Enjoy this best-selling updated 8^th edition – packed with new material, keeping abreast with AI, AR, VR, MR, MA and other innovative approaches to marketing communications. All integrated with the world’s most popular SOSTAC® Planning methodology that delivers a reassuring sense of order in a chaotic digital world and also that delivers success from better, MarComms’ ‘information-based’ decisions.

In Part 2 – all ten marcomms tactical tools (incl ads, PR, sponsorship, Owned, Earned and Paid Media etc.)  has a sample SOSTAC® Plan at the end of chapter.

Ze Zook and I are so pleased with it.  So much new material including AI integrating with MarComms.  We’ve tried to keep the edutainment angle so readers actually enjoy discovering some cutting-edge examples, tips and tools throughout the book. Thanks to the team at @Kogan Page including: Alison, Donna, Bruna and  Jack, Jeylan, Susie and of course, Helen Kogan.

What New Marketing and What Classic Marketing is in the 8th ed.?

What’s new and what’s old in Marketing Communications 8th ed.?

20% author’s discount can be used legitimately by following these instructions.

1. Go to koganpage.com/MC8
2. Click ‘Add to Cart’
3. Click ‘Checkout’ on the top right corner of the screen.
4. Complete your Billing & Delivery Information
5. Click ‘Continue to Review & Pay’
6. Scroll down to ‘Review Items’
7. In this section, click the ‘Add an offer code’ button – bottom right
8. Enter your code AMK20 in the box provided
9. Scroll down to input your payment information
10. Click the ‘Buy Now’ button at the bottom of the screen.

Enjoy Your Book

The post Marketing Communications 8th ed Released! appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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The Intelligence Explosion – a masterpiece from the Guardian.

A Super Intelligence asked to, say, maximise the production of sausages – could decide that the optimal strategy is to breed us for our meat and turn the entire galaxy into a sausage-making factory.

This sausage discussion is for everyone, particularly marketers. How to stop a robot turning evil. This Guardian Original Drama is set in 2027 and asks a question beyond, ‘how do we stop data-abuse and power-grabbing that we have already seen in America and in the UK, but how do you program an intelligent machine not to annihilate humanity? And if its intelligence is ‘skyrocketing faster than anyone could have predicted’, are we about to run out of time?

Subscribe to The Guardian ► http://is.gd/subscribeguardian​ The Guardian ► https://www.theguardian.com

Barry The Board-Bot story is for another time. But do, most certainly,y check out the Chinese GirlBot With 465m Boyfriends and even more interestingly, how a  chatbot software glitch can become a nightmare, for a young Japanese man who married his smart 3-D Hologram, when the company declared no ‘fix’ for the glitch as this particular hologram had run its course. This kind of software obsolescence policy may have a Health and Safety issue as broken hearts can often succumb to other mental issues – all triggered by the glitch?

If you liked this you might also enjoy:

Here Come The Clever Bots – bursting with artificial intelligence?

Here Come The Really Clever Bots – where AI meets customer needs

Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula (IRD)

SOSTAC® Plan for developing your own ChatBot

Join me in Clubhouse in my club called SOSTAC® Plans any Friday 3.30pm – 4.00pm BST for a chat, Q&A, observations about SOSTAC(r) Plans and any other marketing related issues including AI Driven Bots.

The post AI and Data – Crisis Coming? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Chatbots can create competitive advantage. Ignore them at your peril. Here, we apply a #SOSTAC ®  Plan for developing your own chatbot.  Written by PR Smith and Tom Sickert.

Image by Parker_West from Pixabay

SOSTAC ® Planning Framework www.sostac.org

SITUATION ANALYSIS

Hyper-competition is here to stay and chatbots have a role to play. Data, AI, and chatbots in particular can create a new competitive advantage. Ignore these at your peril.

AI-driven chatbots can boost the CX (customer experience), strengthen existing customer relationships, reach new prospects, screen enquiries, identify best prospects, give them personalised answers/services instantaneously, convert to sales and thereafter be used to nurture stronger (potentially , lifetime, relationships).  Ignore chatbots at your peril.

Typical customer service staff feedback reveals: “We have all this excellent information on our public website – product description, prices, delivery times & costs, return policies… but still we get countless calls and emails about these.” It appears that many people are just not willing to work their way through websites, searching, scrolling and hoping to find a solution.

Should you have a Bot?

All customers have a ‘job to be done’ (Christensen et al 2016) when they visit a website (or an app). They want to find product information, check a price, read reviews, buy a product, be entertained, informed etc. Customers just want, access to the information or experience as quickly as possible (with or without a bot).

Chatbots or Humans – survey: what do people want?

Would anyone prefer to queue in a bank to withdraw money from a human or queue for an faceless automated cash withdrawal machine in the wall?

Bots present an opportunity to improve the relationship with both existing and potential new customers. This strengthens, what are arguably, your two greatest assets today: your brand, and your customer data in a new AI-supported world of chatbots. Let us apply this to a fictitious washing machine company.

OBJECTIVES

Be clear about why you want a chatbot? ‘Because everyone else has one’ is not a good enough answer. ‘Reduce costs’ is a popular answer but misses the real opportunity. The ultimate answer is to help customers to have a better CX (customer experience) and also identify your best potential lifetime customers. An AI-driven chatbot can instantaneously answer product questions, share advice, book appointments (for salespeople or technicians), take orders, trigger a follow-up onboarding series of messages in a personalised way 24/7/365.

All of these can, and should, be quantified objectives – in fact, SMART Objectives e.g. Boost CX Satisfaction Scores from 50% to 70 to 90% in years 1, 2 & 3 (or in Q1, Q2 and Q3?); Boost Net Promoter Scores (likelihood to recommend your service to a friend from 10 to 30 to 50); Reduce time taken for the visitor to purchase (reducing these times makes customers happy).

Cost-saving operational objectives are popular e.g. To reduce the number of calls/emails handled by 25% in the first 12 months.

More specific MVP (Minimum Viable Product) objectives can also be set. e.g.  the chatbot must help customers to:

• Find serial numbers and product names for all units produced by the company;
• Solving the top ten common problems – using images, links or text based on customer input;
• Create a service ticket for ALL ENQUIRIES (which includes capturing the customer phone number) so the helpdesk can call and resolve the customer’s issue via phone.

Be very clear about why you want an AI-Driven ChatBot. Think about how chatbots might help your business even more in, say, 3 years from now?    

Is ignoring chatbot potential to save money (and boost CX) like either  burying your head in the ground

Burying your head in the ground doesn’t solve any problems nor exploit any opportunities

or like throwing money down the toilet as you pay for slower, less personalised, human customer service?

Wasting Money

STRATEGY

Stage 1: Build a pilot AI ChatBot for Brand X washing machine website  –  aimed at helping customers find what washing machine is best for them, in a personalised, friendly and reassuring way. The chatbot dialogue must be knowledgeable yet friendly (to match the brand personality). Helping the customer in an informal way, yet demonstrating common sense knowledge (without jargon).

The chatbot must at all times support the values and the purpose of the overall business.   Environmentalism is an important issue for our customers, so and useful green guidance and tips should be offered where relevant and whenever the customer expresses interest (or wherever interest is detected e.g. if a visitor watches any of our green content e.g. ‘3 Tops Tips to Save Energy‘ video).

