In The Headlights: September 4, 2019 Issue - Trust Insights Marketing Analytics Consulting

At our talks this week at both INBOUND and Content Marketing World, we’ve got a lot to share on applications of AI in marketing, but I wanted to share something more high-level that reframes the power of AI as it applies to you and me – not as marketers, but as people.

For the longest time, we have been limited by our abilities. How many of us have heard over the years, “Oh, you’ve got a novel in you” or “You should try singing, you have a great natural voice” – and then we go try the thing and find out it’s not for us. Or worse, we try the thing, we want it to be our thing, but our abilities, our latent talent isn’t enough. It’s discouraging at best and heartbreaking at worst.

What AI offers us is the ability to break through our limitations in ways never before possible.

You can’t write well, but you can frame out the basic ideas of your book? AI will help write the rest with tools like GPT2.

You can’t draw, but you can sketch out roughly what you had in mind? Tools like NVIDIA’s Gaugan allows us to sketch poorly and convert our Microsoft Paint-esque scrawlings into photo-realistic works of art.

You can’t play any instruments, but you know what you like to listen to? AI will compose music with tools like AIVA that make songs with our parameters, but without needing our talent.

We become limited only by our ambitions instead of our talent. So while AI may take away some tasks from our workday, it will allow us to create and unleash the art and beauty inside our hearts.

That’s a future I look forward to.

This week’s Bright Idea are the early returns for Content Marketing World and INBOUND. We enjoy making network maps of events to understand who’s most talked about, rather than who does the most talking. This week, whether you’re at the events or not, check in daily on our network maps for both events to see who’s making a splash.

In the rear view this week, we revisit Instagram’s engagement rates, one of our most popular blog posts ever. We now look at the year to date and find that Instagram’s engagement for brands is leveling out after a tumultuous first half of the year.

We see the engagement rate for brands leveled at 0.42%; this equates to 4.2 people out of every 1,000 engages with a brand Instagram account.

What do you do with this information? Compare it to other forms of engagement like clickthrough rates in emails and ads, benchmarking engagement for different kinds of content.

Methodology: For brands, we tracked 4,123 brands with audiences of at least 100 followers that posted in 2019 year to date on Instagram using Facebook’s Crowdtangle software. The sample size of posts for brands was 1,080,907 unique posts. The timeframe of the study is January 1, 2019 to August 26, 2019. The last 3 days of the dataset were excluded (August 27-30) to allow for post engagements to mature, due to the Instagram feed algorithm. Stories of any kind are not included because analytics are not available in the Crowdtangle API for stories.

Shiny Objects is a roundup of the best content you and others have written and shared in the last week. It uses machine learning for the automated one-sentence summaries.

Exclusive: Funders Are Ready To Pull Out Of Facebook’s Academic Data Sharing Project: Facebook has until Sept. 30 to provide data it promised to academic researchers or a consortium of funders will cease to support the project, BuzzFeed News has learned.
You Ask, I Answer: Attribution Modeling for Social Impressions?: Understand which paths lead to conversion, which ones dont, and then what the differences are.
You Ask, I Answer: Programmatic Facebook Ads and Social Attribution?: To use programmatic impressions data as a proxy for Facebook impressions in general, you have to prove a couple of things: Programmatic audience composition is highly correlated to your normal Facebook audience composition same people Programmatic audience behavior is highly correlated to your normal Facebook audience behavior same actions Cant see anything?

Media and Content

How to Export and Import Users in WordPress: All of the plugins for exporting user data will let you bulk export users in WordPress.
The importance of an effective review management workflow: Remember, your customers will more often than not use Google to search for reviews, so once youve worked through the more basic platforms, carry out some research of other review platforms that tend to appear when typing in your brand and reviews as well as your service or product and reviews search queries into Google.

Tools, Machine Learning, and AI

AI for the Customer Experience in Banking Critical Trends and Challenges: Smaller banks should look at FinTech firms from a different angle.
Enterprise AI Trends: Where are We Now and Where are We Going?: This was touted in an announcement last week from NVIDIA where the company showed how GPUs could become a valuable tool for inference with lower latency, which leads to more natural, human-like conversation.
Using AI Lie Detectors at Borders Poses Unique Problem for Intel Community: That system is now commercially available.

Analytics, Stats, and Data Science

Just and Only: They are small words that can have a big impact on your mindset, how you represent yourself to others and how you teach people to treat and see you.
Challenges In Analytics Sector: The Industry Perspective: Teli Shares that identifying, grooming and retaining talent is likely to be the biggest challenge in establishing an analytics function.
Here are 7 Data Science Projects on GitHub to Showcase your Skills!: pyforest currently includes pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, and many more data science libraries.

SEO, Google, and Paid Media

The line between subdomain leasing and alternative revenue strategy: This strategy has mainly been applied to coupon sites but could potentially be applied to any unrelated third-party content.
Digital Advertisers Look to Connected Cars to Push Industry Forward: Another recent development in the space is the acquisition of Thinknear, the advertising division of the connected car platform Telenav, by the digital advertising firm inMarket.
A no-nonsense guide to E-A-T & what it means for marketers: The latest version of Googles quality guidelines tells us a lot about what the search engine considers to be quality content.

Business and Leadership

High-tech weather forecasting aims to bring new hope to Indian farmers facing the devastation of climate change: Declared dead on arrival at a local government hospital, Katekar was one of 14,207 farmers who killed themselves in India in 2011, driven to take his own life by debt and drought.
Real World Applications of Blockchain Technology, Insights from 102 Leaders: For example, 56% of respondents referred to the financial services industry as one of the next industries to be transformed by blockchain.
3 Trends from Prime Day 2019 to guide your Black Friday and Cyber Monday Amazon strategy: Vertical-specific data is derived from sales and advertising activity across more than 1,300 products sold by our clients in each of the Clothing Shoes and Jewelry, Health and Household and Home and Kitchen categories on Amazon.

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Upcoming Events

Where can you find us in person?

Talkwalker, September 2019, New York City
MarTech East, September 2019, Boston
MarketingProfs B2B Forum, October 2019, Washington DC

Going to a conference we should know about? Reach out!

FTC Disclosure: Events with links have purchased sponsorships in this newsletter and as a result, Trust Insights receives financial compensation for promoting them.