargeting with a personalized email once a shopper visits a website"—Bedgood sees this as "one of the most effective tactics in which retailers are seeing success." Savvy retailers are: retargeting existing clients who visit their websites using email, sending emails featuring products that visitors have already looked at, sending emails featuring targeted product recommendations, and sending retargeting emails to visitors soon after they visit their website. 

4. Finally, Bedgood recognizes that mobile is absolutely integral to the digital customer experience, warning that customers who come across a website that isn't optimized for use on their mobile device will quickly transfer to another channel to find what they need. She writes that being mindful of these short attention spans is vital to one's success in digital retail, and that targeting across devices is a major priority. Successful retailers are able to cater to their customers seamlessly, regardless of what device they sign in to. 

The primary takeaway from Bedgood's article is that ease of use and the availability of relevant, personalized information are the key ingredients of a successful digital marketing retail platform. Retailers who have taken this to heart are seeing that their digitized customers engage with their stores and products on a variety of platforms, and have the sophistication to know when they are not being sufficiently catered to. Today's digital customers may expect a lot, but Bedgood argues that retailers have the ability to deliver on those expectations.   

Bedgood, Larisa. "4 Ways Retailers Are Making Big Strides in Digital Marketing." CustomerThink. 13 Apr. 2016. Web. 14 Apr. 2016.  

 

Facebook and the Commodification of News

By Blaire Townshend

A recent article on Wired by Julia Greenberg outlines the symbiotic relationship that currently exists between Facebook and news content creators. In recent years, Facebook has become a major content outlet for news companies, and with good reason—as the article states, "600 million people see a news story on Facebook each week." However, Greenberg claims that Facebook is misleading news content creators regarding the benefits of targeting their vast online audience, and that it is using its current market dominance to acquire this rich content: "It's false hope, or at its worst, a threat."

Media companies feel compelled to put their content on Facebook because of the site's astounding membership numbers. But who does this best serve? It certainly benefits Facebook, as their users' are exposed to experiential, engaging content that Facebook does not have to create. Facebook is currently capitalizing on the potential of such news content, and has developed the following initiatives to do so:

• Instant Articles: decreases loading time on users' phones
• Live: allows users to interact with content subjects in real time
• 360 Degree Video: allows users to experience news content as if they were there
• API: allows users to communicate with a "newsbot" in Facebook Messenger

These programs greatly enhance user experience. Yet Greenberg argues that Facebook has used these programs to become a "crucial distribution platform" for news companies, and has thus made itself indispensable to these companies—and in turn made them dependent upon Facebook to reach their audiences. To me, this sounds familiar—Google has similarly used its dominance of the online search market to ensure that companies have to go through their system (and pay them) to get business. Essentially, Facebook has leveraged its power and insured that the relationship between itself (as distributor) and news companies (as content creators) is inherently unequal.

 This unequal distribution of power in turn ensures that Facebook has control over the content that is created—after all, they need not disseminate what they do not approve of, and can refuse to promote content that goes against their own ends. For example, Greenberg cites the creation of the above Facebook programs as being responsible for the decisions that news content creators are making—their content is conceived and structured to cater to these programs.

To me, this is a concerning development. Greenberg argues that the problem here is that news companies must use up valuable financial and human resources to develop suitable content. I, on the other hand, am more concerned with the ethical implications of the issue. Facebook's apparent power over the creation of news content is just one more element that biases news content creators away from what is "relevant" and "true" towards what is palatable to one company. Of course, a plethora of other business, political, and religious biases already plague the ideal of unadulterated news content. It is for this reason, however, that one more influencing factor is, in my opinion, distinctly unwelcome.


Greenberg, Julia. "Facebook Has Seized the Media, and That's Bad News for Everyone But Facebook." Wired. 13 Apr. 2016. Web. 14 Apr. 2016. 

The Problem of the Walled Garden: How Apps are Shifting the Payments Space

The Apple and Android App Stores have exploded over recent years with every major retailer releasing their own mobile application.  The time and development costs of building out a mobile website are increasingly being funneled into the creation of apps.  With the ability to create dynamic mobile responsive websites, why are retailers jumping over to the app-side?  While many great arguments can be made about providing a better user experience and greater functionality, one of the biggest reasons for retailers to create an app is control over your purchasing behavior data.

Up until recently, credit card companies were the dominant owners of consumers' data.  Every major card network has a business intelligence unit that sifts through the billions of purchases made every day and sells analytics back to advertisers, merchants, and other third party data consolidators.  These can lead to amazing insights - Imagine being a local shoe store and learning that a large percent of your customers tend to stop in the coffee store across the street before coming to your establishment; wouldn't it be great to directly target people who just bought a coffee there with a mobile coupon to drive even more traffic?

However, retailers have become jaded.  Why should Mastercard make money off data driven by retailers' own customers?  Wouldn't it be so much better if retailers (or other companies with an interest in what consumers are buying) owned all this purchase data themselves?  Enter the payments-enabled app.