Data collection is critical to the long-term success of the AI-Supported chatbot and the business overall. Customer preferences, interests, demographics and other data feed into each customer profile, which in turn helps to find correlations to further improve both specially tailored offers and new products in the future.

Stage 2: Roll out to all other white good product range (e.g. washing machines,  dishwashers and microwaves) within 18 months and increasing NPS scores from 30 to 50 (as listed in the objectives).

Strategy

TACTICS

There are several tactical choices available when developing a chatbot .

1. Out-Of-The-Box Solutions, provided by vendors that have predefined models and features and functionalities, that can be customized based on your requirements. These solutions as well are powered (depending on your budget) by high performance AI solutions and features and functionalities. The provider of the chatbot solution can help you to assess your needs and find the optimal solution. There are now many chatbot companies including: Ada, AWS, Botsify, Chatfuel, Hubspot, Liveperson, Mobile Monkey, Microsoft’s Bot Framework and Cognitive Services

2. In-house Solution Created by ‘Citizen Developers’. These require NO code or LOW code experience and can be created by anybody who is able to create email rules in Microsoft Outlook. Yes, it is (mostly) that simple – these drag & drop (communication flow) solutions are offered by Microsoft and AMAZON alike. It gives you not too many options to customize and apply specific functionalities, but it sure is enough to for professional use. NB Citizen Development – no technical and programming skills needed.

3. Developed From Scratch – by coders and other IT professionals, in collaboration with your subject matter experts. These chatbots are powered either by custom AI with sophisticated algorithms and enhanced features and functionalities.

Sometimes out-of-the-box AI models are used as the basic framework e.g. Amazon’s LEX and Microsoft’s  Bot Framework and Cognitive Services solutions (object and image recognition, speech and sound recognition and reasoning). These can be tweaked later (either the interface or the code itself).

ACTIONS

In the end, the chatbot is just a little icon on your website.  However, there is still much work to be done. Miss these detailed ‘Actions’ and the AI Chatbot project will fail. Depending on which option you take will determine the details of the actions required.  Remember a chat project is never really finished. It can and should be continually improving via small tweaks and/or more data helping the chatbot to become more user helpful. So now the detailed work (actions) – we create the topics/answer, the question and 5-10 iterations of each question that can trigger the relevant answer.

Conversation Flows (marketing language)  / Decision Trees   

This In-house solution was created by ‘Citizen Developers’ (Tactical Option no.2).

Decision trees- conversation flows – from Microsoft Virtual Agents

You do not need any programme/development skills.   Conditions = scenarios – in this case, a condition can be whether you have a front loader washing machine or a top loader washing machine (see below).

Sample questions:

• When is the special sales weekend for your washing machines?
• When does my warranty expire?
• My washing machine is leaking, what should I do
• My washing turned pink, what can I do?
• I washed all my knives and forks in my washing machine by mistake – what should I do?

A script to help chatbot converse with a human customer/visitor

Optimised Resource Planning (also called RSO Resource Scheduling Optimization) is where AI can help customers to book the most appropriate technician (based on the particular problem description plus the items the customer has already checked) plus the customer’s and technician’s time and availability. The booking data is obviously also made accessible for the engineer.

Meanwhile, last but not least, is deployment. You have the chatbot developed and ready to go but how do you deploy it can determine its ultimate success or failure.  The key missing piece in the actions section of many plans is ‘internal marketing’ which comprise: communication, motivation and training.

Make sure people know about the chatbot development early on. Bring them with you. Communicate to them and motivate them about how this will help the business to survive in a hyper-competitive world. Remove fears of redundancy because of chatbots. Get people behind the idea. Perhaps consider redeploying staff into new jobs if the chatbot proves to be very successful – many of which will require training. Managing the chatbots may well require training and certainly going forward maintenance, coding, data analytics and reporting are just some of the jobs required.

NB It is critical that one person takes ownership of the chatbot from the very start, which leads us nicely into the final stage of SOSTAC(r) PLanning – Control – ‘how do we know we are getting there?’.

CONTROL

How do you measure success? Measure the KPIs you wrote in the Objectives section. NPS scores etc.

During the chatbot development stages, measure the MVP you have set . Then when you start testing/training the chatbot – watch closely, make fast changes and repeat.

Stay very close.  Watch your KPI Objectives. After that, you can start comparing last month’s KPIs to next month’s projections.  Don’t overcomplicate things.

Check the data you are collecting. Can it be used to give you insights on customer needs, what they like/don’t like?  What they need more help with? What helps you to identify your ideal customers? You will get a lot of data and insights that will allow you to dig deeper and drive     continual improvements.

Agree Your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) –  your version 1.0   and check to see if its working

e.g. “Tom and Paul agree that their MVP V1 must have following features & functionalities before deployment:

1. Include all washing machine types of their company with pictures and serial numbers so customers can easily identify their product
2. Know the top 10 problems customers can fix themselves and so that the chatbot can provide solutions via images, links or text based on customer input
3. Must have the function to immediately create a service ticket for the helpdesk to directly call the customer via phone
4. Must be able to converse in English and German for the aforementioned 3 features since UK and Germany are they key markets and pilot regions

Stay calm. Chatbots are complex.

In the end, it’s like driving a car – you are probably not an engineer – you simply use the technology. If things need to be fixed or improved – you go to the people whose job it is to do just that.

Supervising Your Chatbot’s Learning

An AI powered chatbot needs to be supervised to ensure that it LEARNS properly. In other words – you must TEACH it, give it supporting guidance and directions. That is achieved with defining “confidence scores” for each intent and related answers or information sources. Example:

• Customer asks: “How is the weather outside?”
  • The bot’s NLU and NLP identify “weather” and “outside” – giving a 99% confidence score that you are asking about the weather.
• Customer asks: “Is it sunny or rainy?”
  • The bot, in the beginning, will not be able to associate “sunny” and “rainy” with a question about the weather. So, it will give a very low confidence score. It might even respond with a wrong answer.

Managing Confidence Scores

Here is where managing confidence scores allow you to manage the responses. You screen the questions asked – filter, based on the automated confidence score the bot gave and begin to fine-tune and manually train your bot. That will take more time in the beginning – but with increased usage – it will take less time and provide better results.

Based on NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and NLP (Processing), the user’s intent is determined and, based on a confidence score – the answer selected is the one that is most feasible. Defining confidence levels is a balancing act   between say “I don’t know” vs giving the wrong answer.

This depends on how important a topic is from the customer’s perspective. And that goes already quite far into AI, machine learning and a bit into deep learning.  You ask:

• “What is the temperature tomorrow in Dublin” an 80% confidence score for the AI thinking you mean “what is the weather tomorrow in Dublin” is OK.
• “How long are the shops open today” a 99% confidence score for the AI would be needed to know that you mean “How long is the mall around the corner open today”?

Here are some examples for confidence scores and features you can apply:

If a question is asked and the bot does not fully understand (e.g. confidence score between 60% and 80%) – the bot could clarify it by suggesting topics e.g. “Did you ask about <topic x>”).

If the initial question has a confidence score between 75-90%, but the question has a typo – the chatbot will specifically reply: “You typed Dutsche Bnudselagi – did you mean Deutsche Bundesliga or Deutsche Bundesbank or Deutsche Bundespost?”.  Each option then could be directly selectable.

