SAP announces secure, scalable business-to-business solutions for marketers

Software and technology provider SAP announced the launch of a new B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that will allow users to securely grant third parties access to first-party data, share sensitive information and manage regulatory compliance without the threat of exposure to security...

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Brands take heed: Facebook is putting Groups at the center of its app

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook Groups are at the heart of the new Facebook experience during his F8 kick-off presentation on Tuesday. The post Brands take heed: Facebook is putting Groups at the center of its app appeared first on Marketing Land.

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Facebook Messenger to get new lead gen templates, appointment booking

Both features are currently in beta, but Facebook said they plan to roll them out later this year. The post Facebook Messenger to get new lead gen templates, appointment booking appeared first on Marketing Land.

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Copyblogger Book Club: Stay Creatively Productive (Even on Crappy Days)

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but keeping your creative confidence going is hard. Our friend Austin Kleon has one...

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Instagram’s new Shopping from Creators gives influencers access to Checkout for in-app purchases

Users will be able to buy items from brands tagged in creators' posts right in the app. The post Instagram’s new Shopping from Creators gives influencers access to Checkout for in-app purchases appeared first on Marketing Land.

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The Impact of Twitter’s Proposed Shakeup on Marketers and Influencers

Twitter needs to change. This truth is acknowledged by everyone affiliated with the social media network, including its co-founder and CEO. Jack Dorsey sat with Chris Anderson and Whitney Pennington Rodgers of TED last month for a roundtable discussion about the state of his company, and the path ahead. Specifically, their chat centered on Twitter’s conversation health, and how to improve it. During the talk, Dorsey laid out some interesting ideas. Today we’ll touch on several of them — including one proposed shift that could fundamentally alter the platform’s very fabric — with an eye on the potential impact for B2B marketers and influencers.

The Continuing Mission to Combat Twitter Abuse

This issue isn’t new. I wrote last year on this blog about Twitter’s efforts to tame the trolls and restore civility to its discourse. At the time, the network had recently enacted a massive purge of fake and suspicious accounts, and was also launching a pair of academic projects regarding diversity of viewpoints. But eight months later, the underlying problems haven’t much improved. In the most striking moment of TED’s roundtable, Anderson confronts Dorsey directly about the widespread perception of an “all talk, no action” approach from Twitter. To signal the urgency, Anderson draws up a Titanic metaphor (a man after my own heart), with Twitter’s CEO as the captain. In this scenario, Dorsey listens reflectively as shiphands express their concerns about the iceberg ahead. “And you go to the bridge, and we're waiting, and we look, and then you're showing this extraordinary calm, but we're all standing outside, saying, ‘Jack, turn the [F-ing] wheel!’” Are Dorsey and Twitter finally ready to take control and change course? One idea he offered, in particular, suggests that a major transformation could be on the horizon.

Shifting Tides: From Following Accounts to Following Topics

Some of the possible changes hinted by Dorsey are relatively minor and uncontroversial. He wants users to be able to hide their replies. He wants to deemphasize follower counts and ‘likes’ on tweets. His team plans to analyze conversation health across four parameters (shared attention, shared reality, receptivity, variety of perspective), and… well, I find myself in agreement with Bill Murphy Jr.: “I don't understand exactly what Twitter hopes to do with this analysis.” But the bombshell of the interview came with Dorsey’s allusion to an entirely new structural underpinning for Twitter. Here’s the full answer he gave when asked about how he feels he can meaningfully shift behavior on the platform:

Well, one of the things — we started the service with this concept of following an account, as an example, and I don't believe that's why people actually come to Twitter. I believe Twitter is best as an interest-based network. People come with a particular interest. They have to do a ton of work to find and follow the related accounts around those interests. What we could do instead is allow you to follow an interest, follow a hashtag, follow a trend, follow a community, which gives us the opportunity to show all of the accounts, all the topics, all the moments, all the hashtags that are associated with that particular topic and interest, which really opens up the perspective that you see. But that is a huge fundamental shift to bias the entire network away from just an account bias towards a topics and interest bias.