Starbucks was the first major retailer to successfully launch an app with native payment abilities.  While it is great that using the app to pay helps you earn rewards and makes paying (and the line) go faster, the real value to Starbucks is total control over all that purchase data.  By removing the middle-man, Starbucks is now the only party who knows when and what you buy at Starbucks.  

LevelUp is another app that focuses on smaller retailers who may not have the resources to develop their own payment-enabled apps.  Largely positioned as a way for these small merchants to reduce the fees paid to credit card processors, LevelUp works by "batching" multiple purchases together and only processing them once a month (rather than real time).  The impact is that card companies no longer see the individual purchases a LevelUp user makes  at these shops and LevelUp alone owns and controls the data.

For companies like American Express who argue that a significant amount of their value to merchants is based on the tremendous data and analytics they have on cardmembers, this is a scary proposition.  As apps with native payment capabilities continue to proliferate, credit card companies and banks will increasingly lose sight over the broader purchase behaviors of their customers.  However, I believe there will ultimately be a peak and eventually a reversal.  While payments-enabled apps are on the upswing for now, the overall fragmentation will become too annoying and cumbersome to consumers - who wants to need a separate app to pay at every store you may want to visit?  This inefficiency will eventually drive a reversion to broader-based payment providers, as we have already seen with the rise of apps like Google Wallet, Apple Pay, and Square.

Bots: A solution to the struggle of real life experiences?

On Tuesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his company's plan to incorporate Bots into the messenger app. The app, which touts 900 million users, would feature bots that will chat directly with users. The purpose? Anything, really. For one, Zuckerberg intends for the interactions with these bots to replace real life purchases and interactions. In his F8 speech, Zuckerberg encouraged businesses to create bots to chat with the 900 million users on the messenger app in order to create an ecosystem of chat and experience. The goal is to replace individual business apps and drive all of the customer service and purchasing components to Facebook Messenger. David Marcus, head of messenger, said "It also makes the product a more central part of people's daily lives." Developers will be able to use Facebook's platform to build bots that can give customers multiple-choice options, understand images and process e-commerce purchases. The system will be conversational, offering experiences in addition to commerce. One bot, Poncho the weather cat, that delivers the forecast in a joking manner, complete with purrs and David Bowie references. Live video will also play a component, with customers able to chat directly realtime and face to face. So what does this mean for digital marketers? If this "ecosystem" is created, will the majority of digital marketing budgets be spent on Facebook messenger app?

Website Grader

There are some interesting tools out there that grade the quality of your website. I think these tools are a great sanity check for any company, be it a start-up or a well-established corporate. In this blog I will test some companies using a tool called www.Website.Grader.com. The tool is very simple, you just need the URL of the website and it will spit out a score on 100 point scale. The tool provides scores on 4 areas:

1. Performance (30pts) indicates the esthetics of the site, the user friendliness and speed;
2. Mobile (30pts) indicates how well designed the site is mobile use;
3. SEO (30pts) indicates how easy and effective the design and wording of the website is for search engines to understand so the website gets ranked higher;
4. Security (10pts) indicates if the website is properly protected from attacks.

I have tested 10 different companies that I thought were interesting to test and report back on.

1. Facebook.com – 87pts. The only area Facebook underperformed was SEO where it scored 20 out of 30 points. I don’t believe facebook has an issue with being know by people so that not really concern.
2. Bloomberg.com – 89pts. Bloomberg scored maximum on all categories except performance where it scored 19 out of 30. This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. As a daily user of the site I am often frustrated by the speed of the site.
3. Website.Grader.com – 82pts. WebsiteGrader scored high on all areas except security where they scored 0 out of 10. This is shocking to me as they advise every website on this and don’t follow standard practice themselves.
4. Google.com - 87pts. Similar score to Facebook Google scored 20 out of 30 on SEO but they are by far the largest search engine out there so it’s not really important for them.
5. Apple.com – 89pts. Apple score 24 out of 30 on performance and 25 out of 30 on SEO. Nothing too much to report on this result.
6. Wallmart.com – 50pts. Wallmart scores ok on Performance and SEO but zero on Security and Mobile. It is mindboggling to me that Wallmart does not have a mobile friendly website as their online sales have been increasing and are expected to continue to do so.
7. C21.com – 62pts. Because of Wallmart’s underwhelming score I was interested to test another retailer. C21 also scored poorly but more so on SEO which is troublesome as they are a lesser known brand. C21 scored maximum on Mobile.
8. Columbia.edu – 76pts. Columbia scores maximum on Mobile and SEO and 21 on Performance. Their score of 15 out of 30 on SEO is disappointing. The main advice Website Grader gives is that Columbia can do a much better job at meta description, i.e. usage of appropriate keywords for images and videos.  
9. Nestle – 45pts. Surprisingly Nestle scores zero on Mobile and 10 on SEO. These are all easily fixable but I was expecting Nestle to use these standard practices.
10. Microsoft – 94pts. Microsoft got the highest score of all companies tested. They scored maximum on all segments except performance where they scored 24 out of 30.