If the confidence score is below 50% (or any threshold you define), you can have the bot offering to connect directly to a person for a live-chat or simply respond “I am sorry, I do not understand what you ask. I know about <topic 1>, <topic 2>,…<topic x>. A properly phrased question could be this: “What is the cost for a top loader washing machine with energy level B?>”

Confidence scores should be reviewed and evaluated topic by topic and adjusted as needed to avoid giving out false information.

The Route to Success
is to define and create proper topics and help the AI to identify the intent based on keywords. If a question causes a confidence score lower than 50% the bot will basically say “I don’t understand” and send a message to the human team to check (and categorise) the question. Based on our review we then can create a completely new topic, adjust the confidence score to relate to an applicable answer, or connect with our developers in case there was actually a technical issue preventing the bot from answering.

Feed the AI with Questions and Answers
If we had 10 basic questions. And say, possibly 5 variations of each question. This is a very crude example of data set. This could be presented as a 3 column table or an excel sheet (see below).

Creat Variations (or ‘iterations’) of a basic question

Doing this manually is a citizen development approach but other approaches will often have some manual approaches too.

We attach an answer for each FAQ.   Each question and its variety of similar questions (‘iterations’ which basically ask the same question) will have an answer Linkedin to it. You can write all imaginable iterations of a question and then link it to the same answer.

Say you have 5 versions (iterations) of a question the chatbot identifies the INTENT (from the use of the keywords in the question) and then provides the answer.

Answers as well can be in various types and formats e.g. pictures and/or videos or text attached to an answer? E.g. take the live weather feed from youtube.

RESOURCES (the 4Ms)

What Resources Do You Need (The 4 Ms)?

Men and Women (human resource) + money (budgets)  + minutes (timescales) +megadata (data – structured and unstructured). ‘Resources Required’ depend on the company’s maturity and readiness in various areas.

MEN AND WOMEN  A different company that created an internal chatbot had the following resources: a strategic leader, 3 subject matter experts from the team, 4 external developers and 4 Microsoft specialists who’s support was included in the contract with Microsoft. They needed 9 months from version 0.0 to deploy version 1.0.

MONEY  (budget) A project manager can allocate a number of hours each week to the project. This can be fully costed. Then there are also license costs which vary enormously e.g. from $400 pm to $4,000 pm for, say, 10,000 requests p.m. Alternatively, a Flat Fee can be fixed at whether you have 1 enquiry or 1m enquiries.  Ask the question: ‘If I get x000,000 viewers/enquiries how much will it cost?’

Hosting – you need to check if the above costs include the cost to host the application (the bot itself) on (a) CSP (Cloud Service Provider) like Microsoft, Google, IBM, AWS plus give the bot access to your data or (b) on-premises (data centre). You can easily spend hundreds of thousands on a solution that makes AMAZON jealous with dozens of developers and features and functionalities and with connections to data sources. Here is where a Solution Architect, Solution Designer or a representative from a vendor can help to calculate and estimate costs and feasibility.

MEGA-DATA Data includes all data – both structured and unstructured. This effectively includes all data and information that can be used – whether (a) a database of customers (and their preferences plus their previous purchases) for personalising answers,  (b) Q&A lists (for recognising questions and ‘intent’ as well as the sending the right answers (c) data readiness.

Establishing information & data readiness for chatbot is a critical step in any AI (or even CRM project).   Is your data ready to be used (is it clean and consistent in, say, the use of first name, second name with first letter in capitals, plus does every customer list the type of washing machine they bought?) etc. If the data is not OK – you may need dozens of people cleaning it up. This can take weeks or even months. However – if everything is OK, you may need no more than a handful of people in total.

Data Readiness is more complex than capital letters for names. It means that data is ready to be used at different levels and angles:

1. Accuracy – is any data we provide correct, consistent, cohesive, always up-to-date and owned by us?
2. Security – can data access be misused to breach our network? Accessibility – chatbot is given access to read, write, modify and create content (access includes diaries)
3. Compliance – are we only displaying data that is needed?
4. Technical – is accessing the data actually possible?

MegaData – ensure all the data and information is ready for the chatbot to communicate to users. This includes Conversation Flows/Decision Trees.

Security  –  protect your business from ‘malicious intents’ (a) hackers accessing your data (b) attacks from say an aggressive competitor 10,000 enquiries per second which creates –   DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) = system overload = systems crash.  There are 7 layers of security including network security, application security and data security.

MINUTES  / TIMESCALES   how long does it take to get a chatbot up and running?  Again depending on the solution you want to see after completion. And how fast you want things done. So using a basic project framework setup triangle might bring everybody in alignment (resource & scope & cost à Quality). In uncertain/ambiguous situations like these – going agile for execution is the best option.  Set an exact number of hours p.w. on this project.  Assign people and say “GO! See what you can do with the money we have in 12 months”.

Incidentally, Speed of Bot-Response should be agreed: 3-5 seconds or instantaneous + volume of enquiries/interactions from visitors (5 an hour or 500,000 a day) affects costs & solution design and architecture.

—end—

Many thanks to Tom Sickert. This is an early draft and so we welcome your comments, queries, challenges or improved examples. Please do post a comment.

If you liked this you might also enjoy:

Chinese GirlBot With 465m Boyfriends

Artificial Influencers – Meet Shudu & Miquela

Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula (IRD)

Here Come The Really Clever Bots – where AI meets customer needs

Join me in Clubhouse in my club called SOSTAC® Plans any Friday 3.30pm – 4.00pm BST for a chat, Q&A, observations about SOSTAC(r) Plans and any other marketing related issues including AI Driven Bots.

The post Develop your own Chat-Bot – SOSTAC® Project Plan appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

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Some English fans booed their own team when they took the knee before kick-off in the Euro 2020 competition (played in 2021). However, Britons are more likely to view Black Lives Matter as a force for good than ill, a YouGov poll suggests. Nearly half (46%) of voters saw the movement as a force for good compared to 35% per who saw it as negative The exclusive polling was carried out for a More In Common paper on the culture wars. The organisation, set up in the wake of the extremist murder of MP Jo Cox, also found through focus groups that “the public can and do make a distinction between the movement and the political organisation”.

That distinction has been at the heart of recent rows over England footballers taking the knee (going down on knee) before matches, in a gesture popularised by the BLM movement. The players said they were doing it to protest against racism and discrimination, but several prominent right-wing figures denounced their stance.

Some English fans booed their own players when they took the knee (they also booed  other countries’ national anthems).  Home Secretary, Priti Patel said it was ‘gesture politics’ and that ‘everyone has a right to boo’. Prime Minister Johnson refused to condemn the booing. Conservative MP MP Lee Anderson boycotted all England games on the team’s run to the Euro 2020 final this month because he believed taking the knee amounted to supporting an organisation with “quite sinister motives”.

Racist Tweets Storm – What Happened Before, During and After the Euro 2020 Final?

I spotted a short post by Dr John Bustard ‘Here is a short blog relating to recent research on twitter’.   It was shocking and uplifting. Coincidentally, this coincided with an ongoing discussion we are having about marketing tools including social media, automated journeys,  AI  and even racism online in #Clubhouse chat-app where, our club called #SOSTAC (r) Plans. We have a lively 30 min chat from 3.30pm-4.00pm each week about what’s new in marketing and SOSTAC (r) Planning Q&A.