As with his conversation health analysis piece, it’s not entirely clear to me what Dorsey is advancing here. Is the idea that we will no longer be able to choose who we follow, and our feeds will instead be based entirely on topical areas of interest? (For me personally, this would be annoying, because there are certain people within my areas of interest that I actively choose to follow, and some I actively choose not to. I don’t think I’m alone.) Or maybe it’s more about how Twitter’s algorithm serves us content outside of the people we follow. Right now, this does seem to be mostly account-driven. For example, you’ll see a tweet on your timeline from someone you’re unfamiliar with, and a message above will explain it was selected due to other users (i.e., “@NickNelsonMN and @CaitlinMBurgess follow this person”). Shifting this to more of a topical basis wouldn’t deter the ability to customize one’s own feed, and could actually be quite beneficial if done right. In either case, the marketing implications are worth considering.

What Could All This Mean for Marketers?

Without having an exact idea of what Twitter is planning (or whether it will actually implement anything at all, given its history), we can’t draw any definitive conclusions. But given our continual tracking of the ever-changing social media marketing universe, as well as emerging influencer marketing trends, a few thoughts do initially cross through my mind, and mostly they are positive.

Removal of Rancor and Vitriol Are Good for Business

One area where Twitter has shown demonstrable progress is in scalably reducing abuse. Dorsey notes that “about 38% of abusive tweets are now proactively identified by machine learning algorithms so that people don't actually have to report them,” adding that this is up from zero percent a year ago. It’s part of an effort to “take the burden off the victim.” Setting aside the snark, let’s acknowledge that this is an important step in the right direction. Twitter’s reputation as a cesspool of negativity and hatred can make it an uninviting destination for any brand. Legitimate progress on this front is undoubtedly a plus.

Topic-based Visibility Could Be Great News for Influencers & Marketers

Large or small following, more established and rising influencers are often dedicated to growing their profiles within areas of specialization. If indeed Twitter moves to start serving people more topical content, it could be a great way for these individuals to get in front of users who are interested in the subjects they cover but may not yet be familiar with them, or immersed in their extended networks. This would also make leveraging Twitter as part of influencer marketing efforts more appealing to B2B brands. Imagine if tapping an authoritative voice in, say, fintech not only gave you credible access to their direct following, but also to a much larger audience of users engaged with that topic? Topical relevance is of the utmost importance, ranking as a top B2B influencer marketing focus. Brands need to be speaking the language of their customers and reaching them in the right context. This development might present an opportunity to better align marketing messaging, expertise, and audience on Twitter.

Impacts for Those Who’ve Built Large Audiences Are Ambiguous

If Twitter were to follow the more extreme version of Dorsey’s vision — pushing aside the traditional format of following accounts in favor of following topics — what would that mean for the people who’ve worked hard to build their own personal brands on the platform? Or, for that matter, the companies that have accrued thousands of quality followers through relevant, quality content? I don’t think that’s necessarily what Dorsey was getting at. He might just be positioning this as a new method of discovery, rather than consumption. But again, he wasn’t especially clear and that leaves plenty of room for uncertainty.

What’s Ahead for Twitter and Marketers?

As always, we’ll have to wait and see whether Dorsey and Twitter back up their ambitious visions of upheaval, and to what extent. It bears noting that the platform has a history of launching capabilities and features that aren’t aligned with what users want (the new desktop layout being the most recent example). They’ll need to tread carefully with something so essential as how our feeds are curated. But with the company taking some undeniable steps toward curbing abuse and improving user experiences, while showing strong business performance and impressing advertisers in the process, Twitter seems to be sailing in the right direction. Fewer trolls and more substantive, expert content organized around topics would make the platform a stronger piece in any B2B digital marketing strategy. Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog for more coverage of Twitter and the social media marketing space at large. In the meantime, I invite you to check out some of these past entries on the topic:

• Will Twitter Succeed in Defeating Trolls? The Stakes for Marketers
• Twitter Has Renewed its Live Video Push & Here’s What You Need to Know

The post The Impact of Twitter’s Proposed Shakeup on Marketers and Influencers appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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How to Best Work with Data

Businesses love having access to so much more data about their audience, customers, competition and overall environment. However, the amount of data is growing exponentially to the point where many companies are struggling to manage this unwieldy amount of information.