Last week we talked about Gareth Southgate (English football/soccer manager) amazing post about his players taking the knee and a lot more inspirational uplifting thinking.  It was, in fact, a letter called ‘Dear England’. It was a classy demonstration of real leadership. Real values, Real harmony. Real humanity. A masterpiece. And an appeal, I think, to English fans not to boo their own team when they take the knee, before each game.  England lost the final to Italy and the racist hate tweets immediately flowed. In fact, they became a storm. Picking on three brave young black lads who missed their penalties.

So I am delighted to introduce our 3 guests today Dr. John Bustard (Ulster University), Dr. Nicole Ferdinand (Oxford Brookes), and Dr. Nigel Williams Uni Portsmouth who are members of  Ruaire and have written  Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens?.

But first, to summarise our previous weeks’ chats about SOSTAC® Plans ….. at the heart of marketing is building relationships via brands, automated journeys, personalised & passionate chat bots. We have discussed

Chinese Girlbot with 465m boyfriends

• Relationships – Chinese Girlbot 465m personalised relationships with boys – AI -Driven chatbots – prsmith.org/blog
• Relationships – England Football Manager & his Customers & Stakeholders– 60m+ via a letter from Gareth Southgate – playerstribune.com called Dear England
• Relationships – with media channels (social media) – Social Media Boycotts by the Premier League + Other sports – Guardian article (29 Apr). NB the  England and Wales Cricket Board, Premiership Rugby and the Lawn Tennis Association + F1 World Champ: Lewis Hamilton – demanded that   the social media giants to do more to eradicate online hate.  NOTE: Ahead of the boycott, the Professional Footballers Association labelled Twitter’s response to abusive posts aimed towards players as “absolutely unacceptable”.

Today, we have three experts here in the SOSTAC ® Plans club who can help the social media companies to rid us of most racist hate posts. They are from an AI Research Think Tank RUAIRE   (Responsible Use of AI in Recreation & International Events)

Social media can nurture loneliness, rage, extremism relationships

We know that social media can nurture loneliness, rage, extremism relationships

I saw Jeff Orlowski, director of the must-see documentary, The Social Dilemma,  interviewed on CNN TV 10 Jan 2021, saying:.

– Lies spread six times faster on Twitter than the truth (MIT)

– ‘The truth cannot keep up in a system that profits off of misinformation’

– We know social platforms can push radicalisation, it can be built into its algorithms – in the systems

– Insider leaked research from FB allegedly revealed that 64% of people who were radicalised because of the group recommendations suggestions that FB algorithms were pushing out….

It seems that social media can push people towards radical thought. interestingly, Dr John Bustard’s recent LinkedIn post ‘Here is a short blog relating to recent research on twitter’ mentions:  Director General of MI5, Ken McCallum says ‘racism presents a threat to the UK from ‘hostile states’ who are fanning right-wing extremism as a means to create a terrorist threat within the UK (quoted on the BBC Radio 4 show ): “Racism is a toxic issue feeding into right-wing terrorism.” There is clearly therefore a need for event teams, their sponsoring countries and tech companies to work together to combat this issue of misinformation and disinformation.

Interestingly, The Chief Whistle-Blower in Cambridge Analytica, Christopher Wylie, openly talks about  the ‘Destruction of society’  in his shocking video in my 2018 blog post called:  ‘The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture’  in which he says: “if you want to fundamentally change society, you first have to break it. And it’s only when you break it is when you can remould the pieces into your vision of a new society. This was the weapon that Steve Bannon* wanted to fight his culture war.”  PRSmith.org/blog

The Dark Arts of Marketing (see end of post references and links).

So we had a heated discussion last week – really about ‘culture wars’, Gareth Southgate and his players taking a stand on this. Then came the Euro Final – tweets started flowing – before, during and after the match & soon after they turned racist – picking on the three young brave black lads who missed their penalties – turned nasty. It was a bonanza of pure hate racism. Here is a summary of the themes being used alongside  #Euro2020final before, during and after the game, as analysed by Bustard, Ferdinand and Williams 2021. They used the publicly accessible tool TAGS which archives Twitter postings via a search application programming interface. While this source is not exhaustive, they were able to collect 32,765 tweets using the hashtag #Euro2020final in the hour leading up to kick-off, 100,282 during the match and 44,554 after the match until midnight.

They then applied topic modelling, an approach that uses machine learning to identify underlying themes in large bodies of text.  The following visualisations present the three most prominent topics during each time period and the three most prominent keywords associated with each of them.

Themes being tweeted before the match

Themes being tweeted during the match

Themes being tweeted post match

These graphics are from:  Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens? (theconversation.com)

Twitter responded to the abuse on its platform by using a combination of machine learning based automation and human review to remove over 1,000 tweets and permanently suspended several accounts. However, ‘this action failed to effectively suppress the negative picture that emerged after the #Euro2020final. We suggest that Twitter could be taking action to stop online firestorms, even before they start.’ (Bustard et al 2021) The sad truth is: ‘Twitter trolls know that racist or hateful content about a high profile event will be widely condemned online. But condemnation of racist or hateful content only serves to further magnify the impact of these posts on such an event. Any positive message will be overshadowed by the discussions of hateful or racist posts.’ (Bustard et al 2021).

Racist hate tweets impact could be ‘minimised using tools Twitter have already developed, such as prompting users to rethink their tweets that may include harmful language. These tools could be adapted to provide warnings that encourage users to think before they retweet…’ (Bustard et al 2021). The other really sad fact is that ‘the discussions the day after the Euro 2020 final should have been about a history-making team, not about the abuse that a small number of trolls were able to turn into a firestorm’ (Bustard et al 2021).

The Prime Minister and the  Secretary of State

for the Home Department, Priti Patel, both condemned this racism YET they previously refused to condemn fans booing their own English team players taking the knee. Priti Patel said it was ‘gesture politics’ and that ‘everyone has a right to boo’.

So the yobos took the cue & smashed, and brutalised their own stadium and city and beat up Italians – having had the ‘apparent approval’ to behave like yobboes by the highest office in the land.

Wembley waste

With racists verbally attacking the three black players who missed the penalties , for me, it proves the English players were 100% correct when they ‘took the knee’, since racism is still, in 2021, big in football. All the more reason for taking the knee. Plus solidarity with American sports players suffering from racism.

The English central defender,  Tyrone Ming  called out, via twitter,  the home secretary Priti Patel –  who would not condemn English fans booing ‘taking the knee’. Originally Patel called taking the knee ‘gesture politics’ and then said she was appalled by the subsequent racism! Here’s Mings tweet.

Tyrone Mings

Microsoft News even featured an article (from the Independent)  ‘A fire they poured petrol on’: Boris Johnson and Priti Patel condemned over football racism ‘hypocrisy’ about both the Prime Minister’s and the Home Secretary’s lack of real anti-racism stance, in fact, they ‘poured petrol on it.’

And now the PM  wants to discuss with Social Media companies how to stop racist tweets.

There is an opportunity for social media companies to, once again, clean up their act, plus political leaders to show real leadership (or any leadership) in the fight against racism.

PLUS We now also have some people who could help the PM to help the Social Media companies to stop the rampant hate…..to stop racist content spreading like wildfire.

This is a must-read: Ruaire (2021) Euro 2020: could Twitter stop racist abuse before it happens,    TheConversation.com

I am so pleased these researchers have stood up. Nothing is impossible. Particularly, it seems, in a fast-moving world of AI. Hence a screaming opportunity to use the technology for the good of all humans on the planet.   

Thank you: Nicole Ferdinand (Oxford Brookes), John Bustard (Ulster University) and Nigel Williams Uni Portsmouth.

The Research Collective, RUAIRE,  stands for Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence in Recreation and Events. RUAIRE is focused on investigating the ethical and effective use of Artificial Intelligence and emerging technologies in the fields of Tourism and Events.

—end–

If you liked this, you might also like:

• How Rats Work = How Twitter Works?
• Chinese Girlbot has 465m personalised relationships with boys 
• The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture
• Facebook Data: How it was used by Cambridge Analytica & Might Be Used in 2020 Election & Still Is Used in 2021? 
• Marketing Gone Wrong: Is the Dark Web Worse Than Subliminal Seduction?
• How Trump Won (a SOSTAC Analysis) – Part 1

• PM – 14/07/2021 – BBC Sounds    BBC 4 PM radio programme where Dr Nicole Ferdinand (one of our clubhouse speakers) has a robust discussion on the topic and others including authorities come in with different views

Or

Watch a 3 minute video explaining how to write the perfect plan with SOSTAC® Planning

Become a SOSTAC® Certified Planner 

The post Can Twitter Stop Racist Hate Tweets? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

Are we being brainwashed? Is the dark web worse than subliminal seduction in the 1950s when brands embedded subliminal messages to unconsciously manipulate customers into buying their products? The Dark Web manipulates audiences  (some of which involves secret ads sent to perhaps illegally analysed voters/shoppers)  – particularly vulnerable, undecided audiences with secret messages/ads that no one else can see. The messages contain incorrect information – even lies, but are hidden from public eyes. The budgets that pay for some of these ads come from unknown sources and are deemed to be illegal and to have broken the law.

The Dark Web secretly influences opinions, purchases and votes.  It happened with Brexit and it happened with Trump’s 2016 election victory. See ‘How Trump Won’.  Will it happen again? Can it be stopped from happening again? This is marketing gone wrong. Can it be stopped?

And this is the brilliant Welsh journalist,  Carole Cadwalladr, calling out the “Gods of Silicon Valley” by name! I think it is amidst a Silicon Valley audience – perhaps someone can confirm?

Data Manipulation. Unknown/Unsourced funding. Lawbreaking. Changed Opinions & Beliefs. Wins Elections.

Possibly the best Ted Talk yet? Brilliant 15 mins. The transcript is worth revisiting also – all the facts listed in detail.

Carole Cadwalladr TED Talk

If you like this you might like:

How Trump Won  (using the magic marketing formula & Facebook and data)

The Dark Arts Of Marketing – Breaking Down Society to Create a New Culture – Using Data & IRD

How Obama Won Two Presidential Elections

The post Marketing Gone Wrong: Is the Dark Web Worse Than Subliminal Seduction? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

Imagine you could personalise videos so beautifully that the recipients couldn’t stop themselves from sharing? What if you could personalise the videos using an individual’s own comments and photos. What if the photo and comment were embedded into the first 3 seconds of the video? What if you could collect comments made about your brand, product and/or market and embed it into an intriguing video, personalised with your name – at scale? Like 150,000 high quality, highly relevant, personalised videos created and despatched in 2 hours? But only dispatched to micro-influencers with networks of more than 500?

Here’s how it’s done. Watch this 6 minute video to see how this is done so beautifully (plus the results), or just jump to 2:06 to see the 15 second Red Dwarf personalised video or jump to  5:04 to see the 20 second Race For Life personalised video.

But what about GDPR?

The above video is the first in a series of seven short videos demonstrating how personalised videos , at scale, are used successfully by a variety of brands who have different goals.

Many thanks to Tim Redgate, the former CEO of Echomany.

Post a comment, or contact me for more info.

Happy Easter.

If you liked this, you might enjoy:

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) – Opportunity to Boost CX or a Threat of Closure? (Part 1)

Artificial Influencers – meet Shudu

Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula 

or

AR  converts competitors ads to your ads

Please do ‘submit a comment‘ below and I will reply to you.

Tell us your story, experience, tip, insight or just ask a question – whatever you prefer.

The post Engaging at Scale with Personalised Videos in Conversations appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

In a previous post, Artificial Influencers – Miquela & Shudu, I introduced you to these two virtual influencers, Lil Miquela  and Shudu,  (below)

@LilMequela

@Shudu.gram

I promised to come back and explore how they work and what might be their value to their fans and to their creators and. It seems that Lil’s 1.5m fans don’t mind her not being real. In fact, perhaps the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ allows fans to just enjoy them regardless of reality.

Instant Gratification & Instant Engagement

Brud, the Los Angeles-based start-up that created @LilMiquel,  specialises in ‘robotics, artificial intelligence and their applications to media businesses’. Brud are clear about the business  they are in and how they let the market decide what works and what doesn’t work – quickly.

‘we create content designed for instant gratification: content to be shared and ‘liked’, not pondered. We have learned to use lens filters and editing apps. Our Instagram feeds have been professionalised. If we fail to get sufficient engagement in the first half an hour, we remove the post.’  

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A robo never gets cold. 🌻

A post shared by *~ MIQUELA ~* (@lilmiquela) on Feb 15, 2019 at 4:44pm PST

 

So Lil Miquela,  Shudu any many other virtual influencers perhaps project say a fashion or style or scene and if their followers don’t like it, its owners delete it and try uploading another post until followers demonstrate they like it. Once this happens they leave the post. So in effect, this is the Magic Marketing Formula (IRD). They identify something people like (a need) , reflect this (leave the post up for others to see) and deliver a reasonable product (whatever the branded clothes are). Is it possible that these artifical influencers are effectively a virtual mirrror reflecting what society wants?

This is the magic marketing formula (identify needs, reflect them (with suitable fashion items) and deliver a reasonable product (wrapped up in a brand).

 

View this post on Instagram

 

Shudu posing with the #EEBAFTAs presenters @edibow and @radioleary on the #redcarpet . Watch live on @BAFTA social channels. . . #3D #3Dart #digitalsupermodel #worldsfirstdigitalsupermodel #virtualinfluencer

A post shared by Shudu (@shudu.gram) on Feb 10, 2019 at 11:25am PST

Celebrity AI Influencers – Brud.fyi is creating a whole suite

Ethical Issues

There are ethical issues of declaring you are a robot or not. And declaring that you are paid to promote these brands. Or perhaps Artificial Influencers are a frightening mirror of our own insecurities which manifest themselves in our declared need for leaders to lead us and influence us. Or for brands to fill the gap between our ‘ideal self’ and our ‘real self’.  Either way, it does beg the question: ‘what does it mean to be human in a digital world?’