That leaves many unsure of how to best work with their data in a way that yields the most insights. Here are some ways I have leveraged available data in a way that has provided significant business benefits:

Frame Everything Around Marketing Objectives

Don’t go for the “needle in the haystack” approach to working with data, hoping you’ll eventually get to the information that drives results. Instead, to get the most out of your data, you need to know what you are using it for and what you need to find within the information to achieve those objectives.

If your objective is to draw more traffic to your site, then you need to work with data that will explain why people go to sites and what type of information draws them there. Or, if your primary marketing objective is to improve your brand’s reputation, focus on the data that reveals online opinions, including praise and complaints found on review and social media channels or hashtags that call out your brand on social media.

Look at Data as an Answer to Key Business Questions

Like the marketing objectives, you can work more effectively with your data by seeking out answers to critical business questions. For example, look for data that tells you where you can get the most value and ROI for your ad spend. Therefore, you would want to focus on data that delivered insights into the highest-converting traffic channel.

Don’t Assume Anything

Often, marketers think they have a good idea about their audience and what they want. Then, they look at the data in a way that reflects what they think they already know whether it is for an online ad or a mobile marketing campaign. Therefore, the one “don’t” on this list of working with data is to not assume you think you already know -- because you don’t know the audience the way the data does.  

Instead, it’s important to be open minded when working with the data to be prepared for different findings. That way, you are more likely to recognize that these insights may signal a new direction for marketing messaging or targeting that you would have otherwise missed.

Data-Driven Marketing Tactics

One of the best ways to work with data is to apply it to specific marketing tactics where the information can directly address specific objectives, such as greater audience and customer engagement, deeper understanding of specific audience needs, and the ability to reach audience members across channels and locations.

Data-driven marketing tactics include personalized marketing, which continues to be a challenge and opportunity in terms of delivering the right message to each audience member when they want it. Using that data to create specific customer profiles that direct how to develop customized content is an ideal way to work with data.

Look for specific insights in the data related to how to improve the overall customer experience, that provides a blueprint for how to deliver multi-channel experiences, and what type of products should be developed in the long term.  

Automate and Integrate the Data Collection and Categorization Process

Because data is multiplying faster than can be managed appropriately with traditional analytics solutions, it’s better to automate and integrate as many data sources as possible to minimize duplicating any work. Some of these automation and integration tools will even pull information into one location to facilitate the development of the customer personas and personalization insights you need to deliver on those specific marketing objectives.

Get AI Assistance

Working at a faster rate than any human, artificial intelligence can essentially do the job of organizing the data for you. Look for platforms or tools that incorporate machine learning so that you can further the automation benefits for handling data. In taking over much of the time-consuming work and producing new ways of looking at the data, you may be able to apply the insights to your marketing campaigns and content for improved results.

Share the Data

One of the best ways to work with data is to share it across departments and functions because that can lead to a greater understanding of the bigger picture for many within the company beyond marketing.

Or, data could be available from customer service that might inform how marketing should address customers or audience members. And, since the customer journey can involve many aspects of your company and travel across locations, it helps to put all those data destinations together into one map. Hence, this collaboration over data can yield ways to address objectives related to enhancing the customer experience.

Keep Measuring

At no point should you stop measuring and monitoring the data as well as researching what’s available to help you collect and categorize the ongoing external and internal information.

See how you can use data to create more personalized messaging for better results with the “Go Further with Marketing Automation.”

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