Warning

Social media endorsements: guide for influencers  from the UK Competition and Markets Authority Published 23 January 2019. This report contains information on complying with consumer protection law when endorsing products, brands or services on social media. CMA (Competition and Markets Authority 2019) Social media endorsements: being transparent with your followers, CMA 23 Jan. Essentially: Say when you’ve been paid, given or loaned things. Be clear about your relationship with a brand or business. Don’t be misleading.

Instagram Influencers are Big Business

Brands currently spend $1b approx. p.a. on Instagram influencers (Guthrie 2018).  Now let’s see how much LilMiquela might earn. If other influencers can get paid between  $2,000 -$3,000 per 500,000 followers, it follows that Miquela (with her 1.5m fans) could charge approximately $10,000 per post. If she did one post per week x 50 weeks equals $500,000 revenue p.a. Miquela also appears on  twitter (20,000 followers), facebook 41,000 fans, YouTube 34,000 fans (as per Mar 2019).  As multiple non competing brands sponsor Miquela (fashion and bicycles and restaurants and holiday locations and so many more brands could fit into her lifestye.  Perhaps multiply this by other family members (Miquela’s brother,  blawko222, has now appeared. He already has 136,000 fans on Instagram, 1600 on twitter, and 3,000 fans on YouTube. So perhaps more family members and lots more friends may emerge and make this a billion dollar business, or perhaps a multi-billion dollar business as it scales up and around the world. Brud have raised funds from some serious investors.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

✊🏿 . . #3dart

A post shared by Shudu (@shudu.gram) on Apr 24, 2017 at 4:36am PDT

See Part 1  Artificial Influencers – Miquela & Shudu 

If you liked this you might also enjoy:

Chinese GirlBot With 465m Boyfriends

Here Come The Clever Bots – bursting with artificial intelligence?

Here Come The Really Clever Bots – where AI meets customer needs

Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula (IRD)

SOSTAC® Plan for developing your own ChatBot

Join me in Clubhouse in my club called SOSTAC® Plans any Friday 3.30pm – 4.00pm BST for a chat, Q&A, observations about SOSTAC(r) Plans and any other marketing related issues including AI Driven Bots.

The post Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula (IRD) appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

Here come the Bots

A few years ago, the Gartner Group forecasted that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human (Gartner 2011).  So let’s have a look at bots. Part 1 explores What are Bots? What are Chatbots, Slackbots, Good Looking AI bots?;  Types of Bots (including Sales Bots, Lead Generation Bots and, wait for it, AI Marketing Assistant Bots as well as CRM Bots). Part 2 explores the Importance of Bots; Intelligent Bots; How to develop successful Bots.

What are Bots?

Bots are fast becoming a very hot topic in marketing since social media and mobile apps gave us messaging apps. Some bots (e.g. basic messaging apps like watsapp, viber, facebook messaging, Yahoo Messenger, playstation messages, skype) are now bigger than social media (see the chart below).  Bots are defined as software that performs an automated task over the Internet e.g. a shopping bot that searches for the best prices and recommendations. Or chatbots that engage in text conversation with customers. Since texting has become so popular, it’s not surprising to see that ‘chatbots are the next logical step in tech innovation’ (Cerny 2016). Soon most of them will become voice operated (like Apple iPhone’s Siri). Who knows, they may, one day even become thought operated. They will become more aesthetically pleasing.

Messaging apps have, for the first time ever, surpassed even social networks in popularity. McKetterick (2016)

What are Chatbots?

Chatbots are ‘special programmes that are integrated into messengers to interact with customers’  (Suvorov 2016). They are like apps that talk back (via text). The level of friendliness and sophistication depends on the quality of the natural language processing technologies and the level of human effort to develop appropriate (friendly) responses. Although we are still at a relatively early stage of Conversation Commerce, it is worth looking at Ivan Suvorov ‘Shopping in messengers article’ to see how four different retailers use chatbots to deliver varying degrees of satisfaction. Meanwhile good chatbots ask salient questions at the right time. Currently, complexity and common sense, limit chatbots for now (particularly in more complex businesses). However, it looks like there’s no slowing down the bot revolution & some of them will create competitive advantage.

What are Slackbots?

Bots can be added to Slack (which is a is a relatively new type of messaging for teams). Slack integrates with many other tools such as Mailchimp, Google Chrome, Calendars, DropBox, twitter). Team conversations are organised into channels (e.g. departments, office locations, projects or anything). Public channels are open to anyone in your team. Private channels are for specific invitees only. You can share files, images, documents, spreadsheets simply by dragging them & dropping them into the right channel.  Private direct messages. Plus direct messages to groups. It sends alerts. Everything is searchable and in synch across all devices. No more email!

What are Sophisticated, Good Looking AI Bots?

Bots will become more aesthetically pleasing & more intelligent

Bots are always on and will become nicer looking and more intelligent as:

• AI (Artificial Intelligence)
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• Facial & Vocal Recognition

all continue to improve.

Some customers will be willing to pay for good advice or to have good conversations with particular bots that can help them solve various issues such as dating, marriage, divorce etc. Perhaps there is a gap for an ‘Oprah Bot’ (see below). Very personal stuff can be managed by robots, if initially, they don’t look like robots. Perhaps we might be happy to be advised by celebrities’ bots. After all, celebs are brands and research shows that many people (in the UK) trust brands more than they trust the church and the police.

The Uncanny Valley – Real Human Looking Robots Scare Children (today)  

In the 1970s, Japanese robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, observed that the more human his robots appeared, the more people reacted positively towards them. But when robots look too similar to humans (but still seen as a robot) people saw them as ‘visually revolting’.

Human Looking Bots can upset children

Mori called this ‘The Uncanny Valley’ – the chasm between ‘fully human’ and ‘nearly human’.  More recently audiences didn’t like the very realistic looking Final Fantasy movie animation (some children cried). Was this the ‘Uncanny Valley’? Dreamworks Studios were aware of this when producing Shrek, particularly when they tested their product (test screenings). They discovered that children perceived the movie to be spooky because the animations were almost real. Dreamworks then changed the characters to be less real and more cartoon-like. [Source: PR Smith 2016]

The Importance of Bots

Bots’ massive user base (see previous chart) is relatively young.  And they like the new interface which is no longer cumbersome texting but rather, it can be language-based (or voice operated), hands-free and, essentially easier and friendlier to use. Major players like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon are making announcements about bots (McKitterick 2016). Skype have their own too.

Skype’s New bots

Remember, however, to succeed, the whole Bot experience must be all about helping customers (or entertaining them or informing them etc.). This can also mean saving customers time &/or having a ‘meaningful impact’ on their lives or their businesses.

Mobile messaging apps are massive. As Will McKetterick (2016) says: ‘The largest services have hundreds of millions of monthly active users (MAU). Falling data prices, cheaper devices, and improved features are helping propel their growth. Messaging apps are about more than messaging. Popular Asian messaging apps like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE have taken the lead in finding innovative ways to maintain user engagement. Media companies, and marketers are still investing more time and resources into social networks like Facebook and Twitter than they are into messaging services. That may change as messaging companies develop their services and reach, and ultimately, provide more avenues for connecting brands, publishers, and advertisers with customers. Is this already happening as mentioned, messaging apps have, for the first time ever, surpassed even social networks in popularity (McKetterick 2016)?

Types of Bots

• Shopping Bots
• Cooking Bots
• Marriage Bots
• Oprah Bots
• Golf Bots
• Mechanic Bots
• Election Bots
• Customer Service Bots
• Research Bots
• Sales Bots, Lead Generation Bots & Retail Bots

Shopping Bots

Have been around a long time. I even predicted ‘shopping bot wars’ more than ten years ago when hovering hologram shopping bots cause queues as they argue with cashiers and bus drivers about prices (Smith 2005). Well the wars haven’t happened and the bots have been slow to appear, but they are coming. They are growing. Marketers need to familiarise themselves with them because message apps (early bots) are already bigger than social media. And they are getting cleverer as AI and access to multiple databanks kick in.

Shopping Bot by Kip

Kip helps to co-ordinate team purchases by pinging a message to staff re ‘who needs office stationary & equipment?’ Then items are added to a standing order & eventually bought with just one click.  Kip can also be used for personal shopping and even encourage customers to use emoji’s and photos to ‘discover new things’. Kip describes itself as ‘your personal shopper’.  Kip uses emojis and photos to ‘discover new things’. People can ask the bot for different things like “Chocolate” or “Coffee” and it will return a list of products. Then Kip earn a percentage on each transaction.

Kip Bots use emojis

Cooking Bot

While the bot will tell you that swapping Cumin for Coriander is okay in a certain recipe – it can also send you an article that talks about “5 Sriracha Infused Recipes That Will Leave Your Guests In Awe” (sponsored by Sriracha of course).

Marriage Bot

If you want anonymous marriage counselling, Ross Simmons et al (2016) suggest that ‘”Marriage counsellors can charge anywhere from $75 to $200 or more per hour depending on where you live, the experience of the therapist, and the type of setting can all play a factor in how much counselling costs. Bots could help marriages, at scale, at a much lower price point and be more accurate in their advice by leveraging the data they receive from their frequent interactions” (Simmonds 2016).

Fitness Bot

These bots can offer tips and tricks on how to stay healthy and use affiliate links to send people to fitness products that have affiliate links associated with them. They can even run an interactive training session with you, inviting you to do the next exercise, if you have completed the 50 press-ups. Layer in additional data from fitness apps and you will probably see a nation becoming fitter as they compete with their own previous performance and simultaneously form relationships with their fitness bots.

Oprah Bot

If you need life advice – why not get ‘personal advice’ from a high profile personality brand with whom many millions already have a positive relationship. This branded app in the form of a bot could be scaled up and yet still give personalised answers from your favourite celebrity, in the strictest of confidence. Data privacy is, of course critical with all of these bots.

Borris Bot

Could you imagine it? Britain’s new Minister for Foreign Affairs advising the nation after pulling it out of Europe?

Golf Bot

Wouldn’t we all like one of these? Interestingly, I’m told many American Business Masters Programmes have an optional half module called ‘golf’ – which includes golf etiquette, golf tips and networking skills.

Mechanic Bot

for information on your car, how to maintain it, service it, and maybe, a premium priced bot for how to fix it.

Election Bot

The New York Times Election Bot gives you live results and updates/alerts.  You can also submit questions to the newsroom directly. There are more and more bots piling into this marketplace such as Purple  which is one of many election bots.

Research Bot

Wondering what millennials are thinking about the next election? Ross Simmonds et al (2016) says: ‘There are bots that you can pay to do the research for you. While I haven’t come across any bots that are doing this today, it would make a lot of sense for Q&A bots to offer this type of service.

Bots like disordatbot are already asking people simple ‘this or that’ questions. Event planners can decide which music act to book for a particular event. Rather than using an expensive research firm or inaccurate focus group, ‘you can run a research campaign with disordatbot and ask users in your city whether they prefer Radiohead or Nickelback.’ (Simmonds 2016)

What separates disordat from a simple ‘either-or’ bot is that disordat bot questions also have an option to get for more information. If the user taps “Huh?” In response to these questions, the bot sends a link that gives more information.

DisorDat bot helps customers make decisions Image Credit: disordatbot

Sales Bots (retail sales bots)

These will encourage customers to ask them (the bots) questions such as ‘do you have any Adidas football boots? The bot will immediately answer ‘Yes’ here are our most popular 3 adidas football boots. Was there a particular style you need? And what size would you like?’ The bot then presents the information (e.g. a photo, product sheet, video, a 3D model and perhaps soon, a virtual hovering hologram/bot). The prospect then buys the product similar to buying on a web site, but perhaps, eventually, with voice control options. Meanwhile, it is worth reading Ivan Suvorov’s  (2016) ‘Shopping in messengers article’ to see how four different retailers use chatbots to deliver varying degrees of customer satisfaction.

H&M Bots help customers  Image Credit: H&M

Lead Generation Bots  

Independent knowledge bots (not associated with a particular brand) could be set up, promoted and used to help people get information about any particular area of interest. In return for giving tailored, relevant and useful content/information, the bot asks “Is it ok if I pass this along to someone who can help you with some special offers? The Bot owner gets paid a commission. In fact bot owner can become an affiliate to several suppliers earning commission each time the bot affiliate passes prospect information to a particular company.

Ross Simmonds et al (2016) suggest that ‘Slack Bots that don’t have a Q&A focus could also leverage this model. If you’ve built a bot that offers valuable content on a regular basis to a niche audience, organizations who want to connect or sell to that audience might have an interest in conducting research campaigns via chat.’

Sales Assistant Bots

Given that sales people spend too much time filling in reports, or researching customers,and arguably, too little time talking with customers, chatbots could do the form filling and also equip sales people with a cheat sheet with some nice ice-breakers tailored to the buyer they are going to meet along with any key information or dialogue the company has had with them.

So there you have an introduction to bots covering:  What are Bots? What are Chatbots, Slackbots, Good Looking AI bots?; and Types of Bots.

Reincarnated Loved-Ones Bots 

Microsoft  has applied for a patent on a new bot that effectively reincarnates your loved ones from the data they leave behind – including  voice data, video clips, posts and comments. See Chinese GirlBot With 465m Boyfriends  which has a section about reincarnated bots.  Part 2 explores artificially intelligent marketing bot; How do you create smart AI driven bots? The key to successful bots; taking humans out of the loop? See the more detailed How to build your own bot .

Meanwhile, please let me know if you see any useful bots. Please do post a comment.

If you liked this you might also enjoy some of my other posts:

Chinese GirlBot With 465m Boyfriends 

SOSTAC® Plan for developing your own ChatBot

Artificial Influencers Use My Magic Marketing Formula (IRD) 

Artificial Influencers – Meet Shudu & Miquela

Here Come The Clever Bots – bursting with artificial intelligence? 

Here Come The Really Clever Bots – where AI meets customer needs

Join me in Clubhouse in my club called SOSTAC® Plans any Friday 3.30pm – 4.00pm BST for a chat, Q&A, observations about SOSTAC(r) Plans and any other marketing related issues including AI Driven Bots.

Sources:

Bachman, R. (2016) The limits of A.I. and chatbots: How not to fail like Microsoft VB Live, 22 June

Campbell, R. (2016) Introducing DisOrDatBot , Readme.mic, 18 April

Cerny, B (2016) Why chatbots can’t do much more than order you an Uber…yet 22 June, venture Beat

Gartner Predicts (2011), Customer 360 Summit, Los Angeles, March 30 – April 1

McKitterick, W (2016) Messaging apps are now bigger than social networks, Business Insider,15 June

Meeker, M. (2016) 2016 Internet Trends Report, KPCB, 1 June

Rogers, S (2016) Shopify acquires Kit, the artificially intelligent marketing bot, Venture Beat 13 April

Simmonds, R et al (2016) How will bots make money? Here are 7 business models, Venture Beat, 9 June

Smith, PR & Chaffey, D. (2005) Emarketing Excellence, 2^nd ed. Butterworth Heinnemann (bot wars)

Smith, PR (2021) SOSTAC® Guide To Your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan 2021 ed., www.PRSmith.org/books

Suvorov, I (2016) Shopping in messengers, Chatbots Magazine, May.

The post Here Come The Clever Bots – bursting with artificial intelligence? appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

SOSTAC(r) Planning – offline & online -integration, innovation & engagement

Any problems with the above link – try this http://www.slideshare.net/prsmith

Good luck with it.

SOSTAC Certification Portal

The post SOSTAC ® Planning – integration, engagement & analytics appeared first on PR Smith Marketing.

—

IoT is not a strange futuristic world with intelligent robots hatching from eggs under your bed. IoT, however, is here today.

What is IoT?

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects chips, sensors, software, networks and data to products and services in a myriad of new and exciting ways that will boost customer experiences, change the nature of your business and disrupt competition in a radically new way.

‘Products have become complex systems: that combine hardware, software, sensors, systems, social media, networks, data storage, microprocessors, connectivity, and occasionally big data in a myriad of new ways’  Porter & Hepplemann (2014)

IoT the Internet Of Things – can connect everything

Trends Driving the IoT Opportunity

As a result of increasing wireless connectivity, processing power and social media combined with  decreasing chip (& device) sizes, we can  now attach, tiny chips connected via wifi to databases and big data to products and services to deliver added value experiences to customers. Add in the ability to create strategic partnerships to share data as well as the benefits of other products and services and you have a potent formula for success via IoT.

IoT Adds Extra Value

We can attach rich layers of data, information, advice, tips, visuals, virtual experiences, added value to anything. This is the IoT. Tomorrow’s smart products  can add so much value,  they can even   create new services by helping customers in new and previously, unimagined ways.  Iot will shift many products into a new categories as smart products deliver additional benefits, way beyond the original products.

The old value chain, is once again, being reshaped and consequently CEOs are, once again, asking the proverbial old philosophical business question: ‘what business am in?’ The following IoT examples show how real this question is.

IoT Brings Marketers Closer To Customers  

If you can discover what customers will really want, when they’ll want it & where they’ll want it (before they know themselves), then IoT can help you to capture your customers for life, by adding relevant extra value exactly where and when required often via integrated partnerships.  Sometimes this may require forming partnerships with other companies (see the Whirlpool example).

IoT can add value , bring customers closer to marketers & deepen customer relations

IoT Deepens Customer Relationships

Equipped with data analytics tools, marketers can segment markets in new ways e.g  each customer’s very specific needs. And then, equipped with the right software, marketers can tailor (through software rather than hardware) relevant tailored products/services just when customers need them. If used correctly, this will deepen relationships.

Iot Examples

Here are some IoT examples many of which were first presented by Harvard’s Porter & Hepplemann (2014).

IoT is not rocket science nor advanced lazer tech. It is however pervasive.

Tennis rackets  containing sensors and connectivity in the racket handle allows manufacturers* to help players improve their game through the tracking and analysis of ball speed, spin, and impact location – all delivered via smartphone application (* Babolat Play Pure Drive)

Baseball Bats with video analytics & over 200 sensors built into it gives players detailed feedback on how to improve their game [PRS markcomms 6^th ed]

Ralph Lauren’s Polo Tech Shirt, reveals  distance covered, calories burned, movement intensity, heart rate, and other data to the wearer’s mobile device.’

Whirlpool is a leader in the connected home, which ‘includes connected appliances including automated lighting, HVAC, entertainment, and security. This is now a product-as-a-service since Whirlpool maintains ownership of the product and the customer simply pays for the use of the machine’.

Home Lighting, audiovisual entertainment equipment, and climate control systems ‘have not historically competed with one another. Yet each is now vying for a place in the emerging “connected home” that integrates and adds intelligence to a wide array of products in the home. ‘

‘Philips Lighting Bulbs introduced the hue smart, connected lightbulb, for example, it included a basic smartphone application that allowed users to control the color and intensity of individual bulbs

Tesla Car  ‘Transmits software upgrades to its cars.  Tesla cars self-detects when the car is due for maintenance or repairs. Then the car either automatically  (a) calls for a remote repair via software or (b) alerts the customer with an invitation to request that a Tesla valet driver take it to the Tesla garage. ‘

They skip traditional dealer network by selling their cars directly to customers who pay the full price (no haggling with dealers – which, intriguingly, improves customer satisfaction). ‘The firm was recently rated number one in customer satisfaction by Consumer Reports.’

Tesla have their own garages for servicing and repairs) which allow  Tesla to deepen its relationship with customers (& capture this revenue stream).

Google’s self-driving car is analyzing a gigantic amount of data from sensor and cameras in real time to stay on the road safely. [PRS Marcomms 6^th ed]

Zipcar (shared cars) A variation of product-as-a-service is the shared-usage model. Zipcar, …..This substitutes for car ownership and has led traditional automakers to enter the car-sharing market with offerings such as RelayRides (originally invested in by GM and now rebranded as Turo) , DriveNow from BMW, and Dash from Toyota.

Aircraft Cockpit Glass Cockpit (LCD) displays can be repaired or upgraded via software

Wind Turbines ‘local microcontroller can adjust each blade on every revolution to capture maximum wind energy. When smart wind turbines are networked, software can adjust the blades on each one to minimize impact on the efficiency of turbines nearby.’

Automated teller machines automatically check themselves for early signs of trouble. After identifying a malfunctioning ATM’s status, the ATM is either repaired remotely, or if remote repairs cannot be carried out, a technician who is equipped with (a) a detailed diagnosis of the problem, (b) a recommended repair process, and ideally (c), the required parts [prs]

IoT Part 2 – will explore: 

• Will All Physical Products Become Commodities?
• IoT Is Strategic Choice
• Where does IoT fit into strategy?
• New Strategic Options
• Here Come the Invisible Roboto
• Technology Stacks That You Will Need

And question whether this is IoT

A remote controlled ball for pets to play with when you are away:

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/playdate-world-s-first-pet-camera-in-a-smart-ball#/

Note to reader: These IoT extracts are taken from  the SOSTAC(R) Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan (V2.0 Feb 2016) in the Market Trends (section 1.6) in the very first chapter, Situation Analysis. IoT is also explored further in the Components Of Strategy (section 3.3) in the chapter on Strategy. A more detailed dedicated analysis of IoT is in appendix 8, Strategy: The Internet of Things.

Sources

Porter,E., Hepplemann, J. (2014), Harvard Business Review, Nov

Smith, PR (2016) SOSTAC ® Guide To Your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan V2.0 Feb, http://www.PRSmith.org/SOSTAC

SOSTAC (r) Guide to your Perfect Digital Marketing Plan

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